I’m avoiding cleaning the house by watching Animal Cops Houston and Pitbulls & Parolees, and I am sitting here bawling like a baby. This might be PMS, but it’s more than likely a response to something I’ve been feeling for a while.
I have reached a point, yet again, in my life where I am finding it difficult to morally and ethically justify eating animals. The paleo diet I was following, where I ate meat with a side of meat, sickens me to think about now. Will I miss the chicken wings? Yes. Will I still eat them occasionally? Likely. Will this be something I reconsider in a couple of years, a couple of months, a couple of weeks? Maybe.
I consider myself prolife in all regards, and I am leaning more and more toward the fact that I need that to include animal lives in that prolife consideration. I desire a consistent ethic in companies I support, friends I make, places I work, and religious institutions I belong to, so it makes sense that I would hold myself to the same standards. I love my cats and my dogs, I am in awe and wonder of wild animals, so it makes zero sense that I eat animals.
I’m trying to get back to a place of peace in my life, to reduce my stress, which has been astronomical for about two years. While I do think that eating more protein has helped me, I also don’t think that ingesting the violence of our current farming practices and ingesting the violence of death has helped me to be a better person. Call me a hippie, but I just can’t get past the fact that a sentient, living, breathing being has to die to feed me. This facet of meat eating has never really stopped bothering me. I have dreams about animals chasing me, and they have never gone away.
On the day after Easter, on baseball’s opening day, I am going back to being vegetarian. This does not mean I’ll start eating a bunch of wheat, soy, corn, or other things that have been genetically modified, but this should mean that our grocery bill will go down a bit, since beans, rice, and vegetables are generally less expensive than meat. I’m not going to be vegan, so I will still use organic dairy and eggs, as I have been. Does the treatment of dairy cattle and chickens bother me? Yes, but I need to take this slow.
I’ve had a good portion of stress in my life in the past two years. I’m not whining about this, but I have noticed that the stress is taking a toll on my body. My body simply feels inflamed. My entire body. My brain feels foggy, my lungs are congested, and my joints are achy, and I think it’s because of stress, so I’m not trying to add more stress by making yet another drastic change in my life.
I’m in a good place right now. My new Caribou is less stressful, because we have more people working at a time. Since I am working my way up to manager, I can even pay my bills. I’m finally getting used to our new house and our new geographical location. I’m making some friends up here, and I am maintaining my friendships with folks in Indiana. I’m adjusting after about six months of the extreme stress of moving 10.5 hours away from where I’d lived for 40 years and changing careers from a professional job where I made $48000 a year to a food service job making $8 an hour. The transition was rough, but now I am through it, and I am ready to take back control of my body (through diet), my mind (through reading), and my spirit (through prayer and meditation).
I’m still training for the Muncie 70.3, though it’s been pretty hit or miss recently, and I am training for Sour Grapes and Big Shoulders. I’ve learned that it’s rough to be on my feet for six. seven, or eight hours a day at work and then still train, but I keep working on it. I’m working on giving myself grace for the times I don’t train. And I keep giving myself grace for being in a weird head space for the past year or so.
Reason Breeds Insanity 