Welcome to day 6 of my week-long vegan eating adventure.

Breakfast: Wheatabix cereal with soy milk.

Lunch: I drag a friend to California Vegan Restaurant on Sunset. I get a sweet and sour seitan (wheat gluten) dish with steamed brown rice. The sauce is tangy and tasty with pineapple, which I always love. But the seitan has a weird consistency and taste, it looks like a cross between tofu and chicken and it kind of creeps me out.

Dinner: I go with some friends to Famima!!, the Japanese convenience store, to get some cheap dinner. I spend twenty minutes looking at all their boxed dinners, studying ingredients, trying to figure out what I could eat. I end up just getting a fruit plate. I watch my friends eat their food and think of a new annoying thing about eating vegan: you can’t try your friends food. I’m someone who always steals other people’s food, so this is incredibly annoying.

2 AM: My friends and I go to Norms diner in Santa Monica after dancing to exhaustion at Gas Lite. Everyone orders pancakes, eggs, ice cream. I order a salad. I get a small plate of iceberg lettuce. I don’t know how they make their salad dressings, so I stick with vinegar. Major yuck.

It occurred to me today that one great way to eat vegan would be through one of those meal-delivery services. Does anyone know of one that has good vegan options?

[photo from veganmenu.blogspot.com]

There were tons of adorable nerdy boys wearing glasses and semi-skinny jeans who looked like they’d just come to chill and have a good time with their friends. Yeah, there were a few desperate-looking ones in buttoned-down collared shirts and pressed slacks, but I just ignored them. I couldn’t understand why my friend S (identity protection) always complained to me about not being able to find datable girls in Los Angeles, there seemed to be plenty of cute guys. So I decided to put myself in his shoes, and I looked around for girls. It was an eye opener.

To start with, there were five guys to every girl, and for every normal-looking, attractive girl, there were ten über-slutty ones. I saw one majorly stacked blonde wearing a blue dress so low cut I could practically see the surgery scars on her nipples. Fake tans, platinum extensions, and cheap stilettos were everywhere. We weren’t in some swanky bar on Sunset, and these girls weren’t going to find their future investment banker husband here, this was Barney’s, a bar full of currently unemployed, future TV showrunners. I suddenly felt incredibly bad for S.

S lives in West Hollywood and the majority of his friends in his neighborhood are gay men; on most nights he ends up with them at a gay bar, like The Abbey on Roberston. I tell him he should come down to visit me in Santa Monica, but he responds with an enthusiastic “No!” declaring it way too far. Now I’m going to have to spend the summer convincing him it’s worth braving the 10 freeway in order to get laid.

The same way that New York is a city of immigrants, Los Angeles is a city of re-locaters, people who have come from all over America to the Dream Coast, trying to chase their Hollywood fantasy. This means two things: one, cute film-geek guys who can play six-degrees of Steven Spielberg and quote “The Big Lebowski” ‘til you’re suddenly craving White Russians and bowling; and two, faux blonde, faux breasted girls who came to LA to be actresses.

Turns out, this is not a good city to be a single, straight guy. My mission now is to get S out of West Hollywood. I love WeHo (a compound word never to be said aloud) because you can walk to dinner at Real Food Daily (yummy vegan burritos), get coffee at Urth Café (yucky Lindsay Lohan sightings), and search for vintage treasures at the Melrose Trading Post, but you’re not going to find a straight, normal girl there. The same goes for guy scoping.

Barney’s had straight women and men, but most bars in West Hollywood are for the man-on-man, so my advice to those of you who live in an area like West Hollywood, populated by same-sex love, but prefer those with different genitalia than your own, you’re going to have to get in your car and venture out of your comfort zone. It’s worth the gas money, and you can even bump boots in the back of your ride.

[photo of hot flaming dudes from laist.com]