Riding On City Busses

      Last week was "Commute Another Way" week. Commute Another Way Week promotes eco-friendly habits and encourages people to commute another way under the assumption that they usually drive cars. The event is heavily advertised and suggests that people bike, walk, car pool or even ride the bus to work that week instead of driving. I probably heard ads for this dozens of times a day on the radio. Presumably there were just as many television advertisements and mentions of it on the news. There were also posters up in the B.A.T. City Buses where I live.
      You would think, from the level of advertising that you would have seen a lot of pedestrians on the morning commute or in the evening. You'd think there would have been a lot of bikes around. You'd think the buses would have been packed. You probably wouldn't think that everything looked exactly the same. There were no more people on the buses than usual and no more pedestrians than I would normally see.
      My theory on the lack of commute-another-wayers is that they're all secretly terrified of changing their routine. They don't know how long it would take to walk or bike so they can't do that. They don't know how to decipher the bus routes or what the fares are or even how to find that out. They don't know anyone conveniently close enough to carpool with. And so they assuage their guilt by assuming that lots of other people will be doing all those things. Except everyone seems to have assumed the same thing.
      Environmental impact wise the campaign would do a lot better by explaining to people how to go about commuting another way. Suggest they go on a test walk/bike the weekend before to see how long it takes to get to work. Tell them they can easily go online and find the bus routes, fares and times in most cities. Explain that even carpooling with your spouse counts as carpooling. I have a feeling that if people weren't quite so terrified of changing their habits they'd be more likely to do this.
      What did I do during commute another way week? Was I being a hypocrite driving my car? Of course not. I got to work the same way I go to work nearly every day. My commute takes about forty-five minutes total in the summer and about an hour in the winter and I arrive at work fifteen minutes early. This past winter I would walk up to the top of the hill and cross a busy main street so I was on the correct side to flag down the in-bound bus which I would then ride to Pickering Square where all the buses meet up every half hour. I would switch buses to the line that went to my place of work and arrive there about an hour after I had left my house and fifteen minutes before I was scheduled to come in. Now that it's not so cold I leave about forty-five minutes early and walk down to Pickering Square which takes about twenty minutes at a casual pace. I then get on the bus line that goes to my place of work and arrive there usually just about on time. I am occasionally a few minutes late through no fault of my own but my boss completely understands. I told her I rode the bus before she hired me.
      It is occasionally inconvenient to ride the bus to get where you want to go but when you live in a city it's a nice way to get around and it's very inexpensive. It's also a good way to reduce your carbon footprint if you're the kind of person who's concerned about that kind of thing. And even if you're not concerned about that kind of thing it's always a good point to bring up in conversation if someone else is pointing out how they have a Prius or something else equally pretentious. Or if you're having a pissing contest in how good a person you are. "Oh yeah, you recycle? Well, I recycle and I ride the bus to work."

Pseudo-Vegetarian

      Vegetarianism is a tough subject. Being Vegan is even worse of a subject to talk about. There are only two sides to this debate. There are the vegetarians and vegans and there are the people who think vegetarians are stupid. I know exactly what you are thinking at this moment. You are either thinking that you agree with me because you are very obviously in one of the above groups or you are in denial that you are in one of the two groups and would like to claim that you support vegetarians but don't want to be a vegetarian yourself. There is no such thing. Vegetarianism is a moral argument. It's either moral in the sense that you care for animals and don't want them abused on CAFOs or it's moral in the sense that you think it's healthier for people to not eat meat. You are not allowed to be a vegetarian solely for the sake of the environment or to claim you would like to be a vegetarian in order to help the environment or to claim that you support vegetarians because they help the environment but you drive a prius so you've already done your part. That is not acceptable. Either you really do support vegetarians and actually want to be one but just don't have the willpower or you secretly mock vegetarians for not eating meat but no not admit this outloud probably because one of your deceptively strong vegetarian friends wold hit you if you did.
      Now that we've established that there are no other options you can either abandon this as boring or continue to read under the premise that this will be interesting as I continue to discuss the strange levels of being vegetarian. This post is mostly digression and not a lot of funny. It is a lot more funny if you live through the digression. You can be vegan or vegetarian, pretty much everyone knows that there is some kind of difference between the two even if they were not certain precisely what. But there are actually different levels of being vegan. By definition a vegan does not eat any meat or animal products such as eggs or milk. But many vegans also do not use animals products such as leather also. Some vegans take the term "animal products" to go as far as avoiding eating honey because it is produced by bees, certain vitamins because they are derived from animal products and even certain brands of wine and beer as they contain something called isinglass.
      And here we have an important digression. My first encounter with isinglass was in Phillip Pullman's "His Dark Materials" series where it was a kind of glass that was used. My mother told me it was mica, which is a mineral formation that can be broken into thin, transparent sheets. The kind of isinglass they put in your beer isn't the same innocent mica kind, it's a tasty (and when I say tasty in this context you should be reading it with a 'n' instead of a 't') and obviously unnecessary ingredient derived from fish bladders.
      Other vegans are happy to simply not eat meat, eggs or dairy and, like the rest of you beer and wine drinkers, presumably concentrate very hard on not thinking about what their beer contains. Then, after the extremist vegans versus the laxer vegans you have vegetarians. Vegetarian is an all-encompassing term for people who do not eat meat so people who are vegetarian but not vegan are often called lacto-ovo to indicate that they consume eggs and dairy products and possibly use leather and eat honey and such. But even those are a fairly decent distinction. But after that it becomes the kind of debate in which Warren G. Harding becomes the Republican candidate for president because they couldn't differentiate between the first two options and ended up going for the guy who looked like a president.
      Yes, I'm talking about Pescatarians or Pesca-vegetarians. Pesca-vegetarians eat fish. Most people would agree that fish are, in fact, meat but because the only meat they eat is fish and typically not a lot of that pesca-vegetarians become vegetarians in the minds of most of society who, frankly, aren't particularly intelligent because we've got them so busy trying to remember the difference between a vegan and a vegetarian that they see anything that appears to be a vegetarian to hold all of the morals of a vegetarian.
      And, I couldn't tell you the lines that pescatarians use when explaining to real vegetarians why they don't feel morally obligated to not eat fish but I think it has a lot to do with the fact that fish are ugly. It's hard to empathize with something slimy and cold that doesn't even breathe air. Fish aren't cute and they don't make noises or display intelligence and so they're okay to eat. That's what I figure, anyway.
      Then you have flexitarians. I don't even want to talk about them. They're some kind of absurdity. From what I understand as I have never bothered to look up a so-called definition for this term is that, basically, flexitarians are vegetarians who sometimes eat meat. In other words they get up in the morning (or maybe in the afternoon like everyone sane and internet-using) and say to themselves: "Today I will be a vegetarian. I will have cereal for breakfast, a salad for lunch and a nice vegetarian soup for dinner. I will eat potato chips for a snack because potatoes are, after all, a vegetable." Potatoes are not a vegetable. Technically, yes, but nutritionally, no. They are a starch and your doctor will tell you starches are bad. Except possibly in different terms unless you are under the age of twelve. Or a flexitarian wakes up in the morning and thinks: "I think I'm going to scarf down a hamburger today because I'm a flexitarian." And outloud I (having read their mind, of course) finish with: "By which I really mean I am an omnivore because flexitarian is one of the most moronic terms ever described."
      I am a flexitarian by all definitions I can discern. And by that I mean I am an omnivore. I am, at the very best, a lacto-ovo vegetarian but I'm not that pretentious, either. I do eat meat about once a week but I could forsee giving up meat entirely as I continue to do a worse job at deluding myself about the world and my body continues to function at less than peak capacity without one of my memorable organs.
      Out of my desire to distance myself from any real defining term and labels I didn't invent in general if my dietary habits come up I introduce myself as a pseudo-vegetarian. Ideally I would be saying this to someone who isn't totally sure what pseudo means and has enough knowledge of vegetarians to understand that there are several levels because they would then ask me what kind of vegetarian that was and I could respond: "Not a very good one." This is funny because pseudo means "fake" so a fake vegetarian would not be a very good vegetarian. No one has ever laughed at this joke. It's because this scenario has yet to happen. It's one of my advance-comebacks. I have still used this term to describe myself upon occasion and I have also used the phrase: "I don't really eat meat." The latter phrase comes up a lot more often.
      I have never claimed to be an actual vegetarian but on multiple occasions members of the general public who are, for the most part, (as you may recall) not particularly intelligent, have made what Malcolm Gladwell calls in his book Blink the "Harding Error" and referred to even me as a vegetarian. I remember a couple of days ago distinctly when we got a new book in at work and someone began to gush to me: "I know you're a vegetarian but you should see this book, Seduced by Bacon." And now, not only am I a vegetarian but for some reason vegetarians are apparently still supposed to be interested in cookbooks that focus solely on meat.
      So I've come up with a new comeback. If someone asks me if I am a vegetarian I will explain to them that of course I'm a flexipescalactoovovegetarian. I will make every attempt to say this with a straight face. If anyone asks me what this means I'll say I'm an omnivore, just like everyone else regardless of what my actual current eating habits include because being a vegetarian (and I don't mean not eating meat here, that's easy) is way too complicated.