Death

I had a very enjoyable breakfast the other day with one of my vegetarian friends. We talked of many things, including bovine growth hormones, rat urine and feces, Wiffle ball bats, students and the Internet, and the evident cost-savings those who grow cattle gain by feeding spinal cords to their livestock. I wonder how 4H feels about that (and, without looking it up, I'm so smart I already know that stands for Heart, Hand, Home, and something else that starts with an aitch). I had a ms corrected once, by the way, by a teacher who didn't like my use of the word aitch.

Anyway, so today I learned that some five thousand people die each year from food-born causes, which is a lot. There's a lot more outcry about that, though, than there is about my pet tragedy, one that kills six times that number. Maybe people yell because many more get sick, and food poisioning is no picnic.

Still, that's only about as many deaths as the 25-35 year olds rack up each year killing themselves. Or, the 35-45 year olds. Nobody cares much about suicide, something I think by definition is 100% preventable. I also believe that suicide and its causes are much more tragic than death by salmonella.

Also today the CDC released some numbers, citing poor eating habits and lack of exercise as causing about four hundred thousand deaths each year, slightly less than the number caused by smoking. Eliminating the super-size fries should help there.


Finished re-writing chapter seven and began chapter nine. A lot of the stuff is coming out better, but I'm wondering if I'm being too fancy and losing the flavor I was going for with my NaNo draft. The trouble with writing colloquially is that so much of it is such poor writing. I like the idea of someone saying "pretty much," but it's not writing that's likely to get an agent's blessing.