iVegans are Better than Regular Vegans.

I partook in a deliciously Angeleno thing to do the other day and ate dinner in a vegan restaurant. Now, as much as I mock the dietary peculiarity of the average white or otherwise empowered Los Angeles resident, I have a special appreciation for it as well. The standard for deliciousness and nutrition is relatively high in our fair city, and the discerning diner (i.e. MOI) is to benefit. I like having these restaurants around as much as I hate their fat faces.

That being said, it’s often a source of great comfort to walk into a restaurant and know I could kick the ass of any man in it. I’ve never been known as a particularly tough or violent man, but something deep within me needs to know that if push came to shove, I would be able to put some couscous-chomping pussybitch in yoga pants through a wall. Provided that there were no studs in the wall for at least six feet on either side and there was already a small tear in the drywall paper. Semantics.

Come to think of it, there are a great many aspects of the douchebag culture here that I find comforting. Apple computers, for instance, are one of the common languages of any cool (“cool,” in this context, meaning “Prius-leasing”) person in town. I’m not talking Myspace cool, but Facebook cool. Twitter cool. Meticulously-scanned Polaroid cool. Firefox 3.1 cool. iCool. All these people use Macs and love sharing a common laguage. An actual conversation that has passed verbatim between me and about a million other Los Angeles residents:

THEM: Hey man, how’s the battery life on your Macbook Pro there?
ME: Funny you ask, because I just got off the phone with AppleCare and they’re sending me a new one.
THEM: Nice. (extends hands from body in a half-shrug, indicating an inability to understand how awesome something is) Apple tech support, am I right?
ME: Shit yeah, Negro. Best customer service at anything ever.
THEM: Same thing happened to me when MobileMe shat out all my contacts.
ME: Yeah, that was the big 2.0 issue for a while, n’est pas?
BOTH AT SAME TIME: Thank God for Time Machine!

It’s a glorious town sometimes. Stay tuned for a forthcoming “local news” feature on My Name is Blog, the Current Events Knowledge Olympics. A chronicle of the blazingly competitive conversations middle-class Angelenos have with each other about shit that’s going on in the world. Coming up first, the qualifying round for the new event “600-word obscure liberal blog quote-a-thon.”