Week 15, Day 2 Veganism: "Emergency Barndoor Suicide"

Another day of veganism down, and no troubles (or hidden mayonaise) to speak of.

The thought occurred to me today that, as Hyperliving is a project filled with weeks of compromise and abstinence, I am learning how to pose all sorts of "Which would you rather?" questions. Like, for example, would I rather live a life devoid of alcohol/coffee/cigarettes or live a life unable to fully enjoy the pleasure of food (ie being vegan). I think right now i'm learning toward the latter, but that could just be a young guy thing for now.

MONDAY

Morning
I had no soymilk at home or suitable breakfast food, so I ate nothing and got a cup of Starbucks near the office. For the first time, drinking soymilk in coffee actually seemed to taste good. I bought some for tomorrow so we'll see how that goes.

Lunch
What I didn't mention in my post on yesterday is that Doorknobs has decided to join me in my vegan quest this week as an act of solidarity. For lunch, I met up with him and a colleague of his to go to a pizza stand somewhere in midtown. We wandered around for a while trying to find it, before finally locating it on 47th between Park and Madison.

Of course, I knew as soon as we set out that I there was no way we were going to be able to eat any pizza, even if it were cheeseless; and when we finally found the man, he said to me, "What? No cheese? I can't serve you no pizza with no cheese." And that was that; I bought a small fruit salad for $2.50 from the adjacent foodstand. Ingredients: strawberries, melon, cantaloupe, grapes, bananas, orange, apple, pineapple, watermelon, mango. It was a solid salad and I enjoyed it--despite the fact that for my entire life i've never liked either melon or cantaloupe. And spending only $2.50 wasn't so bad, even if it really wasn't enough food.








Dinner
We went to Snice for dinner, a great vegetarian/vegan low key restaurant at W4 St & 8th Ave (which is really like W12 St & 8th Ave). I met up with Doorknobs, his Pains bandmate Kip and our friend Nicole. Nicole has been a vegetarian for many years and during dinner had a number of great suggestions for me as far as places to eat and shop for vegan food.

Though it was apparently imperative for me to order and get the "Vegan Panini", I instead settled on the "Seitan Philly (Soy) Cheese Steak" and greens. My sandwich was great--the seitan was fantastic--though I was again reminded of how I just can't stomach certain soy "food replicants", soy cheese being near the top of the list (with tofu hot dogs being the unquestionable no. 1 inedible). I actually left the meal feeling something resembling full, which was great.











Post-dinner
After dinner I came home and went back to Black Betty, where I realized i'd left my credit card behind the bar the evening before. After getting the card, I bought soymilk, vegan-approved wheat bread, and sunflower oil "butter spread", which, while obviously not butter tastes about as good as any other margarine. For the rest of the evening I had one Red Stripe beer, one cup of herbal hibiscus tea and a two pieces of toast with sunflower spread and Marmite. I also did my taxes.

Week 15 is coming along just fine, I guess. It's definitely not ideal to avoid eating foods I enjoy, but it is nice to actually be thinking about what I choose to eat and why. People, myself included, eat so much junk in America and live so unhealthily, and I think a lot of that comes out of never really thinking too hard about what you do. I hope to learn some lessons here I'll continue carrying forward.