Death by vanity

It seems that the soapbox I am on as of recently is a preachy, moralistic, "I'm better than you because I don't eat read meat" kind of spell. This is not intentional. For the record, I am a total walking contradiction and a full-blown hypocrite. I wear leather. With that off my chest (it was a burden, I tell you) I wanted to say that I hate these stupid boots that girls are wearing everywhere. On every streetcorner, on every bus, in every mall you will find such hideous displays of vulgarity. I bet you the girl next door has a pair. The reason I am so outraged is perhaps the fact that these monstrosites cost roughly $300 (of course there are knock-offs which are even worse). I was at the mall a couple of days ago, hoping to run in, find an awesome pair of boots and leave as quickly as possible with minimum damage done to my wallet. All I could find after roaming for about 2 hours were these ugly, stupid, furry, Sasquatch-y boots.


Not only are they disgusting to me because it looks like you harveted your pet bunny to make them, but they look ridiculous on (unless you're going for the Yeti look). I could not find a single pair of decent boots anywhere. And what is even more disturbing is how can anybody possibly find such boots cool? Perhaps it's the sheep mentality which pushes us to any trend, regardless of how ridiculous. I thought I saw the worst of it last year with the Uggs epidemic. Then again, how can you ever account for spandex? Valid question I'll say. But anyway, back to my mall story. I left mad because I wasted 2 hours, accomplished nothing and realized that we girls are mindless robots. Now I have wasted another fifteen minutes of my time writing about it. So I hope that none of my friends have bought such boots. You cease to be my friend as of now. I'm off to watch Top Model.

Why plants are my moral dilemma

This is what I would look like if I were a plant

Plants are people too. I’ve never considered it, but there it is – and apparently, it’s a fact. Now that I’m informed, I’m afraid I don’t know what to eat.
I’ve always loved animals and this love of animals has translated into feeling guilty about not being a vegetarian. And upon attempting vegetarianism on a number of occasions, I was only able to get through a couple of months at a time on whole wheat pitas and hummus. Now my yo-yo veggie binges seem like a massacre.
My self-awareness as a murderous herbivore began with a seemingly harmless get-together with a friend over lunch. Munching a large bowl of leafy greens on a sun-drenched patio one summer day in August, my friend, or rather my bearer of bad news as it were, asked with a slight smirk, “You’ve heard about that wacky experiment they did back in the ‘60s about plants having feelings?”

"No, I hadn’t," I replied in between bites. I naturally think it’s a joke; she’s just playing with my acute sense of guilty conscience. As a 5 year-old, my mother could bribe me into eating everything on my dinner plate by telling me that the leftover broccoli would feel sad because it would be torn apart from the food that was already in my stomach. It didn’t only work, it worked every time. Avoiding the issue for a couple of days, the nagging curiosity set in and I looked it up on the internet. I was sure the only thing I would find would be Chia Pet fan sites. But no: “Happy plants,” “The Secret Life of Plants” – the information was all there, I just wasn’t sure I could stomach it.
The information I found was this: Cleve Backster, a lie-detector expert who ran a school on lie-detection for policemen and security agents in New York City, rather accidentally detected primary perception in plants in 1968. While at work one day, he hooked his polygraph up to a tropical plant on his desk, just to see what would happen. After watering it, he was surprised to see that it produced a pattern on the graph very similar to that of a person after receiving an emotional stimulus. After further testing, he found that, somehow, the very thought of setting fire to its leaves drastically changed the pattern of the graph. It seemed as though the plant could not only feel, but also read his mind.
So now it seems that I should either give in or starve. Natural selection has forced me to opt for the former. I must come to terms with the fact that I will always be a morally corrupt human being and live with it. Nature is nature – I can’t fight it. But the next time I walk by a tree, with leaves coloured bright hues of red, orange and yellow, I can’t help but feel a little sad and a lot less hungry.

Turkeys are better off in the oven

So I'm sitting at my desk and a TY stuffed turkey is staring at me mocking me with his glass eye. I can only see one eye and I know he's laughing on the inside, with his silly beak turned upwards towards me. He makes me mad at times like these. I'm supposed to be writing and all I can do is stare back at him, and vent my frustration. If he could talk, I know what he'd say. As a projection of my anxieties and insecurities he's my worst enemy at times like these. 'Stretch' - what a stupid name for a stupid turkey.