(no subject)

Last night, Jarrod and I went to see a movie at the art museum, called "Our Daily Bread." It's scenes of food production, no music, no narration, just the film speaking for itself. The movie was filmed in Europe--boxes and equipment were labeled in something close to German, it sounded like people were speaking German as well.

I have to say, after watching it, that I've never been so glad I'm vegan.

Yes, the plant farming was hard on people--it's obvious they work long-ass hours doing very physical work, and sometimes handling dangerous chemicals. But that pales in comparison to what the animals deal with.

The way Jarrod put it was something like: "It was factory farming at its most perfect--the most humane, the cleanest--but it's still factory farming." We still saw cows and chickens and pigs die. They showed piglets being held down in a little device so a woman could cut off their tails without anesthetic. We saw whole live broiler chickens being pulled up with a vaccuum-cleaner kind of thing and shoved into big drawers before they were slaughtered.

In some ways I think it was a more powerful film than, say, "Meet Your Meat," because it's not trying to push any kind of agenda. It's just saying, Here it is, deal with it.

Afterwards, I saw a pregnant woman in the bathroom whose eyes were red. I couldn't help but wonder to myself if she was a vegetarian before this--and if not, if she was considering it now.

Time to get ready for work--I'm 7 to 4 this week. Ugh.

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There's a squirrel living in our ceiling. S/he woke us up this morning, trying to break a nut open, the neighbor has a walnut tree. It's disconcerting to hear a squirrel knocking on your ceiling.

(no subject)

Filled out the application at Powell's today. My supervisor pissed me off today, which was inspiring. And then I, uh, bought more books. A Moleskine planner for next year, another Richard Dawkins' book (Unweaving the Rainbow) and a memoir by a doctor who did her residency at a huge urban hospital.

Note to self: Stop buying books. I need to finish The God Delusion, I have a paperback of Neil Gaiman's Coraline, and an issue of National Geographic, that I haven't started on; and then I want to read Sam Harris' The End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation, before I can get started on the ones I bought today. *whew*

The God Delusion can be tough going at times, partially because I tend to read it at times when my adderall is wearing off and my concentration is shot, and partially because the concepts can be tricky.

For instance, the anthropic principle, which basically is a nice way of saying, no matter how improbable life on earth could be (taking into account the various things that had to happen--the physical properties of water, our distance from the sun, the shape and size of the earth and moon, etc.), the fact still remains that all those improbable things happened, because duh, we're sitting here talking about it. *lol*

Random side note: Dawkins came up with meme theory. And I already knew this from reading sociology stuff, but it's only barely tangentially related to goofy quizzes on LJ.

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Jarrod shaved his face. He had quite the huge beard going. It almost feels like kissing someone else entirely. It makes his face look so much younger, too...I feel slightly like a dirty old lady. ;^)