so, what am i doing?

i actually didn't really wake up until early this morning, and then i slept again late this morning. i dunno. that was a hectic four-day weekend, so i needed to take some time to catch up on food and rest, i guess. i'm feeling a lot better, now.

it's a little on the cool side for this time of year right now, but it's not too bad. it should be a little nicer on the weekend, but i actually can't find anything to do.

well, i'll caveat that: there's a large number of dance parties, but no early shows. no (interesting) rock shows, no classical shows, no experimental noise fests, no jazz shows. it's just novelty rock acts and boring acoustic nights. so, i'm toying with staying in altogether. or, i may hit one of them. but, i don't expect it to be like last weekend, when i was out for days straight - there's just not enough stuff to do, and nothing substantive to really plan around.

that could change if i find something.

but, for now, it means i feel ok about hitting the screaming females tonight.

no word from the oiprd, yet. i'll have to touch base with them again on monday.

it's going to be like watching an old married couple, both of whom are well past retirement age, bicker about their grocery list.

at least get larry david in to write some lines.

fuck.

and, we've already reached the heady intellectual realm of debating the merits of "intersectional feminism" vs "corporate" or - how about this - "white feminism".

ugh.

this is why people hate this party and wish there was anything out there that was better.

but, what's happening here is that both of the campaigns have realized that warren's bump in the polls is almost entirely attributed to a large amount of women determining their voting intentions with their vaginas. warren's people seem to be ok with that, and willing to create a wedge around it. and, bernie's right back where he started, again.

expect warren's campaign to bring back the bernie bro, and bernie's campaign to go back to subtly undermining his opponent's qualifications.

and, it's all going to be very, very boring. for months.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-war-between-bernie-sanders-and-msnbc-reaches-a-new-peak

why do i eat meat, though?

because my doctor told me i should.

when i was a kid, i was legit anemic. i wasn't a vegan kid exactly, but my mom didn't really feed me. we don't have lunch programs at school in canada because we don't really need them, and it's not like my mom couldn't afford to make me a lunch, it's more like she was too lazy to make me one, and often actually usually more like she was too drunk and/or stoned and/or unconscious from overdosing on something to make me one. when you're like eight years old, your culinary options are a little restricted. when my mom did cook, it was usually kraft dinner (sometimes with broccoli, usually not), and she tended not to keep things like peanut butter or jam in the house, let alone any lunch meat. she'd rarely eat, herself. so, i frequently ended up at school without a lunch.

my dad just didn't know. when the doctor eventually realized i was horribly iron deficient due to malnutrition and got the information to him, he started sending me home with lunch meat. i didn't figure it out for years later, but the reason he sent me home with eastern european salamis was because they had the highest protein contents. and, i've been eating things like "hungarian salami" ever since.

to my mom's credit, she seemed to be a little embarrassed by the situation when it was explained to her, and briefly adjusted by making things like liver, which is pretty iron-heavy. but, the truth is that she was a drunk, and she didn't enjoy doing motherly things. she hated cooking. really, any attempts to do normal mom things were always very short-lived; it was not long before she gave up, and went back to destroying herself.

so, i was never a regular meat eater because i was raised in such a fucked up family. i consequently never developed the kind of meat-eating habits that are considered unhealthy, but have always been struggling to force myself to get enough protein, to keep my iron and b12 up.

i went "vegetarian" briefly around 2002, but it wasn't a big lifestyle change because i kept eating eggs and cheese. and, i'd eat bacon, specifically, at an opportunistic basis, because it's bacon. so, basically, i just stopped eating meat at fast food restaurants. i flopped on this a few years later, but i still never had a steady source of meat in my diet until i moved to windsor and started buying salami regularly.

and, no, i'm not a vegan or a vegetarian. at all.

i choose soy milk over cow's milk because it's nutritionally superior and it tastes better, but i eat a large amount of cheese, about a scoop of ice cream and a (very) small amount of high protein salami on more or less a daily basis. i also eat about 4-8 eggs a week, depending on a variety of things.

the bulk of my diet is fruit (5 strawberries, 20 blueberries, 1 kiwi, 1 bananas, 5 cherries, 1/2 tomato daily) and grains (1/2 bowl of pasta daily, 2-4 pieces of bread weekly). i eat a small green pepper on most days for extra fiber. add dressings (caesar, frank's, mustard) and spices (celery salt, ground pepper) and that's really all i eat.

i've gained a small amount of weight recently, but i actually think it's mostly that i've built a lot of muscle from doing a lot of bicycling. that sounds counter-intuitive, but i guess i lost a lot of muscle when i stopped biking for a few years. it's just hard for me to figure out where i gained the weight (my thighs are a little bigger from the hormones, but i couldn't imagine it's that measurable) because i can't see it. muscle gain is the only thing that really makes any sense, and all that pasta will certainly lead to that end point.

understand that what i'm talking about is increasing my bmi from around 19 to around 22. i'm still underweight by most metrics.

and, i think that removing my testicles will probably cut my muscle mass, although it remains to be seen what my body does to it.

the truth is that the canada food guide is not a substantive political issue because nobody reads the canada food guide.

the reality is that the food guide is trash, but it always was.

the canada food guide is not a peer-reviewed, scientific document. what the canada food guide is is a marketing tool for canadian industry, and if it tells you to eat less meat in favour of more beans it's because the lentil industry successfully lobbied to have that put in the report.

actual peer-reviewed science in actual academic journals is very, very clear that you cannot replace meat with plants, and if you try to do that you're going to end up with vitamin and iron deficiencies. vegetarians are statistically far less healthy than omnivores are.

there are reasons other than health that the scale of beef and poultry production should be cut down, but if we're mostly concerned about health then we should be looking at insects as replacements, not plants.

but, are these things good for you? of course they aren't. the fact is that it's mostly sugar. but, you didn't think that big mac was good for you, did you?

https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/beyond-meat-burger-beef-health-risks-1.5220777