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Or what I tried to refer to as “No-Bovine-mber” for about a minute, but was too hard even for me to say. My second attempt at quitting something for a 30-day period bombed, there’s really just no other way to say it. After a successfully unsuccessful Sober October (read it!) No Bovine November stood to really make a statement in my life, or at least in my lower intestines.
Here’s the backstory: I decided that I would pump Lent up on steroids, because I’m not Catholic, and quit something each month for 12 consecutive months. I’m trying to choose things that would be beneficial for me to temporarily stop partaking in, to see if it would overwhelmingly better my life to quit that thing all together. Sober October was a no-brainer; we all could cut back on the sizzurp. But after seeing zero positive effects, I gladly (and quickly) reintroduced booze back into my life. And just a quick word of advice: after not drinking for an entire month, you unfortunately must ease yourself back into it. Just ask Danea’s toilet and the sidewalk outside of Couture.
Anyway, my next journey would take me to a magical land of no beef, where I might get a glimpse into the world of vegetarianism. If no cow for one month improved my internal wellbeing, then I might actually continue on to quit other 4-legged consumables. But there were two obstacles I was up against for November, two that I really should have foreseen but was too cocky pay attention to.
Research:
I did not do this, nor did I honestly think I needed to. Cow = beef, and beef = hamburgers, roast beef, beef and broccoli, ground beef, shredded beef, and all cuts of steak. Easy enough right? If it had the word “beef” in it I was going to steer[1] clear. Ohhh, but what little Brenda didn’t know is that lots of things that her cute little brain always thought was piggy, was in fact probably cow. Like: pepperoni, salami, Lit’l Smokies, all stews and soups from a can, gravy on biscuits and gravy, and probably all “meat” from Taco Bell. All things that she heartily consumed without hesitation or second thought during the month of November. Switching back to first person, I honestly broke my rule without even knowing it. I was sadly informed after consuming three of the previously mentioned items.
Memory:
Being confronted with my first couple mistakes, I desperately tried to get back on my no-beef train. As much as my heart was in the right place, my brain was not. Ordering nachos with ground beef on top didn’t wave any red flags to me. (Luckily I was with a devout vegetarian, who glared at me because, despite being good friends for the better of six years, I always forget she is a vegetarian.) I honestly was forgetting that I was supposed to eliminate beef from my diet. This can’t be contributed to my lack of effort at all; I am very dedicated to my overall mission here.
As a legitimate Scientist,[2] I must look back at my experiment’s failure, and hypothesize what went wrong. Could it be that after 26 years of cow consuming I am incapable of switching solely to white meat? No; this wasn’t an incapable thing, just a short-term memory loss thing. And a blonde thing.[3] If happy cows come from California, so do yellow-haired girls that forget to quit eating them. As a Scientist, I deduce that in order to be successful at this attempt again, I must remove all cow and pig from my diet, in order to dissolve any confusion. It may have been that quitting bovine wasn’t a big enough task, therefore easily forgotten. There is a lot in the alcohol family to remember: beer, wine, vodka, whiskey, tequila, rum, well you get the picture. Perhaps I must change my method to include significant changes in my habits, not just small alterations. Stay tuned for next year; when I cut all 4-legged animals out of my diet, including Darwin’s fish.
