I quit smoking nearly three and a half months ago. The changes have shown up subtly since. I can run longer without my lungs giving out. My skin’s starting to clear up. I don’t cough myself to sleep at night. But what’s really stood out most for me, day after day, is the smells in the elevator.
My apartment building has an elevator. Everybody uses it, because the stairs in our “secure” building require you to use a key to get in and out of the stairwells, which is as obnoxious as it is a fire hazard, so everybody uses the elevator. Before I quit smoking, the elevator smelled like nothing at all. Now, whenever I step into the elevator, I can tell everything about the person who was in there before me. I can tell if they’d been drinking alcohol — and whether it was hard liquor, wine or beer. I can tell if they had a dog with them. I can usually tell if it was a man or a woman or both by the perfume scents. If they had a pizza with them, I know that, too. If they’re a smoker, I definitely know. The world encases an entire database of olfactory information that I’d previously left unaccessed. So what can people tell about me from my scent? Like, people who have been using their smell sense for years now? I wonder.
I’m still doing the whole vegan thing, too. After reading the books I read — Skinny Bitch and The China Study — it’s really not been that difficult. Sometimes I do crave cheese, but that’s about it. I haven’t craved meat or milk at all. Whenever I think about eating meat or dairy, I just think about how awful those things are for my body, and how they’re going to cause cancer and heart disease and make me die slowly and miserably, or how sad the chickens and cows are before being slaughtered, and I don’t want them anymore.
Honestly, there is a lot of research-based evidence that a strict plant-based diet is good for you. But what really sold me on veganism was a small argument the authors of Skinny Bitch made. They spoke of how terrified the animals are as they’re lead to the slaughter, how devastated and mournful and loud they are as their children are pulled away from them and tortured, how agonizing their entire lives are. “Assuming you started with a healthy animal (highly unlikely),” they say, “you’ve now eaten hormones, pesticides, steroids, antibiotics, fear, grief, and rage.” And that’s what sold me on this diet. When I eat meat or dairy, I am ingesting the fear and grief and rage of another animal. How can I ever be emotionally healthy when I do this daily?
Today, I accidentally ate some milk protein. I made myself a bowl of oatmeal from an old box of instant oatmeal I had in the cupboard. I figured oatmeal is definitely vegan, right? After I ate it, though, I checked the box and I realized that this particular mix did have a good deal of milk proteins in it. And I was like, “Oops! Well, live and learn,” and I didn’t give it a second thought. About ten minutes later, my stomach started to hurt like hell. Not, like, nauseous, really, more like little daggers of horror piercing through my tummy all over. And at first I was like, “Woah, am I having an abortion?” and once I’d established that, no, I was not having an abortion, it occurred to me that this could be the result of my body trying to digest milk proteins after not doing it in so long. The pain subsided about 50 minutes later. Since apparently milk proteins are slow digesting, this timing would be about right. Isn’t that odd? (In fairness, though, I should note that I’m expecting my period soon, so it could have been cramps, although historically I am not one to get bad PMS cramps.)
