Happy Easter!

Life is pretty good right now.

I can eat meat again, now that Lent is over. For lunch today, my mom cooked chicken with bacon on top and dried beef under it. Mmm.

The weather's getting warmer and I can open my windows for a nice breeze.

Scully, our elderly ferret had a hormone injection about a month ago to control the symptoms of her Adrenal Disease and now her hair is starting to grow back. This means that the injection is going to allow her to live with the Adrenal Disease by making her more comfortable.

Yep, things are going well.

It's amazing how putting meat back in my diet makes everything seem great.

Yes, please

I would very, very much like a hamburger.

I watched Super Size Me today and instead of turning me off meat or fast food, it just made me a little bit suspicious of this guy's research technique. I'd never watched the movie before and was less than impressed by the way he went about things. Not satisfied to prove that McDonald's is bad for you, he felt compelled to combine every stereotype about fat Americans. He ate nothing that didn't come from a McDonald's for 30 days and also stopped walking any more than strictly necessary and taking any kind of vitamins.

I seriously doubt that there is a significant portion of the population who does all these things. Many people take vitamins and many people eat at McDonald's, some more than others. Many of them are probably the same people, meaning that not everyone who eats fast food forgoes vitamins.

Morgan Spurlock (the director, writer and guinea pig for the film) says himself that the average person living in Manhattan, as he himself does, walks several miles a day. He also tells us that Manhattan has one of the densest populations of McDonald's of anywhere on earth. Clearly, some of the people who live there both eat at McDonald's and walk much more than the average American.

The premise is easily understandable: Morgan Spurlock ate nothing but McDonald's for a month to prove that doing so, combined with other unhealthy habits, will damage your health. But I can't imagine that the people who live that stupidly even care that it's bad for them.

I don't hate McDonald's or its evil plot to (heaven forbid) sell its food. Morgan Spurlock and his vegan chef girlfriend clearly do. The faces he makes while eating his first few fast food meals leave me in no doubt that he was not unbiased in his experiment. I'm no scientist, but it would make me feel better about his results if he hadn't gone into the project already believing that McDonald's is the devil.

I'm off now to eat my dinner: a pot pie from which I've removed all the meat.

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.