Living Like This

My Grandma passed away last Tuesday. She was 91, and hadn't been mentally "with it" for the past 6 or more years. So, most of the family seems to be taking it pretty well. They say she's really been gone a long time anyway. But I don't care. She was Granma, whether she knew it or not, and now she's gone. When I first found out, I was horrified, especially at the idea of how the news would affect my dad and my sister. Granma was Dad's mother. He was at work all day Tuesday, so he wouldn't find out till late that night. My mom is the one in our immediate family who found out first. She called me when I was making dinner and told me. It was pretty awful, for reasons that are many and hard to explain, but if you'd grown up in our household you would understand.
The next day I felt alright. And the next. And the next. A few times I was able to cry, but only for a few minutes. I talked to my sister and two of my aunts (Granma had 4 children, Dad, Marcia, Karen, and Lory, so I was blessed with a good share of aunts). But I couldn't really cry or feel strongly when I talked to anyone. I really didn't know how to deal with it. Guess I still don't. I got a lot out today though, I'm pretty confident. Rode my bike to the beach (which is a ways and takes a lot of time and energy), and thought about a lot of things and cried and sang and cried. I got pretty off topic...I have a lot of things nagging on my mind right now, some of them being about Granma and some more of them being about how fucked up the world is and how I am actually contributing to how fucked up it is....
I passed several dairy farms on the way, and one of em always kind of bugs me. It has this sign that says "NO VEAL" right in front of all these rows of little rectangles of land enclosed with wire fencing, separated from eachother, each with a crate and a calf. The calves sit in their enclosements looking more bored even than cows in a pasture look. Normally I try to let the image roll off my shoulders, like hey, no veal! that's good, right?. But today I was already upset, and already thinking about how much dairy I eat and how I probably don't need it, and how for Christsakes my housemate doesn't eat the stuff so why should I need to? Methane emitted from cow farts, outrageous amounts of water and biomass necessary to produce milk, cows being totally unnatural and harmful to the ecosystems here, the oil/gas necessary to operate the machinery necessary to get and transport the milk...oh hell, go ahead and tack on unnecessary suffering of young animals, why don't you???!!!
I mean oh my god. Why on earth am I having anything to do with this? I want to be part of the solution, not part of the problem. So I cried about these things. I just felt awful. I still do, but not as bad. It was getting quite overwhelming, these feelings were, but then I talked to my housemate and she made me feel twenty times better--simply by listening, being sympathetic, and talking with me about it. And it really helped that she said she thought about the same thing almost every day. How cool is that.
But yeah, I'm still here on my laptop using fucking electricity generated by coal or natural gas or somethin awful. Oh god. And how am I going to not drink milk? Or eat cheese? I wish I could just say no more, but I gotta know what to replace that with. And make sure I'm willing to actually go through the motions of replacing it. Like, say kale has tons of calcium so I decide to replace it partially with kale--then I have to eat lots of kale all the time! Or several different dark green leaves. Whatever, always requires something difficult for my vegetable-less vegetarian self. Oh and I talk about hypocrisy.