The Ides of March

It might be a bad day to be Julius Caesar but it is a great day to be me.  Here are a few of the reasons why:

I’ve told you good people how much I love my job before.  It can be very busy at times but I love the work.  In a lot of ways it is a hobby with a paycheck.  For the last three or four months my hobby has required Herculean feats of strength and effort, but like any Greek god I shouldered my additional burdens without a grimace and saved the day.

The extra effort was being invested in my new position that is even more like a hobby than the old cool gig.  The great news is that I’ve completed all of the busy work required to get the ball rolling and now I get to dig into the fun parts WHILE getting back to a normal pace.  The last two weeks were hella intense but that all ended a few days ago… right before…

Shannon and I celebrated our 20th Anniversary together at the Walt Disney World’s Polynesian Resort!  We’ve been WDW Passholders together since before we were married and over those decades we’ve always wanted to stay in the Polynesian but it just never happened.

When we checked in the manager came out with a pair of authentic leis and remarried us in the Hawaiian tradition.  There was kissing and “alohas” and it was totally unexpected.  The leis had been woven by the sweetest Hawaiian woman who was celebrating her 81st birthday that day.  She was an amazing woman who genuinely loved weaving leaves and flowers while talking to nice people.  As Shannon and I were walking away from our time with her we both vowed to do everything in our power to be that excited and vibrant in forty years.

Several people asked the kind of question that you automatically ask people celebrating an anniversary: “What’s the secret to staying married for so long.”  I usually gave a hilarious reply that suggested always doing what your wife says, ha ha ha.

Shannon gave the best answer though, and I’m not just saying that because of my comedy hour marital advice.  She said you have to find someone that you enjoy being with.  She and I lucked into each other at a young age and knew we were meant to be together.  “Knowing” is a tricky business.  Sometimes it works out for couples and other times it doesn’t.  We knew, but then we also had the great fortune to have guessed right.

In 1993 when we were married amidst the Storm of the Century there were not a lot of people that could travel the debris strewn roads and interstates to get to our atypical wedding. During the reception we received a pile of wedding gifts from the bravest guests.  I wish I could remember more about them but the video showing the ceremony and festivities that day but it’s on a VHS tape.  We don’t even have a DVD player anymore so I may need to go antiquing soon so I can buy a VHS player.

Anyhoo, this raggedy old towel came from Carol who was there the summer Shan and I met.  It was part of a thick, fluffy set but this lone towel is the surviving representative.  We held it up this week and reminisced about all of the places this towel had been, all of the babies it has dried off, all of the moves it has protected plates or glasses, and all of the floors it has kept us from slipping on.  It has seen some amazing history.

I love my wife, I love my kids, I love my job, and starting today I am loving myself a little more while I take Somer’s Green Smoothie Challenge! I’ve been a Green Smoothie King for a while now.  I’ve found it to be a great way to start the day.  It is the afternoon and evening where I’ve been dropping the ball.  However, I’ll be following Somer’s approach of NOT having a bag of tater tots for dinner and I’m hoping this will help take care of my tight pants.

May you all have a much better day than Ceasar did.

Happy VEGANtines Day!

It is February 14th and I think that we all know exactly what that means.  It is time to prop up the phoney diamond industry, the dead flower industry, and the Nation of Hallmark.  It is a day that marketers separate the Loves and the Love Nots into different consumer groups with easily manipulated emotional buying patterns.

Forgive me.  I’ve been around the block a few times.  Of the 24 years that I’ve been building an interesting work history, a few of them were dedicated to selling advertising.  When you embrace a life of selling something that doesn’t actually exist you begin to see other examples of it everywhere.  Any Valentines Day bashing I may do isn’t a result of cynicism.  It’s just that my BS Meter is calibrated so precisely that I am unable to endure levels of this magnitude silently.

But lets be honest (you should never start a sentence with a preposition, but I wanted to start a folksy, heart felt paragraph here in an enduring way).  Valentines Day is what we make of it- when focused on the negative it is easy to want to wash your hands of the day.  Luckily, we have a choice.  We don’t have to let this holiday be dictated by commercialism.  We can choose to focus on the love and caring and the excitement and the togetherness and let the miniature Teddy bears and crappy chocolate hearts sit on the shelves.  Being a mindful vegan has helped me hone in on what is really important during the various holidays so I can bypass most of the crap for sale that gets in the way.

With almost exactly a month before Shannon and I celebrate our 20th Anniversary, there is enough actual love to be celebrated without having to buy in to the pink and chocolate hoopla.  This year’s anniversary is exciting for both of us because for the last five years we’ve been having to count using our fingers to try and figure out which particular number we were celebrating that particular year.  16th, 18th, 17th, 19th… they are all so similar and non-distinct that it was hard to tell them apart without some basic Algebra and a calendar…. but not this year.  A nice round 20 is easy to remember.  A pair of decades stands out in the crowd.

So today most people are either receiving bouquets of roses in the office or shooting eye daggers at the people who are receiving bouquets of roses.  In either case, I was only popping in for a quick post about the the holiday.  I was going to mention the ironic steaks I saw for sale in heart shaped containers and wish everyone a lovely day.  I even came up with a cute title for the post: Happy VEGANtines Day! When I was looking for a matching image I did a Google search of vegantines day and found an actual company! It is too late to join the consumerism for this year, but if you’d like to shower your vegan love with appropriate gifts, vegantines.org might be the place to go in 2014.  If you’re into that kind of thing.

I hope you will excuse the short post.  I have to go and kick off a month of pre-anniversary romanticism.

With love,

Jason

Happy Herbiversary to Me!

Time flies when you’re having fun and this last year has been a blast!

As hard as it is to believe that a full year has passed since I took the vegan plunge, the calendar doesn’t lie.  October 16th of 2011 was New Life Eve and the very next morning began one of the most transformative experiences of my life.  I started the year as a Plant-based dieter, segued to compassionate vegan, and finally settled into my new life as a veganaut.

A combination of severe chest pains, high cholesterol and very high blood pressure were enough to make me think that the Atkins diet attempts were doing way more harm than good.  Then, when I was at my most conflicted, the Forks Over Knives documentary caught me off guard.  Plant-based dieting was the polar opposite of what I had been doing and thinking for so many years that it caused some of my internal gears to strip and I think the timing belt may have broke.  It might not be good for your car to go 60mph and then be jammed into reverse, but it worked out great for me.  The healing began immediately.

The next step along the year-long journey was a major shift in thinking that resulted in a minor shift in actions.  I was never the animal rights activist type.  There was no point in my life that I wouldn’t physically attack a stranger that I saw abusing a defenseless animal.  Protecting kittens and puppies is a no-brainer and always has been.  I can’t even say that I was ignorant about slaughter houses and how poorly “food animals” were treated during their short, tragic lives.  I was just under the same brainwashing cloud of denial that the rest of the planet is under.  It is so easy to turn off the logic centers of the brain and join the hive mind when you unthinkingly eat animals.

However, when you stop eating meat you are able to start being honest with yourself.  The safe little compartments that we use to hide unpleasant reality from ourselves crumble without daily reinforcement.  When my compartments came crashing down and I was able to honestly look at what it means to eat meat, dairy, eggs, and yes- even honey, it was a staggering reality check.  It was at this point that I transitioned from Plant-based dieter to compassionate vegan.  Diet is a huge way to reduce our consumption of animals, but there are a ridiculous number of items in our daily lives  (in our garages, closets, and bathrooms) that are made from animals.  They were treated just as badly and are just as dead as the animals that made our double bacon cheeseburgers- and it is equally satisfying to the soul to find these items and replace them with readily available alternatives.

The final leg of my journey during this last year was a result of trying to find a home in the vegan community.  For the whole year I have been educating myself.  I read books and blogs.  I listened to podcast after podcast.  I watched documentaries like other people watch Honey Boo Boo.  Most importantly, I became involved in the vegan community thanks to social networking, group projects like the Virtual Vegan Potluck, and mostly from interacting with you good people on this blog.

I learned that some vegans can be intensely territorial with their label.  These vegans want to make sure that they get full credit for their strict lifestyle while at the same time ensuring that the word vegan doesn’t get watered down by people who aren’t as strict as they are.  After I spent so much time trying to reach the the plateau of “perfect vegan” I can’t not blame them one bit.  If you can lead the ordered and organized life of a vegan, you deserve a label that lets people know how committed you are.  I, however, lack total order and organization in my life.  Mistakes happen and I never felt comfortable claiming to be a vegan when in reality, I was a 99.8% vegan.  This led me to new label and my own personal crusade: the veganauts.

ve-gan-aut /VEE-gun-ot/ (n.) 1. a person who is exploring the rewarding vegan lifestyle without actually meeting all of the vegan tenets all of the time.   2. someone who lives like a vegan but makes occasional allowances for transgressions without giving up the vegan lifestyle afterwards.  3. any omnivore who is experimenting with plant-based eating or vegan living. 4. a person who is sick and damn tired of defending their own personal brand of veganism and prefers to have a label nobody can argue with.  An example sentence: Sarah is a veganaut because even though she is almost always vegan, she owns a pair of leather shoes and eats cheese fondue once a month with her Mother-in-law.

I have a doctor’s appointment later this week so I can have my body poked and prodded by professionals.  I will quantify all the good news after this check-up, but my health monitoring throughout the year has been over the top excellent.  I’ve lost 40 pounds that I don’t intend to find again.  My sky high blood pressure is in the normal range.  I have not been to the hospital in the last year for diverticulitis, colitis, or gout.  I didn’t have terrifying chest pains that made me fall to my knees.  This is the healthiest I have ever felt and I still have 50-60 pounds to lose.  I have energy flowing through me.  It wakes me up early in the morning and keeps me active and focused all day.  People pay for energy drinks and talk about needing afternoon naps while I buzz around like a bee all day long.

For the next year, I will continue on my journey to improved health, environmental stewardship, and compassion for all life.  Additionally, I will ramp up my efforts to reach out to people who are ready to make the change to an herbivore lifestyle.  I want this blog to be a safe house for people who need it.  I’d like to be the underground railroad for people trying to make their way to freedom from societal pressure, conditioning, and compartmentalization.  I want to help other people feel as great as I feel today.

Huge hugs and heartfelt thank yous to all of you who have been here with me during this year.  Your support has been more valuable than you can imagine.  Here is to another great year, followed by 60 more.

Cheers!

Day 192: Earth Day

I am a big fan of holidays.  Religious, social, federal, or manufactured, I believe in celebrating absolutely everything.  Why save the word ‘Happy’ for birthdays and new yearseseseses? I’ll toss out a Happy Tuesday or a Happy Car Payment Day way more often than those other, more rare, annual celebrations.

Imagine the joy that I must have felt when something as massive as Earth Day came around.  This is an annual event that I always take note of because it celebrates the biosphere I live in and, by extension, me.  Any holiday that celebrates me, is of even greater importance than a mere President’s Day or National Tater-Tot Month.

On this Earth Day, I found myself in Miami.  The tropics were in an uproar because they are the tropics and they’re easily provoked.  Rain and gusty thunderstorms raged sporadically all weekend long but did not dampen our festive mood.

We are lucky to have multiple branches of our family tree in and around South Florida.  It is a fun place to visit, especially if you have some locals to show you around and keep you safe.  On this trip, the kids and Shannon got to visit with our sister/aunt and niece/cousin while I got to visit my close friends in Miami’s many poker rooms.  While the rest of the family was relaxing at a book store and catching up on family news, I was being handed stacks of chips that paid for the trip and the car payment for this month.  Does that sound like bragging?  It was meant too.  Maybe I should be more direct.  I rock.

When my mind starts churning it can be as much of a tempest as last weekend’s tropical temper tantrum.  Over the years I’ve tried to calm the thunderous brainstorm with meditation, medication, breathing exercises, and beer.  However, poker is the game that allows me to take all of my real and imagined stresses and remove them from my consciousness.  It is the mute button for my incessant inner 4 year old.  When playing in a poker tournament with more than 100 other people, I find myself as focused and content as people say they are during yoga.  Several different types of math calculations, quality play acting, mind reading, and extremely acute observations take up all of my brain’s operational capacity, and that’s one place that I find my mental bliss.

If you are under the mistaken impression that poker is gambling, I urge you to buy my upcoming book, No, Poker ISN’T Gambling for Crying Out Loud and I Will Tell You Why In This Awesome Book You Are Holding, due out sometime in the future, mere months after a publisher sends me a big fat advance check.

Poker is the only casino game, cards or otherwise, that isn’t built with odds that favor the house.  Casinos dislike poker, because while it is profitable for them to host the game, it isn’t as wildly profitable as the guaranteed money from roulette, craps, slot machines, and valet parking.  Poker players manage risk and make investments based on incomplete information exactly like the stock market, real estate and the movie industry (from the amazing upcoming book, see Chapter 14: Managing Risk and Making Investments Based on Incomplete Information, Exactly Like the Stock Market, Real Estate, and Movie Industry).

Poker players were once a notoriously unhealthy group of people.  Bad food, multiple forms of nicotine, alcohol, and endless hours of Jabba-the-Hutt-style slovenly reclining were just a few of the benefits of playing poker before 2004.  Since I am a product of the poker boom, I was schooled in the belief that every edge you can give yourself in poker equals profit.  Many of the old top-tier players began changing the way they live because a healthy, rested, active body creates a sharper mind.  Marathon runners can sit for longer periods of time during tournaments without suffering mental fatigue.  With tournaments paying out millions of dollars, the edge of having a healthy mind is worth the exercise and proper diet choices that are required.

Since giving up meat and dairy, I have been playing very well.  I can say that with regard to profit and quality of play.  Now, I remain sharper for a longer period of time without slipping into tournament-killing absentmindedness.  If you will allow me to use stacks of poker chips to gauge an increase in mental acuity, I can say that vegan living and plant based dieting have changed the way I feel, the way I think, and even the way I tackle my favorite puzzle.

During the many Earth Days in my past I made it a point to pick up garbage on the side of the road or plant a tree or pay some little token of apology to Earth for doing more than my fair share of damage to the limited biosphere we have.  However, this year is different because there is no guilt!  I can look Earth square in the face (which I imagine to be around Indiana) and say “You’re Welcome!”  Giving up animal-based foods and products is the single best thing you can do to reduce your carbon footprint.

So this is how I came to find myself on Earth Day, using gas to drive home on I-95 with a mini-van full of people rather than wading through a retention pond picking up plastic bottles and leeches.  After a weekend of sitting on my butt in an air-conditioned building with a carbon footprint big enough to be seen from space, I am still WAY ahead of the game.

Day 184: Halfway Around the Sun

Is there anything as stunning as Spring?  Bird songs and cricket chirps wake the Summer child in me and I begin to lust for lounging and crave calm and comfort.  As Sunday evenings go, last night’s version was pretty spectacular.

The skies, which alternated all day between Threatening Grey and Are You Kidding Me Blue, compromised on clear blue skies with enough cloud cover in the distance to make the sunset look like special effects from a blockbuster movie.

Dinner was cooked kale on a thin layer of brown rice garnished with cubes of cold avocado.  This still makes me giggle.  Everything else about the herbivore lifestyle has become commonplace: creative ordering from the menus at restaurants, learning about something called the “produce” section (which it seems is found in most grocery stores), reading ingredient labels as easily as some men read the stats in the Sports section, and so on.  However, the meals can still amuse me.

Sometimes I’ll look at my plate and break out into an full-face smile.  Partially, this is because after 39.5 years of carni-omni living, the herbivore meals can still seem foreign.  It isn’t that I crave the other kinds of food.  Instead, its as if I surprise and amuse myself when I look down at plants on a plate and remember that I’ve completely changed my life.  The remainder of the smile is a result of absolutely loving the grub I’m drooling over.

Sunday- you know, the one with the sunset and the kale- was the half-year anniversary of my new life.  The sun that painted that neon lava lamp for us, watched from the center of the solar system as Earth twirled us through 180 degrees of our 360 degree path to a year.

During that semi-orbit I have been reborn.  It is not simply a health issue.  I wont complain about lost weight and improved health, especially since this was the catalyst for the change that took place six months ago.  However, it is the changes in my heart and mind during that time that I am most thankful for.

Going on a diet and changing what is eaten for a few months because of bathing suit season addresses a pitifully small part of a person’s weight problem.  The real solutions are found by changing what we think, realizing what we already know, and being honest about the choices that we make during our lifetime.  When you’ve done all that, the rest of your life will fall into place- including the now (seemingly) inconsequential weight problem that previously seemed like the sun that all of your other problems orbited around.

My family and I have not just changed the way we eat.  We have changed how we eat,  how we make buying decisions,  how we think of others (animals included), and how we think of ourselves.  Our goals in life have shifted and our priorities have been redefined.  It is a heart-warming miracle just to count the number of extra times we sat down as a family of five and fought over the last bit of ginger salad and laughed about agave nectar.

When I wrap myself in the warm blanket of benefits that this new life has granted us, I feel overwhelming gratitude and sunny optimism for what the future holds.

Day 153: the Storm of the Century

March 13, 2012

Nineteen years ago, on this very day, the Eastern United States was recovering from, and in some cases still battling through, the ’93 Superstorm.  Blizzards and horrendous ice-storms fought with tornadoes and epic thunderstorms to see who could scour the human menace off the land.

When Shannon and I woke up in our studio apartment that day and looked out of our second story window, we were amazed at the destruction visible from a storm that we’d slept right through.  There was no warning for this massive beast.  It even took meteorologists by surprise, and nothing surprises those people.

Through the rainy, thundering aftermath from the worst part of the storm, we saw a community pool filled to the top with water and a tree.  A second, much larger oak tree was laying across the parking lot’s exit and a few cars.  Luckily, Binky, our brown 1984 Honda Accord was unscathed and the entrance  to the parking lot was still passable.  After getting dressed and leashing our first child, Joules, a black lab- dalmatian mix, the three of us climbed over the debris to our car and exited via the entrance on the way to a wedding.  Ours.

The majority of our guests were coming in from out of town, which meant they were not coming.  The interstates were closed.  That is the type of storm we are talking about here.

The ceremony was held at the camp where we met and was officiated by the camp director and the secretary.  It was an honor to have the camp director perform the ceremony because he inadvertently brought us together and a blessing to have the secretary because she was a Notary Public and a genuinely good human being.

As Shannon, Joules and I drove down the winding entrance road to the camp, we stopped to watch a power-line that had fallen across a bush.  The bush was on fire.  We drove on.

At the camp, with snow flakes beginning to fall- let me just refocus your attention on the fact that it was March and we were in Florida- so with the snow flakes beginning to fall along with the icy sleet, and with the wind kicking up waves big enough to crash over the docks, we opted to move our beautiful outdoor wedding into the rec hall.  This old building is probably even less glamorous than it sounds to you.  However, we’d slow danced during Stairway to Heaven in that building so it wasn’t too heartbreaking for us.

The wind was literally howling outside the rec hall, the lakes had ocean sized waves, and did I mention the burning bush?

These were not the ideal conditions we imagined when we planned our outdoor wedding. It was supposed to be in a wooded amphitheater overlooking two lakes that glitter like bowls full of diamonds in the sun.  There was a noticeable lack of flower petals and butterflies floating in the non-existent warm, gentle breezes and the crowds of people we expected were far less crowded than we envisioned.

In front of our collection of brave friends and family, locals mostly, we were married.

Thus began the nineteen years that brings us to today.  The years have been very much like the wedding we had on that weird, unexpected day.  We may have planned to hitchhike across Europe or nap away the summers in Barbados but the reality was usually quite different from the grandiose plans we made.

This is why we have had such a wonderful couple of decades together so far.  Both of us are dreamers who believe that things work out best for people that make the best out of the way things work out.

Life is a blissful miracle filled with wonder and bursting with joy.  It is also a messy affair with pain and suffering.  Life is both of these extremes and every gradient in between.  As mere humans, how are we supposed to be able to plan for a future that is everything we want it to be?  We can’t.  We don’t.

The trick is to find a spectacular human being that loves you more than you love yourself (no matter how MUCH you love yourself) that is willing to enjoy the ride with you.   The ideal candidate will laugh often and cry at the end of Disney movies and Christmas commercials.  This person should be willing let you be yourself, no matter how many times you change who you are, while also gently steering you away from the really stupid choices.  If you can find this magical unicorn of a spouse, you have hit the jackpot.

No mere Storm of the Century could dampen the spirit of someone that miraculous.