someone was changing from the inside out

so i fell off the no dairy wagon for a few days, i have to admit it.
writing about it here makes it easier to keep myself going.

i fell into a serious binge and it did not feel good, and i don't know if it's because of not eating any and then drastic cheese intake, but i have been feeling ill in my body, off kilter.

i went to a show, the big blues fest at the portland waterfront over the fourth weekend with m and his brother, and we had a really nice time, but something has been weighing on my mind since then that i haven't talked about at all, and since this is the place that i have for it, i will talk about it here.

the fest was sponsored by safeway, the grocery store chain. lately, i have noticed that safeway is really trying to push their meat sales, especially their "rancher's reserve" steaks; they have promotional "green" reusable bags with words like, PORTERHOUSE and TBONE and STEAK on them for sale at their registers, which is just a ridiculous contradiction in and of itself. i don't think, even if you love the meat, you can claim that the industry is green, and doing something like buying a damn $1 bag to carry 20 pounds of meat home from the safeway from is like sticking your thumb up your a--- in a dam to stem the tide. you know what i mean.

at any rate, i find this ridiculous. every time i see these bags, it annoys me. but i haven't said anything because i feel like i complain enough as it is to my partner and he really is trying to be as supportive of all my life changes as he can be, considering that he is not interested at this time at making the same changes. i understand this, because i believe a person comes to these things on their own. and so i have begun to try to keep my grousing to more of a minimum because i truly don't want him to think that i'm angry at him for still drinking milk, for example, when he's been eating so much less meat than i ever could have imagined when i first said "i'm going vegetarian." i also never want to get to the point where i become the sort of angry human being who scared me off of this movement years ago, when i was pre-contemplative about animal issues. i never want to be in that place. we haven't bought more than one or two new packages of meat in our home since i said i was going veg in april. comparatively, this is an enormous difference.

anyway. about safeway.

they sponsored the blues festival. and we sat on the grass by the river, and normally i love the waterfront by the willamette, it is beautiful. being beside the hawthorne bridge here in portland is one of my favorite places to be, it reminds me of so many things about my adopted home that i love, times that have been good here, and why i left the third coast to come here.

the blues festival. we saw a great show, and i do mean a great show. check out sharon jones and the dap-kings, if you haven't heard them by now, i'm not sure where you've been, heh, this woman is a tiny force of nature.

safeway had a booth set up to promote, of course, their "rancher's reserve" steaks. i guess this is rather a long post to get to the point of this, but oh god, the smell of it made me sick to my stomach. i didn't know it was going to, actually, i thought the opposite would happen, and that something in me, since i ate meat, and even beef and steak and hamburgers for a good twenty-six years, that i would relish the smell of it still, and that it would be nostalgic and even tempting.

oh but how i was wrong. it really made me ill. there were clouds of smoke coming up from the back of the booth and wafting over to where we were sitting, and since we were sitting for about forty minutes before sj even came on, by the time she entered to sing, i felt like i was going to puke. this both fascinates and thrills and disappoints me: i am intrigued that after only a few months of being vegetarian, this scent affects me bodily like this, i can understand being mentally revolted by it now that i know the inner workings of the meat industry, but i would expect a more pavlovian response to it. it thrills me that my pavlovian response is apparently shut off already, and that my mind has triumphed over it, and that i think more of animals than my own baseless want for meat. it disappoints me because i quite frankly am grossed out by the thought of going out places and wanting to leave because i feel unwell and can't stop thinking about the flesh of burning cows, after my time spent with beautiful, beautiful cows at farm sanctuary. it bothers me that i almost wish for a certain degree of desensitization, even just a few degrees to the colder temperature, because it was very difficult to sit there and keep my thoughts to myself. i wasn't with anyone who would be comfortable with chatting about this, and i truly love the people who i was with, and i'd like not to make every single social occasion an awkward one where i process my own stuff verbally and my friends sit there awkwardly wondering what to say.

i think possibly all people in their adolescent stages of life change have these trying times, and i remember at the let live conference jasmin singer saying something about "crying and crying and crying, and wondering why no one else was doing the same," at her first volunteer job. i remember something very similar when i decided that i was going to go into social work, and sitting at the blues fest with my stomach roiling, i hoped that i would not begin to cry and cry and cry.

sometimes you just don't want to cry in public.
hence, blogging.