Today I began my Vegan for a Month experiment. As much as possible, I’d like to explore what it means to adopt not only a vegan diet, but to the best of my ability, a vegan approach to life in general. You won’t get a grocery list of all the food I ate each day. I hope to learn a little about myself in the process including my personal limits and my ethics of consumption.

Ultimately, this month at Mind on Fire should be about more than my experiment. I’d like to increase empathy and understanding for the growing population of vegans and vegetarians in the U.S. I am planning to invite a few friends to help out. These are bloggers who are currently vegan, formerly vegan, or who seriously contemplate the impact of their dietary choices on themselves and on the world. I hope that they will share their why, what, how, where and whens. How and when did they become vegan, what are their varying approaches to veganism, why did they make such a decision, etc.?

I’d also like to examine public perceptions of vegans, too, and the social ramifications of holding to a vegan diet.

I’m not making a completely radical shift today. I’ve been transitioning into this lifestyle over the past few weeks. Even though I only ate meat twice last month, and I stopped eating eggs and drinking milk for the most part, I’m still amazed at how careful I have to be now.

The picture above shows a few of the products I bought at lunch today to fill the void left behind by vacated dairy and other animal products. I went to take my vitamins this morning and realized I had been habitually swallowing fish oil supplements. So I replaced those with flax seed oil.

I exercise daily, and am currently in the steep beginner’s curve of increasing strength as a rock climber, so I’m concerned about getting adequate protein. I also already eat a lot of soy, and don’t want to add more, so I found a 100% vegan, soy-free protein supplement.

Over the past couple of weeks, I realized that it’s easy to have a few hours with food in easy access, but with little or no healthy vegetarian or vegan options. Those are painful, crabby, hungry hours. So I’m going to start carrying a couple of Clif-bar type snacks and maybe have little boxes of almond milk and fresh fruit and nuts on hand in my office.

One of my first realizations is that vegan does not necessarily mean healthy. An order of fries (in most cases, these days) and a Coke is technically vegan. I start each day with plain, organic, nonfat European-style yogurt, sprinkled with raw almonds, and sweetened only by pure distilled awesome (and fresh fruit in season). This morning I had to make it with the only soy based yogurt I could find at Trader Joe’s and it was syrupy sweet. And it had saturated fat. So I have a dual-challenge: not only do I have to completely eliminate animal products, but also to maintain a heart-healthy, strength and endurance athlete-friendly diet.

Anyhow, wish me luck!

Or taunt me. I shall only grow stronger.

I’ve gradually reduced my meat consumption over the years through a series of fits and starts, and I thought I’d list some points from the latest phase in my years-long conversion.

• I started this month with a personal goal to eat vegetarian, but to allow myself one meat-containing Japanese meal each week.
• I only had one sushi meal this month, and a few tastes of a clam dip that GameBoy is famous for, but I still reserve the above exception for myself.
• I learned that I’m repelled by aspects of vegetarianism/veganism that remind me of institutional religion: for examples, when it is communicated to me as a rigid ethical system, with sources of authority, orthodoxy, and even an overt counter-commensal ritual separation from mainstream culture that to me is similar to Hasidic Judaism or the Mormon Word of Wisdom.
• I learned that I feel that my choice to continue living means that other creatures will die as a result, directly or indirectly. All I can do is limit the extent, but I can never reach perfect preservation of other life.
• My respect for life ethic has shifted from an impossible to achieve absolute to a desire to improve over time relative to where I am/was before.
• I experience a considerable amount of my connection to my Japanese heritage through the food I grew up with (which includes a lot of fish, and some chicken and pork), and am thus unwilling to kill my cultural connections for a vegetarian ethic (the way that Mormonism prohibited me from drinking green tea).
• My ability to connect to people through the enjoyment of food is important to me, and probably accounts for a large part of my elevated meat consumption in Seattle. I may still allow myself to eat meat in social situations when I feel that pushing for vegetarian options would introduce social distance when I’m trying to accomplish the opposite. I’m going to think more on this.
• Low-pressure examples and desires from friends and family members have been a strong influence on my dietary choices.
• I went beyond my original goal, and began replacing eggs with tofu, cow’s milk with almond milk, and processed meat-substitutes (like Tofurky and TVP type products) with less processed, more whole food items.
• Most vegan cheese substitutes preserve everything I hate about cheese-related products while carrying little of what makes cheese so awesome.
• This applies less to nut- and plant oil-based sauces that fill a culinary space often occupied by cheese, but do so without trying to imitate cheese.
• It was surprisingly easy for me to give up milk, but I don’t think I’m ready to give up yogurt (fresh fruit and plain yogurt is a cornerstone of my shift to a healthy diet) and good cheese.

So where am I now? I guess I’m a dietary Frankensteinian monster, composed mainly of vegan and vegetarian choices, with allowances for rare cultural and social meat eating exceptions.

I think I’m in a good place for now–I’ll see if I can at least entrench as habits some of the eating practices I picked up in the past month. This experiment’s success has come more from focusing my efforts on finding tasty veggie/vegan things than by focusing on what I can’t eat.

I’m curious to hear about how you apply personal ethics to your own dietary decisions, and where you struggle the most.

We each pay a fabulous price
For our visions of paradise
But a spirit with a vision
Is a dream with a mission
- Rush, “Mission” from the Hold Your Fire album

Las Vegas is one of my least favorite places in the world, probably ranking just under Chernobyl, and maybe rating a bit higher than the gas station bathroom I once slipped in. Vegas is all façade, and its grand deception is that it promises quick and easy riches, hiding that it’s actually a machine carefully calculated to suck cash from suckers.

I don’t gamble, because the long odds don’t appeal to me. The chance of a worthwhile payoff is small, and the probability of disappointment is pretty high.

This is the same reason I don’t play MMOs. I learned from a months-long stint in World of Warcraft years ago that the game is largely about grinding. I calculated the number of hours I needed to spend slaughtering centaurs or yetis or candle-wearing kobolds in order to get special items (how does a dire wolf carry a two-handed sword?). Generally, the higher the value of the treasure, the lower its chances of dropping, and the longer I had to grind to get it. When I started thinking of the opportunity costs of those few hours, I realized that I could get a higher emotional payoff by spending the same time slicing onions, or reading a book. So I stopped playing.

This investment-payoff concept seems to apply to other activities as well. We use it in crafting fiction–readers expect a payoff in proportion to the time and emotion they invest in a story. I enjoy posting to twitter more than to this blog, partly because a tweet that I spent 30 seconds cranking out can often generate the same level of response as a blog post that took two hours of careful effort. One reason I love rock climbing so much is that I’m in the steep portion of the learning curve. I seem to level up with every bouldering session.

So, where does writing fit in all of this? I just poured six weeks of painstakingly accrued vacation time and several thousand dollars in a writing workshop. For genre fiction. Note the opportunity costs: this was time *not* spent investing in my family, friends, IT career and work projects, etc. And this, and time and money spent on SF cons and writer retreats, and hundreds of hours writing each year, all for the long shot that I’ll become a regularly published, recognized SF author some day.

Fortunately, I’m reaping huge emotional rewards as I go–the satisfaction I feel when I recognize that I’ve created something of beauty (or intentionally disturbing), and the immense joy I get out of the relationships I’ve formed with others who care about this crazy SF-writing business. Maybe this is why some folks get more out of MMOs than I did–while I was a solo-gamer, they join guilds and huge raids and have the pleasure of collaborating with other humans who care deeply about the same things they care about.

That said, maybe I’m more of a gambler than I give myself credit for. Maybe some dreams are so important to me that I’m willing to pour my entire life and soul into them, to fight for them, to work patiently towards them, staking it all on the long shot. Maybe the costs of not pursuing the dream are greater than the cost of failure.

But the odds don’t look so bad when you’re convinced it’s a sure thing.

One of the coolest things about being at Clarion West was being able to go up to someone like Ted Chiang or Ian MacDonald after they had had a drink (Ted) or five (Ian) and ask, what’s your creative process? And because we were Official Workshop Students, and Had Suffered for Our Art, they shared with us the Singular Secret of Science Fiction Writing Success, which I can’t remember because I was drinking too, but I think it was something like Apply Title-Case to Important Concepts for Maximum Impact and Guaranteed Pro Sales.

Now that I think about it, there are many parallels between an inebriated John Remy and his pre-workshop creative process. I used to approach a story like a drunken stagger about the neighborhood. I might have a scene or the setting or a character in mind, but the rest was all blurry stumbling improvisation, and plenty of piss and puke to clean up the next morning.

But now that I am a Certified Clarion West 2010 Graduate, I have A Map of My Creative Process. No thanks to the workshop, though. I had to scratch this map on my flesh with paper cuts from ugly first drafts. The ink was made from Black Tears of Despair, which were shed because there was Virtually No Time To Write. Yep, you heard me. No time to write. At a writer’s workshop. I know that this is hard to believe, so I am going to go all out and whip out my Science to support this claim. Please stand back.

Google tells me that there are 168 hours in a week, and I believe that it is true. Here is the Official Breakdown for a “typical” week at Clarion West. Remember, this is Science, so pay close attention:

Other relevant weekly statistics:

The point is, with all of these Matters of Vital Significance Occurring Daily, there wasn’t much time to actually write, so I learned to focus my writing. So stay tuned for my next blog post, In Which I Really and Truly Talk About My Creative Process.

Oh, and my dear friends Tracie and Andy seem to be pulling themselves out of the Post-Workshop Slump, and are Blogging Their Experiences. I’ll post links to other classmates as they write up their reflections. Check them out!

No conflict, no story.

We learned this lesson within the first day or two of the workshop. We were also taught that the best authors are sadists who delight in tormenting their protagonists, making them suffer, placing them in horrific situations where they have to make heart-wrenching decisions.

And this is the problem as I consider crafting my own Clarion West story. I was the protagonist, but there was no conflict. I didn’t struggle, I didn’t suffer. My friends might think otherwise, but I didn’t feel like I sacrificed to be there. I know it sounds cold and heartless, and I love my family and friends dearly, but that’s how I felt in the Clarion West bubble.

This is not representative of others’ experiences–some folks, including at least one dear friend and several of my classmates, sacrificed jobs and endured serious financial hardship to make it to the Clarion and Clarion West workshops this summer. Others struggled through the relentless pressure cooker of peer and professional critiques and unending deadlines, separation from loved ones and from the comforts and habits of home, distraction by work and family problems, personality clashes with fellow workshoppers, and health crises.

But I didn’t struggle. I didn’t suffer. I didn’t have to fight to stay there, or to stay in the game. Sure, I was separated from family and friends, and I averaged 4 to 6 hours of sleep per night, and I had to read and critique ten to twenty thousand words per weekday while staying on top of my own story deadlines and attending readings and networking events, but I didn’t feel like I was sacrificing anything. If anything, I facilitated the isolation.

I was in heaven, and I didn’t want the world to intrude.

I was immersed 100% in the writing life. I was constantly creating, or reveling in others’ recent work. I couldn’t step out of my room without getting sucked into a fascinating conversation in the hallway with a brilliant peer or three. I lived and ate and worked and played with creatives who shared my passions and quirks and who rapidly became very dear to me. I got to talk and hang out with my author idols–I mingled with the gods and goddesses of my SF writing universe.

Some of you know that in the past I’ve struggled with dysthymia, a persistent, medium-grade depression. While at Clarion West, I was happy. Undeniably, unequivocally, deep to the core happy.

So, as I consider my narrative–my Clarion West story–when does my conflict and suffering begin?

It began the day I left Seattle. It began when I looked out my window as I was flying over Mount Ranier and I shook and cried silent tears. It began the moment I sat back in my chair at work and looked over my IT project board and felt some of my stories wither within me.

But I’m a different John than the one who left here in mid-June. A part of my Seattle experience lives and breathes inside me now, and I’m not going to let it die. My time at the workshop was exposition, set up for my life story. I’m doing all I can to recreate or prolong the Clarion West experience in my life, trying to recapture the pure joy that came with unrestricted focus on writing and on the creative process.

My story has begun. I’m ready for conflict. At Clarion West, I learned that I love the writing life, and that I’m ready to fight and struggle and sacrifice to preserve what is most dear to me.

Bring it on.

I read this recently and plan to spend some time thinking about it. I wanted to run it past you all:

If we agree, as anarchist men, that patriarchy exists and therefore that unequal gender-based class relationship exists between men and women, we ought to admit that we are in a privileged position relative to the women in our lives (despite wide spread homophobia, even homosexual and queer men usually benefit from most of those advantages relative to women.). We should then undertake a process of disempowerment for ourselves and all men. Disempowerment does not mean reducing one’s capacity to act as a human being. Rather, it involved reducing the power we exert as men over women as individuals and as a group, and reducing the power that we draw from our alliances with other men in relation to women.

From Francis Dupuis-Déri, “What About Patriarchy? Some thoughts of a heterosexual anarcho-male” in Social Anarchism, No. 43, 2009: 60.

The article ends with this provocative statement:

“Anarchist men who are serious about upholding their magnificent principles must consent to be the targets of feminist militants.”

I’m taking this out of context, and stripping it of 20 pages of argument and examples, but what do you all think?

So, let’s say that you just experienced something life-changing. Maybe you broke your ankle, and it didn’t quite set properly. A series of events spills forth from that moment. Maybe you meet someone at the hospital emergency room, and you start dating, but he turns out to be a total asshole. Maybe while struggling with the pain of the injury and the relationship, you go back to the Methodist church you attended in college, and find some community there, and rekindle your faith in God. Maybe you have to give up your job at Target with all the standing and you start working temp jobs.

How do you even begin to frame the story of that one simple event and its impact on your life? Do you gripe about how you can’t train for that triathlon, or how unreliable men are? Do you turn it into a faith-promoting narrative, of how God set this trial on you, and how you returned to him and found peace? Do you grumble about the economy and your struggle to get good health care benefits?

Which is my roundabout way of saying that I just went through six weeks of life-changing meetings, moments, and personal epiphanies, and I’m only at the beginning of the cascade of events that follow. How do I even begin to tell this story?

And of course, by choosing to not just follow my initial impulse and write a straight week-by-week account of significant events, and by writing this pre-post, I’m already framing this narrative in a particular way.

I know this tells you very little about the Clarion West Workshop (except maybe that it seriously fucked with my head), but it gives you a window into where I am now.

Anyhow, consider this a warning shot–there will be more Clarion West posts to come!

I feel like I live in a very masculine world. I know this is a stupidly obvious observation to anyone who, you know, can see, but I also feel very often as though I buy into it. I’m not a woman who likes skirts and children, which means it’s hard for me to find a non-masculine way of being. Currently, I’m training to be in one of the most male-dominated industries (law) and consciously making an effort to seem like “one of the boys”: I’m learning to appreciate whiskey, play golf, and smoke cigars. I don’t feel that these are necessarily masculine activities, but they are definitely activities that men in power like to think of as “theirs”.

Sometime between the start of the most recent semester and finals week, a lump that has been in my breast for as long as I’ve had a breast started getting bigger. I noticed it, but I didn’t really notice it. It took my husband saying something (“Is your boob…bigger?”) to shock me into acknowledging it. As I said, I’ve had that lump for as long as I’ve had boobs, but during my first gynecological exam, the doctor mentioned it and I fa-reaked out. I started having nightmares that it was a mouth, eating its way through my skin and then proceeding to devour me. So I went to a surgeon who removed it. And it grew right back. Years later, I started doing research about the kind of lump it was and realized that I really didn’t want surgery, I wanted someone to hold me, let me cry, and tell me what I could do about it. Which, as it turns out, is a lot.

So this summer has been about me and my breast. Specifically the breast with the lump. It’s always been a kind of bellwether for me, giving me sharp reminders not to do stupid things (like eat things that are bad for me, mostly), but now I’m trying to listen to it better. I went to some western doctors and they said what I expected: the radiologist wanted more radiological tests; the surgeon wanted surgery; the internist wanted more opinions and wanted me to not look things up online. That’s the one that really annoyed me—he actually wanted me less informed about my own health. So…I’m going the non-western route. As my husband (whose step-mother is an acupuncturist and Chinese doctor) says, “Three thousand years of Chinese medicine can’t be wrong!”

My sister goes to a non-western doctor who I affectionately call the Witch Doctor. So I asked for a referral and have started going to her. Just like the other hammer-nail doctors, she prescribed what I expected: some witch doctry. Since none of the western doctors thought that the lump was (a) cancer or (b) urgent, I figure I have some time to do crazy stuff before I have to submit to the knife.

So I’m on a strange diet (no wheat, corn, dairy, nuts, or sesame seeds) and I’m taking strange supplements (phosphatidic acid & freeze-dried chamomile). And I’m feeling listened to by a doctor and that I’m participating in my own health.

I also find that I’m seeking out more female energy. I’m spending more time with my sisters, my mother, and female friends of mine (of which I have few—most of my good friends are men). This was the year I got off my ass and put together a little altar that’s been in my mind for a long while. I’m watching Buffy: the Vampire Slayer (which doesn’t sound all that spiritual until I remember that, when I was a badass, athletic, hot teen, I was filled with nothing but disdain for Buffy but now I can’t seem to get enough of it). I picked up from my mother’s house a nude that one of my sisters did when she was younger. I picked up creepy candles and have started displaying images of Mary, my mother’s goddess.

And my breast seems to be approving. One of the major things that annoyed me about the western doctors was that they treated me like an Apple Genius might: There is a problem with your breast; if you just leave it with us for a few days, we’ll fix it; maybe even replace it; just leave it in the hands of the professionals and we’ll call you when it’s ready. But since it’s been with me for so long, I don’t feel that this lump in my breast is a part from me but that it is a part of me. And maybe I will need to get rid of it eventually, but right now, I think it’s just what I need: I need to step back from the masculine world I’m a happy part of and start reconnecting with reality in a different way. I’m eating more intentionally, drinking less, doing more judo, meditating more, and working on accepting myself the way I am.

I’m feeling healthier and, although I’m only a few weeks into this regimen, haven’t discerned any change in the size of my breast lump. So we’ll see. I may need to call in the surgeons and, at that point, I’m sure they’ll be only too happy to chop me into tiny bits and put those bits under microscopes. But until then, I’m going to do this my way and pay attention to the female energy around me.

Some of you have expressed interest in reading the stories I churn out. If you’re afflicted with this minor-insanity, ping me via email (and not in the comments). I have to warn you–they’re going to be pretty rough. We barely get time to write–we read and critique about 65000 words in 17 separate stories per week, in addition to receiving instruction, networking events, attending public readings, etc. The pace is relentless. But worth it.

As always, thank you all for your emotional support. You helped get me into this mess.

I’ve been listening to this song a lot recently, I love the rock of it but I also like the fact that the “Devil’s Party” sounds like a blast! “At the devil’s party/Nothing’s a sin/At the devil’s party/We know where you’ve been.” Sounds like a pretty inclusive and nonjudgemental group, to me. And somehow, even the line “When you’re on fire/You burn like the rest” sounds less like burning in hell and more like bein’ on fya!

But maybe I’m taking this the wrong way and it should be a funeral dirge. Still moves my feet and makes me want to dance…and to thank my host for inviting me.

Join me at the Devil’s Party?

“I might believe it’s love/You might believe it’s war.” Maybe hell, like heaven, is what we make of it. “Where do we belong?”