Small girl in a big world

No, and I am not a vegetarian. Before you jump down my throat let me very clearly explain something to you:

Veganism is a political diet, not a health diet. People can survive on vegan diets if they take the right supplements and get the right nutrients, but most people who choose veganism for ‘health’ reasons are not educated about what they need. Veganism is not an option for many people who are disabled, like myself, and who’s bodies require nutrients to adequately heal and function. It is also not realistic for people who cannot afford the vegan alternatives or work too many jobs to have the time or the opportunity to prepare and think of meals and do regular grocery shopping.

But that is not it. Veganism is a diet for urban centres and huge cities.

Let me explain to you how my non-vegan and non- vegetarian diet prescribes to the core beliefs of veganism: the violent abuse, slaughter, and mutilation of sentient earthlings an the absolutely unsustainable amount of space and fuel these mistreated animals occupy and require on the earth.

I am not in an urban centre. I am barely in a city. I am on an island off the west coast of Canada, in a farming and fishing community. I happen to be lucky enough that I can afford to purchase only local meats and animal products (which is not cheap.) I have been to every local farm. The farms in my community are kept in such good condition and the animals are treated so well that it is a regular yearly school trip for elementary children to go to each farm and learn about plant/animal sustainability and the ethics of animal farming. You get to feed treats to the cows while they are being milked. This is not animal abuse. This is feeding our community. This is a way of life. There are no chicken cages or restricting cruel cow pens.

Don’t get me started on this ‘honey is theft bullshit’ either. The beekeepers in this Valley make their living off of that honey. They do everything they can to keep their bees alive and happy and collecting pollen. They take only the excess honey, and leave enough to last the bees through winter because if the bees die their livelihood is lost.

If pigs are fed on residues and waste, and cattle on straw, stovers and grass from fallows and rangelands – food for which humans don’t compete – meat becomes a very efficient means of food production. Even though it is tilted by the profligate use of grain in rich countries, the global average conversion ratio of useful plant food to useful meat is not the 5:1 or 10:1 cited by almost everyone, but less than 2:1. If we stopped feeding edible grain to animals, we could still produce around half the current global meat supply with no loss to human nutrition: in fact it’s a significant net gain.

Vegans like to claim that it takes 100,000L of water to produce 1kg of beef; this absurd assumption that every drop of water that falls on a pasture disappears into the animals that graze it, never to re-emerge, is frankly bollocks.

UN Food and Agriculture Organisation’s famous claim that livestock are responsible for 18% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions and attributes all deforestation that culminates in cattle ranching in the Amazon to cattle when in reality it is mostly driven by land speculation and logging. It muddles up one-off emissions from deforestation with ongoing pollution.

Many vegetable oils have a bigger ecological footprint than animal fats. Even vegan farming necessitates the large-scale killing or ecological exclusion of animals and pests.

The average vegan diet is not sustainable on local, seasonable produce - and even if it did, that would presume everyone has equal access to such produce and isn’t stuck in a food desert or, as iamatinyowl points out, has the time, energy or resources to prepare it. Much of the produce consumed by vegans has to be imported - usually by air freight; the airmiles contribute far more to the carbon footprint of that food than animal produce would. And the use of such fashionable alternative carbohydrate sources such as quinoa also causes real difficulties and hardship to the people who produce it; it pushes the prices up so that the farmers cannot afford to live on the staple crop that they have always consumed. Since brown rice became so popular, the farmers that produce it (who used to consume it mostly themselves, as milled white rice always fetched higher prices before brown rice became so popular in the west) cannot afford to eat it and so subsist on the far less nutritious white rice and thus their diet is lacking in essential vitamins.

The vegan viewpoint also ignores the fact that some people simply are not capable of processing protein and essential amino acids etc from vegetable sources and have to eat meat.

After several attempt to stop him, she finally declared, “If you keep kicking those over, your leg will fall off!”

No sooner had she said this than she looked up and was mortified to notice a man standing on a pair of crutches with one leg.

Before she could apologize, he looked down at the boy and sighed, “I used to love to kick those.”

Okay, so I might get a lot of hate for this, I might not. I don’t particularly care either way, as long as word gets out about this, because it’s extremely important to me.

As I’m sure most people know by now, bees are disappearing at alarming rates. Simply put, our entire species could not survive without them. This is due to a syndrome called Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD).

Many vegans opt to use agave nectar instead of honey, because agave nectar is plant based. But harvesting of agave nectar is threatening the existence of two other endangered species: Mexican long-nosed bats (who live strictly off of nectars - primarily agave nectar) and the Jaguarundi (a solitary feline who basically looks like a love child between a jungle cat and a ferret.) Approximately 113,126 acres of these animals’ habitat were destroyed from 1991 to 2000, and more has been destroyed since.

On the other hand, beekeepers are essential to increasing bee populations. They monitor the bees’ health and help protect them from dangerous parasites and pesticides that are suspected to cause CCD. In addition, well-kept bees never need to use the amount of honey they produce; Honey is made by the bees to consume only when there is not enough food for them outside the hive. In the care of a good beekeeper, this will only happen during the winter months, and the keeper will leave enough honey for the bees to thrive until it’s spring again.

Body as Altar is our first collaborative project. Its goal is to share photos in which you are honoring or nurturing your body. It is a visual expression of what you are bringing to your own altar, the sanctuary that holds your joy, your dreams, your light.

morning sex

afternoon sex

dinner sex

after meal sex

i made pancakes sex

good morning sex

shower sex

bored sex

make up sex

break up sex

monday sex

tuesday sex

wednesday sex

thursday sex

friday sex

saturday sex

sunday sex

there is nothing on tv sex

i love you sex

It’s coming up on a year now since I got my current job as a pizza delivery girl, and I thought this would be a good time to delve into the little ever-expanding “WTFPIZZA” note I keep on my cell that helps me remember some of my more, uh - interesting deliveries.

So without further ado and in no particular order, here’s some pizza customers who left a lasting impression on me thus far:

- A bearded man who answered the door and periodically spat blood into a crusted Harley-Davidson coffee mug while counting out his cash.

- A woman who slipped me a business card (in lieu of tip) for a laser tattoo removal clinic, explaining “In case you want to bring your mutilated skin back to how God intended it to be.”

- At least three Batmans so far, but only one who did the voice.

- An elderly Spanish woman who meekly presented me with a (rather classy) pearl-handled .32 snub nosed revolver and asked if I knew how to load it (I do) and also, if I could load it for her (I didn’t).

- A group of EMT’s hanging out in the back of an ambulance at a recently extinguished (but still smouldering) house fire.

- A man with a thick Alabama accent who admonished me for standing in front of his mailbox while I waited for him to answer the door.  He then explained how this was a federal offense because I was “obstructing the mail system” and demanded my social security number so he could “report me to the proper authorities”.

- A group of young teenage girls (like 14-16) who begged me to buy a case of Bud Light (ew why) and bring it back to them.

- A hotel room full of badass middle-aged women all dressed as Professor McGonagall from the Harry Potter films, who were also completely wasted on Jello shots.  They kept encouraging me to stay and party with them.

- A 20-something dude who answered the door with an unsheathed katana dangling through a belt loop on his jeans.

- Multiple instances of people asking if I would sell them pot. (bitch get your own dealer sheesh)

- A guy who slipped a twenty directly into my shirt because I apparently was the “spitting image” of his deceased daughter.

- A woman who admonished me for driving a Mazda, and wrote “get a real car” in the tip portion of my credit receipt.

- A very drunk dude who gave me his iPhone and had me take a bunch of Myspace-esque pictures of the both of us.  He did the duck lips thing in every shot.

- Multiple prank deliveries (joke’s on you motherfucker, I get paid for the gas AND I eat the pizzas you ordered)

- An elderly man who wrote “FUCK OFF” as his signature on a credit receipt.

- A thirty-something guy who begged to get his order for free because he “works so hard”.  He visibly teared up and sniffled when I told him I couldn’t do anything.

- A dudebro wearing a bath robe and socks + sandals (indoors) who straight up wordlessly yanked the pizzas out of my hands without paying and shut the door.  Multiple knockings were of no avail.

- A woman who angrily demanded to see my ID because she refused to believe my claims that I’m female.  She proceeded to snatch my driver’s license out of my hand, run back into her house and show it to her children while pointing back at me.

- A kid no older than 14 who desperately tried to convince me to play WoW on the free custom server he was playing on. (But it has double XP!)

- A guy who spent the entire time I was there digging a (impressively large) booger out of his nose.  He proceeded to smear it on, thankfully, HIS copy of the receipt.

- An on-duty cop who flagged me down by intercepting me on the road before I got to the police station and pulling me over to get his pizza.

- A drill instructor looking-guy who filled out his entire credit card receipt, specifically wrote “0.00” in the tip portion, then proceeded to write out a check for seventy-eight cents and handed it to me.  It said “pizza tip” in the “For” section.

- A furious lady who yelled at me for a solid five minutes (I kept track) all about how long it took for her delivery to get to her.  She then tipped me an extra ten bucks on a six dollar order.  I dunno.

- An incredibly stoned teenager trying and failing to look sober.  When I complimented his Adventure Time wallet (which was super cute) and asked where he got it, he immediately looked terrified, sat down on the floor and muttered “I… I don’t know….”

- Obligatory naked man with unimpressive penis

- A chick at a house party who answered the door and immediately turned to vomit into her mailbox.

- A surly Korean mom with an amazing shoulder tattoo of a baby giving birth to a full-grown woman.

- A man who lived in one of those mini-mansions inside a gated community, who sported a seemingly massive collection of what appeared to be solid glass spheres of varying size and color.  I only got a quick glance in his house but there had to be hundreds of them in display racks, tables, shelves - everywhere.

- A group of 20-something guys who challenged me to sing the original Pokemon theme song, which I did.  And perfectly, I may add.

- A completely iced-out musclebound gangster kid who was blaring Regina Spektor so loud and with so much bass I actually couldn’t hear anything he was saying.

- An elderly guy who deadpan asked me if I knew anyone who could score him hollowpoint bullets.