Herbivores Taste Better
Sorry for the long lapse in substantive blogging — I’ve started a new schedule at work that gives me alternating Fridays free, but means I get home at approximately 6:40, which means that I don’t generally finish with airing Nigel, feeding him, and feeding myself until about 8:00, by which time I’m usually more than ready to pretend the outside world doesn’t exist. I’ll try to do better.
Tonight, though, was a particularly special event: Josh of Herbivore came all the way from Portland to give a reading at Cosmo’s, so I had to go. It was totally worth it: he was funny, unpretentious, wryly intelligent (or intelligently wry?), and just generally seemed like a cool person, just like you’d expect from reading the magazine or the several blogs associated with the mag and store. I’m anticipating the arrival of issue #14 in the mail any day now. (If you don’t subscribe, you should; if you’d rather test it out first, Cosmo’s had single issues available for purchase! Now you have no excuse.)
Sadly, I’d forgotten my camera, but on second thought I suppose it doesn’t really matter because the photo card slot that’s built into Nyman the Desktop Computer is broken, and I can’t find the USB card reader, so any photos I would’ve taken would’ve been stuck on the camera for the forseeable future. I didn’t stay very long at all after the reading was over, despite the fact that there was a good turnout and the smell of the brownie cupcakes (I think? something brownielike, I swear: I can still smell it on my hair) was driving me insane and calling out to me to cram as many of them as possible into my face. It was 7:00 by then, and the usual guilt over leaving Nigel alone all day was getting to me, so I slunk out, feeling entirely puppy-whipped. This feeling was shortly to increase drastically.
Where does the “taste better” bit come in? (Hah, little pun there, actually. Sorry.) As I was leaving Cosmo’s and walking toward my car, I saw this nice guy walking an adorable beagle puppy, who was probably about eight weeks old or so. I asked if I could come say hello, which is what I do: see a nice dog, say hello, go all silly-headed over the puppy. Probably a bad idea in this case: the puppy was delighted to make a new friend, but had not quite reached the age when puppies realize that humans are big soft, squishy wimps and mustn’t be play-bitten with full force. He capered around and then sank his little sharp puppy fangs into the fleshy part of my palm, and then swung his entire little body around in an attempt to wrestle. Just play, and totally unintentional, but holy shit! Blood everywhere, hand still twinges, and I’m trying to decide whether I should get a tetanus shot. It seems to be mostly a gash, not a puncture wound, but it’s probably close to 1.5 cm long (over half an inch). (The poor guy was extremely embarassed about his overenthusiastic puppy. After over a decade of not dealing with puppy fangs, I’d forgotten how quickly you have to move when they play-nip you.)
Ouch.
(Addendum: Are tetanus shots vegan? They’ve probably been tested on animals at some point — what hasn’t? — but are they incubated in eggs or something, the way flu shots are? A few quick Googles aren’t helping much to clarify matters. Does anyone know? Obviously, I’m not keen on risking my life; on the other hand, I want to know what is required to produce what I consume, and if, for instance, there are vegan and nonvegan tetanus shots, I want to know enough to ask for the right one. Hell, there are vegan and nonvegan tattoo inks; it could happen with shots, as well. Er, maybe. I just don’t know.)
