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April 17, 2008 - Two :: "Yesterday I woke up sucking a lemon."

I'm feeling uninspired. And I'm telling the internet as if it'll somehow sprout wings and rush through my screen and anoint my empty, heavy head with an atomic burst of creativity. Feelin' a bit desperate and worn, I am.

What's worse, is when I'm here, in boring-land, I get critical and snarky. Over-excited by little arguments. It's why, a while back, I stupidly engaged the C-town yahoo group's angry internet lurkers into name-calling over the then defunct (and now happily revived) Village Pizza and its disinterested, flippant, apparently unhappy employees. I was told to go back to Marietta, to "get used to tattoos" and to stop my apparent practice of treating service folk like slaves. I maintain that all I want is a piece of pizza and a beer, and to feel a little less like I'm bothering the people paid to serve such things to sell them to me. (Well that, and that I have visible tattoos, I've both worked in the service industry and am marrying a member of their ranks, and I've lived in the city much longer than some of the holier-than-thou suburban-transplant gripers.) Regardless, the whole discussion was wrong and now I feel dirty for getting into it.

This rut-frustration is also how I've come to be overly-annoyed by a food-blogging discussion about who can rightly be called a "vegetarian." I don't want to draw traffic to the inanity, so I won't say which food blog. But, the discussion goes something like this:

Blogger: I think people who type themselves as "vegetarian inclined" or "pescetarians" or a "meat reducer" are essentially lying to themselves and should be lumped into the category with everyone else on the planet as "omnivores" along with those who eat meat at every single meal and pick their teeth with bacon between. There's no difference between two, and I can hardly conceal my elitist view of the entire construct.

Commenters: Uh, wait a second. Just as (as you've made sure to mention) choosing to be a vegetarian or vegan is often ethically or socially-charged behaviour, therefore, so can choosing to eat less meat be. It can also be something done out of taste, health, or concern for the environment. It's not an absolute - for one, because nearly nothing is. Anyway, if it were, it'd be like calling all Jews who don't practice Hasidim Gentiles.

Blogger: I'm going to completely ignore both the implications in my first post and your comments and get indignant and say that it IS an absolute, and then hide behind it. Here's all I want to know: can you call a person a "vegetarian" if they eat ANY meat at all. That's the only question.

Commenters: What? Good god. You started this. And what we're railing against has nothing to do with the "term" applied to eaters and non-eaters of meat. It's more complicated than that and you know it. You're f**king with us now.

Me: AAAARARRRRRGGGGH! Why are you spending time on this ridiculous topic? Why are you sucking me into it, when I should be figuring out how to inspire myself out of this muddy rut I'm rolling around in? Just put something in your mouths and shut up. I'd suggest some ground chuck.

And so it goes. Ergh.