Here in Seoul, I prefer to shop for major things like meats and dairies at the box supermarkets but for veggies and dried stuffs the outdoor markets. They always have better quality stuff at much better prices. The only thing is that these businesses here are being pushed out slowly because of growth. We’re not experiencing urban sprawl, the Koreans are smarter–they build vertically. But the number of apartment buildings that go up each year is incredible. They also seem to get taller (30-50 stories). I only wish Americans could devote so much to cultural/civic preservation.

Elias

You have are charming, funny, witty, and smart. You love to party - and people love to party with you.
You are always friendly and warm. You are able to help people get along.

Hmmm… Don’t love to party. The rest is not bad.

I always thought of myself as Sage (ha ha)

But I liked something in this, the way it talks about being stuck in a blank space, a cavity, a threshold, on the verge of… the way it feels when you’ve stared at a blank white space for 1.5 milliseconds too long and whatever you were planning on saying vanishes into the ether.

But would you be familiar with that feeling, anyway? You who always have something to say?

Just reread your lit.org EXPOSED interview again, and was struck by a number of things - we both have gone to school in Japan, both attended many schools (you a military brat, too? My old man was a Senior Master Sergeant in the Air Force - we were stationed at the Tachikawa AFB). I went to 14 different schools, and have never associated ‘home’ with a physical location.

Re your EXPOSED interview: it reminded me, it’s nice to talk with someone who actually thinks.

Drop me a note, if you’ve a mind to, Jen; nice to see you in print again.

I was recently reading a pagan author who was trying to use a similiar line of logic and wound up her argument with the idea that she’d rather become a meal for a cougar than be buried in a hermetically sealed pine box. Oh, me too, me tooo! But two crucial requests I think we’d both share are 1) not to be hunted or mauled by the cougar before being eaten and 2) not to have to die before our time.

And therein lies a crucial difference — it’s one thing to be callous about a death that happens in someone else’s hands. We can trick ourselves with ineffable ‘philosophical’ constructs into believing that when these animals die it was somehow their turn and that their death meets our needs when in reality this is far from true. In fact, universally every food producing animal in our care will die before it’s time, most by half to a quarter of their life spans and they will die horrifically so that we ourselves can die of heart attacks, obesity and cancer, all of which have been linked to overconsumption of animal products.

I personally believe that when we stop making excuses about holding these animals hostage in horrible, hostile environments, that when we stop looking at their lives as things that need to be tightly controlled and overtly managed by us that we’ll be that much farther along in our ability to respect, nurture and honor each other.

An excellent touchstone for this conversation: http://www.meat.org“