Coloring outside the lines

Today sucked. Not gonna lie.

Chef was off at work cooking brunch for all of the other moms out there, and I was home with Chuck, sick as a dog.

Had to cancel plans with my family & scrap my hope to see Ina May Gaskin speak.

I was disappointed, at the very least.

But part of life is being sad and let down and angry and all of that….and part of who we are is how we deal with the crap parts.

You can’t shove them under the rug. You can’t wallow in them forever. You can’t dwell on it until you’re a wreck.

However, how you deal with heartache and puffy eyes and illness is up to you.

But don’t EVER let someone else tell you how to feel. Own your emotions and feel them.

Be sad if that’s what you feel. Have your big ugly sobbing cry while you talk to your friend on the phone about your stupid ex who dumped you on Valentine’s Day. Then get over it.

And to all my ladies out there in a relationship: please don’t lose your “self” while creating your “us”.

Putting on a happy face is one thing, but constantly suppressing your ideas and your joy and what makes you the big glittery YOU that you were born to be is something different. Don’t EVER dumb yourself down for ANYONE.

If they don’t like you coloring outside the lines, screw ’em.

Happy Mother’s Day to all my mommas out there….especially the ones living a big bright life as a great example for their babies.

Xoxox

Merry Christmas! You’re fired.

Image via Wikipedia

So Chef and I knew this was coming….

2 weeks ago, his boss pulled him aside and (totally bawling in a very non-chef like manner) tells him that as of the first of the year, Chef will be “underemployed.”

Definition of underemployed according to Google: employed only part-time when one needs full-time employment or not making full use of your skills.

Definition of underemployed according to Chef’s boss: not working right now because there are no banquets or business, so maybe in March we’ll revisit the situation and hire you back but then again maybe not, but we really like you and wish we could keep you.

This morning when Chef arrived at work, his boss pulls him aside again and says he (and everyone else that ranks below him in seniority) has been removed from the schedule as of THIS MONDAY.

So Merry Christmas, Chef is fired, and I’m canceling Christmas.

This comes the day after the scary doctor calls and flips out because I am not scheduled for a huge massive life-changing surgery like she recommended. So all in all, it’s been a very interesting day.

I would like to inform the Universe that I have a very low tolerance for any more fuckery during this holiday season. This means there will be a moratorium on the following (and this is by no means a comprehensive list):

• dying (seriously, if even another of my HOUSEPLANTS dies, I’m going to lose my shit and wander into traffic in my bathrobe with a stewpot on my head.)
• arrested-ness (no job = no money for bail, people. I’ll come visit you though. You’ll look smashing in drab green or bright orange, depending on where you get locked up.)
• Christmas trees bursting into face-melting flames (this hasn’t happened. Yet. This Christmas) or falling on small children (again, hasn’t happened)
• cars getting hit in random snow storms (seriously, the LEAST you can do is write down the license plate and ATTEMPT to apologize for wrecking our car.)
• getting suspended from school (only 1 more day of school for Short Stack, so I think we’re in the clear on this one…)

So in conclusion, I am tired of Christmas exploding its fake cheer everywhere and crapping all over my house every year.

The End.

Not all vegans are jerks.

Image by hisashi_0822 via Flickr

So yesterday, I got a incredibly asshatted nice email from an anonymous source saying that because I wear leather shoes and “don’t care about the animals”, that I am not a vegan. That according to Ellen DeGeneres and her glossary of vegan terms, I am merely a vegetarian. They said (I use “they” because they didn’t sign the email, nor was there gender indication in the email address itself) that saying that I was being vegan “for the health of it” was akin to telling the animals that I was ok with them being slaughtered for their muscles and their wool.

I didn’t know what to say…at first. I honestly sat there, shocked and appalled that a total stranger would take the time out of their day to write such a hurtful email to someone they (may have?) never met.

Then I realized this person is one of the vegans that run around telling everyone that they’re doing everything wrong, and that they are HORRIBLE PEOPLE for wearing leather shoes or wool or eating meat, and will hand you a pamphlet with graphic depictions of cows being slaughtered as you walk out of a burger joint. (We’ll call that type of person a JV = a Judgemental Vegan)

After mulling this over for a bit, and in the interest of finding out how educated my friends/family are about veganism, I asked a couple of friends (via various methods…Facebook and Twitter mostly) to name the first thing that popped into their mind when I said the word vegan and here’s what they said:

• What exactly do you eat? I mean, I know you eat plants and stuff, but really, where do you get your protein?
• That one guy who stands on the corner near my son’s preschool and hands out “meat is murder” leaflets. He always yells at me for wearing leather shoes.
• Omigod, don’t you have to throw out your leather or something? I’ll take your Frye boots if you’re just going to throw them out.
• I met a lady the other day who was vegan, and she was HUGE. I thought all vegans were skinny hippies? No offense.
• Don’t you have to eat tofu all the time? I don’t like tofu. I just couldn’t do it.

I had to break it to that last person that the frosting on the cupcakes I made her the other day had tofu in it. 🙂

Conclusion? People are shockingly uneducated (as I was when I first thought about switching) about vegans, veganism and plant-based diets in general.

Anyway – after chatting with a lovely (and totally non-judgemental) fellow vegan, I decided that this person (who thinks sheep get slaughtered for their wool….obviously completely mis-informed) just needs to calm down and that I can ignore them and not take all of their vitriol to heart.

People like my anonymous emailer are what turns people off from listening to vegans and what they have to say. It’s a basic tenet of life: If you’re rude, condescending and judgmental, nobody is going to want to stick around and hear what you have to say.

However, on the flip side, if you’re kind and share with others, you bake vegan goodies for get-togethers or bring a vegan dish to a potluck (if, for no other reason, so YOU have something to eat!), if you address all questions about your lifestyle with kindness and don’t take them as accusations, if you live your life the way you like and with a big dose of kindness, then people will be more open to listening to the “vegan party line.”

In other words Anonymous Emailer? CALM THE FUCK DOWN AND LIVE YOUR OWN LIFE. I’m going to just keep doing me. 🙂

Note #1: yes, I am aware that sheep do not die when their wool is sheared. I’m still a “new vegan”, so I’m not entirely sure why we don’t wear wool. If you DON’T shear them, that’s cruel…so I totally don’t understand.

Note #2: I’m not throwing out my leather boots or my jacket. First off, they were all insanely expensive. (I did get rid of 2 leather jackets during The Great Purge.) Second, me throwing them away so they can rot in a landfill doesn’t help ANYONE. Third, I can’t escape wearing wool because I knit and most of the sweaters and socks I knit are wool.

CONCLUSION: If you want to call me a vegetarian, that’s fine. But I still eat vegan food and work hard to make sure I’m not consuming any animal products, so I’m going to keep calling myself a Vegan.

Related Articles

• Not All Vegans Are Out of Their Minds: One Writer’s Story (blisstree.com)
• Worf from ‘Star Trek’ goes vegan (mnn.com)
• Victoria Moran: Veg and the City: The Care and Feeding of Vegetarians (huffingtonpost.com)

Thanks PayPal! *insert sarcasm here*

Awesome.

So I got a notice yesterday from my bank account that I never use. (I put money in there every month to pay for my Zibbet account. So I must have it hooked to my PayPal to do so.)

They say I owe them $175 in overdraft fees for two transactions that PayPal charged to my account. 2 times each. Plus an additional charge for excessive late fees from my bank. (UPDATE: PAYPAL CHARGED THESE TRANSACTIONS AGAIN LAST NIGHT, FOR A GRAND TOTAL OF $245 IN NSF FEES AND LATE FEES)

Funny thing is that I specifically added a credit card to charge these two transactions, and verified that PayPal would charge it. Apparently, since it’s my Chef’s (my fiance) card and we don’t have the same last name, they decided they wouldn’t accept it, and started charging my bank account for the $10 and $7 items I purchased on eBay.

And now, PayPal is saying that they’re considering my transactions as “rejected”, and informing the sellers for these items that I have not paid for the items.

I just checked the PayPal account, and the credit card is listed, but they won’t charge it.

Hey PayPal, do you think you could maybe do me a solid and answer your customer service emails in a timely manner? That would be great.

UPDATED: Bank of America is the greatest bank ever, besides our local credit union (which rocks). They refunded all $245 that PayPal incurred on my account. With no hesitation at all.

Hey PayPal, your turn to fix your end! 😀

**Can someone please tell me how to put spaces between the paragraphs? It’s driving me bananas…I feel like I’m trying to learn to drive a stick shift all over again, trying to fix this blog 🙂