it's sad how bottomlessly hypocritical i am. it's just so hard to be in this world, to be principled. not too long ago i was raging, raging against the inexpensiveness of meat, about how frankly unconscionable it was to be a meat eater because, well, it destroys the world. but you can't blame people about this so much, they'll walk within the cordons of price and fashion, and the world today has put the blinking lights and neon arrows in the steak aisle. so it goes.

but i ache for change and i half believe that we could all make a difference if we worked together and sacrificed. i made the sacrifice and now i've got a soapbox. but there are so many other causes in the world. the fact is i really relish my soapbox, you could not unreasonably accuse me of being a vegetarian for the sole reason of having a grounds on which to denounce other people. i get awfully universal about it; i've got this cause and if you aren't with me you aren't living right. my sister brought me down about this. she reminded me that the world was awfully big and that people have their own causes, things as important as i thought my vegetarianism, and that i likely wasn't living up to their own hopes about transforming the world. like i'm not a vegan, don't give away all my possessions, don't vote socialist, am an ass, etc.

the other night a friend of k's and mine was over and she's got a much taller soapbox than i do. and she mentioned something about flying, and how all the cute recycling one does, all the plastic bottles you've doted on don't mean anything when you compare it to the panda incinerating industrial hell furnace that is an airplane. people shouldn't fly. now k lives in stockholm and i'm from new york and i'm in stockholm right now but im going to have to go home soon. and i am going to miss her wretchedly and i am going to  get on airplanes as often as i can afford and come here. and the friend knows this. and so i hated her in that moment. what a fucking low ass blow.

there's this play i read a while ago by peter weiss with a very long title about the marquis de sade and an insane asylum and jean paul marat. it's about the french revolution, at any rate. and there's this one speech in which marat, i think, is bemoaning the failures of revolution from his bathtub. he talks about sacrifice. he talks about all the sympathetic, righteous feeling there is in the world, but how on an individual level things break down. things get sentimental, special. he talks about how one man wouldn't give up his house and another his dog. one woman wouldn't give up her husband. and it goes on. and that's the death of it, the romantic particulars, the singulars, the individuated life. i don't think i could ever really believe that someone could know what it's like, let alone have a parallel experience to my missing k. and so i'll take my goddamn flight. and strike a blow for the status quo.