Green Your Grounds

I switched to a French Press recently, and I'm a serious fan, besides the fact that my coffee is coming out oddly strong. Maybe I need to work on my proportions. Or maybe my coffee just became magical overnight. I'm going to stick with the latter possibility. I like to think that my Don's Local Coffee Beans uses magic as a secret ingredient over its evil archnemesis Maxwell House.

Anyway, while Coffee is still a neocolonial cash crop that you should probs just avoid, I know myself, and right now in my life as a busy student, I am a happier person with large quantities of caffeine in my body. Maybe you share this feeling. When I drink coffee now, I'm going to use a more environmentally-friendly alternative to the drip-coffee machines:

The French Press!

No coffee filters required (for you daily coffee drinkers, visualize how much extra waste this makes! even if you are composting!), no hot plate using energy to keep the coffee warm, just the initial heating of water in your hot-water heater, hot-water spigot, or handy-dandy microwave.

Price range $20-$30.

A good link on this.

Challenging Hierarchies in Education

I love it when professors go by their first names,

When classes are in circles,

when i learn just as much from the guy

sitting next to me as the professor on the roster.

when professors fumble for acceptance like a schoolkid,

It begins to radically examine the way we go about learning and what it means to truly learn,

It breaks down the distance that we build up between students and professors,

It almost makes up for every hierarchical jab my French professors made when they tutoied me (but s/he required the respect to be vousvoied)

It takes away the pretentious air of learning that people are so fond of

it allows us a space to recognize that some have more wisdom than others,

but there's still room for equality

It makes me welcome to learning, and not just learning in an academic space in a specific set of four walls --

but anywhere anytime in my life.

And this is pretty fucking great.

Sure, my school is still hierarchical in many ways, but it makes my day so much brighter to see the little glimmers --the cracks of resistance.

*pic from here. No copyright infringement intended!

Pamela Anderson's Commercial of Milky Madness: Is it Really PETA material?

Pamela Anderson was one of the first, and perhaps most annoying, animal rights celebrities to grace the world with her presence. Although most of her work seems to have been with PETA, her fame led her to work with a number of vegan advocacy organizations (therefore necessarily being against the production of milk.)* Pamela Anderson has never technically claimed to be a vegan but she was the Honorary Director of PETA for a while in 2007 and it should be noted that PETA is an explicitly vegan NGO.

Oddly enough, Pamela Anderson was recently pictured in a now banned Australian commerical for the internet company Crazy Domains. She plays the object of a businessman's sexual fantasy as she is sprayed with milk or cream in a golden bikini. SuperVegan notes that she blatantly uses Milk and Sex to sell a product completely unrelated to either of these things.

Personally as a feminist, a vegan, and as a human being, I cannot stand Pamela Anderson. There's just something about her that makes me want to gouge my eyes out. Something that makes me cling to the nearest copy of Carol Adam's The Sexual Politics of Meat. I somehow sense that I'm not alone here.

But let's be nice and get back on subject: Naturally organizations don't have complete control over what their spokespersons do, but most would probably hope that their spokespersons would avoid directly contradicting their basic mission statement. Sure, money may be tight for Pammie Pam because people are done watching her porn films, but really Pamela? Where are your principles? You make me mad about PETA, even though they make really cute stickers and created the amazing, famous I Can't Believe It's Vegan website which rocked my world in early vegan days. In just a couple eloquent words: Umm.... what?

*Often for reasons including: milk is destined for calves, milk can only be produced with cows are pregnant therefore requiring yearly re-impregnation of cows-- but calves are taken away at birth, cows are slaughtered once production rate begins to decline, the milk industry is the reason the veal industry is in business, etc.

Personal Revolutions

There's this strange conception that activism occurs only outside of the self, that the ultimate goal is the changing of others. But something I think is so undeniably radical is the idea that revolutions can occur within the self. We are constantly changing beings in an unstable world and we gain something from every new process, progress, change and revolution that occurs within ourselves. Let's stop marginalizing our own personal growth, because we're better people when we're not mindless drones moving about our lives with a narrow perception of what it is to exist.

(One of the many awesome Crimethinc posters)

Haus

I just moved into a vegetarian co-op on campus and it's a strange and beautiful journey already. There are a number of factors pulling and tearing at the way I frame it. This is how most people respond when I mention the co-op :

"Oh where's that again "
"I've never actually been INSIDE ..."
"What?"
"Aren't you guys all like vegans or something? Do you run around naked?"

It's this strange place so ridiculously CENTRAL on-campus but so socially removed that no one dares venture inside.

It is a square building of many bikes, of rags, of hairy bathrooms, of let-it-mellow yellow, of baked goods, of Haus Decisions, of theoretical, of cheap and good food made with love, of creation, of tension of growth, of stickers of hall posters, of beans, of lentils, of Crimethinc signs, of dirty things in clean places, of smiles and 3 am kitchen porn, of song-singing and couch-lounging, of very little academic work and so much interaction, of re-usable yoghurt containers, of eggs and things of disgust, of vegan idealism, of camaraderie, of apple scones in the morning with your name on it, of hall parties, of tensions, of growth, of change, of many things... in the last 4 days.

I'm so thrilled to be a part of it, and so thrilled to watch myself grow in it..

MTRBlows

Radical Mountain Top Removal Action:

http://www.climategroundzero.org/

Beautiful and simple, tree-sitting is a non-violent form of protest which aims to fight the systematic destruction of natural resources for energy and profit. Awesome.

Vegan Conversion Machine

Veg*ns and activists of all sorts and varieties can get so riled up, after all, and want to change the world that they lose sight of the very beauty of their own relationships... We're not vegan conversion machines.

That said, I'm not going to stop handing out flyers and tabling and getting shit done. Shifting to a plant-based diet is helpful to our society in so many ways. Not to mention that it allows us to see the connections behind all the products we have been so blindly led to consume... But to side with certain PETA-activists who argue that every possible interaction should be one that shows veganism in a certain light can be crippling. After all, aren't vegans and vegetarians animals, too? Shouldn't we provide ourselves with some due 'animal justice' in a hustling, bustling world of alienation?

Just a reminder to bring some balance into our lives. Personal revolutions are equally important.