Early virtues of the vegan diet

As of January first, myself and a couple friends have gone to the vegan side. This of course comes with some risks. I hope not to become intolerable to go out to dinner with, asking about each and every item. This was worse enough as a vegetarian. I also hope to continue to love food and eating. So far, so good.

The first two days were the hardest. Maybe it was psychological, but I really felt empty and hungry all the time. I was panicking a little. But things smoothed out. Now I am thinking that vegan has some extra benefits that I hadn't considered up front. 1) I get to eat more often -- I love eating and preparing food so this is a good thing. 2) I get more creative - I force myself to so I continue enjoying food. I used to tout this as a virtue of the vegetarian diet, how I always found myself cooking more creatively since I couldn't rely on things that automatically taste good, like, oh, i don't know, sausages. You gotta work a little harder to make those veggies and grains pop. And now without cheese, eggs, and butter you really gotta work. Luckily, have had some early success already. Ribolitta from Mario Batali's cook book was excellent. I prefer normal cookbooks to vegan ones, since vegan ones are full of recipes for things like "Ground bulgar and lentil loaf". Mmmm. On the other hand, normal cookbooks with some tweaks offer fine vegan cuisine.

Making yoga free at the gallery has brought people out of their caves, which I'm happy about. I gotta get cracking on reading the yoga books for costa rica. Last night and this morning, I was reading a play by Eugene O'Neill called The Emperor Jones. I bought a book of three of his plays, published by Dover (book called Three Great Plays - only after I got home with it did i realize, wow, that's a clever publisher's title that literally got me to buy the book), hoping that one might work as a movie script for Rob. Unfortunately, The Emperor Jones is set in the West Indies and involves mainly a large black man running terrified through the woods. Not exactly what we are looking for regarding 'filmability'. Maybe one of the others in the book, 'The Hairy Ape', is more suitable.

Panicking is a weird word, having to add the 'k' before adding the 'ing'.