MEGA HIPPIE TO THE RESCUE!!!! :)

my original post for today went something like: i'm in essay-land, which is blahblahblah boring, to those of you who are not in university. suffice it to say, i'm in the throes of creating a 12-page paper which is worth 75% of my grade, which was already due two days ago...yammer yammer. i'll do it. i sort of have to, and i might not even get marks taken off, but that's sort of what's on the forefront of my mind.

that and my eating habits.

i do take an anti-depressant every day, but i'm also convinced that "you are what you eat" is one of the basic truths in the world. i try to eat pro-actively - by that i mean staying away from the things that i know will aggravate my health.

met (whose nickname, by the way, stems from the word metrosexual, because lord, when this boy goes out? his keychain lanyard has to match his OUTFIT) constantly tells me how much of a hippie i am, and i can't really refute it.

my mother, coming into my teenaged bedroom which was covered in jim morrison posters and stank like patchouli, used to tell me i was born in the wrong decade. i took that as a compliment.

i work at an organic food store for a reason - i'm into health food. i keep my nails short, because, on the one hand they split once they grow a millimetre, but also - long nails just get in the way. i don't dye my hair anymore. last spring i started shaving again after not doing so for 3 years. i want to live in the country eventually. i buy recycled everything, i pick garbage off the street to make art with (plus people around here throw away beautiful things because they suddenly go out of fashion), and i love wearing my overalls.

one of the things we heard most from people when we started telling people that we were together was, "really? but you're so different." sure we are, i guess, on the surface. for starters, there's the whole he's black/i'm white thing. then (oh my god!) there's the fact that we have different clothing styles. he likes reading plays and manga, and hates actual fiction, but he knows that he has to read mine. we write different genres. (he's the playwright, obviously. i'm the poet/short story girl.)

but underneath we are so similar, it's comforting. we love to talk about everything. we share the same fierce loyalty to our loved ones. we have the same weird, sarcastic sense of humour. we love to tease.

and the one thing he loves to tease me about the most is my hippie-ness. a couple months ago i realized how bad my anemia was getting. it was getting that bad because i never really cooked meat for myself, was not on a tofu kick, and i had stopped eating nuts out of loyalty to him. (would you keep something around your house that your loved one was fatally allergic to?)

so that situation had to be fixed in a hurry.

protein is also extra-specially good for me because of my c.p.

the more protein i eat, the less my muscles hurt, because the less they're eating themselves - so it's fun all around. so i started stocking up on different proteins.

then we got this book in the store. coconut oil is the next miracle food in the organics industry. mind that all i'm about to say is !!my opinion only!! but damn, does it promise a lot of good stuff. a lot of the fat that we eat (the scary fat, the one that we're warned about) is, more technically, a long-chained fatty acid. (don't know what that is? me neither.) coconut oil, on the other hand, is a medium-chain fatty acid - it helps break down a lot of the toxins in the body.

apparently, it can also: build up your immune system, slow down the effects of alzheimers', speed up your metabolism (therefore enabling you to lose weight), strengthen the connective tissues in your body, help brain function.

sounds wonderful? there's a catch, of course. the oil that you're supposed to take is highly stable - meaning it's thick. and waxy. and it's expensive (in canadian dollars i paid $26.95 for a 473 ml. bottle). and you have to take 4 tsps. a day.

so this morning it all sort of synthesized for me. here i was, making my oatmeal with extra quinoa and sunflower seed butter for protein (met calls that butter "whipped shit", if i recall, and REFUSES to try it) - and sweetening it with agave syrup and rice milk, and then i had my supplements all lined up - my effexor, sure, but my vitamin b12 (for my depression), and my coconut oil too. and i had this moment where i stood back and LAUGHED at myself.

because the transition is complete. i am now, officially, the mega hippie.