On this day, many, many years ago, I became a vegetarian. I believe it was 1994 - so 13 years ago (that trig comes in handy, I tell ya). My dad was in the hospital having surgery on his back, I was going thru high school drama. My mom made pork chops for dinner and I looked at it and was like, "hey, this is the same shape it was when it was actually in the animal." I was forever changed and couldn't eat meat again. I started off with the pork chops and ribs, fried chicken and other items in their original shape but finally I just couldn't differentiate any more and I quit altogether. I still eat eggs and dairy - so I'm a lacto-ovo vegetarian. I had tried to quit the eggs and dairy but got so frustrated when I was out at lunch with my friends at McDonald's, ordered a salad, and found the dressing had eggs! When I thought about it, I remembered being on my Granddaddy's farm and getting the eggs from the nests and I was totally fine with that. I later learned about cage free eggs and all that jazz, but I'm cool with where I'm at with the veggie life. Of course, when I moved to the co-op in Chicago, I felt like a full fledged carnivore compared to all the organic vegans. I thought I was frugal for buying clothes at Dots for like $3, they bought their clothes from the thrift store for 50 cents, or even better, got it from a dumpster, or grew their own organic cotton and made their own clothes from a two hundred year old loom from the underground railway (okay so it wasn't that bad, but still). Working at American Eagle downtown and occasionally getting a McDonald's cheeseburger no meat made me like the consumerist enemy or something. I thought that I would totally fit in at the co-op given my tree-hugging ways, but apparently I wasn't tree-hugging enough for the tree-huggers. I guess I'm just in the middle - not carnivore enough for the meat eaters, don't spend enough to be considered consumeristic by most, but not exactly ready to chuck it all and move to the monastery, or hippie commune, just yet.
Copied from myspace blog on 11/10/13
No comments:
Post a Comment