Diary of Indignities = Good Reading!

I just started reading Patrick Hughes’ completely hilarious memoir, Diary of Indignities, a copy of which I strongly recommend you pick up if you, like me, enjoy laughing your ass off at other peoples’ ridiculous misfortune.

One of my favorite parts of the book is a chapter where Patrick talks about the various negative and super annoying characteristics of vegetarians, and how the behavior of said vegetarians tends to alienate everyone around them. I can relate because I had a close friend who claimed to be vegetarian because it was such a healthy life style. And yet, she had no issue with the fact that she was a chemically-dependent, bipolar, chain-smoking mess who had been in therapy for ten years.

So, yeah, she was insane on top of being a militant vegetarian, and maybe she shouldn’t have been condescending to chastise me about eating a few slices of bacon on a nice juicy burger. Mmm…burger.

But I digress. Here’s an entertaining passage from that chapter of Hughes’ hilarious book:

“I was a vegetarian for more than a decade. My crazy mom decreed us so when I was eleven or twelve, and I just sort of eventually went along with it. As my mom no doubt knew, being vegetarian was a good way to get attention and act all self-righteous and morally superior. When you’re vegetarian, everyone has to fuss over you, make special plans. When they don’t it gives you an excuse to sulk, especially during Thanksgiving or Christmas, when the rest of the family has eleven different dishes they can eat and you only have two, corn and cranberry sauce, and you know this because you sat there and counted.

And you can get even sulkier when nobody pays attention to you mewling out questions like, ‘Was this corn boiled in ham water?’ Because they’re all too busy eating delicious regular food to care. Also, when you’re vegetarian you always get to decide where to go eat, because the place all the normal people want to go, the place with “BBQ” in its name, ‘Doesn’t have anything you can eat.’ That’s a funny word, can.”

Yeah! It is so totally true that when you’re trying to decide what restaurant to go to with a group, and somebody in the group is a vegetarian, you have to surrender the restaurant choice to the food Nazi, which is totally unfair and means you can’t go anywhere good. Like these people forget that it’s a choice to not eat normal food.

I always used to say to my crazy ex-best friend that if it was so difficult for her to find stuff she could eat (because she was a particular kind of vegetarian who did not actually like vegetables – crazy!) she should perhaps “investigate adding more stuff to [her] diet.” Duh.

She would also not allow her saint of a husband to eat meat in front of her.

Despite the fact that Psycho Vegan dumped my ass as a friend because I, honestly, forgot to buy her one-year-old son a birthday present, being as his birthday fell at a time when I was basically living hand-to-mouth as a starving Rock Critic and had to often choose between buying food and paying my electric bill. At least my painful experience with her taught me a valuable lesson: don’t be friends with crazy people who are also vegetarians. Because they will add zero value to your life.