Friday, February 27, 2009
Vegetables
I added a slideshow of random pictures of vegetables (none of which I took). This is in honor of my vegan diet. Just got my blood work results back (I always ask for a copy) and everything looks so good, especially cholesterol. To celebrate, I ate at my favorite vegan restaurant and had a chick pea salad sandwich with lettuce, tomato, pickles, mushrooms, roasted peppers and sprouts on pumpernickel. It was SO delicious. I then had a vegan vanilla raspberry cupcake for dessert. The more I don't eat meat has made it difficult for me to smell meat cooking or handle it myself. I used to love a big juicy hamburger. Now the smell of it and the fat from it almost makes me nauseous. Eating for me now is a whole new adventure - each day I learn something new about alternatives to meat and how delicious and nutritious they are.
Friday, February 20, 2009
Friday the 13th
Today is Friday the 13th
How could it have gone so well?
The forces of the universe were with me
I could have pounded the hammer and rung the bell
At work I was in a rockin' zone
my skills percolating and my attitude pure
The dogs all wanted to follow me
The cats, too, for sure (maybe)
There wasn't a misstep moment
My life was groovin' a beat
I have a job, a house and a love
Even have all I want to eat
It must have been a nightmare
for someone else in the world
Where the dark clouds were threatening
and tornados and cyclones swirled
But I guess I shouldn't brag or get cocky
My life at any minute could tank
Cause tomorrow is, yes, another new day
and someone else takes it all to the bank!
How could it have gone so well?
The forces of the universe were with me
I could have pounded the hammer and rung the bell
At work I was in a rockin' zone
my skills percolating and my attitude pure
The dogs all wanted to follow me
The cats, too, for sure (maybe)
There wasn't a misstep moment
My life was groovin' a beat
I have a job, a house and a love
Even have all I want to eat
It must have been a nightmare
for someone else in the world
Where the dark clouds were threatening
and tornados and cyclones swirled
But I guess I shouldn't brag or get cocky
My life at any minute could tank
Cause tomorrow is, yes, another new day
and someone else takes it all to the bank!
Friday, February 13, 2009
Happy Valentine's Day
I know this is one of those holidays that is wonderful if you have a Valentine, but maybe hell if you don't. So, for those of you who don't have a Valentine, do something nice for yourself and be your own Valentine. Or, you can hand out roses to homeless people and spread the spirit of love. I know some people express their Valentine's Day spirit by protesting restaurants that serve fois gras -made by force feeding and creating the diseased livers of a sick duck or goose. Their love is shown by sharing their knowledge of the cruel practices against animals. I think Valentine's Day does not just have to be about romantic love between 2 people. So find your way and go for it.
Here are 3 poems - one of a love gone wrong and the other two true love poems:
the importance of underwear
she told grandma she was just dropping off a shirt
instead she quickly and stealthily removed my underwear
took all my drawers from the drawers, in fact
when asked
she replied
these were our special garments
symbols of our love
can't bear for another to see you
to touch you
to love you
in them
couldn't actually get irked
after all, she did buy them for me
the hearts
the silk
the cartoon characters
some little tokens of her need
not sure at all what happened to us
one day I woke up and just didn't have any desire
to see her
to touch her
so I asked her to move out
she cried and asked me why
I just said I needed my space - need it back
maybe that was the truth
when she was tearfully packing her stuff in boxes
had a moment of sudden weakness
almost called it off - but I didn't
now she's long gone
I am happy and relieved
ok with being alone
but
gotta admit
I do miss that underwear!
she told grandma she was just dropping off a shirt
instead she quickly and stealthily removed my underwear
took all my drawers from the drawers, in fact
when asked
she replied
these were our special garments
symbols of our love
can't bear for another to see you
to touch you
to love you
in them
couldn't actually get irked
after all, she did buy them for me
the hearts
the silk
the cartoon characters
some little tokens of her need
not sure at all what happened to us
one day I woke up and just didn't have any desire
to see her
to touch her
so I asked her to move out
she cried and asked me why
I just said I needed my space - need it back
maybe that was the truth
when she was tearfully packing her stuff in boxes
had a moment of sudden weakness
almost called it off - but I didn't
now she's long gone
I am happy and relieved
ok with being alone
but
gotta admit
I do miss that underwear!
By the Sea
By the sea sunning - you and me
On a mountain high we will touch the sky
In a valley low to the streams we go hoping ........
dreaming walking the trail hoisting the sail riding the rail
driving the car we always go far running ....... striving
Back lit dark room our love is in bloom
In the big chair you kissing my hair
On my soft bed me stroking your head feeling ........ loving
Jealousy
Don't be a Doubting Thomas!
You are the butter on my toast.
Just because I notice a Tom, Dick or Harry doesn't mean it's not you that floats my boat.
No need for jealousy or a prohibition policy specifically and generally not to be confused with occasionally.
You are the pinnacle THE HE - to me - all others are merely chopped liver (see above)
The Hero.... the Winner .... the Star
Just get in the car I'm not goin' far without you, handsome.
Monday, February 9, 2009
Vegetable StandStop paying taxes? Escape to the woods? Sit in? Why not go vegetarian instead?By Stefany Anne Golberg
By Stefany Anne Golberg
“Is it not a reproach that man is a carnivorous animal? True, he can and does live, in a great measure, by preying on other animals; but this is a miserable way — as anyone who will go to snaring rabbits, or slaughtering lambs, may learn…Whatever my own practice may be, I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals....” — Henry David Thoreau, Walden
In 1845, Henry David Thoreau set off on a lone journey into the woodlands owned by his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson. He wanted to know if living more simply, in closer proximity to nature, would make him a better person, and if being a better, simpler person was the path to creating a better society. Walden is a unique and pioneering work in civil disobedience. But Thoreau’s two years in the woods were part of late-18th- and 19th-century America’s many experiments with alternative ways of life. All over the United States, people were living guinea pigs of their own idealism. Wacky communes espousing everything from free love to chastity sprouted up from Massachusetts to Texas. These eccentric communities shared one fundamental creed: that self-improvement, self-discovery, and self-fulfillment were essential to achieving a better society. At a time when the Western world was being swallowed by industrial smokestacks, and men, women, and children toiled away in nightmarish working conditions, Utopian community leaders went back to the basics, namely, the power of the individual to control his own destiny and do good, often in opposition to the mainstream. It’s no surprise, then, that diet was considered central to radical self-improvement. Vegetarianism was honored as the most radical diet of them all.
Vegetarian ideas figured prominently in 19th-century intellectual circles. Though practicing vegetarians remained outside the mainstream, as they do today, vegetarianism itself was intriguing, its arguments compelling. Thoreau, for instance, was not a strict vegetarian, but he did believe that the vegetarian diet was “the destiny of the human race.” Not because animals were cute and fuzzy and therefore ought to be saved from brutality, but because they were dirty and difficult and expensive. “The practical objection to animal food in my case was its uncleanness,” he wrote in Walden, “and besides, when I had caught and cleaned and cooked and eaten my fish, they seemed not to have fed me essentially. It was insignificant and unnecessary, and cost more than it came to. A little bread or a few potatoes would have done as well, with less trouble and filth.” You can stand around in the forest, waiting to spear, skin, and roast a bunny for your next meal, but…why?
Thoreau’s views on meat-eating were no doubt influenced by his friend and fellow Transcendentalist Amos Bronson Alcott. In the early 1840s, around the time Thoreau decided to traipse about Walden Pond, Alcott formed a vegan utopian commune in Harvard called Fruitlands. As you can guess by the name, Alcott’s community was much less tentative about vegetarianism’s essential place in an ideal world. “Who loves a garden still his Eden keeps,” he wrote. In Fruitlands, the garden was all that was needed to sustain and bring one closer to prelapsarian days, when animals and people lived harmoniously. Eden or not, vegetables took less time to prepare, and had the advantage of liberating women from kitchen labor. Of course, without the use of animal labor, the 14 residents of Fruitlands had to toil all the more on their communally owned property. The fact that they renounced animal fats as a means of light and heat meant they often lived and worked in dark and cold. Because Alcott thought trade was a form of labor exploitation, Fruitlands aimed to be self-sufficient through subsistence farming. Yet the commune lacked the economic sustainability of more ingenious Utopian societies like the Shakers and the Perfectionists at Oneida, for whom design, craft, and trade were the backbone of their longevity. The Fruitlands experiment failed after seven months, about the time it took for the weather to chill.
Vegetarians kept on trying. Not many associate the ascetic cracker that bears his name with radicalism, but Alcott’s friend Sylvester Graham was about as radical a vegetarian as they come. For this Presbyterian minister and his rabid followers (who called themselves Grahamites), the Graham cracker wasn’t a treat for kiddies, a vehicle for burnt marshmallows. It was a symbol of righteousness and the power of the people. In his “Defence of the Graham System of Living” which he dedicated to the “Rising Generation,” the vegetarian diet was thought of as a means to curb misery and disease, primarily rampant in cities. Most importantly, it was a tool that any individual could employ to better his or her lot:
The system of a simple [vegetable] diet…strikes at the root of all evil, and is an experiment which may be tried with success, not alone by nations, but by small societies, families, and even individuals.
He then claims that had the masses of Paris sated their hunger with vegetables instead of blood, they would never have supported Robespierre, the force behind the Reign of Terror. Whether or not the French can ever become passive vegetarians cleansed of their innate bloodlust, the basic premise of what a vegetarian diet could offer remained: a personal, incremental, nonviolent revolution.
These more puritanical ideologues — and the thinkers they influenced — who promoted vegetarianism on the grounds of health and cleansing rather than taste may seem unsympathetic to most 21st-century Americans. They were unsympathetic to most 19th-century Americans. But it’s worth bearing in mind that vegetarianism, at its roots, was not considered a simple dietary choice; it was an act of civil disobedience. Alcott spearheaded the strategy of tax evasion as a means of opposition to war and slavery, the same strategies Thoreau wrote about in Civil Disobedience. He was a dissident of the first degree — an outspoken abolitionist, promoter of women’s rights, and educational reformer. His vegetarianism was not just a natural extension of these values; it was his reformist ideals put into practice. One individual was not going to single-handedly end slavery, but could easily live a life that practiced nonviolence and equality.
Control over one’s own body is the most rudimentary freedom, and using diet as a means both of social cohesion and freedom from the mainstream has been a part of independent communities for thousands of years, from Judaism to the Nation of Islam. In 1995, when he was 34, Dexter Scott King, son of Martin Luther King, Jr., visited the comedian Dick Gregory at his vegan health spa in the Bahamas. He came to feel that veganism gave him “a higher level of awareness and spirituality”, and he has been a strict vegan ever since. For Dexter Scott King, like his 19th-century counterparts, abstaining from meat is a clear extension of his father’s principles of nonviolence. He even converted his mother, the great Coretta Scott. And so Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience, so influential to the young Martin Luther King, Jr.’s own ideas on freedom, continues on 160 years later. "There is a connection between how you have life and how you treat others," Dexter Scott King said told Vegetarian Times back in ’95. "It starts with the individual."
As vegetarianism grows in popularity, vegetarians remain America’s kooks and outsiders. Even Thoreau, who now is considered a giant of American letters, was a kook in his lifetime. In Emerson’s eulogy, he chided Thoreau for allowing his friends to fish him out of jail by paying his taxes, calling him “the captain of a huckleberry party.” But he also knew that big ideas had to fail for a long time before they succeed. “The scale on which his studies proceeded was so large as to require longevity,” he wrote, “the country knows not yet…how great a son it has lost.” So while America’s kooks are doomed to failure, they are often its greatest experimenters. Even as they fail, vegetarians continue to promote ideals that most Americans share: the power of the individual to be radical, to be disobedient, to change the world. I salute you, kooks and outsiders, glorious failures, O Captains of huckleberry parties. Fail on. • 26 Monday 2009
By Stefany Anne Golberg
“Is it not a reproach that man is a carnivorous animal? True, he can and does live, in a great measure, by preying on other animals; but this is a miserable way — as anyone who will go to snaring rabbits, or slaughtering lambs, may learn…Whatever my own practice may be, I have no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals....” — Henry David Thoreau, Walden
In 1845, Henry David Thoreau set off on a lone journey into the woodlands owned by his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson. He wanted to know if living more simply, in closer proximity to nature, would make him a better person, and if being a better, simpler person was the path to creating a better society. Walden is a unique and pioneering work in civil disobedience. But Thoreau’s two years in the woods were part of late-18th- and 19th-century America’s many experiments with alternative ways of life. All over the United States, people were living guinea pigs of their own idealism. Wacky communes espousing everything from free love to chastity sprouted up from Massachusetts to Texas. These eccentric communities shared one fundamental creed: that self-improvement, self-discovery, and self-fulfillment were essential to achieving a better society. At a time when the Western world was being swallowed by industrial smokestacks, and men, women, and children toiled away in nightmarish working conditions, Utopian community leaders went back to the basics, namely, the power of the individual to control his own destiny and do good, often in opposition to the mainstream. It’s no surprise, then, that diet was considered central to radical self-improvement. Vegetarianism was honored as the most radical diet of them all.
Vegetarian ideas figured prominently in 19th-century intellectual circles. Though practicing vegetarians remained outside the mainstream, as they do today, vegetarianism itself was intriguing, its arguments compelling. Thoreau, for instance, was not a strict vegetarian, but he did believe that the vegetarian diet was “the destiny of the human race.” Not because animals were cute and fuzzy and therefore ought to be saved from brutality, but because they were dirty and difficult and expensive. “The practical objection to animal food in my case was its uncleanness,” he wrote in Walden, “and besides, when I had caught and cleaned and cooked and eaten my fish, they seemed not to have fed me essentially. It was insignificant and unnecessary, and cost more than it came to. A little bread or a few potatoes would have done as well, with less trouble and filth.” You can stand around in the forest, waiting to spear, skin, and roast a bunny for your next meal, but…why?
Thoreau’s views on meat-eating were no doubt influenced by his friend and fellow Transcendentalist Amos Bronson Alcott. In the early 1840s, around the time Thoreau decided to traipse about Walden Pond, Alcott formed a vegan utopian commune in Harvard called Fruitlands. As you can guess by the name, Alcott’s community was much less tentative about vegetarianism’s essential place in an ideal world. “Who loves a garden still his Eden keeps,” he wrote. In Fruitlands, the garden was all that was needed to sustain and bring one closer to prelapsarian days, when animals and people lived harmoniously. Eden or not, vegetables took less time to prepare, and had the advantage of liberating women from kitchen labor. Of course, without the use of animal labor, the 14 residents of Fruitlands had to toil all the more on their communally owned property. The fact that they renounced animal fats as a means of light and heat meant they often lived and worked in dark and cold. Because Alcott thought trade was a form of labor exploitation, Fruitlands aimed to be self-sufficient through subsistence farming. Yet the commune lacked the economic sustainability of more ingenious Utopian societies like the Shakers and the Perfectionists at Oneida, for whom design, craft, and trade were the backbone of their longevity. The Fruitlands experiment failed after seven months, about the time it took for the weather to chill.
Vegetarians kept on trying. Not many associate the ascetic cracker that bears his name with radicalism, but Alcott’s friend Sylvester Graham was about as radical a vegetarian as they come. For this Presbyterian minister and his rabid followers (who called themselves Grahamites), the Graham cracker wasn’t a treat for kiddies, a vehicle for burnt marshmallows. It was a symbol of righteousness and the power of the people. In his “Defence of the Graham System of Living” which he dedicated to the “Rising Generation,” the vegetarian diet was thought of as a means to curb misery and disease, primarily rampant in cities. Most importantly, it was a tool that any individual could employ to better his or her lot:
The system of a simple [vegetable] diet…strikes at the root of all evil, and is an experiment which may be tried with success, not alone by nations, but by small societies, families, and even individuals.
He then claims that had the masses of Paris sated their hunger with vegetables instead of blood, they would never have supported Robespierre, the force behind the Reign of Terror. Whether or not the French can ever become passive vegetarians cleansed of their innate bloodlust, the basic premise of what a vegetarian diet could offer remained: a personal, incremental, nonviolent revolution.
These more puritanical ideologues — and the thinkers they influenced — who promoted vegetarianism on the grounds of health and cleansing rather than taste may seem unsympathetic to most 21st-century Americans. They were unsympathetic to most 19th-century Americans. But it’s worth bearing in mind that vegetarianism, at its roots, was not considered a simple dietary choice; it was an act of civil disobedience. Alcott spearheaded the strategy of tax evasion as a means of opposition to war and slavery, the same strategies Thoreau wrote about in Civil Disobedience. He was a dissident of the first degree — an outspoken abolitionist, promoter of women’s rights, and educational reformer. His vegetarianism was not just a natural extension of these values; it was his reformist ideals put into practice. One individual was not going to single-handedly end slavery, but could easily live a life that practiced nonviolence and equality.
Control over one’s own body is the most rudimentary freedom, and using diet as a means both of social cohesion and freedom from the mainstream has been a part of independent communities for thousands of years, from Judaism to the Nation of Islam. In 1995, when he was 34, Dexter Scott King, son of Martin Luther King, Jr., visited the comedian Dick Gregory at his vegan health spa in the Bahamas. He came to feel that veganism gave him “a higher level of awareness and spirituality”, and he has been a strict vegan ever since. For Dexter Scott King, like his 19th-century counterparts, abstaining from meat is a clear extension of his father’s principles of nonviolence. He even converted his mother, the great Coretta Scott. And so Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience, so influential to the young Martin Luther King, Jr.’s own ideas on freedom, continues on 160 years later. "There is a connection between how you have life and how you treat others," Dexter Scott King said told Vegetarian Times back in ’95. "It starts with the individual."
As vegetarianism grows in popularity, vegetarians remain America’s kooks and outsiders. Even Thoreau, who now is considered a giant of American letters, was a kook in his lifetime. In Emerson’s eulogy, he chided Thoreau for allowing his friends to fish him out of jail by paying his taxes, calling him “the captain of a huckleberry party.” But he also knew that big ideas had to fail for a long time before they succeed. “The scale on which his studies proceeded was so large as to require longevity,” he wrote, “the country knows not yet…how great a son it has lost.” So while America’s kooks are doomed to failure, they are often its greatest experimenters. Even as they fail, vegetarians continue to promote ideals that most Americans share: the power of the individual to be radical, to be disobedient, to change the world. I salute you, kooks and outsiders, glorious failures, O Captains of huckleberry parties. Fail on. • 26 Monday 2009
Stefany Anne Golberg is an artist, writer, musician, and professional dilettante. She's a founding member of the art collective Flux Factory and lives in New York City.
Thursday, February 5, 2009
A Sultry Dream
A Sultry Dream
Last night I had a sultry dream
of a tropical isle - all lush and green
palm trees, pineapple, cocoanut drinks
bikini tan babes, muscle brained hunks.
This talented group wanted to hang out with me
ya know, swimming, snorkeling, sailing asea
I looked in a mirror and to my surprise
I had long blond hair and big dreamy blue eyes
Batting my lashes like Marilyn Monroe
a kiss to myself I coyly did blow.
The next thing I knew I was up on a stage
singing and dancing with Nicolas Cage.
Just as ol' Nick was about to swing me
I was whisked away by Patrick McNee
Guess the 'Avengers' needed my aid
Emma Peel and the mystery of the stolen jade.
Apparently I solved the case
'cause next I was running in a cross-country race
with the Stooges - Curley, Larry and Moe
Man they could sprint - look at them go!
At the finish line an angel flew me into the sky
Ack! she suddenly dropped me and waved bye bye
Just then I woke up with a jolt and a start
Next time I'll know better than to eat that stale tart!
Last night I had a sultry dream
of a tropical isle - all lush and green
palm trees, pineapple, cocoanut drinks
bikini tan babes, muscle brained hunks.
This talented group wanted to hang out with me
ya know, swimming, snorkeling, sailing asea
I looked in a mirror and to my surprise
I had long blond hair and big dreamy blue eyes
Batting my lashes like Marilyn Monroe
a kiss to myself I coyly did blow.
The next thing I knew I was up on a stage
singing and dancing with Nicolas Cage.
Just as ol' Nick was about to swing me
I was whisked away by Patrick McNee
Guess the 'Avengers' needed my aid
Emma Peel and the mystery of the stolen jade.
Apparently I solved the case
'cause next I was running in a cross-country race
with the Stooges - Curley, Larry and Moe
Man they could sprint - look at them go!
At the finish line an angel flew me into the sky
Ack! she suddenly dropped me and waved bye bye
Just then I woke up with a jolt and a start
Next time I'll know better than to eat that stale tart!
Tuesday, February 3, 2009
Superbowl Menu
This is my SuperBowl menu for a mixed vegan/non-vegan group:
Turkey Subs
Tofurky Subs
Condiment Choices: Cranberry sauce, baby spinach, sliced tomatoes, sliced onion, mayo, mustard
Fruit salad with apple, canteloupe, strawberries, pineapple and banana
Tortilla Chips with guacamole and salsa
Rich chewy vegan brownies with both vegan chocolate chips and cocoa (and of course other vegan ingredients
All attendees raved about the delicious, easy and healthy food. We wanted to watch every minute of the game and the commercials, so wanted the food and drinks to be easy to get and not messy or difficult. I even had the 3-D glasses. That was a great game. I was happy for the Steelers, but was rooting for the underdogs and marveled at some of the great plays by both teams. I spent 4 years in marching band in high school and 1 year in college and never cared about the football game. Many years later - now I love watching it. Maybe next year I'll get out my piccolo and play the 'touchdown' song when my team scores. Unfortunately that may whittle down the attendees for the Superbowl party, eh?
Turkey Subs
Tofurky Subs
Condiment Choices: Cranberry sauce, baby spinach, sliced tomatoes, sliced onion, mayo, mustard
Fruit salad with apple, canteloupe, strawberries, pineapple and banana
Tortilla Chips with guacamole and salsa
Rich chewy vegan brownies with both vegan chocolate chips and cocoa (and of course other vegan ingredients
All attendees raved about the delicious, easy and healthy food. We wanted to watch every minute of the game and the commercials, so wanted the food and drinks to be easy to get and not messy or difficult. I even had the 3-D glasses. That was a great game. I was happy for the Steelers, but was rooting for the underdogs and marveled at some of the great plays by both teams. I spent 4 years in marching band in high school and 1 year in college and never cared about the football game. Many years later - now I love watching it. Maybe next year I'll get out my piccolo and play the 'touchdown' song when my team scores. Unfortunately that may whittle down the attendees for the Superbowl party, eh?
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