What do you call it if it's not helping anything?

Day 1,695,213 of Lent

Dear Diary,
Today I ate Hamburger Helper with no hamburger in it.

Lent

Every year for Lent I give up something challenging. I usually choose some kind of food. I gave up sweets or junk food several years in a row. This year I finally realized there is something I love to eat much more than doughnuts and Doritos. It's meat.

What could possibly present a bigger challenge to me? I am a carnivore. I would eat bacon at every meal if I could. My vegetarian friends are used to me mocking their way of life. "I love animals...they're tasty" etc.

So that's what I've been doing since Ash Wednesday; going meatless. No meat and no fish for me until Easter. The night before (at our Mardi Gras party) I loaded up on my roomie's homemade jambalaya. The night before that, my midnight snack was three kinds of preserved fish: sardines, smoked salmon and anchovies.

I was right when I thought this would be my biggest Lent challenge yet. I'm taunted in restaurants by clam chowder, pasta salad with tuna in it and my friend Susan sitting across the table from me with crisp bacon hanging out of her mouth. My pantry and freezer dangle chicken noodle soup, taquitos and even canned ravioli in front of my vegetarian lips.

My aunt, who has spent several years off and on living meatlessly, told me it gets easier. I don't think she understands my pathological reliance on dead animal products. There are plenty of days in my regular life where I don't eat meat, but they are interspersed with days where I eat 2 or 3 burgers or a plate of homemade tacos. To go for 40 days without any of my favorite foods may be crippling to my sanity.

"Smells good," Roomie told me as I cooked some fake burgers the other night. "Thanks," I said, and told her what it was she was smelling. "They are good," I said. "They taste nothing like burgers, but they're good." And that's the thing, I love veggies too, but they will never replace meat for me. I could eat my weight in asparagus, Brussels sprouts and lima beans, but if there's not a seafood omelet or a ham biscuit in my foreseeable future, I may start eyeing the ferrets in a new way.

Immersion

I love simultaneously reading several books on the same subject. This summer I read Jack's Widow by Eve Pollard immediately after reading November 22, 1963 by Adam Braver. As you might guess, both are about the Kennedys. Both are a mix of fact and fiction, like most books about celebrities, whether the authors are honest about it or not.
By reading these books so close together I got a continuous flow of the story of Jackie O's life: glimpses of her girlhood; meeting, marrying and burying John F. Kennedy; meeting and marrying Aristotle Onassis. The basic facts in each work were real--the structure of the story was historically sound, but the authors provided fictional tidbits about microphones hidden in pillbox hats and fingerprints smudging a metal casket.
It's always interesting to get different people's perspectives on the same thing. Braver's Jackie is the fresh widow; the beautiful woman in the blood-spattered pink suit and then numb behind her black veil. Pollard's Jackie is daring and cunning, ready to spy for her country and marry strategically.
I had never been very interested in Jacqueline Kennedy/Onassis before, but I found myself liking the woman behind the fiction. I had the same experience when I researched Marilyn Monroe, Jackie's bête noire, for a role I was playing my senior year of college. These women are cultural icons, but all I'd ever gotten was the legend until I started delving. I don't know yet if I like the real Jackie or just the slightly fictionalized version. Marilyn definitely became more endearing when I read her own words or observations made by people who knew her. I realized I had always hated what people have made of Marilyn: purses with the shape of her face outlined in makeup, unattractive women in billowing white dresses and glued-on beauty marks, and especially the overrated Andy Warhol paintings a child could have done.
Jackie had simply never interested me. She was tragic and stylish and that was it. I have the feeling I'm going to have to settle for the thought and feelings she might have had. For better or worse, she was more discrete than Marilyn and we will probably never get the truthful, soul-searching self-truths about her that we find in volumes on the Sex Goddess.