meats

first things first: at the risk of sounding like a fuddy duddy old lady, i despise loud motorcycles.  there is absolutely no acceptable reason for me to feel like an asteroid is on a collision course with my house when you feel like driving down the street.  it's obnoxious and gross.

second things second: luke and i are having some peeps over for dinner tonight and i think his plan is to roast a chicken.  this wouldn't be a problem to most people, but i'm having a hard time reconciling with luke's abandoned vegetarianism.  as i've ranted about before, i stopped eating meat when i was 8.  and, when i met luke, he'd been a vegetarian independently for a few years.  recently, though, he decided he wanted to start eating meat again and i became cool with that.  my only rule was that he couldn't cook it in the house.  (i realize that sounds extreme, but as someone who has spent the last 16 years studying the meat industry in the united states and growing intensely uncomfortable with the whole scene, i'd like to keep the corpses out of my kitchen and away from my utensils.)

now he's going to roast a chicken and i'll probably go cry about how horrific roasting and then sawing apart the flesh of a dead animal is.*


*incidentally, this is why i can't do a decomposition study for my thesis in my master's program.  i think everyone i've told this to just wants me to grow a pair and stop acting like a baby, but there is something deeply disturbing to me about being responsible, in whatever way, for the death of any other living thing. people are big fans of telling me that meat in a store is already dead and would have been killed anyway, so it makes no sense to boycott it or refuse to purchase it.  my response is that each person who buys the meat produced by factory farming is contributing to a market for shit like that.  so, if you consume it, you are responsible.  and, in the case of a possible decomp thesis, in california, studies of that kind must be done on animals (namely, pigs as they are incredibly similar to humans).  therefore, in order to run as precise a study as possible, one must go to a butcher shop, select one's pigs and have them killed at the appointed hour so that one knows time of death.  i know i wouldn't be ok with that, because it doesn't matter to me whether or not ten minutes later someone would have killed the pig for a luau.  what matters to me is how i deal with the choices i make and i would probably be haunted by the dead pigs for the rest of my life.