Hi! Hope you had an awesome weekend. Let’s get the discussion of my complete and total failure out of the way now, shall we?
What happens at the Gay Pride Parade goes like this, especially where we sit at the very beginning of the route. Everybody in the parade comes by to give you stuff — candy, beads, popsicles, sunglasses, coupons, whatever. All kinds of stuff. It’s pretty much the best thing ever for the kids. I was sitting there, munching away on my vegan mini quiches, when someone from Tony P’s came by with cookies. The cookies looked pretty awesome — they were topped with powdered sugar and pine nuts. They sat in the middle of our blanket, not yet devoured by the children. I can’t eat those, I thought. I’m sure they’re not vegan.
And then a few minutes later I was like OMG these quiches aren’t very filling and these cookies have pine nuts on them and . . . and I ate one. And it was so good I ate another one. And then I thought, shit.
And then I went forth and enjoyed the rest of the day but as I did so, I was nagged by the constant and unrelenting desire for a goddamn pizza with goddamn actual cheese on it.
Our Father’s Day tradition has always involved pizza. So my plan was to get pizza from one of the local joints that offers vegan cheese, and get one regular pizza and one vegan pizza. But as we got closer to Father’s Day, I had to be honest with myself and admit that I don’t really like commercially produced fake cheese products, such as Daiya, which is what’s offered at said establishments. I mean, I liked it at first, or at least I convinced myself that I did because it wasn’t, like, totally awful or anything. But as time went on, I was less and less willing to pretend to like it all that much. And I don’t want to eat pizza without any cheese on it.
And then we decided to make homemade pretzels with vegan cheese sauce instead of getting pizza, but that kind of defeated the purpose of having one goddamn meal we don’t prepare ourselves and had us (predominantly Ben, let’s be honest) in the kitchen instead of doing something else and, well, pretzels aren’t exactly pizza.
And I’m not blaming Father’s Day for my fall from vegan grace. It’s not Father’s Day’s fault — it’s entirely on me. I wanted a goddamn pizza, and a goddamn pizza is what I ate. And I loved every second of it. And I want to say I’m strong enough or committed enough to just go without pizza, but at this point in my life, I’m not.
And I’m starting too many sentences with “and.” Sorry about that. And I’m probably a little defensive, and a little bummed. But honestly, I need to stop obsessing over food every second of every day, which is what it feels like I’ve been doing. For example, I’ve been spending a lot of time sitting in my office and thinking about all the things I can’t eat. So I’m going to call it My Vegan Half Month. I can say that I’ll definitely eat many more vegan meals than I did before this experiment, but I just can’t make the transition right now without going totally nutballs.
And so I don’t have to gaze into the steely little eyeballs of my failure every time I look at my site, I’m going to edit the “My Vegan Half Month” page and turn it into a post.
So that’s the story. And while I’m on the topic of veganism, props to all the actual vegans out there. I admire the hell out of you guys.
