Day 3

So I have to confess that a large part of my interest in veganism stems from my desire to “reduce my carbon footprint” as they say. I try to avoid talking about my reasons because I don’t want to be pigeonholed as a self-righteous fart sniffer. But I’m generally concerned about our environment and I have quite a track record of rampant consumerism to make up for. This led me to the decision to give up my car. I still own it, but now my dad uses it instead of his eight-seater SUV, and I use my feet, my bike, or the bus instead of the Jetta.

Living without a car in LA is not impossible, but it’s a bit of a time vampire. Which is great for catching up on your reading, but not so great when you’ve got to take 3 busses and 2 hours from Venice to have dinner with your BFF in the Val (more on that in my next post.) In this case I was going to West Hollywood, which took only 2 busses and only 1 hour. I would estimate that if I took my car this amount to a 30-minute ride, but who’s counting? I was going to a seminar on Arts PR. It’s what I do.

Again I had the problem of being freely offered a platter of foods that I’d crossed off the edible list. I’m assuming that those muffins weren’t vegan anyway. But all was right in the world because a mere 20-minute walk away was my destiny in food form: lunch at Vegan Glory. Perhaps because I done a good bit of walking already, but more likely because I knew I had carte blanche to order anything that struck my fancy, I went a bit crazy with the amount of food I ate. Crispy “chicken” tacos, green papaya salad, and a young coconut to sip on maybe doesn’t sound like too much, but usually I try to get someone to split an entrée and order water with some lemon (ok, lots of lemon.) Everything was good. Everything was real good. I was a bit annoyed with myself when the bill came, but I’m not planning on hitting up too many restaurants on the Westside sooo….