Chicago: Beef, Love and Understanding

giving up cheese would definitely make me sad.

AMEN.

holy crap julia is POSTING. Like, in earnest! I love you, julia.

Shut up, john.

Did you get the ysi I sent?

yeah, once in a while i get all crazy and actually say something.

we like it. keep it up.

Kenan, I did get the YSI, but I can't open .rar files. :(

Don't worry about it.

damnit, you can open rar files if you try. they're not secret or anything.

http://www.unrarx.com/

but if you like, i'll zip it. :)

Oh cool, that worked!

I downloaded some similar program a while ago and couldn't figure it out, so I thought .rars were a lost cause for me.

nope

i'm seeing a doctor who might want me to give up cheese at some point because of something with digestion and wtf and i don't know. the concept scares me, but i'd do it temporarily if it would really impact my health. i think. i kind of doubt that it would make that big of a difference, though. i dunno.

i had the most beautiful sharp white cheddar in my fridge, really potent stuff, which is now all gone and eaten. how can i give up flavor like that? cheese is such an incredible foodstuff.

i really do miss xposts.

It's a good thing I haven't emptied out the trash on my desktop, too, because I have albums by Of Montreal, The Shins, and Peter Bjorn + John in .rar format that I downloaded just to see if they'd work. They didn't, but they will now.

YAY!

julia, i got you cheese instead of chocolate for valentines day, because you can't eat chocolate, and whatevs, because cheese is better anyway. But if you stop eating cheese... OH NOES. What's next, you won't eat bacon??? This is insanity.

that really was some serious cheddar, wasn't it?

treasure island, ppl.

it was AWESOME.

i don't know about stopping with eating cheese altogether. i don't know if it's humanly possible for me.

(and cheese for valentine's day was totally better than chocolate)

I have it on good authority that Julia still eats bacon. She had one of my leftover burgers for dinner, which is a big medium-rare slab of ground beef with a thick, nasty piece of bacon wrapped around it and fried all together in its own beautiful animalistic greasiness. I tried to fancy it up with arugala when I put it together, but I needn't have bothered. It would have been awesome with just a little mustard.

Or with nothing. That would also work.

This thread is pretty great.

I have yet to dig into my (piss-lapping) collards with (son-of-a-bitch-motherfucking) pork neck, but I (godfuckingdamn) am looking forward to it.

OH SHIT. I AM ON THE WRONG THREAD! OOOOOPSS1!!!!!

Holy-ghost-goop-gobbling greens with turd-fucking cum-curd-eating corn bread.

(I'm practicing.)

for what?

For our date.

Tonight is the kind of night where I wish I smoked weed. If a joint wouldn't make me want to run through the window, I would love to sit around and smoke one.

I'm more likely to espouse a philosophy of "do what you can."

OTM. Plus, meat-eaters who feel the need to justify themselves are just as annoying as self-righteous vegans.

Who's going with me to see Mastodon at the Riviera on May 12?

There are few feelings more frustrating than getting up and leaving for work an our early to get in and get some work cranked out before the day hits, only to be stuck in molasses-ass traffic and ending up twenty minutes late.

I totally want to see Mastodon, I love them.

"our" = "hour"

Back when I was a vegetarian, I strived to avoid leather. I was generally able to w/r/t most accessories but the problem I found with "vegan" shoes was that they fell the fuck apart after a few months. I think the best bet is to try and buy used as much as possible - clothes, shoes, whatever. That way you can get quality goods, save money, and subvert the cycle of capitalism-mandated overmanufacturing and its subsequent landfill-choking waste. Buying new quality items and learning to repair them instead of buying junk and then throwing it out is good, too.

Julia, just cheese or all dairy?

JVC... that f'n sucks!

Vegetarians in this thread. I may have asked this before, but what are your main reasons for not eating meat?

My reason was an inability to remedy the cognitive dissonance between enjoying the company of some live animals and then being willing to eat other animals. Plus I don't know that I could kill a pig or a cow, so I figured I shouldn't be eating it.

My reasons for being such a conflicted meat eater now are those plus the horror of factory farming and what that does to animals, human workers, the environment, and our other food. And also because it takes so many resources to support such a meat heavy diet and maybe if we ate lower on the food chain we could redistribute some resources, assuming of course a total paradigm shift as far as leadership goes.

Like, I have a general rule that I can't eat anything I've ever had as a pet. But then, I've known some pretty great ducks in my life and duck is really, really good. But how can I eat duck after knowing that ducks are kind of funny and interesting when they are alive?

I do like Amanda's approach to meat-eating, though. 2/3s vegetarian, 1/3 bacon-eating.

Jeff obv. already knows this, but I wanted to answer as a show of good faith that this isn't a meat eater's demand for vegetarians to JUSTIFY THEIR PERSONAL CHOICES but an attempt to learn things about stuff and junk.

Also, RTX is playing the Empty Bottle on May 7. No one cares about this except me.

yes, what Jenny said.

I am a vegetarian because Sarah told me to.

You see, that's a perfectly valid question, but I always hate answering it, because it puts me on the defensive. Also, it makes me feel like I'm preaching and tends to put other people in an argumentative mode, when I didn't feel like discussing it in the first place. At least you aren't bringing this up at a table where people are already eating meat. That's the worst. I guess my point is that I don't feel like turning it into THIS THING.

Never-the-less, I'll say that I honestly became a vegetarian out of peer pressure. I was 16 and had just started on my third new high school in a row. All my new friends were vegetarian. I'm talking at least 10 new friends were all vegetarian. They were really into it. Also, I found them all to be dazzlingly intelligent (I was in the International Baccalaureate program at that school) and took what they said seriously. And one day, one of them happened to show me one of those horribly graphic brochures that would make anyone want to kill themselves.

Also, I didn't eat much meat before that anyway, at least not for several years prior. I really wanted to be vegetarian in middle school, but my mom flat out wouldn't let me because she was worried I just wanted to diet. My inner urges to be veggie first flared when I saw Bambi in the theater (as a wee one). Then they came back full force in 8th grade when I had the popular teen obsession with death and my part in it and how crazy the world is... yadda yadda...

So fast forward to 16-year-old me who had basically been veggie for a few months before meeting these friends with the exception of the occasional slice of pepporoni pizza or piece of fish. It was easy to make the transition.

That said, I was not a healthy veggie to begin with, because that wasn't the point for me. It was more about animal rights. In fact, it was all about animal rights. So I ate a bunch of crap (french fries & coke played a big part). In the past few years, my diet has taken a 180 in that I've been paying a lot more attention to what I put into my body, but I think that is all about GROWING UP and has little to do with my vegetarianism.

Mostly it's habit now and it's easy and I believe in my reasons for doing it, so I don't see why I'd change that. Also, our society has become a hell of a lot more vegetarian friendly. Most restaurants, for example, have at least one, but usually a few more, vegetarian entrees. Vegetarian groceries (ie: veggie soup with no chicken stock for example) are so much easier to come by. Also, my knowledge of food, especially ethnic vegetarian foods, is a lot bigger now, so I have a lot more healthy options.

As I said, I dont' like talking about it. I don't like arguing about it. I think everyone should just make their own food choices/ decide for themselves. I have been constantly amazed at how many people talk to me about vegetarianism as though I'm trying to change them.

Like, I have a general rule that I can't eat anything I've ever had as a pet. But then, I've known some pretty great ducks in my life and duck is really, really good. But how can I eat duck after knowing that ducks are kind of funny and interesting when they are alive?


this is why i always imagine cows as having little hitler moustaches. it makes the steak taste that much better.

I imagine RTX would be pretty fun at the Bottle, but I've never really checked them out. How similar/not are they to Royal Trux?

For the record, I'm a meat eater. Hard to grow up on a farm in central Illinois and not be, but I've grown to be more conscious of my choices.

one of those horribly graphic brochures that would make anyone want to kill themselves

They got me, too! They still get me.

RTX is probably closest to "Accelerator," the super-distorted overcompressed yet poppy version of Royal Trux (and probably my favorite Royal Trux album). It's a little hair-metally as well. OK, very hair-metally. Transmaniacon was my favorite album of 2004, and everyone here was probably really sick of me talking about it.

(not that I think you think I'm trying to change you, Jeff)

Also, I just said I don't like to talk about it but LOOK AT THAT POST. ha ha

Don't read the following if you're queasy:
I forgot to reference all of my encounters with death, especially animal death, when I lived on the farm in middle school. During my few years there I saw dead birds, parts of deer (and had to pick them up), dead cats (had to move them out of the road/usually not ours! or would find one trampled by a horse or one killed by a dog...), dead rodents and squirrels and such killed by our cats and dogs, a dead pony, dead snakes (didn't mind that one), dead fish, and a few dead kittens. Also, I had to deal with the deaths of a couple of relatives during this time. This made me feel even more protective of animals, which would include not wanting to eat them.

The only time I tried to go veggie was in high school. My mom was such a horrible cook that all the meat she prepared was dry, under seasoned, and tasteless. I thought that was how all meat tasted so I wanted no part of it.

Once I left home, I learned how wonderful well prepared meat can taste and have never looked back. I like vegetables too.

I got a book about animal cognition for Christmas. I need to start reading that, I wonder if it will change any of my current beliefs about animal consciousness.

I'm willing to go veg again! It will be easier if we both try it.

i want a steak for breakfast.

hey, is it payday this friday? if so i'm going out for a steak.

No way sister, I'm still in my meat renaissance.

CHICAGO: Meat Renaissance.

It would make a logical follow-up to "Beef, Love and Understanding."

Chicago, give me one good reason why I should go to class today instead of going home and studying for the MPRE and possibly doing some laundry?