This past week I did something I didn’t think I’d ever do again – I ate meat. After a 6 year run as a Vegan and Vegetarian, I radically changed my path (again) by adding meat back to my diet.  This move was a long time coming; it’s something that had been brewing in my mind for a while.

So why did I do it? Why did I decide not to eliminate meat from my diet?  The answer to that is both pretty complicated and pretty easy. First, the easy answer: because I can, and I did.  I’ve always held firm to the belief that a person’s dietary choices are theirs, that labels only serve to complicate things and ultimately when it comes to eating, we’re all hypocrites (at least I am). So I added meat back into my diet because I wanted to. It’s as simple as that.

Yet, it’s not that simple, and the road that lead me here is fairly complicated.  I’d like to think over the last 6 years of being veg that I wasn’t all that dogmatic, but that’s total bullshit. Of course I was dogmatic, I was even dogmatic when I said I wasn’t being dogmatic. When you make the move to eliminate all animals and animal products from your life, it’s a pretty radical move, one which is nearly impossible to do without a litte dogma. I’d always tell my friends, mostly truly, that my choice not to eat meat was my own and that I didn’t care what other people ate – it was my decision about what I ate that mattered. Well, this was as untrue as it was true.  Of course there were times when I cringed at my friends as they scarfed down huge slabs of meat, crunched on bacon or tore into a piece of fried chicken – how could I not? After all, I had put myself in a spot where I equated each piece of meat with the life that it was connected to.

The real reason behind not being dogmatic and be “the coolest veg person I (they) know” was more about bridging the immense chasm that was created between me and the rest of the world and a lot less about how I felt or what I thought. I don’t think at the time I was really able to put my finger on this chasm; it wasn’t for many years that the gap between me and the world became more and more visible and more and more present.

I think Michael Pollan captures this chasm better than I ever could:

What troubles me the most about my vegetarianism is the subtle way it alienates me from other people, and, odd as this might sound, from a whole dimension of human experience. Other people now have to accommodate me, and I find this uncomfortable: My new dietary restrictions throw a big wrench into the basic host-guest relationship. As a guest, if I neglect to tell my host in advance that I don’t eat meat, she feels bad, and if I do tell her, she’ll make something special for me, in which case I feel bad. On this matter I’m inclined to agree with the French, who gaze upon any personal dietary prohibition as bad manners.

One of the great ways to combat this disenfranchisement is to connect or bond with a local community of like-minded people. In Portland the options for this for Vegans and Vegetarians are vast.  I found the Vegan community to be extremely welcoming when we first were starting to go veg. People seemed to go out of their way to give us tips, recipes, suggestions and even invite us out for potluck dinners.  This was a huge bridge over this abyss and for a while it did help.

When I first went Vegan, combined with near daily exercise I lost a ton of weight. I went from 233 down to 185. I looked and felt better. Naturally I credited it to my new diet. Also being veg at first was an adventure. It was a challenge to find ways to locate, invent, create, or recreate my favorite omnivorous foods into vegan creations. People often asked me if I missed meat, missed cheese or ice cream, and I triumphly said “No!”  I think there was some sort of badge of honor which I wore which made me feel good to be veg.

Of course secretly I felt superior to everyone else. How could I not? After all, I had tapped  into a progressive way of eating, I looked good, felt good and I was going to live forever. I was also 35 and deeply mourning the loss of my father who was obese and died from esophageal cancer, so pulling it all together health-wise was a top priority.  I didn’t really let on that I felt superior to everyone, which would make the chasm between us even bigger; instead, I couched it all in health advice. Who is going to scoff at someone who recommends being and eating more healthy?  It was ultimately a good cover for a moral superiority that would  bite me in the ass.

The unfortunate truth was that, aside from losing weight, being veg wasn’t really helping or fixing other health problems I have. It did nothing for my GRD (reflux), my bad back still gave me problems, and I still battled low blood sugar when I didn’t get enough protein in the morning. I ignored anything that possibly pointed to any downside of being veg. When I was shaking and sweating one mid-morning because I didn’t get enough non-carbohydrates into my system, I never thought that it could be a downside of being veg.   I ultimately solved my morning shakes by dropping coffee from my diet (yet another dietary restriction) and drinking fruit shakes with scoops of hemp or soy protein powder in them.

I’ll never forget the day that I went into a sporting goods store and they had a free cholesterol screening. I proudly stepped up for my test knowing full well that OF COURSE I would do fantastic, after all I was veg. This unfortunately wasn’t the case and when I got my borderline troubled results back I quickly stuffed them in a file drawer never to be seen again.

Instead of stepping back, I decided to go deeper into the rabbit hole. Slightly disenfranchised with the vegan community and in a search to do even better for my health, I decided to explore raw foods. Again I entered the honeymoon period, new friends, new community and new results. I felt GREAT at first. This of course was the elixir of life, right? Maybe not. Preparing raw foods takes hours and hours and hours (some things even take days).  I wasn’t completely raw, although to raw foodists in my life I said I was “high-raw”, a fancy way of saying “while I am not completely raw, I’m pretty damn good”, and to fellow vegans I was ‘playing with some raw foods’.  Again I didn’t want to create any bigger chasm than I already had.

This came to a head when I attended the Raw and Living Spirit retreat.  It was an all-day raw foods love fest complete with a catered meal. I took a ton of notes, met a lot of great people and then came home and got sicker than I ever had in my life. An extremely high fever had me laid out for days. It didn’t compute – how could eating so healthy leave me open to getting so sick? I filed this in my little mental file cabinet and moved on.

It went on like this for years. There was rarely any doubt about what I was doing and why, and then we moved.  Moving from our little bubble in the suburbs to the city, we were thrust into the ‘real world’. As we walked the streets of our neighborhood, past local restaurants, and made new friends, we started to feel that gap more and more.  One of our neighbors brought by an amazing plate of freshly baked chocolate chip cookies – a wonderful gesture – and yet we agonized about eating them because they weren’t vegan.  It was my wife who said that she felt it was time to look at adding some dairy and eggs back into our diet. It was one huge step at bridging the gap and would open a whole new world of options for us. She did this, the kids did this, but I did not.  I’m not completely sure why I didn’t make the step at that point; perhaps it took so much of me to stick to my dietary direction that the thought of changing that was almost unimaginable.

So we went on like that for a number of months. I was vegan, my family vegetarian and everything at home was prepared vegan. Then I went to India.  Prior to going to India I was told in no uncertain terms that it was going to be extremely difficult to not have food with dairy in it. India prizes dairy and almost everything they cook is cooked in ghee (clarified butter). I was also told that Indians are so accommodating that if you ask for no dairy in something they will assure you that it’s ok and that they will take care of you even when they can’t. It’s hard to put into words the impact of my trip to India. They say that going to India is a life altering experience; all I can say is, not all life altering is a good thing. My biggest take away from my trip to India (aside from the fact that I love whole milk chai) is that ultimately what we do here in the US with our lives is of almost no consequence in the scope of the entire world.

We do things like not eating meat or recycling because it makes us feel good, or it’s something we believe in. Ultimately it doesn’t even register on a global scale, not even a nano bit.  It was a tough realization, but an important one. One of the big reasons I had stopped eating meat was because I wanted to make a difference. I thought that I was making some sort of political statement with each bite; unfortunately, it was complete and total sanctimonious bullshit. At almost no time in the near 6 years I was veg did I ever open myself to any opposing ideas. I took it on faith that being veg was something good and something that made a difference.

I don’t want to completely disparage being veg. For some people it’s something meaningful to them – it has a real positive impact on their lives and their identity. It’s their choice and I respect them for it. But as a whole, vegans aren’t very open to dissenting views.  This became amazingly clear when two vegan activists threw cayenne-pepper-laced cream pies into the face of Lierre Keith, author of “The Vegetarian Myth”. I’m not defending Lierre or her book, because I haven’t read it, but I think the reaction is indicative of the community.

But this isn’t about the veg community or the impact of being veg on the world. Ultimately it came down to my family.  As I sat in front of a plate of red curry with tofu at one of my favorite local thai restaurants, I realized something: I really couldn’t eat any more tofu. My system had been sending messages about the over-abundance of soy in my diet and here, faced with one of my favorite dishes, I just couldn’t do it. As I picked out the pieces of tofu, I had a feeling the end of being veg was near. But that wasn’t what ultimately did it.

One evening I was sitting in the audience of my son’s third grade play, filled with pride and excitement. I love my son and seeing him up on stage with his class having fun filled me with joy. But that joy was seriously tempered by something – the unavoidable fact that he just didn’t look that great.  Pale and horribly thin, my son wasn’t the face of anything happy or thriving. He looked drained and he looked tired and he looked fucking thin.

So after a long talk with my wife we decided the time had come: we were going to return to meat. I posted a tweet on twitter asking for places in town that would be good for a first non-veg meal and of course I was met with a symphony of veg tweeters who said ‘don’t do it’. We ended up deciding on a local BBQ place we had read good things about and decided to take the plunge. It was horrid. Not only was the food mediocre but I found it very difficult to dispel almost 6 years of aversion to meat. To make matters worse, my system got completely trashed. Had I made a wrong decision?

The next time out wasn’t nearly as bad. I had an amazing pork dish from the chef at the Teardrop Lounge that put all my concerns to rest. After a week I noticed a clear difference in my son. He looked less pale, had more color in his cheeks and had more energy. Also gone were my mid-morning low blood sugar shakes.  I began the road back with my first steak at Laurelhurst Market, my first burger at Foster Burger, and so on.

An entire universe opened up to me. I went from being able to eat at less than a handful of restaurants to being able to eat anywhere and everywhere. I noticed how immediately the gap between me and the rest of the world closed in and how people who hadn’t invited us over for dinner suddenly offered.

For the most part I don’t regret being veg for the period of time that I was. For a lot of the time, for one reason or another, it was the right answer for me, but now I’ve decided to move on. I consider myself a conscious omnivore. I still care about what I put in my mouth and what impact it has in the grand scheme of things. I won’t abandon my feelings but in the same respect I’m not going to feel bad eating meat.

Got a teapot today from Serenity Art in Portland, Oregon and the side of the box had some of the BEST Engrish I’ve ever seen:

I think my favorites are:

“Crack is the reason for Glass Broken”

“When washing, please keep space with others”

“Let glass keep away from the wet place”

I wasn’t trying to make a grand statement or anything, but several hours after placing my pre-order for the new Kindle 2 I decided to cancel it.

I’d been mulling over the Kindle for quite sometime. I first saw the Kindle “in the wild” at Wordcamp when Josh Bancroft(of tiny screenfuls) whipped it out of his bag and into my hands. I was honestly quite impressed at first by the device and a few weeks later I even had a Kindle 1.0 in my Amazon cart $50 Oprah coupon in hand, just about to expire. But the reason I didn’t pull the trigger then is different than why I decided to cancel my pre-order now.

With the Kindle 1.0 I knew full well I would be paying to be an early adopter. For years I’ve pledged that I would step off the bleeding edge and let other people go through the pain and suffering of a first generation product. This pledge has served me well (I do own an iPhone, but happily waited until the 2nd Generation 3G was released).

So when the Kindle 2 was announced I decided it was time to take the plunge. I hopped onto Amazon and put in my pre-order to ‘save my place in line’…and then I started to think about it.

Why was I ordering a Kindle 2? Well first off, it’s no secret I am passionate about reading. I read almost every single night, exhausted or not. So why not step up and invest in a device that is centered around reading? In addition to being a big book reader, I am also a very faithful newspaper reader, and this winter I found myself paperless more often than not. So the idea of getting the paper digitally delivered sounded fantastic.

Yet I enjoy sitting with my morning paper, flipping through it in a way no device enables me to. I’m not searching for information when I read a paper, I’m stumbling through it. I’m sure the newspaper as we know it is an endangered species. So why hasten its demise, why give up something I really enjoy.

As I thought about carrying around a device that holds several thousand books, I really thought about my reading experience. With music I love being able to switch between thousands of albums at a click of a button. Music is whimsical – at one moment I may be in the mood for one song and then for another. Books on the other hand aren’t. I’m extremely ‘loyal’ when it comes to a book. I pick up a book and read it cover to cover. I don’t start up other books, leave one half read while I start another. So what’s the real benefit of carrying around so many books?

I am also a night reader, and the digital paper, while fantastic for day reading really doesn’t have any real benefit at night. I’d still be clamping my old book light to the device.

Then there’s that city square block of books called Powells that we have in our fair city. It’s absurd how blaze Portlanders get about it. Yeah, yeah, yeah a whole city block of books…been there…done that… But it is astounding, and I derive a lot of pleasure walking through the stacks of physical books, out to discover a book I may know nothing about. I just couldn’t see giving up that experience and dedicating all my book business to Amazon. Not that I don’t like Amazon, I do, but after investing $350 in a reading device I’d be hard pressed to justify buying non-Kindle books.

Lastly there’s that price tag – $350. It’s not that I couldn’t justify it. I work extremely hard and I do make it a point to reward myself, and so if the Kindle were something I really wanted and needed I’d do it. At $350 the Kindle is really an investment, and at that price if you’re going to buy it, you need to be serious about using it.

For what it is I think the Kindle 2 is a pretty impressive device, G3 whisper-net updates, long battery life, possible over the air sync-hing with other devices, RSS delivery and more. Amazon should be proud of their new product. But for me, as a lifelong reader, I’m just not ready for it. Tonight I plan to curl up with Tom Petrota’s The Abstinence Teacher for the last 50 pages and at the end I’ll triumphantly close the book, set it down on my nightstand and pick up Ray Banks Sucker Punch. It’s the same book I easily toted with me today and read while my kids were at their Kung-Fu class. I didn’t get any ooohs and ahhhs for reading it, but I can say I enjoyed every minute.

I’ve been not celebrating Christmas almost my whole life. This isn’t as easy as it sounds. Not celebrating Christmas is like being six feet tall and not playing basketball. But I do play basketball, or at least I have, but I’ve never been able to really dunk the ball, and that troubles me. What I don’t do is celebrate Christmas.

Not celebrating Christmas hasn’t always been the issue that it is. I’ve not celebrated Christmas in some pretty extraordinary places. I’ve not celebrated Christmas in Hong Kong where everything was open and ready for business. I’ve not celebrated in London, where the only restaurant open was McDonald’s but we got to test market this ‘new’ product called the Chicken McNugget. That not-celebration was followed by an amazing Boxing Day celebration filled with fun and revelry. It was one of those perfect days I’ll never forget.

My usual not-celebration involves going out for some sort of Asian food and a movie. For many years this not-celebration was a pretty sweet deal. We ate like kings in restaurants that rarely had anyone in them. Once in a while we’d run in to other friends not celebrating Christmas and we’d not celebrate together. Food would always be followed by some big holiday movie and we always got the perfect, middle of the theater seats. Not celebrating Christmas used to be like getting into Disneyland before everyone else; there’s a reason they call it The Magic Kingdom, only the magic goes away when all the fucking people show up. But things have changed, and over the past few years my not-celebration has been completely invaded by people who are actually celebrating.

It’s not that I get particularly blue around the holidays, I just sort of get annoyed. As I’ve gotten older I’ve tried to delve deeper into the source of my general aversion of the holidays, and the unfortunate revelation I had was, it wasn’t just the winter holidays I had issues with – it was all holidays. This bit of news was rain on my wife’s parade, who unlike me actually loves the holidays.

This all came to an explosive head on Mother’s Day a couple of years ago. In an ill-fated attempt to show my wife that her holiday was important and I was big enough of a man to make it happen, I tried to make a nice pancake breakfast, with a huge hangover. Now this doesn’t sound like a recipe for disaster, but it was. Yelling and screaming at someone who is the focus of a special day when you completely fail at a fairly easy and mundane task is really, really bad. I call this particular day “holiday ground zero”.

That day put me in a complete tail spin. How could my approach to holidays be causing such misery? Then it hit me. I’m Charlie Brown. My issues with holidays aren’t over the actual holidays themselves, it’s the complete lack of ability to deal with the crushing weight of the expectations of others. The stakes on holidays are so high that it magnifies any and every basic imperfection. How can you possibly celebrate in the face of all that?

This holiday existential crisis came around the same time as my wife suggesting that maybe, this year, we actually celebrate ’some’ Christmas. Heather is Jewish but didn’t grow up that way, so she connects some of the non-religious elements of the holidays with her family. This suggestion sat like a big white elephant in our home for weeks until the weight of it literally knocked me on my ass.

Lying there, I discovered just how complicated I had made all things holiday, and I realized my solution was pretty simple. I was going to just stop worrying about it and find some way to love the holidays. I know there are no guarantees to having a successful holiday but that doesn’t mean I can’t try. I may still be just like Charlie Brown, but in the end, it always seems to work out for him. Perhaps the same will be true for me.

This story was reprinted from Back Fence PDX as part of their series Rock The Bells. The next Back Fence PDX event is December 10th.

What a breath of fresh air!  Barak Obama holds his first press conference as President Elect and he answers more questions that Bush answered in his entire 7 3/4 years in office.

If you missed it on TV listen to the audio at NewsJunk: Obama’s First Press Conference as President Elect

Tonight I experienced one of the most unfortunate computing nightmares of my many years dealing with computers. My Dell Inspiron 700m almost caught fire. Smoke began pouring out the side of the machine, the section of the keyboard began to bubble and the screen began to melt. It was my daughter who noticed the smoke emanating from the laptop, which was sitting plugged in to the power strip, just sitting there. I quickly unplugged the laptop and then tried to reboot it. It wouldn’t restart.

After a few tries the laptop did power on, but the screen was dead (only shining a grey light) and the smoke started again, so I shut it off.

I then spent almost 2 hours on the phone with Dell getting bounced around from service rep to service rep. One even hung up on me and never called me back on the callback number he asked for at the beginning of the call.

Finally I got through to a service rep who indicated that Dell would indeed replace the melting laptop, although it’ll be 21 days till i get the computer.

It’s amazing to me how electronics can fail like this. This laptop was never dropped, always well cared for and used on many trips. It only became a full use computer when we moved into our new home and Heather wanted to be more mobile in her computing (rather than using a deskop as Ivy is too mobile for Heather to actually sit and check her email.).

I hope that Dell actually DOES ship out the replacement and we can get back up and running before too much time passes by. Until then I’ll have this BBQ’d laptop on my desk.

It’s this very question that I find myself grappling with today… How Jewish AM I…Really? Technically, I am very Jewish. I was born to two Jewish parents, went to Hebrew school, had my Bar Mitzvah at age 13 and then what? Since 1983 the whole definition of my religious beliefs have been muddled. From Age 13 to 18 I spent most summers at Jewish Summer Camps. I enjoyed the communal Jewish experience, the community shabbat, singing Jewish songs around the campfire… if you asked me at the end of a never-long-enough summer, I would answer ‘VERY JEWISH’. But the with the return to school and the soon to follow ‘High Holidays’ my passion and connection would quickly fade.

By Yom Kippur while fasting I’d quickly change my answer to ‘Not Fucking Much’. You see, I hate Yom Kippur. Despise being ‘trapped’ at temple, pressured not to eat anything. I dread the ever repeating service where my most common activity is flipping through the pages of the sedur to find when the damn thing is going to be over. And it’s always puzzled me, how exactly did my passion and love get so quickly transformed?

This cycle of love and dread has continued through most of my life. There have been times where I have embraced my religion, held my arms out wide and then held it close. Then there are times when I’ve crumpled it up and tossed it in the trash. One of the most challenged times for me with my relationship with my religion was when my father died young from cancer. Since that point I’ve never really been able to fully reconcile a belief structure with such a rigid view of the universe and the death of someone who I loved dearly and who by all accounts was a good man.

At times I think I’ve stuck around Judaism out of pure pressure. I mean my religious path was always well established – I’d get Bar Mitzvah’d, go to Israel after being ‘Confirmed’, Marry a Jewish Woman and raise my kids Jewish. And while I’ve deviated from that path, I’ve always felt that I’m locked into it. At 13 I did have my Bar Mitzvah, but almost the next day I told my parents that there was no way in hell I was going to study any more and get confirmed. To this day I still haven’t been to Israel. I married a woman who converted to Judaism and yet every member in my extended family married someone who isn’t Jewish. I don’t really celebrate Shabbat, only go to temple to drop off my kids at Hebrew school and no longer fast on Yom Kippor.

I do have quite pleasant memories of my Bar Mitzvah. I can remember riding the long bus ride from Moraga to Danville (where I had a short stint in private school) listening to my Torah portion on a Walkman the size of a brick. My mother brought over the DVD copy of my Bar Mitzvah tape the last time she visited, and I was of two minds about the whole thing. The first, that the party and all those people were more about relatives and friends of the family than anything else, and second that I look like I had a really great time.

But mixed with any good memories are ones which are not so fond – fighting with my parents (usually my mother) about exactly what we could or could not eat on Passover (I mean corn syrup in coke…give me a break! Also I never understood the idea of a passover cake!). Also many of my memories of temple involve either being bored out of my mind, or the feeling of being trapped…. flipping pages, looking for when it will all over.

When I start to really think about how religion even fits in my life I have an impossible time reconciling something that makes me miserable with something I’m supposed to be doing. What is this for exactly? I’m not trying to be coy, I don’t think I’m every really clear WHY I’m struggling with being Jewish. I mean, shouldn’t it be obvious? Shouldn’t it be clear why I’d go to temple, why I’d celebrate holidays, why I’d what to teach my kids the same things I was taught?

And yet, I find myself joining and quitting congregations in a town far too small to be changing dates at the dance. As I stood last week, arms crossed, ready to explode at my son’s Hebrew school I realized that I had to start dealing with my real feelings about it all. The issue which got my blood boiling was the explanation of a series of annual benchmarks that my children had to meet in order to be granted a date for a Bar or Bat Mitzvah. While this might on some level be entirely reasonable, I mean kids do have to learn what they need to learn in order to have a Bar Mitzvah, the idea that there’s some standardized testing of sorts for faith just struck to the core of my problems with my religion.

After all…. Isn’t religion supposed to be something you feel inside, something that connects you to others and something you WANT to do!? When did a sort of standardized testing get into the mix. And then it hit me, the feeling of being trapped, flipping through the book to find out when we’d be done… it’s the same awful feeling I felt in school when I wasn’t learning and wasn’t having any fun. It’s the same… YOU HAVE TO… feeling I felt growing up, when my destiny wasn’t in my own hands.

So with the annual renewal form sitting on my desk I’m drafting another letter of resignation to another congregation I’m going to no longer be a part of. It’s like agreeing to have your car towed away… What the fuck do you do next? And that’s where I am at, or rather it’s much more complicated than that…. Because it’s not just about me, I have a wife and kids. So it’s not only my own beliefs and connections but the responsibility for my children’s.

So back to that question… How Jewish am I Really?! I’m starting to think that the answer really isn’t important. The truth is, on some level I AM Jewish, but I don’t think that really needs to be measured. My path clearly isn’t an easy one and I realize that I need to not let the expectations and impressions of others dictate what and how I do. Perhaps if there’s some way to find my way back to those not-nearly-long-enough summers and that feeling I had so long ago.