A Very Vegetarian Thanksgiving

So this is my first Thanksgiving as a vegetarian. Allow me to recount to you my own Road to Damascus conversion.

Last January I went to Chicago for work. Because we live so far out in the middle of absolutely nowhere and I had a 6:05am flight, I had to leave for the airport at 3:15am. Now this is January. It was 4 degrees. And early.

Get on the plane in Albany and the pilot gets on the intercom and says, "Just uh..." (and have you noticed that no one has perfected the Pregnant Pause like the commercial airline pilot) "Wanted to give you a weather update." Pause. "In Chicago the air temperature is -2." Pause. "The windchill is -50." Someone said: "-15?" The pilot, as though he could hear us says, "-50."

So that's bad.

As a carnivore, with a wife at home who is a vegetarian, any time I go somewhere for work, I want to eat something I can't get at home. I went to a Persian restaurant near Wrigley Field and ordered something called koubideh.

It turns out koubideh is raw, minced lamb.

I had a rough night. I slept maybe 20 minutes because I was constantly going to the bathroom, but didn't know whether I would be crouching or bending, if you catch my drift. However, in those 20 minutes where I was unconscious, shivering because (a) it was -50 that night, too and (b) I had no fluids in my body, I had a very, very vivid dream that I woke up next a recently deceased prostitute. It was one of those dreams where you wake up gasping for air and scrambling against the wall to look and see how much blood there is.

Within a month I was a vegetarian. Because carrots don't make you have dreams like that.

So this is my first Thanksgiving as a vegetarian. Which is interesting, because as this Newsweek article says, there are only about 4.7 million vegetarians in the United States - less than 2% of the nation's population.

And I don't know why, but that makes me feel much better. In the same way that I love the Pernice Brothers, Spoon, White Rabbits and Todd Snider because they're not on the radio. In the same way that I am a Texas fan who married into a family full of OU fans. In the same way that I am an Astros fan in New York.

So today I'm actually giving thanks that the other 296 million are eating turkeys (sometimes stuffed in ducks stuffed in chicken). And I'm not. Because I'm different from you, and that's okay.