Alright Day

9:02 PM

Waking Up and Last Night's Relapses

Today has been a pretty good day. I relapsed a lot last night, four times, which is a lot and which I wrote about in yesterday's entry. I don't ever plan on relapsing again although the urge did come to me again today. I know the exact date and time my last relapse was, and I think that will be it for the rest of my life. As long as I can control myself and my urges, everything will be good. Anyway I fell asleep I think at around 12 AM last night and I woke up this morning at around 6 AM. When I woke up this morning I thought it was 8 AM due to the sun shining out so brightly and I was so happy thinking I got 8 hours of sleep, but nope, it was just 6 AM.

Caught up on Journal Entries (not completely though)

Apart from taking some morning log photos, the other main thing I did this morning before work was I worked on my journal entries like I said I would from last night. I caught up on all my missing May entries, and I caught up on some of the ones in April. There's still around 8 days missing in April though, and from what I've done so far in April, I think on those days I literally just bicycled a lot and browsed the Internet a lot, and therefore didn't have a lot to write. Those entries are not priority for me right now, so tonight after I write this, I'll be working on my homework and then studying until I go to sleep.

Updated Habitica Guilds

One other thing I did this morning was on Habitica I updated the guilds I was a part of to tell them that the challenges I was hosting would end tomorrow. I just went to the four guilds and posted updates in them, I rarely read any posts inside there, but a message right above an older comment of mine caught my attention.

Reply to random post I saw

I was copy/pasting some message that I posted in the past, since it's easier to copy/paste reminder posts instead of writing them again, I saw someone post in the Habitica Triple guild that they agreed with vegetarians but couldn't do it herself because they thought that it would be too expensive. I just wanted to reply to that, so I wrote up a post and replied to it, it's probably easier if I copy/pasted.

The context of this is Darc-Star said she saw cabbage selling for 300 yen ($3) and concluded from that being vegetarian was too expensive and m_sklar who herself is not a vegan/vegetarian sensibly replied to Darc-Star that she buys lots of vegetables for under $1 a pound. Apparently this conversation between them in the guild took place 10 days ago but I only saw it today, here's my reply to both:

"@darc-star well vegetarians do not only eat vegetables or even majority vegetables. Most of their calories usually comes from starches just like everyone else (like Rice if they're Asian for example) and starches are the cheapest food category. Other starch foods are legumes (beans, lentils, chickpeas), grains (rice, wheat, corn), and tubers (potatoes, sweet potatoes, purple yams). I'm reading through a thread now on how much vegans are spending a week on food, and I'm seeing $15 a week at the cheapest to $80 a week as the most expensive, with the average being around $30-$40 a week.

As someone who has been vegan for over 7+ years, I'm spending around $60 a week on food feeding two people. It is really not expensive at all.

@m_sklar The reason I don't buy beef or any other meat is not that it is expensive but there is literally no reason to buy or eat it. I don't get the panic rush in people buying meat when people can live without it. Plenty of cheaper healthier plant foods are readily available."

By me spending $60 a week on food for two people, I mean me and my dad, I don't have a partner, and I don't even go out and buy the food. I give my credit card to my dad, and he buys all the family groceries with it, he just knows to avoid any animal products, and we just eat whatever he buys. And often it's like $40 a week or something like that, very inexpensive. I rounded up to $60 to add some padding since sometimes it does go up to that amount, but I think food is so cheap it's practically free. What is expensive is rent / mortgage, that is like a thousand and a half dollars a month which is more than 10x my food expenses.

Anyway m_sklar who is not a vegan, was a pretty cool person. She replied that she understood what I was trying to say and was already doing meatless meals every now and then. That's pretty cool. It is a rarity to encounter anyone with open-mindedness like that. I think her Openness in the OCEAN personality rating (which I'm currently studying for in a class, you can see my own results when I took the personality test in my School Log entry) is high. My openness is actually really high too, like 67% or something. I just checked, my openness is 65% which is pretty high, I think. I'm about 50% on everything else, and then about 35% on neuroticism which is pretty good, but I am very low on conscientiousness at 37% which is bad.

Second reply to random post I saw

So darc-star did not reply back, m_sklar did, and I found some more related info that was super interesting and so I replied to both of them again:

"@m_sklar That's awesome to hear :)! I too grew up eating meat myself but eventually transitioned out of it.

@darc_star

Anyway I found this comparison and thought it was quite funny / entertaining. So there is a "Frugal" community on Reddit, and it looks like the average "frugal" person spends about $50-$75 a week on food: https://www.reddit.com/r/Frugal/comments/2dtpor/how_much_do_you_spend_on_food_a_week/

So the above people are intentionally trying to make their spending as low as possible but they're still spending like $50-$75 a week on food which I think is a lot. In comparison okay, here are some random vegans who are not part of being "Frugal" and yet the average is about $30 per week per person with a bunch of people posting they spend less than $20 a week on food: https://www.reddit.com/r/vegan/comments/gadeeu/how_much_do_you_spend_a_week_on_food_im_sick_of/

That is pretty freaking hilarious if anything. I can relate, some days I literally spend just $1-2 a day on food, but people who eat meat CANNOT imagine that at all. Here is an article of someone living near San Francisco which is one of the most expensive cities in the United States who spends only $175 a month on food, and yep they are vegan: https://www.businessinsider.com/vegan-grocery-budget-trader-joes-2019-3"

I sound like a dick in that last paragraph, but it's true. There were days when I spent only $1-2 for an entire day's worth of food.

Yes I thought the above posts were quite funny. There is a group of "Frugal" people who budget and try their best to lower their food expenses, but then they're spending $50-$75 a week, which is a lot. To me it's a lot. What's funny is that there are some random vegans, who aren't even trying to budget nor do they call themselves "frugal" but a lot of them say they're spending like $15-$20 a week on food, the average being $30-$40, and the most being $80 a week, I think there were only two people in that entire thread who said they spent more than $50 a week on food. But I did ask two other vegans I barely in a knew and they said they spent about $70 a week on food, they buy a lot of processed expensive brands too, so costs can greatly vary from person to person and that one thread is not representative of everyone, though I think it's a good example on how inexpensive it can be.

Work

Anyway after all that was work. It was a pretty normal work day. I sent some emails out yesterday at noon, and I didn't get a reply back for a long time even today. Usually I'm expecting some pretty quick replies, but nothing, for almost an entire work day. A lot of my co-workers were offline too, so I was like, where is everyone? Did everyone just have an extended vacation from the 4th of July? I sent an offline co-worker a message asking where everyone was, and they replied back after a few minutes. It was like a ghost town but I still got some work done, and I got some email replies back eventually.

Purely Studied After Work

After work I studied for a couple of hours. Just straight up studied. I learned a bit I guess, but not enough. Man there is just too much content to learn, not enough time. I was so concentrated and so deep into my studies though, but I didn't do enough of it.

Walking and Jogging Outside Like a Blob

I went out for a walk. I drove to the wealthy neighborhood again, parked, and started walking. When I reached the "Isolated Sidewalk" portion, I took off my shirt and I started jogging. Usually there's no one here except some cars, but there were a bunch of cyclists out on the road today. Oh great, the day there's some cyclist race on this deserted area is the same day I started taking my shirt off and jogging.

There were a few dozen cyclists that passed me, I wasn't embarrassed at all or anything. Like I said my neuroticism is very low, so this pretty much had no effect on me other than me thinking it was kind of funny. But yeah here I was, some overweight nearly bald dude with a big stomach running out half naked in sandals. I'm not super fat, but still, there I was revealing my blob looking body to the world and I wasn't embarrassed by it. I ran about 2.5 miles which is not bad, and then I walked the entire rest of the way back to the car, still with my shirt off. I put my shirt on again as I got closer to where people were concentrated though, because I didn't want to get too much attention while walking across the streets and neighborhoods with a bunch of people around.

Shower and Writing Entry

When I got back home, I took a shower, and then I started writing this entry. Now it's around 10:30 PM, and I now want to finish up my homework that's due tonight, and then I'll be too sleepy to study but I'll probably study for 10 minutes maybe before going to sleep. I am so sleepy right now as I write this sentence though. I'll finish up my homework and then probably go to sleep after because I am too sleepy now.

Anyway that was my day today.