Chicago VeganMania!

Well, after more than one hundred posts, I clicked on a mystery button, my garage didn't explode on the spot and thanks to this miraculous confluence of events, I now know how to post a link! Like I can now link to my new gig as Chicago Vegan Examiner just like this. Sa-weeet! If you appreciate the wacky hijinks of this here blog but would appreciate more practical and helpful information - not that uses of bad bananas is not practical or helpful - you might want to subscribe to this page. Chicago residency is not required. It would be so appreciated.

Second, oh, sweet heaven, have I got a deal for you. First a little background: my husband and I have had this idea percolating in our fizzy heads for a while. You know how the different social justice movements seem to go through different phases of integration? Like third-wave feminism, for example, building on the previous waves, or the movement away from HIV-awareness activism (represented by groups like ACT UP) and more toward demystification and integration into society. Each begets the next and so on. Each phase is crucial for the genesis and development of the particular movement, which is why I respect at least the need for each stage. Usually these waves were created by brave people using the tools and information they had access to at the time. It is easy for us to look back and say, for example, "Oh, those stupid second-wave feminists with their power suits and capitalism." In retrospect, it is easy to point out the flaws and shortcomings of pretty much anything. It is important to look critically at points along the arcs of the various social justice movements so we can learn from our mistakes: to see the misogyny so endemic to the Civil Rights Movement, for example, or the consumerism of second-wave feminism. At the same time, it's important to have some understanding, to understand why movements went in a certain direction and to show forgiveness. I believe that most of what we can look back at now with derision started out as a genuine attempt toward progress.

With all this bubbling around in our brains (my husband and I are both big into movement theory), we determined that as vegan activism is at its core a social justice movement, we also were subject to waves and evolving philosophies. It seemed to us, if we followed a similar arc as several other social justice movements - from activism, to education, to integration - we would be wise to start working on the integration phase. (These are not isolated stages, by the way: they overlap considerably and go back and forth. It's not like we're done with either of the two previous stages.) There are many others who are working on integrating veganism: this would be the Veggie Pride Parade in New York (also one can clearly see activism and education at work here), for example, or the work of someone like Isa Chandra Moskowitz, with her fabulous cookbooks. We would not be at the next phase without the activism of groups like Mercy For Animals and the educational efforts by Vegan Outreach but right now my heart is all wrapped up in integration. As we wake people up to the cruelties of animal agriculture through our activism, and we give them the information they need to learn more and educate their friends, we must also give people the tools for integrating this new way of living into their lives. This integration must come in many forms, from teaching new recipes to finding a new community to support this new lifestyle, but we do know that it is not enough for us to say "just do it." We have to extend a hand.

This is where Chicago VeganMania comes in, the project my husband and I - as well as a group of other very dedicated and creative volunteers - have been working on for the past year. Chicago VeganMania is described by us as a daylong celebration of vegan culture, community, commerce, cuisine and couture. It is taking place this Saturday, October 10, from 10:00 - 4:00 at the Pulaski Park Fieldhouse, 1419 W. Blackhawk, near Wicker Park in Chicago. All the details are on the website above. We have been getting some great feedback from those who planning to be there and we hope to see you at Chicago VeganMania, too. It is going to be impossibly cool, if you can imagine that.

First of all, the first one hundred in line will receive a free swag bag chock full o' vegan goodies. Don't despair if you're one of those people who is slow moving on Saturdays, though: all attendees get five free tickets for food samples from our vendors. There will be ten food vendors participating, and one can try anything from vegan comfort food at the Chicago Diner to the soul food from Soul Vegetarian East to raw foods with a Middle Eastern flair from Cousin's Incredible Vitality. (There will also be chocolates, Tofurky slices, Vega smoothies and on and on. Check out the "vendors" link from the Chicago VeganMania website for more.)

In addition to the food vendors, there will be other vendors, selling everything from books to high fashion coats to jewelry to soaps to vegan message gear. It's going to be a great opportunity to support these conscientious, cruelty-free vendors. There will also be non-profits present, like the formidable Mercy For Animals and the Vegetarian Resource Group, to namejust a couple. The mind boggles at the magnitude. Even though I helped to conceive and organize Chicago VeganMania, truly, it is staggering sometimes to consider the scope of it and what we can achieve by harnessing the good will of our community, so eager for opportunities to bring more compassion into the world.

And that's not all.

There will be live bands and world famous DJs. There will be a children's crafts area. There will be a kazoo-playing children's spectacle procession led by incredible performers towards the end of the day. I kid you not. This is all happening.

And that's not all. (Now I'm really feeling like a car salesperson, but hear me out.)

There are speakers, too, just upstairs from the festival. On the docket are Caryn Hartglass, Dr. Will Tuttle, Nathan Runkle, Dr. Michael Greger and Rae Sikora and JC Corcoran (both together here). Each and every speaker is incredibly impressive on his or her own. I cannot do justice here. They are speaking on the ethics of a vegan diet to the latest in health information to creating a more connected life. And you can sip free, Ayurvedic tea while watching the speakers. How amazing is that? Goosebumps are entirely appropriate.

So join us. It will be amazing.

And here is my final pitch. If you sign up to be a follower on this here blog and are the first to identify yourself as one to me (friends don't count, as much as I love you) at Chicago VeganMania, I will give you ten free food tickets (a.k.a., grub stubs). Simple, right?

I will see you there!

The Hard Sell...

Back when I was nineteen, I had a conversation with a man named Owl, a radical librarian who was partial to wearing skirts, in a park at a Lawrence, Kansas art festival. Somehow or another, the topic came up of the Rainbow Gathering, which is an annual love-in at different locations each year, culminating in a patchouli-scented prayer for peace on July fourth. It involves camping and a barter system and good vibes and hallucinogens. I was both repelled and intrigued, mostly intrigued. I was also eager to get out of town for a week. I didn’t think much about it before Owl called me a few days later, having borrowed the requisite VW van and arranged for people to pick up in Kansas City and Lincoln. When should he pick me up? I was thrown for a loop, stammering there for a minute, not remembering that I had committed but I found myself saying that he could pick me up on his way out of town. I borrowed camping gear, told my only-vaguely-remembered today boyfriend at the time to go screw himself, bought some bug repellent and called in to my job, which was nude modeling, citing some flakily constructed “family emergency” that would take me off the charcoal-smudged platforms for a week. I packed my big suitcase on wheels and took off.

The Rainbow Gathering was a huge adventure for a girl who was raised on the North Shore, the conservative, affluent suburbs directly north of Chicago. Aside from the culture in which random dudes in orange tie-dyes who would feel perfectly comfortable asking this “sister” for a hug (little did those poor, unsuspecting, dilated-pupiled souls know that I was going through a pretty active anti-male phase of my feminist awakening during this time, though they did soon), and the big-as-robins, bloodthirsty mosquitoes that Lake Superior State Park apparently breeds, I had a pretty great time. While I was exposed to more counter-cultural types when I went to school in Lawrence – home of William F. Burroughs and countless dreadlocks – going to the Rainbow Gathering was a total immersion in anything that flew in the face of mainstream, middle class values. Queer, self-proclaimed nature fairies? I met them on the long, dirt road walk to the campground (not easy with a constantly upending suitcase on wheels, I will tell you). Alcoholic bikers? They were there, too, just set off from the rest of the gathering, thank goodness, which had a strict anti-alcohol, pro-‘shroom platform maintained throughout. There were also latter-day flower children, potheads (this goes without saying), suspiciously frat boy-esque dudes looking for a “dose” (hit or two of acid), artists, sixties hangovers, feminists, peripatetic gypsies, you name it. There were also some who were very opposed to The System.

One day, I happened to mention a trip that some of us had made into town earlier that morning, a long journey that required miles of walking on a super hot day, to stock up on supplies. We had stopped at a Dairy Queen and I had a Mr. Misty, a sort of a Slurpee: we were extremely hot and dehydrated and I will admit that it tasted exquisite at the time. I should also mention that while I was a vegetarian, I had virtually no consciousness about consumerism or waste or any of that other stuff that drives me today. I just hadn’t been exposed to these ideas. Anyway, as soon as I had mentioned the Mr. Misty, one guy who just happened to be standing nearby overheard and flew into a sputtering, vitriolic rage.

He started screaming at me – jabbing his fingers and the vein in his forehead furiously pronounced – about Dairy Queen and how evil that corporation was and how they were exploiting the animals and destroying the earth and now I had just given them a couple of dollars to do it some more. I was shell-shocked. Not only had I never heard of any of these ideas (thrown up against me, rat-a-tat-tat), the fact that a random stranger started loudly berating me because of something I casually mentioned left me stunned. After his tirade, which lasted a good minute or two before he stormed off with sizzling lines of angry hissing all around him (or maybe that was my imagination), I was speechless. The best I could muster was a very pallid “Umm…”

I think back to that day often and more than anything, I resent that anonymous Angry Dude for not giving me the opportunity to learn more. As it happened, it wasn’t until about eight years later that I learned enough to become a vegan. I learned enough through the power of the internet and books, yes, but also through the positive outreach of many dedicated activists. Think of what an opportunity he squandered with his angry and vicious diatribe. Not only could I have learned right there and then all I needed to lay the groundwork for becoming vegan – thus I would have stopped supporting the horrible dairy and egg industries earlier – but I could have spent all those years helping to inform others about it. One bad experience with an awful messenger has a reverse ripple effect that can not only help to block progress but it can also work to turn people away from positive, life-altering changes completely. We often hear about the arrogant, strident, rude and hostile advocates who turn potential allies away in seconds flat. Think back in your own life to someone like that. It’s possible that the person’s message itself was good (as was his: think twice about supporting wasteful, exploitative businesses) but when it is wrapped up in a delivery that is so off-putting, it is a medicine very few willingly swallow. Given that, is it in the best interests of an advocate to bulldoze over those he is trying to persuade? Yes, people can be persuaded with threats and guilt tactics and insults – there are those who have such low self-esteem that they can basically be cajoled into anything – but for every “mission accomplished,” there must be dozens and dozens more who are turned off so thoroughly it may take them years, if ever, to reconsider.

I am not talking about wrapping up an ugly truth into a more agreeable package, for example, saying, “Well, factory farming sucks so you could just buy free-range products,” or “Don’t worry, the world go vegan happen overnight.” I am a big proponent of not apologizing in any way for having a message that may be upsetting to the general public. I do not apologize this message ever. What I do do, though, is try to maintain a warm and approachable demeanor. Simply by thinking to oneself, How would I want to receive this new information?, is all we need to go on. I would want the person delivering the message to listen to me without dismissing what I have to say out of hand. I would want to be respected. I would want to be heard and treated with compassion. Simple. At least it should be simple..

I understand the feelings of frustration, anger and sense of urgency the Angry Man had and I share them, often. Despite his shrill example, I have also turned off many people on my path to becoming a more balanced person and better communicator. I deeply regret this. While I am an lifelong fan of polemics, I am equally opposed to fundamentalism. It is unhealthy, imbalanced, puritanical and too often accompanied with a steaming side dish of hate. Is this the sort of world we want to create? I am a vegan activist because I believe in the power of dynamic compassion and because I want to people to stop being complicit in cruelty to sentient beings. I am not interested in creating a world with people who are stomping around, certain of their moral and mental superiority. As far as I am concerned, the message of ahimsa, whether we agree or disagree on the details, is not in question. What is being questioned (and rejected) by me is dogmatic, doctrinaire zealotry. I have no patience for fire-and-brimstone evangelicals in my life, whether they are preaching religion or screaming at me as a naïve nineteen-year-old for buying a Mr. Misty. Going in for the hard sell, whether it’s for religion or a new car or veganism, is going to make people naturally suspicious, those who don’t walk away in the first thirty seconds, that is. Our message doesn’t need the “hard sell”: it does require that we are honest, compassionate and thoughtful. It is also essential that we evaluate if our communication methods are effective. If they are ineffective, we may as well be shouting into the wind. In fact, if you are an ineffective communicator, shouting into the wind is often the case. This might do wonders for your sense of righteous indignation and conviction that everyone else in the world is stupid and cruel, but does this help the cause one iota? Again, I am not talking about changing the message itself, just how it is delivered.

It is my experience that all advocacy movements have a healthy population of those who follow the take-no-prisoners school of outreach. It has appeared when I’ve traveled in feminist, anti-war and sustainability circles and it is true of the animal rights movement as well. It is at that point to me where the far left and the far right intersect: a steadfast refusal to budge from a rigid, often purely theoretical, point-of-view. As I said, I have no place for fundamentalism in my life and it doesn’t do those the crusader is advocating on behalf of any favors either.

So what’s the answer? I think we’ve just got to strive to be better, more peaceful people. It should all fall into place from there.

Bananas Gone Bad...

They are the first solid food many of us eat and one of the last. Bananas. Such a fun word to type, fingers just mirroring micro-movements on the keyboard. Just the word itself sounds comforting, all repeating soft A’s and gentle consonants. Bananas are both sterile and wildly propagating, soft fruit protected in a tight jacket. Bananas are found in smoothies and pies, frozen in chocolate and (heavenly, yes) even a sauté. Did you know that a cluster of bananas in a tier is called a hand and the individual bananas are called fingers? Isn’t that even more endearing?

But sometimes good bananas go bad. The lifespan of the average banana on your kitchen counter may be, oh, two to four days from solidly yellow to mottled brown, but for some bananas of a more Type A nature, it is a much more brief shelf-life, and a much more ugly demise. They would prefer to burn out – or, rather, brown out – than to fade away. How many times have this happened: you give your banana a knowing little smile one night before you go to sleep – to dream of smoothies and custards and round or oblong (what is your preference?) slices on your morning porridge – and then you get that sinking feeling when you pick it up in the morning. It feels funny. It is browner than it should be and maybe one of its seams is unzipped a little. It is weepy and oily and sad inside. As you try to figure out what to do with it, the banana seems to decay by the second. Before long, it is fully committed to its decomposition cycle. Taps is playing in the background. The mood is somber.

So what do you do with a banana like this, inedible in its present state but being someone who is disinclined to waste? Some suggestions…

Twenty-five Uses For A Nasty Banana

1. Draw a sad face on it in Sharpie and mail it to Anthony Bourdain, Dick Cheney, the latest Fox News assclown who you can’t be bothered to learn the name of, or your favorite pick. Mail it fourth class. From Death Valley.

2. Puree it and use it as egg replacer posthaste! (One half large or one small banana blended until smooth equals one egg.)

3. Start a fruit fly colony. Study their complex and highly nuanced social behaviors. Name them. Become the Jane Goodall of fruit flies.

4. Prop the banana up and use it as a surrogate for an adversary in a debate. Bananas are famously slippery: stay on top of your game so that you are not trounced.

5. Take a picture with your cat or dog and the banana. Can you think of a good word balloon to accompany this? Something very cute? “I Can Has 'Nana?”

6. Dingdong ditch. (In other words, put it on someone’s doorstep, ring the doorbell and run.)

7. Stuff it in your pants just to see. Extra points if you then hug a friend.

8. Write a long and involved and adorably quirky story about this banana and its relevance to your life, list it on eBay and see what happens. Add cleverly crafted footnotes to ratchet things up a notch.

9. Stick some earth-toned soy wax candles in it for a raw foodist’s birthday party.

10. Begin your career as a prop comic.

11. Hone your still life painting skills. Quickly.

12. Take the banana on a last trip around the world, or at least down the block.

13. Start a write-in campaign for your banana to run for state senate. Platform ideas: hard on the outside, soft on the inside. Scratch that. Beloved by babies and senior alike? Neither very important voting blocks. How about this: Because everyone loves banana bread. It’s simple but golden.

14. Knit it a banana cozy to stave off further decomposition. Become the darling of the indie DIY crafters set with your useless but adorably retro creations.

15. Purchase some baby bananas for it to see if they make your banana feel younger. Warning: it could easily have the opposite effect.

16. Mash it up and invite your one friend with the baby over.

17. Stunt! Figure out some blog-endurance stunt featuring the banana and keep it going until you can’t see through the swarm of fruit flies or you have a book and movie deal. Ideas: dress it up as boyfriends from your past and create re-enactments with it and a peach [your surrogate]. Or travel with the banana back to its country of origin, fall in love with a swarthy, earthy stranger there who mocks your neurotic, complicated Western life and, in the process, find yourself. Eat banana pancakes along the way.

18. Bronze it.

19. Send in a video audition to The Real World, 2010. Play up the foreign bad boy angle.

20. Contemplate its banananess until you have reached a state of nirvana.

21. See if banana peels really make unsuspecting people slip, especially when two workers are carrying a long, clear piece of glass across the sidewalk.

22. Do bananas float? Find out. Do they burn? Find out. Do they splatter when dropped from great heights? You know what to do.

23. Pretend that you’ve mistaken your banana for a phone and talk into it to make your toddler laugh while making a funny face. This never stops being funny.

24. Watch an episode of The Banana Splits with it for old time’s sake, just the two of you all cozy. Order in Chinese food.

25. Accidentally leave it on the bus.

What are your ideas for downturn bananas?

The switch inside...

If you have been vegan for any significant length of time, you have undoubtedly asked yourself several vexing questions during your tenure. You may have wondered why your mother persistently mispronounces the word, nearly fifteen years later. (Or maybe that’s just me.) You may have speculated over why the omnivorous world seems to view you as a priest in a confessional as they lay their souls bare about their flesh-eating ways (“It-is-not-much-it-is-just-fish-I-tried-to-do-the-vegetarian-thing-but-just-couldn’t-resist-my-grandma’s-brisket”) seeking absolution, like you are some sort of God proxy figure. And then there is the Eternal Question, the one that has nagged at us since the word vegan was first coined by that English gentleman in 1944. It usually sounds something like this: what makes me different from my omnivorous and even vegetarian friends? Why do I tick when they tock? How can I see something so very clearly when it remains obscured to my friends, my family? Further, why do I see this when others do not and how can I get them to see it, too?

We all have friends who are so progressive in every other way but for whom the diet part of the equation does not factor in much. They eat whatever is in front of them, no or few questions asked. But then there are those who are aware of their consumption habits within the context of what they eat. They may scrupulously avoid food that is out of season or shipped too far or artificial or over-packaged or produced by horrible companies, Many even will avoid the most infamously torturous “delicacies” like veal and foie gras, but the line they will not cross is a broad one and one that is very clearly rolled out in front of them. The line is more of a wide gulf, really, and it separates the vegans (a.k.a., The Crazies) from everyone else (a.k.a, The Sane Ones). Vegans have good intentions but they take it too far, they may say or broadly hint. We are absolutists, extremists, people who wake every day with the sole purpose of wrecking everyone else’s good time. My question is this: when we are trying to live our lives with integrity and a certain measure of consistency, veganism could be seen as the natural extension of a general point-of-view, an intuitive conclusion to draw when taking into consideration one’s whole path and perspective, right? It would be ignoring the elephant in the room for many of us to not adopt a vegan lifestyle. It is rooted in the same desire to live compassionately and mindfully, therefore it would be radical and extreme to pretend that it wasn’t natural. It entirely natural if you are trying to live compassionately, are concerned about social justice, believe in your power to effect positive change.

Knowing this further compounds the confusion I feel when those who are so clearly on a similar path as mine take an entirely divergent route right exactly here, where how we live our lives and food intersect. It is as though we were walking along together, really enjoying one another’s company, compatible as peas in a pod until my feet just want keep following the path – the one that seems to be the most natural one – and my non-vegan friends take an abrupt turn and bid me adieu. “You’re on your own with this one, friend. Good for you but not for me,” they say as they skip off and I am left baffled once again. I can think of so many examples right off the top of my head and after almost fifteen years of wondering about this, I am no closer to understanding it. There are friends who won’t purchase any new clothing because they don’t want to support the brutality of the sweatshop industries. They are not vegan. There are people I know who will go on a hunger strike at the drop of a hat to draw attention to the military violence overseas. When they resume eating, they eat the product of violence. There are feminists, artists, freedom seekers, peace workers, culture jammers of all variety who actively reject the consumerist-patriarchal-military-industrial-you-name-it complex but feel no conflict with eating animals and even more who do feel that inner-tug but decide to live with it anyway. How is it that our moral compasses are so out-of-synch on this single issue, but return to being coordinated once we leave it? I know that people disagree all the time on core issues – we all have our own path, it is part of what makes us unique, blah blah blah- however when things are lined up to point in a certain direction, and then that direction takes what seems to be a random, hairpin turn, it is only natural to look back and say, What on earth just happened there? Where did you go?

Except it’s not really accurate to say that I am totally confused because I do have an idea, even if it’s fuzzy and only a metaphor. I tend to think of vegans as having had their switch turned on. Imagine the switch as the mechanism that turns on a light. Either it’s the kind of switch that turns on a blast of light at once (the equivalent of a mental epiphany) or it’s a dimmer switch, slowly illuminating a room over time (the equivalent of a slow dawning). This light switch reveals the arbitrariness, brutality and injustice of our dominion over non-humans. Occasionally people have the light switch engaged but then decide that they no longer want to see all that it exposes, or that they still do see but it doesn’t affect them the same way any longer. (They can see but have turned off the corresponding feeling switch.) For most of the vegans I know, though, I would say that once that light switch turned on – either as an epiphany or a slow dawning or somewhere in between – it is stuck on. From that point on (the point being where recognition leads to an inner- and outer-transformation) our new perspective has fundamentally altered us. The veil has been removed and we can clearly see. The challenge is in coexisting with those for whom the practice of eating animals is still shrouded, either intentionally or unintentionally, and that we are asked to suspend seeing what we do so the rest of the world can continue maintaining the status quo, which is that animal parts and products are neutral and harmless, no different than broccoli or apples or kidney beans. To us, this is being complicit in a deception we have already identified and rejected.

So this is how I’ve come to think about vegans, as patronizing as it may very well be to omnivores: somewhere along the line, our lights were switched on. This doesn’t mean about everything, that we are above reproach in all matters. It also doesn’t mean that I think omnivores are entirely in the dark, Gollum-like creatures lurking in the shadows. I don’t think this, never thought that. (Okay, there was probably a period in the spring of 1995 when I did, but no longer.) Vegans are just regular people who have our lights switched on. Once the light switched on, we made changes accordingly. We can be approachable and helpful, but it is a tall order to ask us to pretend not to see what is plainly obvious to us.

How do we activate this switch in another? We can’t. We can leave a trail of clues to locating that switch but the other person’s hand has to be on it herself. You cannot force anyone’s hand, you can just sort of coax it along.

Helping others find their light switches is our work.

I.N.S.O.M.N.I.A.

I have had insomnia off-and-on since I was nineteen or so, and it's been in mostly-on mode for the past few years. When it occurs to friends of mine that I send lots of correspondences at around 3:30 in the morning and that the status updates on Facebook at 5:43 a.m. are not from someone who just woke but from someone who had been awake for the better part of the night, they are justifably concerned. When one imagines an insomniac, I think the picture that emerges is one of a neurotic, jangly-nerved basket case. My friends - I have wonderfully caring, nurturing friends - look into my eyes sympathetically and ask if I need to talk about anything. They tell me that they are here for me. They offer ideas - yoga, chamomile tea, meditation - that are lovely, nourishing and enriching but always remain simply nice things I can do for myself prior to spending another night awake. They advise me not to drink caffeine (as if!) and to not eat late at night (I don't). I joke that I am transitioning, on my way to becoming a vegan vampire, though my adoration of garlic is still intact and my commitment to nonviolence remains unchanged. They want to help me but my internal clock is frustratingly, unintentionally defiant. It wants to rouse me in the middle of the night.

Nothing seems to help for more than a day or two or at a time. Over the years, I have tried black cohash and every other herbal remedy, homeopathics, Sleepytime Tea, acupuncture, going without sugar, cutting out spicy foods, blocking out the sun with black cardboard on my bedroom windows (again, training to become a bloodless vampire), not drinking for three hours before bedtime, not turning on any lights when I do get up in the night, counting backwards from one hundred, and counting blasted sheep jumping backwards from one hundred. I get plenty of exercise and not too late in the day. To my knowledge, I am not engaging in any habit or product that facilitates sleeplessness. Oh, except for my inability to turn my brain off.

When people ask why I have insomnia, my immediate thought is, Why don't you? The fact that anyone can sleep for more than four or five hours in a row is pretty shocking to me sometimes. There is a theater playing newsreels, distant memories, revisited conversations, to do lists, nagging worries, funny thoughts, weird ideas (and I can tell you firsthand that the ideas that seem brilliant at three in the morning don't usually have much going for them in the unforgiving light of day) and on and on in this overactive mind of mine. I remember when I was little - in the time of my life I was a blissfully unknowing pre-insomniac - I had this fantasy that I could program my brain shortly before I went to sleep to screen episodes of The Monkees and The Banana Splits as dreams. Sort of an early, biological Tivo. It never quite worked like that, but this sort of thinking, that I must be productive with everything, even when I have clocked out, that I must not waste my time on something as patently inefficient as sleep. I know the flaws of this thinking (sleep is healthy! sleep is necessary!) and yet I still can't stop seeing it as a big ol' waste of time. Please don't send me messages about how healthy sleep is, how necessary it is for our functionality. One part of my brain fully agrees and recognizes this: it's the other part of my brain that causes such a ruckus.

I thought I'd list here some of the random things that one can get done during three or four hours while the rest of the world is supine. Sure, insomnia has its drawbacks, like, for example, stinging eyes for the first hour or so of the next day and being ready for lunch at around 9:30, but being awake in the middle of the night also has its pluses. For example I could:

Check my Facebook. I can look up ex-boyfriends and examine the tiny square photograph for signs of aging. Things that feel like self-indulgent time-wasters during the daytime are excused when the sun don't shine.

Mentally set the next day's goals, even though they may be totally thrown off by these hours spent planning them.

Wonder what my son's teacher really meant when she said that he was having trouble concentrating. Did she mean to intimate that he has ADD? Oh, God, does he have ADD? Look up symptoms of ADD. Decide that my son may not have it, but I definitely do. Adult-onset ADD perhaps? Ponder suing Facebook.

Try to figure out how on earth I could coax more clothes storage space out of my 1920s-era home. Go through each room in my mind and come up pretty much without solutions. Except! Hangers on ceilings.

Wonder if there is lead in the flaking-off paint of the sunroom where I spend most of the day in front of the computer. Does lead poisoning cause insomnia? Or maybe I'm getting radiation poisoning from the computer? Look up radiation screens online. Also, write a note reminding me to get a blood test for lead poisoning.

Decide on a lark to bake mini-loaves of banana bread because my son is not getting cute enough snacks at school and I am losing my opportunity to properly promote veganism to his first grade peers.

Plunder the depths of Wikipedia.

Plan this year's bulb plantings and next year's garden. In the process, discover last year's lost garden plan for this year. Become chagrined.

Blog!

Skim through the magazines that have been occupying space in the second bedroom for the purpose of being read late at night. Ponder a Venus Zine for old ladies like myself without tattoos and who never go out but still love Cat Power.

Read some David Foster Wallace. Get really, really sad about his suicide. Look up interviews online.

Come across a picture of Sissy Spacek as Carrie. That picture of Carrie with her eyes wide, fingers all splayed out, and blood pouring down her must surely rank as one of the scariest images in the history of cinema. Shit. Now I'm scared. Decide that Carrie must be reviewed again by me for a feminist analysis. Try to get the image out of my head. Think about that girl in seventh grade who everyone said looked like Carrie. Wonder what she is doing now. Try to her up on Facebook but there are 318 others with the same name.

Write a meal plan. Write a grocery list. Sort through cookbooks. Make up recipes. Throw out old spices.

Contemplate Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, other hideous men. They're probably sleeping like babies. "Yeah, they're probably soiling themselves," you think and laugh out loud. Status update?

Hormone imbalance? Search symptoms.

Pick up the craft project I abandoned six months ago. Now what was it I was trying to do here?

Jot down ideas for new articles to shop around, then decide that they are all idiotic and this has been a totally unproductive time and now I'm sleep-deprived, most likely rendering my day less than

Is that the sun coming up? Damn...[Did you know that there's a sound just before sunrise? I swear that there is. It's a sound sort of like the sky opening up, if you can imagine that. It always makes me feel a little sick to my stomach because it means that I've likely missed my window for falling back asleep.]

So this is a lens into the nightlife of an insomniac, not all insomniacs, but this one. A thrill a minute as you can see.

(Sorry for the lame post, honeys, but I'm tired...)

My sidekick...

My little sidekick is gone. Absent. Vamoose. I shouldn’t be so dramatic. Allow me to restate: for at least seven hours every Monday through Friday my son has skedaddled from my life. No need to issue an Amber Alert. My son is finally in all-day school.


It was inevitable. Kindergarten last year was a loosey-goosey half-day of song and revelry, as were all the years of pre-school proceeding it, and those little three hour spans were all either of us was accustomed to with school up until now. A week after diving into the grueling rigors of first grade, he seems to be rolling with the whole sitting-at-a-desk and eating-lunch-with-hundreds-others just fine. My one and only has flown the coop without much of a glance behind, no feathers terribly ruffled.

The decision to have a single child is one that has always felt right to me. My reasoning is that I get to have the motherhood experience while still enjoying a full life outside of being someone's mother. My friends who have more than one child lead active and interesting lives, rich with the interesting stuff of life outside of motherhood, but I know for myself it would be the death knell for any hope I have of living a creative life. I have never been someone for whom it is natural to juggle and multitask: I can do it and I have to all the time, but I am just not particularly adept at it. When I try to juggle for prolonged periods, it means that stuff gets dropped, broken, inadvertently trod upon. For me, being able to really dig in and concentrate on the task in front of me is essential to that being both a gratifying experience and me being reasonably successful at accomplishing it. When I have a bunch of different responsibilities vying for my attention, I just sort of become dysfunctional and, well, unpleasant to be around. When I have two or three Big, Important Responsibilities - say, for example, raising a child, writing a novel, organizing an event – along with a reasonable cushion of time to be able to devote to them, I'm in my element. Too many dependencies that demand my attention and my limited time resources, though leave me anxious and unfulfilled. I need to really dig my fingers into the rich loamy soil of all-consuming projects to function at my optimal best.

This awareness of my shortcomings has resulted in my unshakable conviction that if I had more than one child, I would soon be joining Sylvia Plath’s ghost and countless other defeated mothers with my head in the oven or jumping off the cliff or speeding away in the car without a license plate. It’s not because I don’t love children but more because I’m a fundamentally selfish person and I know that what I’m already giving – to my family, my friends, my cat, myself, my creative life, my interests – is not a boundless resource. I have to manage that tap pretty closely. There are women I see all the time, friends of mine even, with four or five children who are able to be present, to not be snippy, to not mind being called away every other minute to attend to a diaper, a snack, a spill. I have admiration for that Buddha-like quality of selflessness so many possess, the limitless font of unconditional nurturing, but, boy oh boy, that is not me. If there were only the option of raising five children or raising none, I’m pretty confident I know what I’d choose. I say this while loving my son with my whole flawed heart.

One of the real luxuries of being the mother of one is being able to truly concentrate on my child, or what my friend Rae refers to as my “little project,” fully. My son and I have always had a close, symbiotic bond, perhaps most perfectly represented by the freakishly short umbilical cord we shared between us. He was never the sort of toddler who wandered, who I had to worry about roaming into the street: he was always firmly planted, happiest in the arms of his parents or at our side. My mother has given voice to many worries over the years – that’s what she sees as her birthright, being a Jewish mother and now grandmother – and she has said in the past that she is concerned that our son is too close to us. The thing is, though, that he has always enjoyed going to school, never complained about us leaving him much past that first month or two of pre-school, and of course he likes playing with his friends with no grownups around. As he has matured, he has moved beyond his comfort zone socially and he is quite fine when we are out of his field of vision these days. For the most part, though, our son likes being with us, which I actually think is kind of cool. Of the things there are to worry about in life, should a close bond between parent and child even register, I mean as long as it’s not emulating something out of the Norman Bates family dynamic? I know there will come a day when he will lock himself in his room and barely manage eye contact with his me and my hyper-annoying motherly ways so I am enjoying our closeness while I can.

But now he’s gone for most of the day. The days of hopping on the train to go downtown – a museum? Millennium Park? - on an afternoon lark are behind us. The latitude one feels in pre-kindergarten and even kindergarten starts to dissolve as the expectations pile on, and with that our days of calling in with a stuffy nose so we can go to the free day at the Field Museum are, for the most part, behind us. I was given an amazing opportunity, a tremendous luxury of time that I am well-aware is quite a privilege – during which I could devote myself to raising my son and indulging our whims (among many other things). Now, though, the time of that freedom together is behind us as we move to another stage in life.

The past week has been difficult to get accustomed to, I have to admit. I keep expecting to see my little sidekick, the ketchup to my mustard, the Cisco to my Pancho, nearby as he has been for most of the past seven years. He’s not at arm’s length these days, spouting off theories of alien abduction (I have a delightfully strange child) and drawing elaborate space machines. We’re not taking off to the woods to look for signs of craft landings or investigating tree stumps for fascinating bugs. He’s at school, filling his classmates’ ears with the product of his very active inner world. I miss him, having his sweet face being nearby, his soft cheeks always available for a quick nuzzle. In some ways, motherhood is a process of continually saying goodbye.

Despite this, I have to say that I am also very excited about the easing up of my responsibilities as entertainment coordinator. Now I have the time I have been so longing for since my son was born to unabashedly follow my muse and wherever that leads me without interruption from approximately 8:00 a.m. until 3:00 p.m. Monday through Friday. This is going to be a time of growth for me, I can feel it, of moving beyond my own comfort zone. For the past seven years, I had a convenient excuse for not fully pursuing my creative goals: not enough time! Too many interruptions! (Not that I have been totally shiftless, just not as productive as I like to be.) Now I am ready to dive back into that world out there and commit myself to the new path I know is there, clearer dreams and ambitions.

My sidekick has moved on and now so will I. While there is a loss here, I am eager to see what this will mean for both of us.

The Vegans In The Dells...

Sometimes we all just need a break.

This world is cold, hard and mean like a little metal ball sometimes, ready to ping you wherever it hurts most. In fact, sometimes you feel like that especially vulnerable bumper in the pinball machine, hit repeatedly by the ball (ding-ding-ding-ding-ding...!) as the toll rises against you until you are ready to topple over with just one more hit. This early summer, I kind of felt like every time I left the house I had to look over my shoulder for that mean metal ball, ready to roll me over at any moment.

Still some of us are so hardwired to believe we can affect positive change that the prospect of the absence of this ability would make it very challenging to get out of bed in the morning. So we put on our happy faces, frown a little at our newspapers, pull ourselves out of it somehow (Coffee? A hug? Whatever it takes...) and go on about the business of trying to make the best of this very flawed place. Some of us are activists, busying ourselves with meetings and petitions and protests. Others are artists, using the creative process to give voice to our discontent. And then there are the community builders, helping this world we are trying to will into existence take form in the shape of relationships and personal connections. Whatever it is that we do, we do it because we have to to respect ourselves and to feel some measure of effectiveness. This all works, often magnificently well, but sometimes we just need to chuck it all for a day or two or three and let ourselves get silly. We need to grin, laugh, giggle, chuckle, let go, and relax. We need to eat calorically dense, nutritionally modest food, entertain ourselves in ways that amuse but do not challenge, find peace with allowing our inner-simpleton to take over the driving for a bit.

At times like these, there is the Wisconsin Dells or the equivalent near you.

My husband and I started going to the Dells every year on our annual voyage to Minnesota, otherwise known as when the Jewess observes the happy Viking family in the dead of winter. The Dells is approximately the mid-point between Chicago and his tiny hometown in Minnesota, a three-and-a-half hour drive, a reasonable distance in which to have earned a lunch or dinner break.

I had heard of the Dells all my life but only went there for the first time as an adult. The first time I went, it was a revelation, though I scarcely remember the specifics. I was simply too overtaken by sensory overload, even in the snowy quiet of December. I have come to learn that driving into town in the winter, the Dells takes on a radically different quality than in the summer: the nearly deserted downtown, spookily empty roller coasters, the billboards that must look so enticing under the punishing July sun - water-drenched thrill-seekers; big, icy drinks in sweat-beaded glasses - chill to the bone in late December. It is a distinctly sad time of year, the death cycle for pretty much everything but polar creatures, but for those of us who cherish the bittersweet, the Dells in winter is also exquisitely plaintive. It seems as if you can hear last summer's voices shouting, thrilled at the whatever adventure awaits in front of them, in the distance. In the very far distance.

In the summer, this is a very different town, every chock-a-block inch of it alive and fully awake. We had been to the Dells several times in the winter before we went in the summer, when the beast is really alert. Every time that we've returned, my initial assessment has barely diminished: this is a staggering town, deeply impressive in its audacious embrace of the tacky.

It can be described as Las Vegas for kids. Or the sort of town a consortium of seven-year-olds would create if they ran the town council. Everything is loud, obnoxious and created for maximum fun, at least what your typical seven-to-ten year-old tends to find fun. Much of it is also under gallons and gallons of chlorinated water. Subtlety is not a prized quality in the Dells, in fact, I would say that it is scorned; the Lutheran reserve and stoicism that pervades through much of the Dairyland politely inspects its nails and whistles to itself when it comes to city planning here. As long as it's family-friendly, there is seemingly nothing that is beyond the pale, pushing the envelope of frivolity too far. Even the pictures of those dressed up as bordello barmaids in the "old time" black-and-white portraits at the novelty photo studios in the downtown area are stripped of any prurience.

There are two distinct parts of the Dells that interact together chaotically but still agreeably. There is the more contemporary side, the one with the big water park hotels and
expensive theme parks with "Extreme Rides" (anything where a human form and bungee cords interact reboundingly) and then there is the Old Wisconsin Dells. This the part that was created from the 1950s through the 1970s, seemingly influenced by the blocky aesthetics of The Flintstones meets the groovy, faux-natural style of The Brady Bunch with a nice blast of futurism (Robots! Space exploration! Mind-blowing science!) inserted throughout. It is all done seemingly without tongue-in-cheek (tongues are too busy lapping up syrup-and-crushed-ice-based beverages here) or an ironic sensibility. This is the Dells I love. It is the anti-slick, the anti-Disney. Throughout the town, there is no single unifying corporate iconography or overarching theme other than the pursuit of fun for its own sake, and whether that takes shape in the form of a Wisconsin Duck (a vehicle that drives on land or water) or an afternoon visit to a haunted house teeming with animatronics, it is up to you.

One memorable visit to the Dells pre-parenthood was with Lisa, my best friend from college and onetime partner in crime, who was visiting from California and is constitutionally unable to refuse the promise of a silly good time. We went there with a little bag of, um, dried mushrooms that we had to consume so they didn't go to waste and then hit the water slides for a madcap twenty-four hour adventure that included the largest water park in the US (key memory: riding down the lazy river in an inner-tube and the girl who slowly drifted past, inquiring, "Is that an earring in your nose?," [I had a nose ring at the time] me answering in the affirmative and then her saying, "Cool..." as she languidly floated away), a visit to Biblical Gardens (now closed, sadly), which Lisa, a former Catholic schoolgirl, giddily defiled at every little statue station depicting Jesus' life by placing her breast in his outstretched hand. We also tried to figure out what was exactly behind the sunny smiles and overwhelmingly energetic mien of the largely European workforce at The Cheese Factory, a vegetarian restaurant in nearby Lake Delton, by climbing the fire escape on the side of the building, like that would reveal something. (We learned later that The Cheese Factory is somehow affiliated with A Course In Miracles, which leads me to a funny aside: when I told a friend that a new vegetarian restaurant that was opening in Chicago had a meditation studio operating from it, he said, "Can't a vegetarian restaurant ever open here that's not affiliated with a cult?" which cracked me up, both because of the preponderance of the sort of thing he referred to and because of the notion that meditation practitioners are cultists.) We drove home the evening after we arrived, sunburned and sleep-deprived and happy to have been there.

Last weekend, we took my son to the Dells for the first time in the summer. We also took my mother along. This would be a very different trip, double-entendre fully intentional. When you first drive toward the downtown area, officially called the Wisconsin Dells Parkway but we like to maintain the Vegas parallels by referring to it as the Strip, you are immediately greeted by big wooden roller coasters up against the road, just feet away, sending screaming riders slowly up and then plummeting down. My son gasped. His eyes, already enormous, rapidly drank in everything as he whipped his head from side to side, not wanting to miss a thing. He is right square in the middle of the demographic target: a seven-year-old boy. He was visibly shaken at reaching his mecca, pointing, gasping, finally insisting that we stop the car. Now! We happily obliged.

So there is a miniature golf course that is truly immense on the left as you enter the Strip. And there is a haunted house with an animatronic creature that throws up water and a Ripley's Believe It Or Not Museum, something called The Torture Museum and lots of candy shops selling grotesquely pumped up caramel apples and dozens of varieties of fudge. The sickly-sweet smell of melted sugar is everywhere. Needless to say, it is not a vegan paradise in the Dells, aside from The Cheese Factory and its sister bed-and-breakfast restaurant, and at one point, my family had three varieties of fried potatoes for two meals. I prayed for our arteries, vowed to eat as much green stuff as possible as soon as I could and moved on. That's what the late Tommy Bartlett, the entertainment mogul with the eponymous water ski show in the Dells, would have wanted me to do.

In the Dells, concrete volcanoes emerge from miniature golf lands, timed to erupt every fifteen minutes. Adults clutch three-foot-long strawberry-flavored Puffy Rope Marshmallow Candy as though that's a perfectly acceptable choice. Novelty t-shirts announce to the world that the wearer feels cuckolded by his wife. Most apparently never got the memo that fanny packs are not stylish. Either that or they just don't care.

So we had fun. My son proclaimed that the Dells is "the weirdest place he's ever been" and that he would like to move there, two seemingly incongruous thoughts that make perfect sense to young people. No doubt this desire to be a permanent Wisconsin Dells resident is fueled by his fanciful and still naive grasp of "the real world" and how it functions. I'm sure that he thinks that residing in the Dells would be nonstop revelry as we would go from water park to Duck ride to Ripley's Museum to dinner out and back again in the morning. And, really, why would I want to try to puncture this impression? The real world of rushing out the door and deadlines and appointments and passive-aggressive coworkers awaits.

The strongest visual memory that remains the one that sums up our trip to me is this: John and I were in this positively insane pool at Mt. Olympus that shoots - seriously! - nine-foot-tall waves over the assembled every ninety seconds. At the first wave, I instinctively grabbed onto my husband, apparently the wrong thing to do, as it pulled both of us to the bottom of the pool. By the time we emerged back into daylight, a person in a bungee swing thing was catapulting way above our heads from a nearby ride. Seeing that person swinging up against the bright blue, cloudless sky as I wiped my eyes and gasped for air will probably stick with me for a very long time. That was the Dells experience in a nutshell.

What won't stick around for a long time? This vegan fudge, perfect to bring along to the Wisconsin Dells or the equivalent near you. This is not health food by any means but it is cholesterol-free and delicious, and sometimes, you just have to enjoy yourself.

Vegan Fudge

12 oz. dairy-free chocolate chips
6 Tablespoons melted Earth Balance or coconut oil
3 1/2 cups powdered sugar
1/3 cup baking cocoa powder, sifted
2 tsps. vanilla
1/4 cup rice, soy or coconut milk
Optional: 1 cup vegan mini-marshmallows (like Dandie's by Chicago Soy Dairy's) and/or toasted, chopped nuts, especially nice are pecans.

Lightly grease an eight-inch square baking pan.

Place everything but the optional ingredients in a double-boiler and stir until all is combined and the chips are melted. Add any optional items and stir together. Pour into the prepared pan and chill completely. Also, swirling creamy peanut butter or vegan cream cheese through might be a nice addition if that's how you roll.

Enjoy!