Vegetarianism

Such a lame blog title I know. "Great, another self-absorbed hippie with a blog". Well, maybe. Anyhow, this is the story.

Anyone who knows me well knows that I am motivated by my dreams (ref: Marina, etc) -- or at least I talk about being motivated by them more than most people I know. Abouta year ago, I had a dream about killing an animal.

The dream opened at a tense moment. I was across a table or countertop from a furry animal like a cat or a rabbit. I had a knife in one hand. My mission was to kill the animal -- that's all I was to do.

I tried a bunch of times to get it with the knife, mostly missing it completely, but I struck it a couple of times. One time I caught its front foot, which I sliced off. At this point, things started to get horrifying to me. It was clearly in pain and now struggling with the situation. I had very intense feelings of sadness for this creature, but I was still driven to kill it -- now partly out of pity since at this point there was really no going back.

I made a final lunge at it with the knife and pierced its chest area. Clear liquid (not blood, hmm...) poured out. It was staring me dead in the eye. I could feel the life draining from it and it upset me very much. It was asking me over and over, "who do you think you are?"

At that moment, I woke up with my heart racing. I was sweating, breathing heavily, and really bothered inside.

That was really the turning point. We had been eating veg maybe one or two nights a week, but that dream marked when I got more serious about not eating meat.

There are lots of good reasons not to eat meat, not the least of which is avoiding causing pain and anguish in another animal. Environmental reasons, health reasons, kitchen-hygene reasons all point to going veg. On the other hand, lots of folks enjoy the taste of meat in their food -- fair enough.

I definitely found it hard to give up eating certain things -- not having sausage in lasagna or pizza was a biggie. The longer I stay away from meat though, the less I crave it. I'm actually kind of grossed out by chicken now -- I've had it here and there and can really taste the chicken coop in it.

I'll make an occasional exception though. If I'm at someone's house and they don't know I'm veg, I'll usually not say anything because I'm not a veg-zealot and I'm not so grossed out as to make a scene. An infrequent trip to a Ramen house or Vietnamese Pho restaurant is also a time where I'll de-cloak from vegetarianism.

Anyhow, that's the story. Hopefully we'll now get back to more interesting posts...

UPDATE 2014-10-23 - It's been about five years since I've had any meat. I don't miss it a bit.