Cheese 🧀

Did you think I would let a month go by without an update? Things here are pretty good. I have a “permanent” subbing assignment for the rest of the year, which is awesome because we’re almost at the end and everyone is out of vacation time. So I’m in a middle school, helping out with the kids who have autism. I have a summer gig lined up as well, and although I don’t have a job yet for next year, I have three interviews next week. I’m still working on slowly moving my life to the big city. The main reason for this is that I still have a dissociative disorder, and although it’s usually managed pretty well, I don’t think I should be driving. This makes me “different” where I live now, because there is a bus system but it’s just for the marginalized. In the big city, you can just not have a car and nobody asks any questions. Plus, in the big city you can go to Meetup groups and make friends based on your interests, rather than just being trauma bonded to whoever you can find in the projects that doesn’t have a substance abuse problem. However, it’s going to take a while because my current rent is subsidized and rent in the big city averages $3,000/month. So the cheaper option will be to pay $340/month to take the commuter rail and go in every day, which will allow me to meet people and figure out where middle-income housing is available. Then I can move to the city and start working toward my primary life goal, which is to have children. In the meantime, I’m trying to squeeze in time for Life Goal #2/2, which is to write my book. So while my to-do list has a million items, I’ve had the same two life goals for a pretty long time.

Now, I’m still trying to figure out how to prioritize my daily tasks. I tried to get AI to help me out and paid $36 for this app called Motion. I put in my working hours and sleeping hours, and my hopes were in the clouds until AI broke it to me that I would need approximately 48 hours in a day to get everything done. So now I’m working on prioritizing.

Naturally, once the turtle and cat are reasonably attended to, I’ve been reading a book on cheese. I’m still doing the vegan thing (aside from exceptions) which is working out really well for me, and I’ve even been able to mostly tighten up on the freegan exceptions thanks to learning about how animal products affect your body. Specifically, there was all this free food in the break room one day that was leftover from something and I never have it together enough to bring a lunch to work, so I indulged in a bunch of pork, and then spent the next several days

• Questioning my whole life and commitment to my values, and
• Yearning for cheese

This finally came to a head and I posted on the vegan subreddit, which is not known for being supportive but one person made an interesting point:

This made sense and I managed to find an article:

Scott-Lutyens, J. (2014, August 28). Do Gut Bacteria Cause Cravings?. Probiotics Learning Lab. https://www.optibacprobiotics.com/learning-lab/in-depth/gut-health/are-cravings-determined-by-gut-bacteria

Basically, whatever you eat, the bacteria that survive off of that food becomes the most numerous in your gut. So, if you eat cheese, the cheese-eating bacteria start to thrive. These bacteria have to survive, so they need you to eat their preferred food. So, whatever your gut bacteria need, they evolved to be able to make you (the host) crave that food. If you eat cheese, you get more cheese cravings because the gut bacteria you have need it and are demanding it.

Now, the article was literally on the Optibac Probiotics website but yo girl cannot afford that now or probably ever. But, in theory, if I can force myself not to eat cheese, the cheese-eating bacteria will eventually die and be replaced by plant-loving bacteria.

So I’m working on it. I got this book:

Barnard, N. (2017). The cheese trap: How breaking a surprising addiction will help you lose weight, gain energy, and get healthy. Grand Central Life & Style.

I’m broke but I found a free sample on Google and once that ran out, I made a trip to the local library and picked it up. It’s been very good for helping me relinquish my connection to cheese. I also did some introspection into why cheese was so emotionally important to me. I realized that cheese and dairy generally mattered to me because it’s been in my family for a lot of generations. From a strictly biological perspective, the ability to digest dairy is basically the only thing we Caucasians have going for us. If I stopped eating it, I would lose that ability and then what would be left? I mean, technically I have a slightly increased ability to produce vitamin D but I’ve been on 2,000 IUs of that daily since 2021. And I’ve been in an outrageous number of situations where I was in the extreme minority and everyone around me thought I was weak and entitled because I was white. If I couldn’t digest dairy, would there be anything good left about my body at all? Or would I just be visually associated with brutal colonizers with not even the slightest good trait to make up for it? More recently, my maternal grandmother grew up on a dairy farm during the Great Depression. And I grew up with a ton of food scarcity because my mom was irresponsible and there was no food in the house that kids were allowed to eat, but I managed to solve nausea from what I now assume was low blood sugar, by drinking milk when it got really bad. Dairy is the only reason I survived.

So, I re- wrote the narrative. Humans came into existence close to the equator. They had abundant plants to eat. Then, my ancestors moved to Europe. In Europe, it gets really cold in the winter and there really aren’t many plants available that humans can digest. So, in order to survive, we had to live off of animal products. It wasn’t the natural, healthy diet that would have been ideal, but we survived. Now there are greenhouses, better shipping, better ways of preserving food, and we have the option of going back to eating plants. But because we had to eat animal products for so long, we forgot that that was just a stepping stone. It’s like if the Antarctic explorers had to eat their dogs, and then they came home and just kept eating dogs. The gene for lactose tolerance is like the scars under my tattoo or the loose skin on my body. It shows that really hard things happened, and I survived. It doesn’t have to be like that anymore. My ancestors churning butter in their little cabins in the freezing cold would want better for me.

So, that’s how I’m dealing with that. I’ve also been cooking Chinese food, which is a project I started in 2014 and then had to abandon for nearly a decade due to not having a kitchen to cook in. I was reminded of the project while watching goofy YouTube videos. Which, I may already seem like a racist for saying I don’t like being white because everyone thinks I’m a pansy and I’ve had to develop a semi-spiritual connection to my ancestors to cope with that. So hopefully this won’t also seem racist? But calm down they’re just funny YouTube videos, not actual anthropology.

Steven He. (2020, December 8). When Asians run out of rice [YouTube video]. Retrieved April 28, 2024 from https://youtu.be/qI-k9QGNbR8?si=khacDH240Bi0jRkK

Anyway, the videos crack a lot of jokes about “who ever decided to try expired milk?” and I remembered that I first embarked on cooking Chinese food because Buddhist monks in China have been vegan for ages and have obviously found nutritionally-complete ways of doing so or they wouldn’t still exist. Fortunately a better vegan Chinese cookbook has come out since 2014 because my last one by a different author was a little bit cheaply made. So now I have this beauty:

Che, H. (2022). The Vegan Chinese Kitchen: Recipes and modern stories from a thousand-year-old tradition: A cookbook. Clarkson Potter.

All the recipes I’ve made so far have turned out terrific! It sucks trying to find time to cook, but at least I get good food out of it 👍🏻

Which, the vegan thing has been going really well for my body as well. It was an unlikely character who figured this out. It was 2022 and I was in the ER with a fever of 103. The doctor came in. He had the jokester sort of personality that is very understandable for ER doctors in underprivileged local hospitals in localities that are heavily affected by the opioid epidemic. Anyway, he was asking my history and it went like this:

Dr. T: “Any diabetes?”

Me: “I’m unclear on that. Apparently I used to be diabetic and then my levels randomly went back to normal.”

Dr. T: “Did you lose a whole bunch of weight?”

Me: “Yes, I’ve lost a lot of weight recently.”

Dr. T: “How did you do it?”

Me: “I don’t know, I just randomly weigh less now.”

Dr. T: “Are you eating the same things?”

Me: “Well, actually I became a vegan.”

Dr. T: “Okay, so you changed your diet. How about exercise?”

Me: “Oh I walk around all the time because I got rid of my car.”

Dr. T: “Okay, so see? You applied diet and exercise.”

Me: “🤯 I had NO idea that actually worked!!!”

So anyway, I recovered from whatever superbug I picked up working in the day care, and I’ve continued to steadily lose weight since then, despite continuing on basically the same meds, including Zyprexa. Now I officially weigh less than I did when I first went into the hospital in April 2021. My PCP thinks this is terrific. Given that I’m putting in approximately no effort, I agree with him. I don’t usually post about weight because I think it’s stupid that we’re expected to adjust our self-esteem according to what is essentially a medical condition outside of our control. And even if it were 100% based on what we ate, why should anyone care? Society is infinitely crueler to fat people than it is even to smokers. However, it’s been fun being able to walk farther and do things I enjoy, so it’s nice to have found a life hack that works for my body. Plus, if Dr. X ever happens across my blog, I hope he would be happy to know that I’m healthy. He did once admit, “I don’t like making people fat.”

In other fun news, I found out from a conversation on the bus that they filmed a horror movie on the campus of the state hospital I was almost institutionalized at. So, although the group home surely did suck and the people I currently pay my rent to definitely have sociopathic tendencies, the current state of my life is a bona fide miracle. And I hope Dr. X and the social worker who pulled this off think of me sometimes and smile that they made this possible.