Incite Full

Ok, so lately i’ve been reading a lot about our food system and how it works. Well, how it doesn’t work is probably a more apt phrase but I’ll get into that later. The thing is, I’m surrounded by several people that often talk about things such as factory farming, vegetarians, geneticly modified seeds, and the fact that chickens cannot turn around in their cages. Even with all of that around, I was able to tune it out.

I’m not sure how it really happened, but I’ve decided to make quite a change in my diet. I’ve decided to give up factory farmed foods as much as possibly. This will entail quoite a cutdown on my meat intake, which is probably for the best, but it doesn’t rule it out completely. I’m trying to plant/grow some of my own food and when that’s not possible, I’m going to purchase my food from farmer’s markets and other reputable, local and/or organic sellers.

I recently purchased a grass fed steak and cooked it like i would any other steak. While the meat was definitely leaner and the texture a bit different, the taste was absolutely amazing. I’ve heard that grain fed produce a more marbled piece of meat, and therefore more tender and juicy, but I could not have been happier with mine. Honestly, South Americans have been eating grass fed beef for their entire lives, and they clearly know what they are doing, so maybe it’s the American palate that is accustomed to our grain fed cows.

I’m not going to try and convince you (yet) to this until I’ve walked the walk, so to speak, for a while, but I assure you the day is coming.

I will convince you, however, to stop using the word “just.” I will of course allows it’s use in certain situations, like when talking about just anger, as I believe I have for a word in this case, or a play or novel where one wants to show a certain voice for a character, but in all actuality, the word brings absolutely nothing to the table. Think about it this way and the following few sentences.

I just ate an entire sandwich.
Don’t question me, just do it.
I just can’t do it, I’m too afraid.

Does the word bring you any closer to waht the person is saying? You just ate? does that mean 2 minutes ago? Half hour? An Hour? It’s as ambiguous as “I Ate,” which, by the way, I much prefer. The next two implicitly give a reason for soemthing. But what’s the reasoning? Do it, in all accounts, is a stronger more forceful sentence, isn’t it? I don’t udnerstand the use of this word, and the mere fact that it has “just” 10 definitions is a little mind boggling.

I won’t condemn others for using it. It’s not as hot of an issue as irregardless, or using “good” when you mean “well,” but I hope someday it will reach the same weight as those.

In other news, I’ve gone and purcahsed a slew of books. My current reading list includes:

Blindness
Dear American Airlines
Omnivore’s Dilemma
Pygmy
Gravity’s Rainbow
In Search of Lost Time
Freakonomics
Catcher in the Rye

That outta keep me busy.

By the way, you should probably read Blindness, as it’s an amazing book thus far, and one of the few works i’ve read where an author is fully able to redefine the rules of language to stress their point.

“Eish: so i went to bed thinking about who i would poop on last night”

These are the things I am greeted with in the morning. To be fair, I should explain how this all came about. Yesterday at lunch I asked my friends, “If you were a bird, who would you poop on- name anyone alive or dead.” No one really had an answer, but I made some of them promise to tell me when they figure it out. Eish still hasn’t, and this was her “Good Morning” to me.

I mentioned yesterday that I’m reading Atlas Shrugged. I should clarify when I say “read.” To me, I can’t just read and be done with it- it’s not a string of words, obviously, we all imagine the scene, the characters, and the rest of it. But I really pull apart the writing. Why is she using full names? What does that say about the character. What does it mean when she says “She had never heard the symphony before, but she knew it was one of his” (or something to that affect). I guess what I’m saying is that i look for meaning in everything, and it’s hard work.

It’s one of the reason’s Heart of Darkness is a favorite of mine, 80 pages of dense, intentional writing- each line a multitude of meanings, like an everlasting Gobstopper we could pull that apart and find meaning over and over. How insulting that my English professor was worried if the book was “racist” or not. There was so much more to it than that.

I digress, Ayn Rand will be the death of me. 1000+ pages of heart of darkness(que?) writing, and it’s that tiny print, the kind on the bottom of an infomercial. I must say I’m enjoying it so far, even though I don’t know shit about it yet (who is John Galt?). Now if I could just kick my roommate out long enough to actually read a bit of it in peace

“Don’t be seduced into thinking that that which does not make a profit is without value.“