BE YOUR VEGAN

I started eating meat again a few months ago (which after a year of veganism and seven of vegetarianism was a pretty big deal). Still not ready to fully identify with the meat eaters of the world I've taken to calling myself 'post-vegan', if not only to avoid the failure implied by being an ex-vegan. I'm not going to lie, my flatmate's mexican chicken lasagna had a large part to play in the whole matter, but in all honesty the move was a well thought out and philosophically justified decision. Unfortunately, the explanations and justifications that I know make sense in my head have been tough to convey to others, and my attempt at a blog entry has until now been just as incoherent, if not more so, than my verbal ramblings.

Thankfully, life has been kind enough to provide me with friends who have the special ability to gather up my ramblings, string them together, and give them back to me in a form that makes sense of things that even I didn't previously understand. Most recently, one of these friends wrote about my post-veganism in a vegan punk cookbook/anarchist zine... thing created by another friend of ours. Knowing that he really did get what I was getting at means a lot to me, and I doubt that I'll ever come up with a better elucidation, so here's what he said:

"Yo peeps, now here's the thing. I've got a friend who oppressed herself through her own vegan-ness. She took herself there and maintained a diet through a morality of punishment:I must not eat that, or I'm a bad person. She had whips in the mind, man - which as we all know makes people do stuff but kills their will to do it. Veganism Is Joy, my sistren - it's a diet of love, and if it hurts us then there's no point not hurting our fellow cyborg planetary residents (ANIMULZ).

So she's POST-VEGAN now. That means she holds onto the reasons for bein a vegan with none of the guilt. Sometimes she eats a cheesy pizza. We both know some poor old cow got the zippededoodah sucked out of her to make that cheese, and that's a bad thing, but if my friend can't not eat the pizza without sucking the zippededoodah out of herself then she has to not not eat the pizza. Which doesn't mean she has to, but she does anyway, coz it's tasty. What she's working to do is reconfigure her vegan self so that she can eat vegan without using guilt as a motivator. And because that vegan label is so corrupted by mad diet fascists, body-deniers and intestinal terrorists, she's a POST-VEGAN. I suggested Neo-Vegan, but post- is always cooler than neo- (post-liberal/neo-liberal, see?), whatever the Matrix says."

See the film 'Persepolis'. It's beautiful.

(I may have identified a bit with the main character Marjane . Ok, I identified a lot with Marjane. And, by the way, I met the real Momo when I was in Amsterdam. Yeah. I'm that cool.)

I want to be a person, not a philosophy student.

The box told me to enjoy my pizza, but my attempt at doing so was just as futile as my effort to find the motivation to study tonight. Tomorrow afternoon I’ll write the last exam of my undergraduate career, and as I look at the philosophy books, empty coffee cups, highlighters, and cold pizza strewn about me, I’m beginning to feel nostalgic for the student life I imagined in high school, but never really lived. I’m glad that in my time here I’ve begun to create an identity for myself that doesn’t depend upon academic achievement, and I’m eager to finally live life as a person rather than a philosophy student*. Yet there’s still something sad about spending my last night as a student looking at my notes in the same way as that last piece of pizza. The excitement, curiosity, and hunger that were once there have been replaced by the fatigued and slightly ill feeling of having indulged without achieving proper nourishment. If my life is a sandwich, then my degree in philosophy is a take-away pizza. You never regret eating that pizza; it was exactly what you wanted at the time. But one day you grow up and need something more fulfilling.

I’ve been thinking lately about an email I sent to a friend a couple months ago. I remember thinking at the time that it was a paragraph that secretly wanted to be a blog entry:

“So that gig I went to last Thursday turned out to be a bit of a weird experience. It was put on by the oneworld society (the activist group that I devoted my life to last year) and was the first oneworld event that I'd been to since my burn out. At first I was really uncomfortable paying for my ticket and sitting around enjoying myself rather than running around making sure everything was going smoothly. There were a bunch of other "old" oneworlders there as well, and we ended up sitting around reminiscing about when it was us running these things. I got all nostalgic, and ended up just sitting there with my beer reflecting on how much I'd changed in the last year. Looking around the room made me feel really old, which is ridiculous considering how young I really am. But the night just confirmed for me how ready I am to graduate. I'm too old now to go to the student's union on a Thursday night and drink cheap beer out of a plastic pint glass, watching first years smear fairtrade chocolate on their faces making drunken fools of themselves.”

I keep waiting for the realisation to hit me that I’m about to graduate. I’m waiting for all of these moments, reflecting over plastic pint glasses and pieces of cold pizza, to add up and make me feel like the adult that my 21st birthday supposedly made me two days ago.



*I went for lunch with my flatmate some time ago, and while we were doing the whole girly "reflect on past relationships" thing, I came out with the sentence: "well, if you look at the normative definition of the term boyfriend...” She told me I was a philosophy student, not a person. At the time I chose to believe that philosophers make better people, but there's a growing voice in the back of my head that thinks she may have had a point.