Chopping block

This seems to be the year of giving up for me. Not in the negative sense but in the positive way. I am not sure that it started with a grand purpose in mind but it has become a way of aligning my life with what I believe, which is so hard to do sometimes. I started off the year giving up eating fish. I had already given up eating red meat (grazing animals) and white meat (poultry) a few years before but fish and seafood was particularly difficult for me to give up. I love the flavor and the experience of eating it, Sushi is one of my favorite cuisines and it cheered me up to eat it. Recently though the ecological and Health problems have become too big for me to ignore. So many fish are near extinction because of over fishing, not to mention the terrible health effects of all of the Mercury and other harmful substances that have been getting increasingly higher in fish and seafood. There was a recent article about the Japanese trying to save Blue fin Tuna from Extinction by having other fish give birth to Tuna. I don’t want to be part of the problem so I gave fish and seafood up in the beginning of the year and I feel a lot better for it. It has been hard but if you have a solid reason for giving it up it doesn’t linger or feel like a sacrifice.
The second thing I gave up this year was Pepsi and Coke products, all of them. I have known for a long time about the bad social and ecological business practices that they both participate in but it was very difficult for me to give up something that had become such a part of my daily life. I wrote a while ago about how much Coke I would drink a day and I was not exaggerating. I decided that I needed to stop supporting companies that I knew were doing terrible things in third world countries. It was very hard in the beginning to overcome the habit but it has become a lot easier lately and I feel so much better for it.
The latest thing has also been really difficult. I gave up cable TV! I always knew that I spent too much time watching Television but I never wanted to do anything about it, not really anyway. I wanted to stay informed and current on things and so I would rationalize my way into keeping it and rationalize my way into watching it from the time I got home from work until the time I went to sleep unless I had somewhere to go or something specific to do. This meant I spent a lot of time watching shows I had no particular interest in but were watchable enough to keep me on the couch or to keep me from shutting it off. If one channel didn’t have something to watch some other channel surely would. This meant a lot of channel surfing and a lot of hours but not a lot of enjoyment. In August I wanted to cut off the cable at the end of the month. Jeannie was fine with it as she never really watched that much TV anyway so I cancelled it. I thought that I should get an antenna for Broadcast TV so we could watch the handful of shows that we actually enjoy so as not to go cut off all TV and probably not be able to stick to it. We only watch Heroes, The Office, My name is Earl, 30 Rock and Medium so I thought that I would just get some rabbit ears and watch Broadcast TV. The problem was that I could not get a picture. I thought I would have to break down and get cable again but instead the solution has been that we have just been watching them online. NBC is no longer offering them on I-Tunes but they have been showing them on their own site so we can watch them when we have time and not have to worry about being home for it or recording it. It also means that we only watch what we consciously want to watch. This cuts down on my TV time dramatically and so far it has worked out really well. I’ll keep you posted if I relapse on any of the things I have given up so far or if I give up anything else. I don’t plan on anything right now but I don’t know how I will feel next week.