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miserable entropy-creating lives
Monday, December 31 2007
There had been snow last night and Gretchen had postponed her return from the City. This morning I shoveled out the driveway, which had experienced an accumulation of six to eight inches of snow. That snow melted gradually thoughout the day as the sun came out and temperatures rose into the upper 30s. At some point I went over to Andrea's house with the chain saw to cut up a large White Pine limb that had been brought down by the heavy snow and impaled her back deck. Pines don't normally suffer from breakage in snow, but this one had managed to pile up heavier loads on evergreen boughs because it hadn't been accompanied by even the gentlest of breezes.
I picked up Gretchen from the bus station at around 2pm and later returned to town to get dog food and other necessary supplies because the weatherman was anticipating another big winter storm. I expected Hannaford to be more overrun with New Years Eve and winter storm shoppers, but I was lucky to get there before 5pm, when Joe Sixpack is finally free to crack a brew and drive home from work.
At several points today Gretchen and I discussed her veganism and my reaction to it. She'd been displeased with how I've been mocking it and otherwise failing to embrace it. In our discussions about it, it became clear that we both viewed it as philosphical wedge issue that has come between us. I support her views on animal rights, extreme as they may be, but I find her judgements about people's dietary habits to be harsh and overly-simplistic in the same way as a Christian fundamentalist fond of bashing queers while praising Jesus. And wasn't it true that as recently as two years ago it was Gretchen who found the vegans to be holier-than-thou and annoying? Her excuse was that she hadn't known back then just how horrible the dairy industry was. She hadn't known, for example, that one had to keep breeding cows and producing veal calves in order to continue milk production. This seemed like a weak excuse, considering I'd grown up on a farm and had communicated this to her at several points early in our relationship. But she claimed she couldn't remember me communicating any such thing. And besides, according to her, none of that matters now because dairy is just so horrible. Anyone who knew how bad it was would surely stop consuming it. This trapped me in a rather weird rhetorical position, since I've known from an early age that dairy necessarily involves the production of meat, and yet I've never stopped eating cheese. And nothing she can tell me now could ever shock me into veganism because I've never been ignorant about any of the horrors; they've always been of a piece with the things we'd rather not think about as we go about our miserable entropy-creating lives. Well before I got back together with Gretchen, I considered the eating of meat and cheese a sin against my moral framework, but no worse or more avoidable than driving a car or inadvertently destroying spider egg masses as I burn salvaged firewood. In my view, to live means to take from the world, and to take means someone or something has to give, be it a dairy cow, a spider, or some troops sent to keep the price of oil below $100/gallon. Gretchen and I could live pleasure-free lives in a Ted Kaczynski cabin in the mountains, but neither of us is that extreme. Truth be known, we both have our weaknesses for first world luxuries that would be unsustainable if everyone on Earth felt the need to satisfy them. While I enjoy buying gadgets and the occasional cheese-containing slice of pizza (or shrimp-containing pasta), Gretchen likes to ride jet planes to foreign destinations. But for some reason diet has come to define Gretchen's view of what is wrong with the world, which is perhaps an easy mental path when one comes from a religious tradition that is inordinately obsessed with what should and should not be eaten. Her conversion to veganism is as if she joined a religion that eschews everything except dietary laws. When I pointed out that absolutism in such things is something of a distraction from the bigger picture, she countered by saying things like, "I'm sure that back in the days of slavery there were people who thought it was okay to own only a few slaves. Or to beat their children, but only once a week." It's hard for us to find common ground on this issue, though I'm willing to be vegan in the house for days at a time and I'm going to try to roll my eyes less when she offers veganism as the answer to questions that might better be answered with say, "a hammer."
This evening we watched a DVD of Superbad, a hilarious portrayal of the day in the life of three nerdy high school kids. When I was a teenager such movies focused on the relationship between such kids and the more popular kids, perhaps with a moment of vindication at the end when the nerdy kids finally win the admiration of their peers. In this movie, though, the focus was entirely on the nerds' horndog interest in pussy.
Gretchen and I weren't invited to any New Year's Eve parties, so we had our own little party by ourselves in the living room by the fire. We drank California "champagne" and, when not talking further about veganism, we actually did that exercise where one discusses the high and low points of the previous year as well as the hopes for the next.
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