I keep running into this “aquatic ape” theory. First from one of my dad’s ham-radio friends, then in Real Food, and now from Seth Roberts. I just finished Freakonomics (which, by the way, was rather lackluster compared to Malcolm Gladwell’s works of similar style) and decided to investigate this guy up in a fit of procrastination. The book mentions his self-experimentation and his discovery of the Shangri-La “diet” (it’s not technically a way of eating), a little fishy, but his blog is dedicated to the pursuit of amateur science. The discussion in the comments of the aquatic ape post is intelligent and surprisingly civil, considering the debate is about whether or not humans evolved from water-dwelling primates. It’s less wacky than it sounds, but the theory doesn’t exactly — excuse me — hold water.

On the other hand, one of his commenters suggests that boys do better than girls in interactive classrooms: “Boys do best in classes where they can move around and don’t have to be quiet. Girls do better in the traditional format– sit at your desk and listen quietly to the teacher.” I feel like I need to find a phone booth and a Feminist Superhero costume… all I need is research to back up my visceral objections. There’s just no way boys are genetically predisposed to have more fun!

I’ll console myself with wishful thinking.

Fact of the day: Dumbledore is an Old English word for bumblebee.

I’ve been partaking of a lot of cooking shows recently. Well, mostly just Good Eats. I skip most of the meat-heavy episodes, and then spend the rest automatically making substitutions and thinking of ways to veganize, designing my kitchen and making a list of cooking supplies (did you know a burr-style coffee grinder can also mill flour? How exciting!). Along with Vegetarian Food for Thought and the badly-written but well-researched Real Food: What to Eat and Why, plus the frustration of not actually having my own kitchen, this has fermented into several wacky ideas.

The first is to do my own cooking show someday (podcast-style), in which I copy the illustrious Alton Brown (explaining the science, history, and health of ingredients and methods with the help of humorous props and skits), except vegan (I can honestly live without cheese and bacon — I know, it seems so wrong).

The second is to do a cooking vacation, in which I hire a chef in an exotic locale to teach me and some friends how to cook. Or maybe not even a big-time professional chef, but just a farmer, or a cafe-owner, or a baker. The lessons could even be in trade for helping out around the kitchen.

The third thing I might actually do, especially once I have full access to academic resources again: write about the philosophy and science of vegetarianism. I know I said to ignore health studies, but I think doing some solid research could really help get to the bottom of food myths and health propaganda (without the meat-and-dairy-biased Nina Planck). Plus there is basic information about the role of various nutrients. What is the role of cholesterol in the body? What are the differences between various kinds of fats? Does protein source matter?

And most importantly: will I find time to write an extra Thesis? Answer: only if no one gets me Spore. That game will suck up all the cognative surplus I have, and then some.

In the meantime, reap for yourself the harvest of my initial research:

• Vegan Action FAQ’s, for some quick vegan basics
• The Animal Rights Library, with some well-known names like Dawkins and Shelley (I’ve a lot of reading to do here)
• A response to criticism of The China Study, a book clearly on my reading list
• The Practical Ethicist, an interview with Peter Singer

Sleepy afternoon eyes
Legs still from moving
Thinking slow like light diffusion
Alone in the breeze
And wanting nothing else.

So much to say, so little internet! Here I’ve been off having adventures, and leaving all my anxious readers (if I have any) in the dark. Well, no more.

About two weekends ago, I went to Mistra on my last CYA excursion. Little did I know that Mistra is actually right next to Sparta, so I was able to spend the twilight hours in the ancient site — now a most tranquil place of olive groves, overgrown wildflowers, and wide cobbled paths. Prof. Coulson, advanced in years though she is, even jumped a fence to get us into the ruins of a Byzantine church.

Not that the next day wouldn’t be full enough of the things. We made sure to stop by the church Prof. Coulson did her thesis on, which actually left me completely enthusiastic for our on-sight final. Half Eastern, half Western, it was an intriguing puzzle… at least for those with at least a few weeks of background and an unusually excited guide.

The on-sight final was a similar project, describing a little church at Mistra in an attempt to argue whether or not Byzantine architecture was stagnant or truly creative. I went for the latter, but it’s hard to see why with the untrained eye. However, whether or not one likes Byzantium, one must certainly fall in love with the fairy-tale-like ruins of Mistra, with its brick-red churches and castles giving way to a spring of lush greenery and a kaleidoscope of flowers, all buzzing with honeybees. I saw a lizard, a lumbering beetle two inches big, a donkey, and came face-to-face with a grasshopper the size of a weta.

I also met a young man who didn’t know what pollination was… It’s still too painful to talk about.

Mistra, in fact, soon leapt to the top of my favorite locations in Greece, immediately followed by Meteora. However, you are in Greece for Orthodox Easter, do not miss pension Carlos in Akrotiri, Santorini. I’m sure glad I didn’t.

My Easter holiday was cold, windy, and rainy. Naxos provided me with hours of wanderings through the Old Market, a series of alleyways between white buildings with blue trim and dozens of little shops spilling out onto the pedestrian street. Naxos town was like a clean white labyrinth set on a hill, a pleasant enough place to stop for a day or two before moving on to Santorini.

But at the port of Santorini, I was picked up by Maria, and driven up to the modern town of Akrotiri and her family-run Carlos pension. I didn’t actually realize it was Akrotiri until I went for a walk past the (unfortunately closed) archaeological site, but wouldn’t you know it: a swallow flew right across the road in front of me, looking just like the famous Minoan wall-paintings. I am quite the Classics geek: It took my breath away.

I became fast friends with Maria, and her mother Eva. I helped Eva set up breakfast one morning for the big group of Icelanders, and we talked of vegetarianism: “Do you do this for God?” “No, I do it for myself.” It turns out Eva had been vegetarian herself for a time; “When I am on my own, I would like to give up meat again.” She made me some delicious fried vegetable patties.

The lambs, though… I almost had to leave the room. The night before Maria made candles for everyone, and we went to church to be mortar-bombed by fireworks. Now was the Sunday feast, and they brought in three whole lambs on spits, their white teeth grinning horribly from holocaust-charred faces. And there was Eva, honing her knife theatrically, and she and her son just started hacking those bodies to pieces. I stared at my water, waiting for the carnage to render them shapeless and meaningless.

Fortunately, it was uphill from there. I filled myself with potatoes, vegetables, bread, and Easter cakes. And then, oh then! Five hours of dancing: we watched the Greeks do individual Zembetiko, some of them quite amazing performances; and everyone joined in the line dances, and we eventually even picked up a few real dance steps. The Icelanders and I took center stage for a short bout of Western and Latin American music, from Wild Thing to Ricky Martin. By the end of the night, my feet hurt, but I was the happiest, most unselfconscious thing in the world!

I even managed to keep my spirits up for the 11-hour ferry ride I had to suffer through the next day, passengers sitting on the floor in the hallways like refugees. I might have gotten a little stir-crazy towards the end, when I started getting the urge to wear the fire-extinguisher cover as a pope-hat… er, let us never speak of this again.

The truck with all the trees
Rolls slowly down the street.
The gypsy calls
To sell! The trees!
But no one comes to buy
And the truck just rolls on by.

If there’s anything cooler than a British Classics professor with a mean sense of humor, it’s a vegetarian British Classics professor with a mean sense of humor. Today I was walking along in the hot afternoon sun, and who should I happen upon, but Raish! “Sarah! Just the person was looking for,” says he, and proceeds to ask what this lignan is that’s in his flax. I tell him it’s a fiber that causes ground flax to gelatinize, making a good egg replacement in baked goods. It’s also an antioxidant. “I knew you would have the answer,” he said, and I walked on with a big smile on my face.

Another reason to smile is Passover. I’m not Jewish, but one of my good friends here is. Becky showed me how to make charoset, an apple and walnut topping for matzo, and we feasted on this as well as carrots, and dates and dried apricots from Istanbul, all while watching Die Hard 4. But the biggest success of our seder was the pomegranate truffles. These were the easiest thing in the world to make, and they turned out perfectly divine. Becky and I were reeling with success, and new ideas are tumbling out of our heads: orange-juice truffles rolled in candied lemon zest? Mexican truffles with cinnamon and cayenne pepper? I even have some crazy ideas involving balsamic vinegar and sea salt. We’re already planning a truffle-making marathon for May Day weekend, and after that, potential careers as chocolatiers.

A while ago my dad pointed me to an excellent article from Smashing Magazine about cool new technology designs. I especially like the simple Pock-It, a sticky-note that forms a pocket, and the Dual Music Player which unfolds like a beetle to play CD’s. Even the less practical devices are still creative and beautiful. It’s always sad when concept designs get dialed down in the end, but I suppose when you’re trying to appeal to broadest market possible, you don’t want things to be too distinctively styled. I wonder if that’s why designers tend to prefer bold niche-market products, even when they sometimes sacrifice a bit on ergonomics and aesthetics. Yet I believe that the most beautiful objects are those everyday things that are a joy to use, invisible in their perfect rightness, and inherently elegant in form.

Despite all the impressive technology that makes me drool, I check my desire to own the cool new thing. I actually have an almost unhealthy aversion to spending money, so I also have to be careful not to be pound-foolish or miserly. If I need something, I should purchase what will do the best job and make me most happy. Most people seem to have the opposite problem, but in the end we all want to own only possessions we love.

In other news, I have spent my weekends knee-deep in flowers at Olympia and Delphi, both the ancient sites and the quaint one-road modern villages. Seeing statues that I studied back in Freshman year was thrilling, especially when the emotion on the faces of frightened Lapiths or dying Argives was so much more keenly felt than when seen in photographs. Prof. Nicola also saved us from a day wasted on museums by taking us to Pylos, where we hiked through a fort, clambered the rocky shore, and fed fish by the docks.

And the Friday after I went on a hike for my Natural Environment class on Mt. Parnassis. Burned and scarred though it is, the place we went was not lacking in sub-alpine meadows and scrubby forests. It was great fun, especially spending the entire day talking with Becky, a girl after my own heart. I could reference things in fantasy, sci-fi, old movies, literature, science, and other geekery without getting odd looks or being questioned about “who Ares is” or “what lingua franca means.” Instead, we laughed and shared stories and recommended books to each other.

Speaking of books, I just finished Persuasion by Jane Austen. Is it sacrilegious to say I liked it far better than Pride and Prejudice? It started out slow enough, but pretty soon I was loving the characters and fretting or squealing far more than I ought to at all their interactions.

Oh, and I forgot to mention two weeks ago, when I was still a bit sick, I went to the Olympic torch ceremony in the stadium next door. Never will you see so many Chinese in one spot in Athens ever again…

Weird fact of the day: Luke Skywalker was originally going to be a girl!

Stop reading health advise. Right now. I am completely fed up with the contradictory information: suffice to say that there are peoples who live or have lived on every sort of diet imaginable for generations and not come down with horrible diseases or deficiencies. There are those that eat tons of calories, tons of red meat, tons of saturated fats, what have you. And there are those that eat only vegetables. Are the French, those lovers of butter and cream, sick and overweight compared to the Cretans, famed for their Mediterranean diet? The only thing anyone can agree on is to avoid processed, industrialized foods, and stick to whole, natural foods. The people dropping like bloated flies are the modern Americans and their cultural colonies, who sit around getting their so-called nutrients from isolated chemicals stuck together in a jelly-mould.

So for heaven’s sake, eat what you want, just make it food! (And yes, I really need to read Pollan’s latest book.)

Except… vegetarianism feels right. I don’t like the idea of animals dying for my appetite. Healthy and natural or not, are humans so superior to other animals that their lives and deaths mean nothing except the satisfaction of our taste buds? Because what nutrients they provide can honestly be found elsewhere. And don’t think dairy escapes guilt-free, either: mothers need to be pregnant to give milk, and the babies for which the milk was intended have to go somewhere. The dinner table would be a good place to look.

If you’re okay with killing animals, at least consider that factory-farm-raised animals, even those labeled free-range and organic, are treated horribly and fed unhealthfully. This translates to unhealthy meat, dairy, and eggs, which then have to be fortified with the same isolated nutrients that are used to pass off processed edibles as real food.

The reason it’s so hard to figure out what’s healthy and what’s not, is that all the chemicals in food act in concert. Some help and some hinder the digestion of other chemicals, making any fuss over a single nutrient just plain silly. And imagine the folly of trying to study the effects these complex interactions on the infinitely more complex human body. No wonder the health professionals are so confused! But of course they’re not confused: each one of them thinks they know what is best for our bodies. So stop letting them swing your diet from extreme to extreme like a spastic monkey. Keep a clear head, a kind heart, and a pantry stocked with whole foods, and I don’t think you can go too wrong.

(My source for a lot of this information is Vegetarian Food for Thought.)

I finally feel all right again. I can look at food without feeling sick, but I still feel unreasonably picky: bananas but no apples, grains but no nuts, hard cheeses sound good but not feta. Which is a shame, because I stocked up on fruits and vegetables at the Friday market, and I’ve been busy trying to pawn off my food all weekend in exchange for simple crackers and digestive biscuits. Or, better yet, leaving my stomach alone and not eating anything. Thus, to reconstitute, Shandra and I made amaranth chocolate last night.

Amaranth is a super-nutritious grain, which you can pop like popcorn. Itty-bitty popcorn. It’s like snow in a pot. Then Shandra, my vegetarian mentor flat-mate, comes along with the brilliant idea of mixing the stuff with (organic dark) chocolate to make our own version of crunchy puffed-rice chocolate bars. This was the best — and most substantial — food I’d had in days, but even our non-sick friends liked it. Next time we’ll put in more amaranth, and a bit of chili powder, for a truly Mesoamerican treat.

This morning I tried making quinoa with honey, but I have reaffirmed my dislike of warm breakfast cereal and instead had a banana, some apple juice, and the last ounce or two of chocolate. I don’t want to throw any curve-balls at my digestive system quite yet, so my diet must remain weird. This virus is frustrating to all of us, because it has no correlation with food. Every second or third person at CYA got hit, but so did Prof. Nicola’s daughter’s school. And apparently there was a Greek news item about hospitals being overrun with dehydrated patients. Yet it had all the symptoms of food poisoning, and everyone got it within the same afternoon — even my friend Becky, who was in Istanbul.

But thanks to the pick-me-up chocolate and banana — a neat trick, by the way, is to peel it from the bottom end, which a friend of a friend of friend learned from a monkey — I feel cheery and alive. It has been wonderful learning about thriving as a vegetarian, and I almost want to email Arthur and tell him how very possible it is to be happy and healthy without meat. Except that I don’t want to contend with people about what they eat, drink, and smoke, especially when I tend to internalize lessons without being able to regurgitate the particular facts that evangelicalizing requires. In fact, without a textbook in my hands, I’d probably be a terrible grade-school teacher, as well. So, carnivores, you escape my wrath this time…

I would have gotten away with it, too, if it wasn’t for you meddling kids.

I am sick, but if I don’t move, I can enjoy the afternoon sun coming through the windows of my room and gentle breeze. There is even a dove walking around on the balcony, assuring me that I’m not going to die, that this thing is going to pass. Maybe I’ll be able to eat solid food again soon. And with my recently aquired obsession for food, the most frustrating part of having my entire digestive tract attacked is not being able to think about eating without feeling nauseous. No, I have decided that a lifetime’s worth of raw cookie dough would not be worth another 24 hours of this. And I didn’t even get to eat the cookie dough this time.

But life is truly good. In my bout of loneliness after Corfu, I asked my parents to help me — there was no way I was going to get through a month traveling through Italy with my sanity unscathed. So they did the best thing ever, and booked an apartment in Spain (thank you Julianne and Dr. Osborne!). That means I get to see my family so much sooner than I expected, and Italy will just have to be one more thing I share with Thomas. It can be hard to be away from the people I love most in the world for so long, but anticipation makes the missing just a little bit sweet.

Knowing that I need a surrogate family wherever I go alone, I made sure to book my Orthodox Easter trip to Naxos and Santorini with so-called pensions or domatia. No more than a half-hour after reserving two nights at Windmill Naxos, in fact, the owner emailed me to ask what time my ferry got in — so he could pick me up! And Nadia, CYA student advisor extraordinaire, hooked me up with another family-run place on Santorini where they make their own bread. I almost had to cancel this little getaway since the ferries were almost full, but in the end the travel agent found me a spot. With everything taken care of, and ferry tickets burning a hole in my desk drawer, my trip to two of the most beautiful Aegean Islands promises to entirely pleasant.

As soon as I feel better, I will upload my photos of Greek Independence Day and Thessoloniki. Last weekend was filled with Byzantine hymns, seaside cafes, the longest bus ride ever, a man named Vladimir who insisted his accent was Cockney, stolen buffet food, and a roadside stop that will make my guy friends drool (it will suffice to say: This… is… Sparta!).