Rash Road

Driving is something a lot of people have the misfortune of having to do at some point in their lives. We spend a lot of time doing it, too. It gets repetitive and monotonous for those of us who commute longer distances to work or school regularly, and it gets even worse when you get stuck in traffic that’s slow due to the thousands of people trying to go in the same direction at the same time.

I'm the type of person who has developed a very flexible and tolerant sense of patience, being someone that works with people that have developmental disabilities. I have had to learn to put up with all kinds of juvenile-type behavior: People not listening to rational explanations for things, intentionally doing something I explicitly asked them not to do, throwing tantrums and/or objects at one another over mundane and harmless things (“She keeps looking at me!” “Why does she have to call her mother every day?!”). The list of nuances goes on and on. I put up with it daily, and on occasion I’ll lash out at someone myself – when I start to see a nasty behavior beginning to brew, in an attempt to lop it off before it can escalate – but certainly not because I’ve lost my patience. I’m rather proud of my ability to keep a cool head in the worst times.

Boy, I wish I could carry that virtue in my pocket when I got into the car.

I drive during times when there’s minimal rush hour, so I don’t even get the worst of it. But it doesn’t matter – I get absolutely furious on the road. My driving actions don’t reflect these feelings, unless you count my liberal use of the horn (Mitch Hedberg would be disappointed). But I’ve definitely fantasized about getting myself a paintball gun to keep under my seat for people who piss me off. I can’t count how many times I’ve wished I could send them a text, or a message over the radio that told them they’re a shitty driver, or just go all Grand Theft Auto on their ass and ram their stupid douchebag self off the road. I can’t imagine what it must feel like to be stuck in stop and go traffic every single day, to and from work. I just might destroy someone.

I have been assembling a mental list of things I like to complain about when I start ranting to friends or family. I finally decided to record them. These are in no particular order.

One of the first things is this: I drive a lot on the highway, and there are a lot of lanes. Many of the lanes end in some way, whether it’s because a lane exits onto another road, or just merges into the adjacent lane. Routinely, particularly when traffic is heavier, people will ride these lanes to the bitter fucking end, not wasting a square inch of asphalt and ensuring that they pass as many people as possible before trying to squeeze between two cars that are already bumper to bumper. The sign a mile back said that lane was ending, jackass – you should have merged back there like everyone else.

Although… I like to give people the benefit of the doubt – what if there’s some kind of emergency? Their wife could be in labor in the back seat – I don’t know. But it’s pretty obvious you’re just a prick if you’re driving your giant-ass SUV and blaring your crappy music for the whole highway to suffer through. Piss off. And by the way, if you’re on the on-ramp and about to merge onto the road with some fast-moving traffic, ACCELERATE. You need to be going the same speed as the other cars to merge effectively and safely.

Another thing that gets to me is people who pace the traffic in other lanes. The primary purpose of lanes is to allow higher flow of cars, yes; but secondarily, multiple lanes allows for multiple speeds. If you’re going the same speed as the person next to you and it’s not because of rush hour, move the hell over into their lane with them. Four morons, side-by-side, and all going 53 in a 65 that have a horde of 500 impatient drivers immediately behind them, and with an empty football field of space in front… One of you fucking DO something!

On the other hand, there are people who drive a different speed than others, but clearly don’t have an idea as to what lane they’re supposed to be driving in. “Slower traffic move right”. There’s a damned SIGN because people suck so bad at doing it. If people are passing you on your right, you shouldn’t be in your lane; either speed up or move the hell over (notice I said “people,” not “one person;” obviously you’ll occasionally have the guy who weaves between every car going 30 mph faster than everyone else – that’s different). And I don’t care how fast you’re going – 70mph in a 60mph zone, whatever – if someone catches up to you while you’re in the left lane, move over to your right and let the faster traffic through. It’s safer and courteous, and it allows for that benefit of the doubt in case that person does have some kind of emergency.

The next thing I want to address is behavior at stop lights. People see stop lights as massive time sinks because they have to stop, and many will do anything they can in their power to avoid it. Heck, I will even speed up a quarter mile before a light if it will get me through and save me the agonizing 30 seconds of sitting still. But speeding up a bit and doing something asinine are two very different things.

I’ve seen people stretch out that yellow light for multiple seconds after it has turned red. My light is green, but there are still people coming from my left and right that are jetting through the intersection – did I miss something? Part of me wants to pull out into the intersection and let the ego-centric morons hit me so I can sue them.

The other thing at intersections is courtesy to people turning left – many intersections are terrible at allowing people to turn left, whether the green arrow is too short, or just nonexistent. When I’m about to go straight through an intersection and the light turns yellow, I stop if someone coming the opposite direction wants to turn left in front of me. Why? Because turning left sucks, and everyone who drives knows it. They’re sitting out in the intersection, grasping at any opportunity to NOT sit there for another light cycle, and then there would be me whipping through to go straight, preventing that massive line of left-turning cars from shortening at all. This idea requires a bit of empathy, so I have yet to have any expectations of other drivers.

The next thing that makes me want to lob eggs at cars is when the drivers don’t use their blinker. I don’t care what the circumstances are – there’s never an excuse not to use your signal when you want to switch lanes or you’re going to turn. End of story.

This leads to the next point – PAY ATTENTION to other people’s signal(s). People use them for a reason – they want to switch lanes. Again, there’s no excuse for not easing on the brake enough for someone to squeeze in. Getting behind by a few car lengths over your trip is not going to hurt you.

It irks me worse when traffic is actually moving fast and I witness that happening – we’re going 70 mph and this guy is tailgating the person in front of him so closely that someone couldn’t merge between them if their life depended on it. Tailgating is an extremely stupid thing to do. Train yourself to not be such an insensitive and impatient ass hat. You’ll lose 1 or 2 seconds off your trip for the benefit of being infinitely safer and allowing people to merge or switch lanes when they need to.

All in all, you need to apply a couple different principles when you’re driving. You need to not do things that you’d be upset at someone else for doing. Next, you need to not do things that would make a situation unsafe, and there’s a long list for those since you’re driving multi-ton hunks of metal and glass down the road.

This is just a small compilation of my thoughts on the road – what are yours?

~A

Geek Central

For a number of years, I've been looking for an artistic outlet. I grew up doing musical theater, and that's always something that I can go back to if I really feel like it. I've been in a band before, and I love performing music in that way. The thing is, I do need something I can do on my own; even now, at home, I have an acoustic guitar, vocal microphone, and mixer that I have hooked up to my computer. With that, I've been playing music more often, and doing some recording and production. Also, I've played with a few different trial versions of computer programs like Photoshop, seeing if visual art is a better channel, but never had much luck. I've always had a hard time creating my own fictional stories, so writing never seemed appealing either. I've also thought about doing more photography, but that's much less expressive for me. None of these things have really appeased my urge to create something.


A few weeks ago, though, I came across an artistic inspiration. It was in the form of an independently designed video game called "Cave Story." If you're into video games at all, I recommend you give this game a shot, especially since it's free on the PC.


There's nothing totally remarkable about that game, but something about it set off a spark of determination. I decided I wanted to learn how to design games. Not just learning how to write programming code, since that's actually the least exciting and artistic part - but creating a visual, interactive world full of personality, music, and beauty. So, for the last couple weeks, I've been trying to figure out the basics for game design.


The first thing I decided to do was figure out how to design with Adobe Flash. Just based on websites like "addictinggames.com," it seemed like you could create relatively simple games that probably wouldn't require a ton of learning. I discovered something I was semi-excited about: Creating interactive media in Flash requires learning how to use ActionScript, a variation of ECMAScript, which is commonly used in other programming like JavaScript and JScript for gaming platforms. In addition, ActionScript is an object-oriented programming language, which is the type of syntax and language that you use for interactive media. Those aspects gave ActionScript some appeal as the knowledge can be used in other applications for similar purposes.


I spent some time learning how to use Flash and am going to continue learning how to use ActionScript. The problem I came across is that it's REALLY HARD to learn programming languages without any sort of formal training. I started looking for a simpler solution, and perhaps in the future I'd focus more on learning the complexity of such a language.


Coincidentally, I came across an application that is used specifically for making games, aptly named "Game Maker." This program does a number of things, but I've discovered two steps that this program takes to make game programming exponentially easier.


First, it uses the high-level programming language of Delphi. High-level refers to the amount of "abstraction" from machine language (binary). Essentially, it hides a lot more details of of the code, making it more user-friendly, but conversely ends up with less efficient and less precise code. So, it may be a good language to start with if you want to jump right into making complex applications. It's object-oriented, so it will have a lot of similarities to the languages in other interactive media. I may be able to use what I learn from that and apply it to other languages.


The second thing the program does is create a very user-friendly interface. It takes many of the commonly used functions and makes simple-to-implement buttons that you can use to quickly generate sprites, objects, rooms, background music, sounds, and timelines, along with rules like gravity. I've been playing with this program for a few days, and I can see that it has the potential to do exactly what I'd want to do, and my potential to make it do that is within grasp.


So, as soon as my brain comprehended that beginning to design a game could plausibly happen in mere weeks, a floodgate opened in my head. I started creating a fictional universe for a game to take place. I've got this huge backstory and plot, and I'm trying to develop an entire civilization based off of the premises given in this world. I have a sort of role-playing, platformer adventure in mind that will be vast in depth, gameplay, and length.


All the aspects of developing a game are tedious, but interesting. Designing environments, sprites for characters and monsters, thinking of music to implement, coming up with game concepts to integrate, learning computer code, and using the program to tie everything together is sort of a holistic artistic outlet that I'm excited to suddenly have. I have no sense as to how long a project like this would take to finish, but I wouldn't be surprised if it took me years to complete. I will likely create some simpler games as side projects as the time goes, but I have aspirations to create one very large project. High hopes for 2015! ;)


~A

4 Weeks!

After today it will have been 4 weeks since I started my vegan diet. This was sort of my unspoken goal; I wanted to see the short-term health benefits and sort of re-assess how I felt about eating. It has been a good 4 weeks, and a lot has happened - I learned how to make a couple new foods, I've felt better overall; and (an even bigger change) I've been able to step back and look at health, ethical, and moral issues surrounding the Western diet that we've fallen into. Michael Pollan's book, "Food Rules," ended up being quite a good guide to go by as I pursued this, and I'll refer to some of the rules here.


Spending more time in the kitchen has been healthy for me, in more ways than just making healthier food. I'm also not sitting and playing video games as much. :) I haven't made a lot of new foods, but that wasn't my goal - I just wanted to make sure I was well nourished without meat and dairy. I've done some experimenting with different recipes of veggie stir fry, which has been fun and delicious. I learned how to make cookies (Rule #39: "Eat all the junk food you want as long as you cook it yourself."), pancakes from scratch, and still kept up with making hummus and salsa. I've also been trying to have a glass of wine every day (Rule #43). I've barely scraped the surface of the number of foods that are available, but I had to ensure I wasn't spending half my paycheck on food. If you're not aware, it's pretty easy to spend twice as much as you normally would while grocery shopping if you're buying a bunch of non-seasonal produce, unprocessed goods, and things that aren't supplemented with some chemically altered form of corn (Rule #3: "Avoid food products containing ingredients that no ordinary human would keep in the pantry." Rule #4: "Avoid foods that contain high-fructose corn syrup."). Ultimately, it's probably worth it...


I mean, I was buying less food to try to cover the same amount of time (Rule #44: "Pay more, eat less."). Simply enough, that means I'd be eating less food per day over the course of the month - I genuinely wanted to be a bit more conservative with my food and not wasteful. To help avoid that, I tried a couple different things.


Rule #46: "Stop eating before you're full." When you're not buying bulk amounts of food for a small amount of money, your food becomes much more valuable. Avoid wasting it (eg. overeating or throwing it away). As long as you'll eat it and it will not spoil too quickly, keep it. And again, don't cram your stomach to avoid having to deal with leftovers (Rule #61: "Leave something on your plate."). Save the food for when you need it.


This next one was a little harder to follow, but it forces you not to overindulge the way we do in this country: Rule #47: "Eat when you are hungry, not when you are bored." If you're not hungry enough to eat an apple, don't eat anything else. The idea is that you only eat when you're actually hungry, rather than when you see something you want to eat or are using it as stress relief (it can be easy for me to eat cheesecake and strawberry sauce even when I'm already full). I think it's fair to substitute something for the apple that fits yourself; for most, apples taste good, but people generally wouldn't eat one as a treat or anything. A salad, an orange, or some carrots and celery - whatever works.


Another thing I did: I'd always drink a lot of water, particularly when I started to feel hungry. Apparently, in many incidents when you feel hungry, your body is actually thirsty. I read that somewhere and decided to test its merit, and it worked well for me. I try to drink a tall glass of water before each meal to eliminate unnecessary hunger, which in turn helps me to eat less.


These few simple things helped me to eat a lot less food, and I think it's been beneficial. I've felt like I've gotten better rest, and working mornings has become a lot less painful since I feel more energized. Waking up at 6am still sucks, but once I'm up and moving, I feel fine; prior to this, I'd feel tired all day. Also, it's hard to describe, but I kind of feel less toxic and groggy. I've lost a couple pounds over the month, which is saying a lot for me since I only weigh about 150 pounds to begin with, and I guess is a pretty realistic amount of weight to lose for someone who is doing it healthily. I think I was able to shed some of my unhealthy weight. On the less pleasant talking subject, my digestive system is much cleaner. I have to go to the bathroom a little more often, but it's usually goes a lot more quickly. Also, the increase in natural sugars and soluble fibers in my diet has produced more digestive gas, an unpleasant side effect. But again, a small drawback to the benefits.


Finally, while thinking about the health benefits of eating like this, I've been able to consider the moral and ethical issues surrounding eating and come up with a diet that I think I'll be satisfied with.


Ethically and politically speaking, I think the big food corporations are far beyond what they initally were there to do: provide food for people. Now it's just business. Money. The problem is it's really hard to get around them. There are 4 huge food companies that provide most of the food that's out there. The technicalities around things like seed patents and those companies buying corn from farmers for under the cost of production are hard to avoid, particularly when you live in a place like Minnesota where local produce is out of season. During the right times of the year, however, going to farmer's markets becomes an option. I'll do what I can to get my food from farmers rather than corporations. Unfortunately, my currently limited knowledge of the politics around food companies inhibits my ability to make rational decisions based on it. As a result of that in combination with me not really knowing how much suffering takes place due to the food corporations, this is less of an immediate concern to me.


I've decided that the biggest moral consideration is this: Animals shouldn't have to die for me to eat. I love eating chicken, and I often like hamburgers and steak, turkey and ham on holidays, and pepperoni on my pizza. But come on, killing animals for us to eat isn't very nice, especially considering how unneccessary it is for us. Meat is like, the most nutritionally inefficient food, and everything that our body gets from meat can be gotten from a plant. Again, as I said a few weeks ago:
"For the vegan, the fact that he has to supplement his lack of animal product proves him omnivorous.
His recognition of this fact makes him an intelligent being.
His exercising of it makes him a compassionate one."
I still believe this (although it's arguable that we're even omnivores in the first place, I'm giving the benefit of the doubt), but I think it applies mostly to animals' lives. I've decided that the byproducts of animals (dairy, eggs, honey, etc.) are a small price for them to pay for us providing healthy and enjoyable living environments for them. With that in mind, a vegetarian diet that sticks to those products that come from animals in ideal living environments rather than factory or industrial-style farms is what I've concluded would be a good solution (this is inclusive of the health rule, #27: "Eat animals [and products from them] that have themselves eaten well.").


I mostly don't want an animal to die for me to have a meal, and if I'm going to drink their milk or eat their eggs, I'd prefer them to be well-treated and well-nourished. Seeing as I have experience firsthand how much a difference a change in diet can make, I plan to continue being much more conscious about what I eat. By no means do I want to decide what other people eat - they're totally entitled to satisfy their hunger with what Michael Pollan would call "edible food-like substances." The point is that I strongly encourage them not to.


~A

Why Didn't I Just Do That Right Away? Oh, Right - Because I'm An Idiot

So yeah, this'll be me whining about something everyone's heard at least once before. Everyone has heard the pissing and moaning: "Arrgh!!! Stupid cops! What the hell do I pay taxes for? For the cops to drive around in the middle of the night and find harmless traffic offenses so they can hand out tickets without confrontation!? Frickin' cowards..." Yeah, that's actually about right, once it happens to you. A $95 citation for having tabs that are 3 days beyond expiration.


Seriously? My car's been registered in the state for almost 7 years, and I go 3 days without it and suddenly that's grounds for taking more than an entire day's wages. The scale of the cost is really what doesn't make any sense to me. That's almost the cost of: Any illegal traffic signal movement (eg. running a red light); speeding on bridges; illegal passing (tunnels/underpasses/intersections/no passing zones); going the wrong way on one-way street; driving in the bicycle lane; tailgating too closely; using divided highway crossovers; not signaling a turn or lane change; disobeying stop/yield signs; stopping/standing/parking on highway; obstructing view of driver (4 or more people in front seat), and many other petty misdemeanor traffic violations. Mind you, most of those listed above are $125; I guess running a red light or passing while going around a curve is only 132% as bad as having your harmlessly parked car in the same place it is every night with the wrong color stickers on the license plates.


It's pretty phenomenal that we consider these violations to be almost equal in terms of the penalty involved, considering the potential threat of each of them. It's also too bad that someone who earns 10 times my salary would have to pay the exact same amount of money, especially when it's a violation that could only be prevented by (guess what?) shelling out a hundred and some dollars in the first place. What would have been wrong with just giving me a warning? What if I was the single parent with 2 kids and 2 full time jobs who was waiting for their paycheck this Friday to pick up their tabs at the DMV? So much for the tabs - now I have to pay the frickin' fine.


Speaking of which, I'm genuinely curious here: What determines whether an officer is going to give a warning or an actual citation with a fine? Honestly, if the piece of paper on my windshield this morning would have said, "Hey, get some new tabs," I'd have been like, "Oh, dang - okay. Forgot about that," which would be true (it's hard for me to keep seemingly empty money-sinks a priority - I already paid for the car's sales tax, etc... What's the registration tax for, anyway? Whatever.). But he decided not to give the guy with ZERO violations on record the benefit of the doubt. Is it to the discretion of the officer whether it's a warning or ticket? If that's correct (I suspect it is), it's another example of injustice in the system; not that that even comes close to measuring up to police brutality and the like, so I really can't complain there.


In any case, I learned my lesson: You won't get a penalty for paying your utility bill late (once or twice). You won't get a penalty for paying your mortgage late one time; or your credit card bill. Instead, make sure you get the shiny stickers for your car! Alternatively, place your priority for Christmas shopping for your family a couple of notches lower.
~A

Just Another Work-Related Rant

Everyone has their own qualls at work that they need to deal with; not many people want to hear about others' crap. On the other hand, this is a form of output for me, so I'm gonna say it anyway.


Some days, everything goes fine. I go to work, and my co-workers stick to what they're supposed to do. Tasks are completed, I'm not stuck picking up the slack for a group of people, and things are prepared the way they're supposed to be. Working with people that have developmental disabilities puts us (the direct support staff) in a position of great responsibility and power over other people's lives. However, some days, I think some of us forget all about that and just do whatever the hell makes our own lives easier. This results in friction between staff, miscommunication, and lost time that ultimately leads to maltreatment in various forms - medication errors, missed activities or appointments, negligence, and even legal issues. Certainly no one person is to blame since there are multiple problems, but perhaps that is what makes it so bad.


As direct support staff for people with developmental disabilities, we've been given the task of administering medications for these people. We staff have all gone through a two-full-day training session, paper and skill testing, and orientation for our particular work site to ensure we are competent enough to do it properly. Considering the fact that administering medications can have drastic results if NOT done properly, we should probably make damned sure we're doing it right. Why, then, do I see so many gaps on the med administration record? Were the meds given? Why are we running out of a 30-day supply of liquid medication in ten days? Why, when the pharmacy provides us with medications stocked in monthly bubble packs, and EACH PILL labeled with each day, do we have multiple partially-filled packs? Why is the 60-dose bottle of use-as-needed medication gone after 20 days, with no documentation to show for it? Why is one person's nasal spray in another person's medication box? Is it because you want to watch American Idol and aren't paying attention? Is it because you had an outing that kept you out a bit late and now you're rushing to ensure you aren't at work a second later than you're scheduled? Are you trying to do too much now because you were sitting on your ass earlier? Is it because you just don't care? Or, and I give people the benefit of the doubt with this one, do you just not know how to do it correctly anymore?


This is all about people taking responsibility for their own tasks. It seems like people don't plan out anything - they think stuff is just gonna happen on its own, and the high-functioning nature of the house we work at just makes the day a Lazy River. Then when someone realizes they didn't do everything they were supposed to, they either rush to do it and screw it up or they delegate it to someone else (who may have a hefty to-do list in the first place). "Oh, shit - I forgot to do this one thing; I'll jet an email off to Adam, and ask him to take care of it. Ooo, while I'm at it, I'll ask him to take care of this other thing, since I have been thinking about it for a couple weeks and it needs to be done by tomorrow. Then, while I'm driving home, I'll remember something else and send him a text, too. Oh, yeah - and when he is driving to work tomorrow morning, I'll send him another text and ask him to do something that is physically impossible for him to do as it requires him to be in two places at the same time." Sorry if I sound like a martyr, but this situation is actually commonplace. Guess what happens? People miss appointments, or they don't get a ride home from work, or they don't get to go to their activity which puts them in a behavioral frenzy of whipping all their belongings out of their bedroom at we moving targets, leading to a miserable day of all the other residents being quarantined in another corner of the house so they won't get hurt.


Honestly, I can deal with these situations of having additional tasks fairly well. I find alternative ways of doing things, or go out of my way to make something work. The thing is, these issues are totally preventable with more preparation and better communication, which leads to my next point - proper communication. This is something that is so extremely lax in our workplace, that even though I'm a (slight) superior that's here 40 hours a week, I still have no f***ing clue what is going on most of the time.


Someone has a dental appointment today? Sweet, okay - Um, is the person's ride canceled? Dunno - it doesn't say in the appointment book under "Ride/Work informed?"... Okay, gotta call them quick. Let's see, what's the dental appointment for - is this a routine cleaning, cavity filling, or what? Hmm... Doesn't say on the calendar, in the appointment book, or on the referral form that isn't filled out. Alright, whatever - I'm sure the office will know why they're there once we show up (sometimes they don't). Alright, now where is this appointment? I see something scribbled on the calendar, but I can't read it... Uh, nothing in the appointment book or on the referral form; I guess I'll check their health progress notes and see if it says anything about the appointment in there... Aha, yes - 6 months back it says, "Next appt in 6 mos." Lucky me! Dr. Ekswyzee... Well, still doesn't say WHERE... Guess I'll do some Google searching and find out where this doctor is working. There we go - looks like the Park Nicollet in St. Louis Park - I'll call and make sure...


This is me, every day.


All this information that I have to hunt around for could have simply been written down in 30 seconds, and would save me the 20 minutes of work. I'm quite sure a five-fold quantity of time is accurate as to how much more work I have to do to figure out the situation, on top of me feeling like a complete ass hat in the situations when none of us know what the hell we're doing at the medical appointments in the first place.


Same thing with activities and events, and food/clothes/other stuff that randomly shows up at the house, and issues with the people's workplaces, and new support objectives for the people, and protocols for medications or treatment, and lots of other random things. There will be one (or zero) piece(s) of documentation about these things, and the inability to get a hold of the author leaves people with a cryptic message they need to try to get to the bottom of, only having the very selfish, skewed voiced desires of the residents to work off of. On the flip side of that, when *I* leave a piece of documentation for everyone to read and/or follow, even if I leave it in the most reliable place, it seems it doesn't get read. I have a note right next to the fax machine requesting that people look at my recent medication orders before faxing an order for something that we're running out of, since, chances are I'll have already placed an order for it. But we'll still end up with double what we ordered - this can become an issue since medical assistance won't always cover extra orders. I try to improve medical documentation by requesting that, on a daily basis, the person NOT passing medications check all the med records at the end of the day to make sure everything is completed and initialed by the med passer; I have instructions on how to do this posted ON THE DOORS of the medication cabinets, along with a calendar for the "med checker" to initial once they've done it for the day - 7 of the last 90 days are initialed, 3 of which are my own (I was working different hours the first few weeks of that calendar). And, by the way, this process was something that we did up until a couple years ago, so many of the staff are already familiar with it. To be fair, incidents of missed documentation are few and far between, but they could be indicative of someone not getting their delicately-controlled seizure medication.


Often times, I really wish we could have fully computerized documentation. We'd be able to have all the med administration stuff in there, all the communication notes, all appointments, and an holistic index of information regarding the vast complexity of the house. On the other hand, there'd have to be some major training sessions involved with computer use, I estimate that not everyone can type as fast as they can write, and we'd have to get computers for all the company's houses - honestly, small prices to pay considering the potential benefits.


Now, since I coincidentally am at work right now, I've cumulatively used up all my break time for the day typing this up. Time to get back to doing something that probably isn't my job. ;)
~A

Thought For The Day (week/month/however often I post)

For the vegan, the fact that he has to supplement his lack of animal product proves him omnivorous.
His recognition of this fact makes him an intelligent being.
His exercising of it makes him a compassionate one.
=========================
A few weeks ago, I watched "Food, Inc." It had an immediate effect on me, but traditionally this sensation is short-lived and doesn't really make much of a difference to me in the long run. I did, for a few weeks, focus more on eating healthy food; avoiding the heavily processed stuff, junk food, and fast food. I ate a lot less meat in that time even though my vegetarian wife has been out of town working on her internship, which you'd think would provide me an opportunity to indulge my hamburger or steak cravings.


In any case, last week I finally did cave. I hadn't eaten any junk food in a long while, and I hadn't drunk any soda. While sitting and playing video games one evening (the opportune time - when I'm sitting on my ass), I decided a can of Dr. Pepper and a quarter of a bag of Cooler Ranch Doritos was a good idea. That sat surprisingly well with me for the rest of the evening. However, morning came, and things were not quite the same.


My mouth was dry but oily. My stomach was churning. I had a pounding headache and felt like I'd become the guy from "Supersize Me" two weeks into the project. I almost didn't go to work.


Later that day, I strongly considered fasting for a while, just to totally cleanse myself of toxins. I wanted to start exercising, too, but realized after very brief thinking that I'd be putting way too many eggs in one basket.


After reading Michael Pollan's book, Food Rules, I decided a vegan diet seemed reasonable. I've been trying it out for almost a week now, and I actually feel pretty awesome. I've been eating veggie stir fry mixed with lotsa nuts, drinking some Naked Juice and soy milk every day, and eating a bunch of raw produce. I'm also drinking a glass of red wine every day (though I mix it with some juice to sangria it up a bit, since I really don't like wine alone).


Although I'm going with the vegan diet, I can't say I totally lived the lifestyle. I still wear my Italian leather jacket, and I was taking a fish oil supplement capsule daily for the healthy benefits. The jacket I've had for years - I don't see my continued use of it as any harm; the fish oil supplement I just don't see as being necessary, and I don't think it's harvested as harmlessly as something like overproduced honey from bees.


All in all, I'm happy with how this is going. I am only 5-6 days in; we'll see how it goes over the next few weeks.


~A

Hey - please don't judge. Just read, and respond if you wish.

http://www.alternet.org/belief/144354/hey_religious_believers,_where's_your_evidence_/?page=1


Just a quick note - when I said "don't judge," I wasn't referring to me - I was asking that people didn't judge the *article* simply by its title and choose not to read it. But thanks for the reassurance that you're not judging me, either. :)


Anyway - thanks to you guys (my Facebook homies) for commenting on this. In fact, in my experience, *most* theistic people who I know will value that everyone is entitled to their opinion; we accept that we can disagree and still lead lives of empathy and compassion for one another.


This article simply puts many of my slightly more militant feelings into words. These are real questions - they're not rhetorical. I really want legitimate answers to these questions because, let's face it - being an atheist leaves me without something that supposedly enhances the lives of billions of people around the world. If there's a real reason for me to join someone in their beliefs without being dishonest with myself, I want empirical evidence as to why I should do it.


The only somewhat compelling reason I've heard for people having their beliefs is from personal experience. But, this is not evidence; it's very subjective - every individual has a threshold to which they'll attribute an experience to the natural laws of our universe. Earlier in my life, I'd experienced things that convinced me that a God existed; however, as I grew, I started to understand that I could explain those things as fully natural events.


I have yet to hear of any legitimate event that could not be explained without the involvement of supernatural phenomena. Even so, I'm not trying to argue that people should change how they feel about those personal experiences; I'm referring to just about everything else.


On the other hand, I do see the appeal in exploring things like quantum physics, string theory, higher dimensions, etc. However, those are all speculation - entire complex ideas are based off of premises that are flimsy at best.


Just to add to what Andrea said - yes, mono- and poly-theistic religions are based on a faith principle, meaning that you believe something without empirical evidence. One may say they have "faith" that their car will start today or that the sun will come up tomorrow, but this is a semantic error. You're not talking about faith in these cases because you've routinely seen these things happen in the past, so you have a logical and evidential reason to believe they will happen again.


My issue is when people decide to make decisions based solely on their faith-based principles, that will affect other people. Of course, some of those decisions do good things for humanity, but I'd give those things up in a heartbeat if it meant we'd stop religious-based war and discrimination. I'd rather just see people do good things for one another based on compassion rather than sycophantism.


Again, thanks for the kind words. You guys are also awesome. If I'm attacking anything, it's ideas - not people.
~A