Day 103

Garden of weeds

It's getting late in planting season, and I haven't done a thing with my container garden yet, but look what I discovered on the balcony today! It's actually starting to look like a garden again. Other than the chives, I have no idea if anything is of any worth. I didn't think that much of what I planted was perennial. In the pots last year were tomatoes, strawberries, chives and peppers, clockwise from the top left. Anyone have any clue if I might actually be growing fruit and veggies? Or are they weeds?

Herbs? These didn't even sprout last year

I took my last final today, which means I can blog, knit and otherwise procrastinate with a clear conscience. There's no lab work and no studying to be done. I don't think it's completely sunk in yet. I still feel very tense. I think it's more than school work, though. Even when I've had the time, I haven't wanted to go hiking in the past few days. I tricked myself into taking a walk both yesterday and today. Yesterday, I told myself I was going to mail a letter at the mailbox two blocks away. I did, and then I just kept walking through the neighborhood, looking at gardens and letting my mind wander. Today I took out the garbage and just started walking again. For someone who doesn't want to be outside or exercise at the moment, those hour plus walks were certainly cathartic. I felt much better when I got home. Why is it that I resist what I know will make me feel better?

It's a bad habit of mine to focus my anger and frustration on small things and realize much later that it's a bigger issue that's bothering me. I've been trying to be more aware and in tune with what I'm really feeling. If I make myself go outside and walk, sometimes the pieces sort themselves out on their own. As far as I can tell, there are two issues that are bothering me. In the immediate future, my parents are visiting twice this weekend. I love them, but our relationship is strained at best. And that relates to the bigger picture.

The short version is that as I get older, I need my parents less and less. Though I work, they've help to support me through college. I've secured funding for grad school that will largely take care of living expenses, but I may still need their help to some extent. When I start working, though, I won't. My father tries to keep an open mind, but my mother is vehemently against gay marriage and against gay couples raising children, both of which I intend to do within the next decade. This has been underscored by the fact that my cousin got engaged this past week. I am very happy for her, I think that her and her fiance make a great couple, but in contrast I know that the church wedding I dreamed of as a kid is not a reality for me. I've fought fiercely for independence, but the thought of estrangement makes me sad. Completing undergrad is a huge milestone, but it also puts me closer to this. I didn't choose to be gay. It's been almost nine years since I came out, though, and it's unlikely that my mother will change. The way I deal with it is what has to change.

This has nothing to do with being raw, but I think I'm hoping that acknowledging it and putting it out there will keep me from repressing how I feel and coping with emotional eating. Bleh.

Also, I miss Madeline. She's been working such long hours lately. She leaves the house at 6am, before I get up (although I get a kiss when she's on her way out the door), she gets home after nine at night, has enough time to eat dinner and spend time with me briefly before she crashes before 11. Ostensibly she has two days off, but she goes in then, too, if there are things that need to get done. I don't in any way resent the time she spends at work. It's essential to her career, and she needs to establish herself. It's just the way it's going to be for now. I'm just used to spending more time with her, and I feel a little lost at home in the evenings by myself.

Okay. All the negativity goes in this one post. Now we can move on.

-Eloise

Day 88

Five 4.5 pounds of Medjool dates. Mmm.

Madeline called me the other night and asked if I wanted to meet her at work to get dinner. I hesitated for the briefest of moments. After all, we'd used up our self-imposed quota of one cooked meal per month with lunch the week prior. But I had been in the library working on research for the past 6 hours and Mad was going to be at work for 18 hours that day. As soon as she mentioned suishi, I was packing my things and heading out the door.

Dinner was fantastic. There's this amazing Japanese restaurant near her work, in a strip mall of all places. You wouldn't expect it to be so cute until you made it inside. We sat across from each other with a platter full of veggie rolls talking about how are days went. Madeline looked exceedingly sexy in her work clothes- dress slacks and shoes, white button up rolled up to the elbows. On a normal night, we change into PJs right after walking through the door and eat on the couch with salad bowls balancing on our bellies. It was just really nice to go out together, and I think it's really good for our relationship.

So this the long way to say that I've been thinking about what it means to eat raw (again), and how it's impacting my life. A lot of good things have come out of it. I am happier, healthier, more energetic, in love with my skin. I am eating much, much better. There are downsides, too, though. I am hyper aware of everything I'm eating, which I don't think is necessarily a good thing. If I had a smoothie for breakfast, a big salad for lunch and fruit throughout the day, I don't want to feel guilty because I had some rice with dinner.

As we're nearing three months, I'm going to let go a little. Everything we make and eat at home will still be raw, but eating out will be flexible. It'll be an occasional treat, as we've never eaten out more that every couple of weeks, anyway, and of course it will always be vegan. But I'm going to stop obsessing over whether or not I've had a cooked meal within the month. I think this is more a change of my state of mind, rather than circumstances, because really, does it make a huge difference to eat a cooked meal every three weeks as opposed to four. Not really. But relaxing and being able to enjoy it instead of feeling like I'm "cheating" is important to me.

It's kind of difficult to talk about being less than perfect here in the open, but I want to create an honest narrative. Eating raw isn't always easy, and it does involve sacrifice, both gastronomical and social. I know that I will never be one of the raw gurus, but I'm okay with that. Health is the goal for me, not purity.

I think I'm also going to expand my horizons here a little and include s0me knitting content every once in a while. I used to have a knitting blog, but I only finish a project every couple of weeks or so. Makes for slow updates. Doing so opens me up to another world of controversy, though.

I knit with wool.

Wool is not considered vegan.

I consider myself vegan.

There, I've said it. I was a knitter prior to being a vegan, and it's the one thing I never gave up. There are very good reasons for opting to abstain from wool, which I will not recapitulate, but direct you here if you're interested.

But I am also a materials engineer with a focus on textiles, and I can tell you that the production of almost every fiber has significant ecological repercussions. Many so-called green fibers are terrible, bamboo and recycled-from-soda-bottle polyester being my biggest pet peeves. Also, science cannot replicate nature, only mimic it if it's lucky, and there is nothing like wool for it's insulative, wicking and shape retention properties. It's good stuff.

So bottom line: I'm really not raw and I'm really not a vegan. Glad we cleared that up.

-Eloise

Day 61

See the new pink picture hanging out on the sidebar a little ways down the page? It's an award that bloggers can pass along to other bloggers that they enjoy, and I received mine from Autismom. The rules of accepting the award are to share seven things you love and pass it along to seven blogs you love to read. So here we go:

1. The family I've created for myself, meaning Madeline, our cats and our rabbit. I know that this is a bit of a cop out, but growing up gay, you sometimes come to realize that love can be conditional, and it's not something you can take for granted. Mad and I have gone through a lot in the 4 1/2 years we've been together, and I think it's important to stop and appreciate the life we've made for ourselves. It's a good one.

2. Knitting. My knitting hasn't made an appearance on the blog as of late, but I learned to knit when I was 16, and it's been an obsession ever since. Focusing on the repetitive motions is like meditation for me. It's funny, though, but in the past month I haven't been knitting as much, because I can't sit still for too long. Unless I'm eating or utterly exhausted, I feel the need to be up and doing something. Usually it's preparing food or cleaning the kitchen, which is good. i need to knit more, though.

3. Days off. For a while last semester, I was going to school or working seven days a week, which is a recipe for burning out. I've learned how important it is to take time for myself and to stop over committing.

4. The color yellow. It makes me happy.

5. Sunshine. The weather completely affects my mood and my level of motivation, and I have a lot of difficulty getting anything done on cloudy, rainy days, even if I'm indoors. I think people are solar powered.

6. Being domestic. It gives me a lot of pleasure to make a delicious, healthy meal, to vacuum the living room free of fur, to scrub the bathroom until it sparkles, to grocery shop and fill our fridges and cupboards. If it weren't for the fact that I'm in a non-traditional relationship, I'd be such a retro throw back, it would cease to be ironic. It's difficult to find the time sometimes and housecleaning is often the first priority to slip (because I don't really like scrubbing the toilet, I just like when it's been done), but I like a clean house and taking care of my family.

7. Blogging. I knew when I started that it would be helpful to me to record our progress, but it's really thrilling to know that my words are being read, that it's a journey that other people can share with me. Mad and I originally started this as a joint project, but as it turns out, she wasn't really interested and I became mildly obsessed. Whatever. She doesn't know what she's missing. :) I've also found that blogging helps me to focus on the highlights of my day. There are a lot of days that I feel overloaded by school and work, that I come home pissed off at the driver that cut me off, that I'm tired of doing the never ending load of dishes in the sink, a million different little things, but then I sit down to tell you all about the amazing dinner I made or the hike I took or the positive changes I'm noticing and it put things into perspective. Gratitude is a very unexpected side effect of blogging.

In no particular order, here are seven blogs that I've been reading frequently:

1. Becki 365
2. Green and Crunchy
3. Insubordiknit
4. A Baker's Dozen
5. Kristen's Raw
6. Stellar Path
7. Yarn-a-go-go

It's an eclectic list, some who share my passions and some whose lives are completely different than mine, not all of whom read my blog but I think it's a really interesting slice of the blogosphere (and of course, Autismom. Go check her out, though it would have been redundant to put her on the list).

-Eloise

Day 60

The following (one sided) dialogue is what occurred when I walked into the kitchen, camera in hand...

"Mad! I'm going to take your picture! Okay, smile!"

"Wait the flash was on, let me try again...Don't make a face at me, smile!"

"That's better."

Heh. She's been so busy at work lately that this is pretty much the most I've seen her in the past couple days.

Two months raw! It's definitely getting easier, and I'm definitely getting better at putting together meals. Preparing food has become kind of a mediation for me, which is good, because I do spend a ton of time in the kitchen. Right before going raw, I was talking to a co-worker at my weekend job about how great raw was going to be, and a customer who overheard me chimed in. He said that he had been raw for a while, but he hated having to think about what he was going to eat days in advance. I politely nodded and we went on to talk about the best places to get raw food in the city, but inside I was thinking, How long could it possibly take to make a salad?

How naive I was. We do eat plenty of salads, but I do my fair share of soaking, sprouting, slicing, processing, dehydrating... I spend a good couple hours in the kitchen everyday, and it's important to me to keep things interesting. It would be too difficult for me to stay committed to being raw if I wasn't willing to put in that time.

That being said, though, tonight's dinner was pretty quick. I made a variation of Kristen's Candy Kale Salad with kale (massaged with lemon juice, olive oil and sea salt), chopped dates, raisins (both soaked to plump), brazil nuts and strawberry slices. It was so incredibly good. The strawberry was a particularly inspired addition, if I say so myself, although that's makes it a poorly combined meal for those who follow those rules. I'm lax about them, but I can't help but note when my foods are "mis-combined".

I've lost weight this month, too, about 5 lbs. I can't say that's entirely because of going raw, though, but more of a lifestyle change. I've been watching calories, limiting nuts and oils and getting out to hike a couple times a week. I'm just a lot more conscious about the way I take care of myself, and I'm a lot more balanced for it.

-Eloise