Anyone who's met Pär knows he's a voracious omnivore, taking particular delight in meat and dairy foods. For the month of April, however, he's gone vegan. Not just vegetarian, but vegan: eating no animal products at all. This came about because Pär noticed a few weeks ago that his body kept overheating. He concluded that he needed to finally adjust his Swedish eating habits to the Californian climate. Instead of just cutting down on meat and such, he decided to take a month to clean out his system and live entirely without it.

To his surprise, he's discovered that for the most part he feels really good. He even came home from a Thai restaurant last night claiming that he had eaten lots of tofu -- and liked it. (Real life friends of ours will appreciate the enormity of this development.)

But it is far from his customary inclinations.

"Karen, I want meat."

"I know you do," I said.

"I've gone two weeks without animal products and now I'm like a huge gaping sore, aching for meat."

"Ew."

"Oh, come on! You have to be able to hear things like that. You can't censor out that image."

"Oh, excuse me for not getting off on the picture of you as a huge gaping sore!"

"It's a primal human urge I'm describing. How can you be a writer and cut out anything that's got a bite from your idea of what's acceptable to talk about?"

I thought for a moment.

"You're right," I said. "It's acceptable."

"I mean, really," he continued. "You're DisneyWoman."

A pause. His last words echoed in the suddenly ominous silence.

"Okay," I said, "now you've crossed a line."

Both of us began to laugh.

"I'm very sleepy," he said.

"No excuse. You had me agreeing with you and everything! You sealed the deal, and then you had to push it too far."

"You're not really DisneyWoman," he crooned in a concilliatory tone, stifling a giggle.

I threw a pillow at him. "Just quit now, don't compound your error!"

Pär is reading a book called The Elegant Universe: Superstrings, Hidden Dimensions, and the Quest for the Ultimate Theory. He's always reading stuff like that, groovy scientific non-fiction that gives me headaches just trying to understand the titles. He also gets very caught up in thinking about the ramifications of what he's reading. Not always in a detached, abstract way. Yesterday while I was in my office-née-closet typing away, he walked in and quietly sank to his knees beside me. He put his arms around my waist, pressed his face against my shoulder, and held me close.

"What's wrong, honey?" I said, putting my arm around his shoulders.

"Scared by physics," he said.

"What about physics?" I asked, stroking his hair.

"If I ever got near to a black hole, even if I could pull away from it, when I came back to you, time would have passed much quicker for you than for me. So you might be dead, or very old, and we couldn't be together like this."

"That's what scared you?"

"Yes."

I kissed the top of his head. "It won't happen," I said. "We aren't going near any black holes. There's no guarantees about how long either of us is going to live, but for as long as we've got, we'll live in the same time, together."

It really is a reassuring thing.