We went to a vegetarian fast food restaurant in my neighborhood, at his suggestion. I made sure to wear my second most animal-printed shirt. The first, a red sweatshirt with dozens of antelope silhouettes in pink, is for winter wear. I also flossed the turkey leg tendons from my teeth. N and I had gone to Taste of Chicago the night before, and had shared many pounds of barbecued poultry sitting on a curb near the Buckingham fountain. I was vegetarian for ten years and vegan for six months, but this was for environmental reasons and to woo a hot vegan, not because I cared about the animal suffering behind my diet. In fact, I believed that concern for animal suffering was only an ancillary and not very compelling reason to go veg, and a bad way to pitch the plan to potential vegetarians.
This guy I met on Monday has almost changed my mind. He didn't make arguments that were new to me - in fact, he didn't make arguments at all. He wasn't proselytizing, although as always with a conviction that the speaker feels so strongly, any conversation with an outsider about it will feel to her like evangelism. I was honest with him about the limits of my sympathy for his cause. But I liked what he had to say a great deal. First, I just like people who can speak enthusiastically about the things that matter to them, no matter what those things are. It's the sort of nauseating relief you feel when Mark Sanford describes his Argentinian consort as his "soulmate"; nausea because OMG TMI, but relief because his honesty about his lovesickness is easier to understand than the soulless and politic contrition we have come to expect from our horny politicians. I felt the same way recently when IB explained that he stockpiled Kashi Autumn Wheat cereal in order to achieve a "honeycomb" effect in his bowel movements: more fascinated than repelled, more accepting than judgmental.
Second, he was very smart, in a limber and associative way that reminded me of the people I admired most in college and law school. Schopenhauer is a dick, but a person who can talk about Schopenhauer on social movements and animal rights is a person I want to listen to. Move from Schopenhauer to the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines, and I might even break my prohibition on second dates to see you again! We talked about the latter when he described to me the sentences meted out to his activist friends for trespassing, videotaping conditions in the meat industry, protesting, etc.
Third, he was sincere, kind, and sympathetic. I asked him his animal rights activist story. The story started with him being "one of ten Chinese people in Indianapolis, all of whom were evangelical Christians," being shunned, bullied, and beaten in his all-American high school, and finding companionship and solace in Vivian, his dog and his best friend. People who haven't had a connection with an animal think dog owners/animal lovers are nutjobs when they talk about their animal friends, but as someone who has crawled underneath a bed and whispered "Nobody understands us, my friend" for half an hour, to Boo, during a raging house party, I get it. So he and Vivian went off exploring together, and grew up together, and he still regrets that he chose to stick to his GRE study schedule rather than drive back to see Vivian in her last hours. He said he quit his economics Ph.D. at MIT in part because he had stepped on a mouse that had made a home inside an old shoe.
It's easy to dismiss this as kooky, and animal rights activists generally as kooky, but I didn't think he was kooky. Who am I, anyway, to tell someone that the pain he feels upon seeing animals hurt is unreal pain?
Incidentally, I ate a fried tofu burger with a cream soda, which made me sick for two days, and he ate a wrap with a vegan chocolate chip cookie dough milkshake. He declared fruits and vegetables to be his "mortal enemies," which I have never heard a vegan do.
Anyway, I didn't change my mind. I started out from a sympathetic place. Like the other yuppie liberals you know, I believe that unnecessary animal suffering should be minimized and that consumer and dietary habits should change to reflect the true cost of eating meat, so that you pay a couple more bucks to eat a decently-raised chicken once in a while rather than having cheap and plentiful meat from toxic, tortured birds for all meals. I don't like how wastefulness drives up demand for products that suck up animal and natural resources. But I am also a bit more brutal and profligate than my new friend, and I accept that sometimes animals must die for human use.
Well, who cares about my thoughts about animals. I liked this person a lot. I liked that he likes Ratatouille, I guess because it depicts parasitic animals and humans living in harmony. (I didn't tell him about my desire to chop into a thousand pieces the rat that has been hiding in my kitchen for two months.) I liked also that afterward he texted me to say "New mission. Find gem of cyttorrak for [Veggie Bite] owner," and clarified that said gem "gives wielder unstoppable powers." Still later, he declared by text, "Hell yea! Im a lvl 7 conjurer w a pet iguana and a powerful, uh, staff...Cloud strife has nuttin on me!" I have never developed my fantasy/comic nerd potential but I am attracted to those who have.
But, wholly unrelated to this person, I am still feeling so squeamish about dating and intimacy that I'd might rather just be friends so I can continue to distract myself with half hour sessions of conversation with and blind trust in total strangers. It remains to be seen what the heart (and the nether heart) will allow.
1 comment:
Date him. Date him NOW, for those geek references alone.
Post a Comment