November 6–7, 2001 — On the morality of fake meat

I don’t remember much of yesterday afternoon. Nathan came over the take pictures during the evening and we ended up playing Scrabble afterward. I played “unshield” on a triple-word score and used all of my letters in the process. It will no doubt be the highlight of my month, ahead of my twentieth birthday by a considerable margin.

Before Nathan left, he stole three of my homies. (Homies are tiny figurines that you can only buy in the US. They’re banned in some places for encouraging gang activity, but they actually look quite harmless for the most part. We discovered them in Kentucky during the summer and never looked back.) I started on my way down the stairs to stop him, but Johnston yelled for Nathan to start running and I decided not to pursue it. Instead, I’m dedicating myself to embarrassing Nathan via periodic messages posted on the message board by my remaining homies in response to the kidnapping. And I’m convinced that my homies come to life when I leave the room and that they’re planning Operation Enduring Justice as I sleep. So it’s only a matter of time.

In less delirious news, I still haven’t paid my rent this month. Our landlord insists on being paid in cash, so I’m sure this will become a monthly event and that I’ll consistently forget. She came up to ask for it and I immediately offered to give her a cheque, saying that it was hard to get the $400 out of the bank at once since my limit at ATM machines wasn’t high enough. She ended up being more than happy to take cash before the end of the week in the place of a cheque right away. I went and got the money out of the bank this afternoon, but I’m not going to give it to her until tomorrow in case I need to use this excuse next time I forget to pay the rent on time.

I also need to put out the garbage tonight, and my nails are in dire need of a trimming. The world is catching up with me. My laundry pile is getting a bit terrifying again, too...

In happier news, I’ve been typing a lot less lately and am getting back into reading books about grammar. I’ve started reading Woe is I, a book that I bought in the spring but that I never had the energy to read during the summer. It remains to be seen whether or not I’m going to be able to find the energy to begin using “their” properly (instead of using it in the place of “he” and “she”). I think I’ll keep splitting infinitives like it’s going out of style, though — I’ll just blame Star Trek (and Star Trek: The Next Generation) for ingraining the habit so deeply that it will never quite go away.

(At this point, I’d like all the people who actually got the joke connecting split infinitives with Star Trek monologues to give themselves a pat on the back. You’re in good company. The rest of you are no doubt pledging to never visit again, deciding that you’d rather not read anything as lame as that ever again. Don’t worry, I respect your decision, I’m getting rather sick of reading these too.)

Andrew and I finished the Cuff The Duke design yesterday and I printed out the final proofs of it today. If all goes according to plan, I’ll be able to get in touch with Jeff tomorrow and he’ll be able to give it to Brad at the Cuff The Duke show tomorrow night and it will be on its way to the printers before the end of the week. It’ll be nice to finally have a professionally manufactured CD under our belts over at Doublenaut. It’s just too bad that the barcode had to delay things as much as it did.

Meanwhile, tomorrow is the Bane show, so I want to go to sleep reasonably early. I’m spending the day tomorrow shopping for papers and inks and rubber stamps. It should be an exciting one.

And I just realized that I didn’t talk about the morality of fake meat at all in this journal entry even after using that as a title. Silly me. I have been eating far too much of it lately, though. Fake meat, that is. Fake chicken more specifically. It tastes real enough to someone who hasn’t had the real thing since early in 1998. And I really do need the protein. But somehow the entire situation irks me just a little bit...

Or maybe I’m just being weird. To sleep, then.