Vegucated

Vegan.  No delicious grilled chicken.  No creamy cheese.  No salmon sashimi.  It's almost unimaginable.  But after I stumbled upon Vegucated on Netflix tonight, I can't bring myself to make my turkey sandwich for work tomorrow.  If ya'll don't know--I love me some sandwiches.

My back is really bothering me, so I picked this film to watch while I was stretching on a yoga mat in the living room while Trevor went to the gym.  When he came back, I turned to him and the following transpired.

Me:   "Soo.  Veganism."
T:  "Oh, Jesus."
Me:  "I KNEW you would saw exactly that.  I know you think it's ridiculous.  But, yeah.  Veganism."
T:  "Uuuuggghhh now I need to watch this damn movie!"

We are currently on the second screening of the evening.  The one loophole he's found so far in the logic was immediately addressed.  There have been far less comments since then.

Honestly, I think the hardest part of accepting even a trial of being vegan is giving up animal based clothing.  I have 4 different colors of the same leather flats because I love them so much.  They are by Bloch, a ballet shoe company, and they are elegant and sturdy.  What am I going to wear to work?  My other go to work shoes are Coach.

I recently contemplated changing Waffles' cat food brand because I read the label and investigated the ingredient "ash".  I felt like an awful cat mama feeding my favorite buddy something that I had no idea was it was made with!  I bought the Newman's Own organic brand from Safeway since I haven't had time to go investigate at Petsmart and now I'm wondering if I can help Waffles go vegan.

I'm not sure where I'm going to go with this information, but I think I'm having a meatless Monday.

Do Nannies for Cats Exist? and Other Ramblings

After we adopted Waffles and took him to the vet, we were instructed to start limited him to a smaller amount of food instead of just having it out because he weighed in at 17 pounds.  We were feeding him in the morning and at night, and he decided he was hungry at 4:00 AM and 6:00 AM.   He would insist on waking us up to let us know about this development.  After about a week, I'd had enough of that and solved that problem by buying a 5-serving automatic feeder. Ha!  Beat that, cat!  You will not get the best of me because you are nocturnal and eat at weird hours.

Mr. Waffles is once again meowing loudly while standing on me while I'm sleeping like he's climbing a mountain at 4 AM.   #@$@)#(*Q)@(*#)@*  WHY?   The first night this happened, I tried very hard to ignore him and let him carry on with the meows.  The Ferver method works on cats, right?  I felt awful when I checked his dish after I had woken up at a decent hour and showered and saw that the feeder had gotten stuck so only half of his food was showing!  Poor hungry, tubby kitty.  But for the last few nights that this meowyness has continued, there has been no apparent reason.  After getting about 3 hours of sleep last night (I never sleep well on Sunday nights -- or early, for that matter), I realized today that he's probably bored.  He wants us to play with him...at 4:00 AM.  

I totally get it.  I grew up as an only child and had to entertain myself against my will after my mom told me to get out of her hair for a while.  Mr. Waffles needs a buddy to hang out with and have shenanigans with at 4:00 AM so that we can sleep.  Or I would just have two cats attempting to climb me at 4:00 AM.  Can I have Supernanny Jo Frost come and teach Mr. Waffles how to soothe himself or teach us how to put him on a proper kitty timeout?

In other news, I was flossing today.  I need to stop there because this is an accomplishment.  My last dental visit came with bad news:  I have gingivitis.  Gross--I know.   I'm horrible at flossing (like, only when I feel food stuck in my teeth) but this is the only way to get the inflammation down before I start to lose bone.  Okay, the hygienist had me at missing teeth.  So I was flossing for the seventh consecutive day in a row today and these thoughts started meandering across my consciousness: "How much pollution is caused by floss production?  What did people do before floss was invented anyway?  Is this how people lost all their teeth in the frontier days because they didn't have the luxurious modern development of floss?  I should Google this."  I still haven't Googled it, but I figured ya'll didn't want to read an essay on the history of floss and dentistry.  Or do you...

Americans are Dumb?

This is news to me (insert sarcasm).  But if the statistics I read earlier while checking out Lisa Bloom's book, THINK, are true, then we are all in big trouble. Most people can't name one branch of government.  Collegians think we are at war with Egypt and Morocco. They can name more Kardashians than issues before their city council. Okay, the latter would be difficult for most, I think. I know more about DC than my actual city because the free newspaper I read on the metro to work discusses the most mundane issues like how much money the traffic cameras rake in annually. 

What is most depressing about this idea is that it highlights the consequences of this mentality. It's no secret that sex sells in our society. Ms. Bloom's research shows that women would rather be voted America's Next Top Model than become a Nobel laureate.  Sure, intellectualism isn't for everyone, but if every single woman was pressured by the media or decided to eschew the study of social issues and current news, just imagine the state of the world. The sedentary blobs floating around the spaceship in Wall-E come to mind, but just women. I would think in this scenario men would be able to easily convince women to leave Earth for promise of notoriety based on sex appeal somehow and continue to run Earth, but that's another can of worms. 

I know some women care about hot topics and are bright enough to recognize them as such. Why aren't we talking about them as often as our relationship problems? Why aren't more women empowered to find solutions to society's ailments? How do we start small and overcome the bystander effect? We as women cannot sit on the sidelines hoping for someone else to corral and conquer the world's problems.