Once again, the idea of eating meat is on my mind. I’ve been a vegetarian since November 1993, nearly 15 years. For the past five years or so, I’ve thought about eating meat again. I originally became a vegetarian for ethical reasons, I used to do the “I won’t eat anything with a face” thing, but I now feel like it’s just become a habit. I know about being vegetarian is better for the environment and all that, and I like doing things that are good for the environment, but I am just so curious about eating meat again. Today we went to Chutzpah for lunch, and A ordered the matzoh ball soup. Here’s the conversation we had:

Me: So…what does the chicken broth taste like?
Her: Uh…chicken? (pause while I keep peering at her bowl) Do you want some?
Me: Well…I’m thinking about it.
Her: (gets a spoonful of broth ready)
Me: (stares at broth)
Her: It would be the first time you’ve intentionally eaten meat in 15 years.
Her: No! I can’t do it! (resumes eating egg salad sandwich)

I just don’t know. I’d like to open up my diet meal options, there are only so many different foods available from Lean Cuisine and Healthy Choice, etc. I just don’t know. I think about it a lot, actually. I like saving animals, I like saving the planet, but it just feels like a habit I can’t break. I’ve been doing it for 15 years, after all…more than half my life. Is it awful to just try eating a chicken dish from Lean Cuisine? What does it mean if I do? Will I have given up vegetarianism? If I decide I don’t like it, can I really call myself a vegetarian again, if I ate meat deliberately that one time? Will I still love chicken with cashew nuts like I did when I was a little kid? Will it taste good? Will I feel immoral, breaking my long-held beliefs? I just don’t know what to do.

Well, there isn’t really a lot to say about today, because I stayed in the hotel room! I finished off that bottle of wine and ran around the room naked all day. I did go to Disneyland yesterday though, and those pictures are now on my Flickr, as are the pictures from Monday, which I spent in Long Beach.

One of the things I did today was research restaurants for my birthday dinner on Friday. (Holy cow, in 36 hours I’ll be 27!) I asked on Yelp for recommendations, and I think the place I’ve settled on is Inn of the Seventh Ray in Topanga. It gets high marks for being romantic, fancy, and vegetarian. Tonight we went to The Spot down in Hermosa Beach. It was nice - the portions were huge and the prices were good! It was a little bit woo-woo and hippie-dippie, but I liked it! I wasn’t feeling very well, though, so we ended up getting most of our food boxed up, including dessert. The beach was only a block away, though, so I insisted we put the food in the car and go check out the beach! We walked all the way out to the water, and I bent down and touched it - the first time I’ve touched the Pacific Ocean. And then I ran away squealing because it was cold! We walked back to the car and came back to the hotel room, and here we sit.

Tomorrow I am going to Universal Studios Hollywood to use the last coupon in my SoCal City Pass booklet. I’m not sure what it will be like there, I hope I enjoy it. I didn’t have any plans for Friday until a few minutes ago, but now I think I will go to West Hollywood and see what’s there. It’s supposed to be the gay district of L.A., so we’ll see how it goes. On Saturday we are going to do a hop on/hop off bus tour that stops at the Walk of Fame, Rodeo Drive, and all the other classic places.

Today we docked in Hamilton, the capital of Bermuda. We arrived about an hour later than scheduled, but we didn’t have any morning plans so we didn’t mind. When we got through customs I called the dive shop on a pay phone, but they said the trip would probably be canceled due to lack of enrollment. She said to call back in an hour, and so we wandered around shops near the passenger terminal. When I called back she confirmed it was canceled, but said that they already had the minimum signed up for tomorrow, so we switched to tomorrow’s dive.

Next we took a ¾ mile walk to find a geocache, which was not actually easy to find. On the walk back we stopped in the gift shop of the Bermuda Underwater Exploration Institute, but we didn’t take the tour. We also went into a grocery store to see if they had anything we couldn’t get in the U.S., but there wasn’t anything interesting. We also went into Tattoo Pirates, who we’d seen ads for around the terminal. I was seriously considering getting a tattoo as a souvenir of Bermuda, but the guy mocked my idea of a hibiscus (yes, they’re cliche, but I’d just seen some walking from the geocache) and A said he was adjusting himself a bit much (ew), so I may not go back after all. I couldn’t get anything before I go scuba diving anyway, so that was how I begged off from him.

We did a bit more shopping, and stopped into an Internet cafe for a few minutes. Then we came back toward the terminal, and A wanted to go into a perfume shop. I went too, and ended up buying a cute purse and a wallet that’s much more practical than the Hello Kitty one I’ve been using for a couple of years. Next we came back on the ship for a very late lunch, and I turned a blind eye to the veggie burger being cooked on the same grill as the meat and handled with the same tongs. I am a strict vegetarian, but some battles just aren’t worth fighting…but I won’t be getting a veggie burger again.

I met aidan_boi_x today! I’ve known him for a while on LiveJournal, but he moved out of DC before I got to meet him. He came back for a visit but disappeared before we got to meet up, but then he moved back to Baltimore! So he met me at Sunflower, a mostly-vegan restaurant right near my house. I enjoyed having lunch with him but I felt a little awkward at my in-laws’ house. I had to go over there to take care of the cat (they’re on vacation), so aidan_boi_x came with me. I guess it’s just hard to be a good host when you’re not even in your own house.

I have a three-day work week this week, hooray! Wednesday will be short because I go get my stitches out at 3:15.

Saturday came too soon, of course. A and I ate our leftovers from the night before, and then had plenty of time to kill. Eventually we went to the pool bar, where I got more than a little drunk on Banana Quit and Coconut Kooler - for some reason none of the bars offered any kind of food, which might have helped me out a bit. C and :R: joined us for a bit, but then :R: left to go back to air-conditioning. The three of us moved over to Spicer’s (I think I was able to walk on my own) and shared a couple of plates of fries. We found :R: in the Television Lounge in the main hotel building, and we sat around and watched music videos for a couple of hours until it was time to go. Getting to the airport was no problem, but we did have a bit of a wait to check in. Of course they had problems printing my tickets, so it was a while before we could join the next line, the preliminary security check. While the other three stood in that line, I went and paid the $20/person departure fee. When I rejoined my friends, they’d moved about halfway through the line - only one man was checking everybody’s passports! Once we got past him, it was the usual metal detector check and then on to the waiting areas. A bought a couple of things in the duty free shops, and then they announced our flight, so everybody got up and formed a line…and stayed put. They finally announced a problem and said that boarding was canceled, so everybody sat back down…and stayed put. They didn’t update us for a long time, and finally I heard that if you showed your boarding pass at the snack bar, you could get a free non-alcoholic drink. I presented ours and got a couple of sodas; meanwhile A had ordered some cheese sandwiches from the upstairs restaurant to be brought to the snack bar, because after passing through security you had to stay there until your flight left. She also tried contacting US Airways because we could tell we’d miss our Philadelphia connection, but she couldn’t get any further than the Grenadian operator; the gate agents were utterly useless as they promised everything would be taken care of by the time we got to Philly. Our cheese sandwiches arrived within minutes of our flight being actually called for boarding; A held onto both of them even though we were in separate rows. When the flight attendant came around with the snack bags, she said “here’s your vegetarian meal” and handed me…a low-fat meal. With meat. I pushed the button and got her back, and she realized that she’d given my meal to :R: “and he’s already eating it.” Okay, fine, could she please go up to Row 12 and ask the woman for one of the cheese sandwiches? It took a while for her to figure out what I was asking (and apparently she still wasn’t clear when she asked A about it), but she did return with my cheese sandwich. I missed out on the plaintain chips and cookie, but the sandwich was heavy and compensated somewhat. The rest of the flight was uneventful; C and I did my crossword puzzles together, and we played Scrabble on my Visor. Of course we did get to Philadelphia quite late, and because that was our port of entry we all had to wait for the baggage to be unloaded and show up on the carousel, and then we had to go through customs and immigration. The baggage was the longest wait - the legal proceedings went fairly quickly, we’re American citizens and only bought souvenirs overseas, and we weren’t in a country where Mad Cow Disease is prevalent - but I don’t think there was any chance we could have made our connecting flight to BWI, even if we hadn’t been two hours late leaving Grenada.