Thursday, May 10, 2007

focus

i was watching tv tonight, something that has become more of a routine for me these past couple of weeks. as with all perfectly normal and perfectly useless behavior, television consumption pulls you in quickly even when you've been away from it for a while. i've heard that if you're diligent enough, you can get to a point where you are simply disgusted by it. i am probably not going to watch a good portion of what's out there, but i consistently take in too many feature-length films in theater or on disc to really become immune to the tv bug.

the thing that was surprising or sad was how hard it was to watch a couple shows without my computer as a handy distraction. the commercial breaks, which i mostly watched on mute, were a real drag without email and web sites to tide me over. it was almost like a test of willpower. it was easy to stick to what i planned once i'd made up my mind to leave the computer alone, but maybe harder than being vegan for 8 days. that's another issue, but i'm not really sure when to back off the vegan thing. probably next time i leave town; eating out and being 100% vegan is tough. i had a couple english muffins at a diner on day one or two, having read one package and determined that they contained no milk products. later on, i checked another brand just to see how safe i was...and they had some milk ingredients. oh well.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

You tried to be vegan? I am so proud! Not that I recommend it as a diet for life, but it is considerably kinder on the environment...and some would say the animals involved.

I've thought of going back before, but just in the summer when it's too flippin hot to eat meat. Still, there's nothin' like a grilled burger and a coke on a hot summer night.

seth said...

a lot of people gave me a hard time about the vegan week thing. of course, vegetarians thought it was cool. i still haven't had meat in a week and a half, and i was in texas this past weekend.

my sister tried to argue with me about the environment thing; she kept talking about if you have grassland that can't support agriculture it's better to raise cattle there than try to irrigate it...i don't know that she knew what she was talking about, but i know you lose a ton of the energy that you feed an animal in order to make it edible...99% or 99.9% acc. to Jared Diamond, if memory serves correctly.