<<the following is a delineation about my life as a psychology student, which is not very relevant to vegetarianism or veganism>>

photo by Zach Hale

This summer is basically my transition into the graduate program at the U of MN. As you may recall, I’m going to be a doctoral student in the psychology program. But I’m not going to be one of those therapist types (though I greatly admire those who choose that track). I’m going to be one of those researcher types. I run auditory perception experiments on human subjects (as an animal lover, the idea of experimenting on animals is not on the top of my list).

My adviser is basically putting me in charge of designing my next research experiment. My research over the last year has revolved around pitch and timbre. The two main goals were to see whether there is a difference between how musicians and non-musicians perceive pitch and timbre, and whether or not pitch and timbre are separable dimensions in the brain. In other words, can one dimension affect how you perceive the other? So far it appears that there are differences between musicians and non-musicians, at least in terms of pitch perception– timbre maybe less so. And also, one dimension can definitely affect how you perceive the other. In other words, if you are listening to a tone with a a high pitch, but with a dull timbre (instead of bright) the pitch will be perceived as lower than if the high pitch had a brighter timbre. Interesting, right?? Well, I think so.

photo by courtneyBolton

So, now it’s my turn to design and code in MATLAB a new pitch and timbre experiment that we can use in the fMRI. This is not an easy task. Sure there are some books out there, and seminars and tutorials that teach you the basics of MATLAB, but as far as coding an experiment specifically for auditory experiments… I pretty much have to do a lot of guess and check work and look at code from other experiments we’ve run in the past to have any hope of figuring out what to do. It’s not like coding for a website where all the coding terminology is the same. MATLAB is so versatile, you can pretty much create your own code, which is a blessing if you’re good with MATLAB and a complete curse if you’re trying to learn it. It’s going to be a long, bumpy road.

I have to say, though, I am excited by the challenge. And I know I’ll be pretty psyched once the program is complete. However, I also need to get trained on how to use an fMRI, read a lot of research, and figure out a lot of math. In other words, the amount of learning I’m going to be doing over the next year, in addition to the courses I’ll be taking, is going to be insane.

For some reason, though, I’m not all that stressed about it. Maybe it’s the fact that the horrible agony of finding out whether or not I got into grad school is over. Or that I know my adviser well, he respects and trusts me enough to let me manage his lab and be his teaching assistant, and I get along with him famously. Maybe it’s the fact that it’s summer, and I have a great new house and a great life. Whatever the case, I think I’ve got a lot less to stress out about than pretty much all the other graduate students in the program who need to relocate, start working with an adviser they don’t really know yet, start coming up with research ideas, and adapt to a new lab and a new campus. I’m very fortunate to be in the position I’m in.

I’m sure there will be plenty of moments in the future where I’ll feel like I’m in over my head, I don’t deserve to be a doctoral student, I feel like an idiot, etc. But for now, I’m just going to enjoy the hell out of the amazing experience I’m getting.

So we’re (almost) completely moved in to our house now. It’s been an eventful move. Our loan officer went missing several days before our closing. Turns out he just decided to go hiking for a few days and not tell anyone– not even his boss. But, after an insane amount of paperwork and headaches, and our cat getting a bladder infection, likely from stress, we managed to have a successful closing. And then came moving day…

Several of our wonderful friends came to our apartment to help us move out. 20 minutes into the move, the elevator to our building broke down (we live on the top floor). To top it off, our friend was stuck! It was a holiday weekend and we were having a hard time getting ahold of any sort of building management. I eventually ended up calling 911 and our friend did get out safely after about 45 minutes of being trapped in a hot elevator on a very hot day. Oy!

After a great deal of sweat and exhaustion, we decided, since we had the moving truck, we’d just move the furniture and get the rest of the stuff later, once the elevator was back up and running. Due to the nature of the problem, the elevator didn’t start working again until several days later, once new parts were ordered. So, our friends helped us move the big stuff and we had a lovely cookout on our new grill as a thanks for their hard work. It was a pretty great end to an insane day.

Our grill is great, by the way. We went with a cute propane grill and it’s perfect. I’ve grilled many veggies, veggie dogs, faux chik’n cutlets, and veggie burgers on it already. There’s nothing like a great grilled meal.

Since then, the hard work really hasn’t stopped. Any time we’re not working, Emory and I are painting, unpacking, mowing the lawn, weeding, making trips back to the apartment to get more stuff, going to Home Depot, fixing things… I’m getting into great shape this summer just by owning a house!

Needless to say, we haven’t even noticed that we no longer have cable. It’s so expensive, we just decided to drop our cable, other than for the internet. We need to start building up our savings again, so we’re cutting costs where we can.

Amidst a very busy month, we got to spend a long weekend in Boston this past weekend for my dear friend (also named Emily)’s  wedding. It was an amazing time. I only wish we could have stayed longer. I love Boston, and I love the area where Emily lives, and also where the wedding took place, Jamaica Plain. If I were ever going to move to the East Coast, that’s where I’d move to. But I’m not moving any time soon. I just bought a house! And what a great house it is… 

This weekend Emory’s dad and mother-in-law will be coming up to help us do some more home fixins. And to bring us their amazing home-brewed beer. I can’t wait!

In conclusion, buying a home can be very stressful, yes, but it’s also one of the most amazing experiences. Family and friends come together to celebrate your new home, and you work hard (and have fun) making it just right for you. It’s pretty neat.

Can being a vegetarian make you sexier and funnier? PETA has named the sexiest celeb vegetarians of 2011 and they are… Russel Brand and Kristen Wiig.

Similar to myself, Russel Brand started his vegetarian venture at the ripe age of 14 (I was 13– got him!). Not similar to myself, he was also addicted to heroin while maintaining his vegetarianism. If you’re going to be addicted to something that could likely kill you, at least it’s nice to know no animals will be killed in the process… or something along those lines.

And Kristen Wiig is adorable and funny. I’m pleased she won. She’s a good role model for other aspiring vegetarians to have, in my opinion. At least as far as being attractive and funny and famous goes. I guess I don’t really know her personally.

Overall, I say good picks, PETA!

photo by BrierDoctor

With this new house we’re getting, we’re super excited to have friends over and grill things! We did a little research and shopping around, but we’re still not sure what kind of grill we want to buy. Gas? Electric? Charcoal? Some people say charcoal makes for the best flavor. Others swear by gas grills. I hear electric is the least authentic (obviously) and also is most lacking in flavor.

Since our main use for the grill will be to grill veggies (my mouth is watering just thinking about it…) I thought I’d reach out to my veg friends and see what your thoughts are. What kind of grill do you have? What grill do you recommend? Is there a brand you prefer?

We don’t need a big expensive grill, just something affordable that will grill our veggies to perfection. I would greatly appreciate your input!

I love Greek Salads. It’s one of the things I’ve been thoroughly enjoying now that I’m not exclusively vegan. Then it occurred to me.. “I wonder if anyone’s ever tried to make vegan feta…” It turns out, they have. Now, I haven’t tried it myself, but it’s certainly worth attempting if you’re a feta fan. To add to the amazement, this feta is not only vegan, but fat-free! Talk about no guilt! If anyone attempts to make it, let me know how it goes.

Thanks, Happy Herbivore! http://happyherbivore.com/2010/06/vegan-feta-cheese/

Photo from Happy Herbivore

Hey all,
I know I’ve been away for a while. I’m still going strong as a vegetarian, so I’ve decided to update my site to be a “veggie” blog instead of an exclusively vegan blog. Some recipes I post will be vegan, some vegetarian. Also, since my other passion is music psychology (and psychology in general), I may slip some psychology posts in there as well. I’m planning on updating the look of my site some time in the near future. I’m excited! I’m happy to be coming back in a fresh and new way!

What’s New?

Emory and I bought a house! Our closing date is July 1st. Many of our belongings are already packed up and we’re eager to start living the homeowner lifestyle! One thing I’m super stoked about is our adorable backyard that has a perfect spot for a vegetable garden. Wee! There’s also a nice big deck. We haven’t had one since we’ve been living in our current apartment. It’s a great downtown loft apartment, but I really miss not being able to sit outside on my own private porch. The house was built in 1939 and it has lots of charm. It’s in a great neighborhood, too. Not too far from campus, which is good for me. And Emory will finally have a designated office space, which he really needs now that he works from home. We already have lots of ideas for updates that we’re very excited about. Check out photos of the house.

In other news…
The warm weather has finally arrived! I’m back to working out outside and already have a nice tan going. I walk four miles a day to and from campus, and I run a few times a week as well. I feel great!

I’ve been craving nummy fresh salads. Here’s one I made recently. Simple and delicious:

Ingredients:

• Romaine lettuce
• grape tomatoes
• baby carrots
• roasted soy nuts
• cucumber
• feta cheese
• sugar snap peas
• red bell pepper
• ground black pepper
• oregano
• light balsamic vinaigrette

It’s been a pretty great summer so far. We’ve had a chance to travel to Seattle, northern Washington, Canada, Milwaukee, WI, and Duluth, MN already. And we’ll be heading to Boston in July for a wedding. Lots going on! Lots of shows, festivals, family visits, house hunting, moving, weddings, work… We have so much going on, in fact, that we’re determined NOT to make plans in August, other than enjoying our new house and working. I doubt we’ll be successful at maintaining our non-plans, though.

WELCOME TO SUMMER, EVERYONE!!

photo by artizone

So, as was mentioned in my last post, I’m on a vegetarian vacation. Put simply, it’s something I felt I needed to do for myself. This may be upsetting to some militant vegans out there, and for that I apologize. I’ve been in your shoes and I understand how you must be feeling.

You may be curious about how it’s going. Well, in all honesty, it’s been delicious. I grew up in the dairy state. I am a fan of cheese. My initiation into my vegetarian vacation started with me going to a fancy wine and cheese store and buying a very strong European cheddar cheese. It was the best cheese I had ever tasted in my life.

But it’s been a strange feeling for me, after many years of veganism, to give myself so much freedom in food choices. It makes me feel both guilty and gleeful. For now, I’m really enjoying exploring foods I haven’t been able to eat in many many years. I don’t know how long my vegetarianism will last. I’m not giving myself a deadline. The whole point, I guess, is to not be as strict, the way I have been as a vegan. Don’t worry, though. This is not some gateway drug and next thing you know, I’ll be eating a raw steak. I have no desire whatsoever to eat meat. Not in the least.

We’ve gone out to eat at some of our vegan-friendly establishments since my transition, and I still end up ordering a vegan dish because it’s what I prefer, even when I have many vegetarian options to choose from. I still buy soy and almond milk and have no desire to buy a gallon of cow’s milk. I still love my vegan staples of fruits, veggies, nuts, and beans. But now I eat them because I really want them. Whereas, when I was having those strong dairy cravings, I would eat an excess of vegan foods just to try to get rid of my strong dairy cravings.

I still care about animal ethics and I understand that eating dairy and eggs feels like a contradiction to that. I was hesitant to write anything, because I’m really not sure how I feel about things right now. All I know is that I felt a strong need to make this adjustment in my life. It kind of feels like free falling. It’s refreshing in some ways, but frightening in others. I don’t know where I’m going to land or how it’s going to feel when I hit the ground. Time will tell, I guess.

photo by Nina Matthews Photography

Vegansim has been part of my identity for about seven years. I’m proud to call myself a vegan and I admire others who choose to be vegan. It can be a challenging venture at times, going against the grain. It can also be a challenge making sure you’re eating the right foods to fuel yourself effectively.

For the last several weeks I’ve been getting very strong cravings for vegetarian foods and avoiding them has been a major struggle. In order to stave off these cravings, I will eat something else, and too much of it, as compensation. Ultimately, I remain unsatisfied, but full.

I feel as though my body is trying to tell me something. And as someone who cares about my body, I feel it’s time I listen to it. Now, please don’t take this as me “jumping ship” in terms of my veganism. Most vegetarian food and all meats still gross me out. But I feel like I should take some time to explore what my body is craving and see where I end up. Most likely, I’ll end up going right back to being vegan. Or I’ll take on a “mostly vegan, occasionally vegetarian” persona.

Believe me when I say this is a difficult decision to make. I still believe very strongly in animal ethics and want to do what is best for them. But I also want to do what is best for me. Life is far too brief and it’s ok for us all to explore our options, be it different careers, different adventures, different relationships, different geographic locations, or even the little things like a different wardrobe or different hair color. I think we know ourselves best when we keep our minds open and are willing to try on different hats in order to see which ones fit best.

It’s so easy to be type-cast as a certain type of person, and once you’ve settled into that version of yourself, it can be difficult to remember who’s the real you and who’s the you that people expect you to be. I think a prime example is people who are overweight. If you’ve been overweight your whole life and try losing weight, a big hindrance can be the fact that you’ve always identified yourself as overweight and losing that weight feels like losing part of who you are.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that, since I’ve identified myself as vegan for so long, I’ve gotten comfortable in this role. But I can also feel my body fighting me right now. So, I want to give my body a vegetarian vacation. I want to see what happens when I allow myself to eat the things I’ve been trying so hard to avoid. Most likely I’ll end up feeling sick initially, since I’m not used to eating vegetarian foods. And then I’ll probably explore a mostly vegan diet with the occasional vegetarian item.

I completely understand if this upsets some people who relate to my blog based on its pure vegan nature. I humbly ask for your patience as I try to get my body back into balance.

As part of the U of MN welcome weekend for prospective graduate students, psychology and neuroscience students were given the chance to visit the Center for Magnetic Resonance Research on campus. As someone who hopes to work with fMRIs and other neuroimaging techniques in the future, this was the highlight of my already awesome day. In order to enter the lab, we first had to remove all our metal and any cards containing magnetic strips, because the magnetic force in certain parts of the building was powerful enough to demagnify credits cards, drivers licenses, etc. And to show us just how powerful the magnetic force was, we went into a room containing a bunch of metal equipment which was in a room next door to an MR machine and there were metal objects suspended in the air. Like a wrench and a bunch of nails just hovering horizontally, clinging to a drill machine. Pretty amazing.

One part of the tour I had not anticipated encountering was animal research. My stomach immediately dropped and I knew I should prepare for a pretty emotional tour. I had many conflicting emotions. As a researcher, I was incredibly curious about what research they were conducting. As an ethical vegan, I was scared to death of what might be going on in these labs.

The research they were conducting was on two rhesus monkeys. In contrast to the non-invasive, broad scale resonance imaging research they do, which enables you to observe general brain activity in a large amount of neurons with fairly good spacial resolution, the research they were conducting on the monkeys involved microelectrons, which enable them to target a very specific set of a few neurons and learn exactly what those neurons are used for.

From what I could tell, the monkeys are actually treated very well there. The researchers essentially treat them like co-workers. In the experiments, the monkeys were instructed to look at certain things and to change their eye movements at very precise time intervals. It was incredible how accurate their timing was. They were given automatic juice rewards when they performed tasks correctly. I watched the adorable creatures for a good 30 minutes and they really seemed pretty content with their task, and slurping their juice. The researcher told us that, since the task requires very good mental focus, as soon as the monkeys don’t feel like doing the task anymore, their work day is done. He said they hope to work with these monkeys, which he referred to by name, for a long time, so they treat them very well. And they seemed to really have compassion for these monkeys, which made me happy. One of the researchers had this really cute National Geographic picture of rhesus monkeys socializing (grooming each other) as his desktop background:

The sad part about this research is that they implant electrodes into the heads of the monkeys in order to study these neurons. However, the researcher said they get used to having a little piece of plastic on the top of their head very quickly and are not bothered by it. Another downside is that the monkeys do end up spending a great deal of time in cages. So, it’s still hard for me to accept animal research, even under pretty ideal conditions, and even though the research they are doing is very important in helping us understand brain function.

I’m very glad I don’t have to do animal research. I’m happy sticking with my non-invasive human research.

I knew this day would come eventually. The day when I would witness animal research, firsthand. Psychology has a long history of animal research. And many more animals used to be sacrificed in order to study the brain before the invention of wonderful neuroimaging techniques like the fMRI. Needless to say, I’m very happy to be working in psychology now and not 20+ years ago. But I am aware that animal research, which involves animal sacrifice, still exists today. So the boundaries of animal ethics continue to be crossed. But with the continued and rapid advancement in technology and the ongoing fight for animal rights, circumstances are improving.

I woke up bright and early today, knowing that I needed to be on campus by 9am for my morning class, only to discover that the U of MN campus will be closed until noon today. What?! But I’m wide awake now, so going back to bed is not an option. Yes, there was an all-day blizzard yesterday, but it is very rare for the U to cancel school, so I did not think to check school closings as soon as I woke up, nor did I have the insight to check my email at 10:25 last night, when they sent the announcement that campus would be closed. Ah well, I’m not very good at sleeping in anyway. My 9am class was my only class today, so, theoretically, I don’t have to go to campus at all today. Unfortunately, one of the textbooks I need to do my homework for tomorrow is on campus, so I’ll have to head over there at some point today anyway.

I guess I’d be more excited about this, except that we were trapped inside yesterday, due to the blizzard, and I’m kind of itching to get out now. But we did have fun with our new bread maker yesterday! Yup, we bought a bread maker. We haven’t gotten very creative yet, but we can make a mean vegan French bread!

Now, my family had a bread maker when I was growing up and I remember it being pretty awesome. I forgot, however, that when the yeast “drops” the bread maker goes apeshit for a few minutes. So there I was, doing homework in the living room, when all of the sudden the bread maker started jumping around and growling. I was convinced something was terribly wrong. So I wiggled it and picked it up to see if I could get it to calm down. No luck. Eventually, I just decided to wait for it to calm down by itself. And it did. Nice.

So, if you are looking to get a new bread maker (or your significant other decides to get you one as a gift for Valentine’s Day) keep these things in mind: first, they are not as easy to come by anymore. My husband went to several different stores and finally had to resort to ordering one online. Second, when your bread maker seems to be having a meltdown on your kitchen counter, just let it go through its teenage angsty period, and it will calm down eventually. And turn out to be a nice, strapping young loaf of bread.

If anyone has some great homemade vegan bread recipes they’d like to share with us newbie bread makers, please do! And I’ll be sure to share some recipes once we get brave enough break out of our French bread shell.