Nova Vegan

Without much forethought, I shifted over to a vegan diet last week.

I've been a vegetarian for about seven years now - long enough to have internalized that change to the point where I don't think much about it. It occasionally comes up in conversation, as it did recently when I got together with some old friends from high school. Upon hearing I'm a vegetarian one asked, "But not a vegan?" No, not a vegan. Not then.

But questions like that, especially when they come from dear friends, can cast an interesting spell on us.

I'd tried going vegan a few years ago, but after a week of gyrations around what dinner might look like, how I could possibly find a way to feed myself while satisfying the omnivores I live with, how I would ever get used to the rubbery concoctions that pass for vegan cheese... I gave up.

But the impetus has always been there. I'd become a vegetarian not for health reasons, but because of the earth, and the animals (when folks ask why I started, I often just shrug and say, "one too many PETA videos"). And when your reasons for vegetarianism are the condition of the earth and the animals we share it with (think everything from feed lots to deforestation to why it is we can milk a cow for years in a row), it's hard to justify going half way.

So last weekend it just all kind of clicked. I ate my last dish of yogurt and I've managed to avoid milk, cheese, ice cream and eggs since.

And interestingly, I've had an easy time of it this week. Dishes miraculously presented themselves with cheese or ice cream placed on the side: optional. A friend, not even knowing I'd made the change, sent me a vegan recipe they'd just tried. Others offered up their cherry trees for the picking, and my sweet tooth was satisfied.

So moving into week two, I'm heartened and I feel less like I'm giving something up and more like I'm getting something new. This time, maybe, it's a shift that will stick.

Bodhisattva MIA

I'm the last person to ask about buddhist history (ok, not the last), let alone buddhist art. But I know what I like — what moves me, and calms me. And being in Minnesota, I have to take what I can get, which at first blush might not seem like it would be much.

But the Minneapolis Institute of Arts has a surprisingly lovely collection of buddhist paintings and sculpture, the most striking of which is a wood sculpture from China of the bodhisattva Kuan-Yin. The photo doesn't do it justice, of course. In the gallery, he sits on a 3-foot high pedestal, towering over you; the very act of craning your neck back to look him over is a cue to your body that you're in the presence of something special.

I'm a big fan of the bodhisattvas. Faced with the prospect of actually — finally! — reaching Nirvana, they choose instead to stick around among the rest of us and help out. They are, if I might say so, real mensches.

A Promising Look At Sustainable Energy

So, I friend turned me on to a post on boingboing about a new book called Sustainable Energy — without the hot air. The author, David JC MacKay, is a physics professor at Cambridge, but despite his highbrow credentials, he's written a pretty accessible book about energy - how much we use (Britain's the model here, but extrapolation is possible), and how much might be available from the variety of sustainable sources currently on the radar screen.
I haven't finished reading it, so I'm in no position to critique the book here. But I will say that I'm impressed by the book's distribution model: in addition to printed copies (retail price a numbing $49.95, though the Amazon juggernaut has it at $32.97, and even at that price it was ranked at 844 on the site when I checked it out back in April), you can also download the entire book as a free pdf at its plain jane website.

First Post

That 'first post' moment is always a little strange. You've spent hours setting up a site, pulling together the banner, deciding how the nav will work, and by the time all that is done, you don't necessarily have much to say. So this is the first post. Like the first dollar earned at a business, it's the kind of thing you think you'll keep as a momento, then lose track of as the days roll on.