I'm going home tomorrow!
Did I mention that I'm going home tomorrow? In twelve and a half hours, I will be on the plane going HOME.
In other news: I wasn't eating there anyway, but they made BLTs for dinner at Theology on Tap tonight (a sad end to a series marked by vegetarian-friendly options). I walked in the front door of Calvert House and the smell of bacon was so strong, if I hadn't been fasting in order to receive communion, I would have promptly been ill in the foyer. Ugh...
SPEAKING OF VEGETARIANISM: I had lunch with the lovely Margaret on Friday, and met up with her outside the Reynolds Club. When I arrived, she was running late, so I settled down on the bench with the sock, taking note of the angry glare of the girl sitting across from me.
A few stitches after I had settled down, a young man came up with a placard with a picture of a pig and a picture of a cat, which read, "Which do you pet, and which do you eat?" He walked past me to throw away the string that had wrapped his pamphlets, and thus I became one of the first objects of his propaganda.
"Would you like information about a vegetarian lifestyle?" he asked me.
"Actually," I replied, "I am a Vegetarian."
"Oh, good for you," he said, "would you like to sign up on our mailing list to become an activist?"
"Oh, no thank you," I said, continuing my work on the accursed heel flap. "Not today." I didn't particularly feel like explaining the fact that a)I'm moving to Canada, b) I probably have very different reasons for my Vegetarianism than he does. (i.e. concerns for the Environment and land use.) I can tell you that he and I have very different reasons for our vegetarianism, because he was asking people if they wanted to live a "cruelty-free" lifestyle and shouting statistics about how many animals are tortured every year-- he tried this on me, too, trying to get me to become a vegan.
The only thing more shocking than how bad he was at engaging people in the real issues at hand, was the number of perfectly nice-looking folk who would deliberately provoke him. One woman, nicely dressed and pulling a toddler on a wagon behind her, responded, "no thank you, I like my meat" and then acted surprised that he redoubled his efforts. She then entered a conversation with the glowering girl, laughing at the vegan activist and asking, "animals eat one another. Why can't we eat them?"
"Animals also eat their own babies," he responded. "Would you eat your own child?"
At this point, I really had to suppress my desire to sigh loudly and perhaps break the third commandment, both of their arguments were so very contrary to my own views on the subject.
No sooner had this argument calmed than the angry girl across from me (who, by now, I had definitely decided I did not like) was joined by a companion and they began unpacking their boxes... of socialist newspapers. Margaret arrived just as they were arguing over who suffers more in this world... farm animals, or the proletariat. (PETA guy at least knew the population of humans in the world, and so was able to point out to the socialists that if their statistics about workplace death were correct, humans would be on the endangered species list...to say the least.)
Oh, and... did I mention that I'm going home?
In other news: I wasn't eating there anyway, but they made BLTs for dinner at Theology on Tap tonight (a sad end to a series marked by vegetarian-friendly options). I walked in the front door of Calvert House and the smell of bacon was so strong, if I hadn't been fasting in order to receive communion, I would have promptly been ill in the foyer. Ugh...
SPEAKING OF VEGETARIANISM: I had lunch with the lovely Margaret on Friday, and met up with her outside the Reynolds Club. When I arrived, she was running late, so I settled down on the bench with the sock, taking note of the angry glare of the girl sitting across from me.
A few stitches after I had settled down, a young man came up with a placard with a picture of a pig and a picture of a cat, which read, "Which do you pet, and which do you eat?" He walked past me to throw away the string that had wrapped his pamphlets, and thus I became one of the first objects of his propaganda.
"Would you like information about a vegetarian lifestyle?" he asked me.
"Actually," I replied, "I am a Vegetarian."
"Oh, good for you," he said, "would you like to sign up on our mailing list to become an activist?"
"Oh, no thank you," I said, continuing my work on the accursed heel flap. "Not today." I didn't particularly feel like explaining the fact that a)I'm moving to Canada, b) I probably have very different reasons for my Vegetarianism than he does. (i.e. concerns for the Environment and land use.) I can tell you that he and I have very different reasons for our vegetarianism, because he was asking people if they wanted to live a "cruelty-free" lifestyle and shouting statistics about how many animals are tortured every year-- he tried this on me, too, trying to get me to become a vegan.
The only thing more shocking than how bad he was at engaging people in the real issues at hand, was the number of perfectly nice-looking folk who would deliberately provoke him. One woman, nicely dressed and pulling a toddler on a wagon behind her, responded, "no thank you, I like my meat" and then acted surprised that he redoubled his efforts. She then entered a conversation with the glowering girl, laughing at the vegan activist and asking, "animals eat one another. Why can't we eat them?"
"Animals also eat their own babies," he responded. "Would you eat your own child?"
At this point, I really had to suppress my desire to sigh loudly and perhaps break the third commandment, both of their arguments were so very contrary to my own views on the subject.
No sooner had this argument calmed than the angry girl across from me (who, by now, I had definitely decided I did not like) was joined by a companion and they began unpacking their boxes... of socialist newspapers. Margaret arrived just as they were arguing over who suffers more in this world... farm animals, or the proletariat. (PETA guy at least knew the population of humans in the world, and so was able to point out to the socialists that if their statistics about workplace death were correct, humans would be on the endangered species list...to say the least.)
Oh, and... did I mention that I'm going home?
3 Comments:
why was the girl across from you glaring? were you enslaving the proletariat with your sock?
By
Mr. G. Z. T., at 5:51 AM
And you're going to avoid this by going to the Bay Area?
Or are the PETA/socialist activists out here perhaps less loony, because less isolated?
By
Patrick, at 4:21 PM
The ones that irritate me the most are the ones who start with "Do you have a minute for the environment?" My internal, if not spoken, response is always along the lines of "I have hours for the environment, and I've no intention wasting any of them talking to you." Grr.
By
Nemo, at 11:16 AM
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