So I'm back home in Louisville now until the fall semester begins, which obviously means I have become seriously unmotivated. I don't know what it is about being at home, but it makes me want to be completely unproductive. God forbid if I come home on a break and have a paper to write or something, because it certainly won't get done. Perhaps it's this sweltering heat (I know, you probably haven't noticed it, but I'd call it a heat wave!) that has made me lazy. Either way, I'm forcing myself to write this blogpost so that I don't feel like a complete waste of matter. Please enjoy (or harshly criticize, depending upon your particular inclination) the story of how I became a vegetarian. I thought I'd make a blogpost about this, not because it's all that entertaining in and of itself, but because it's probably my most frequently-asked-question--including "Are you albino?" and "Do you have eyebrows?" which come close, but only manage to make the top five.
When I was in sixth grade, I wasn't exactly a social butterfly. Having come from an elementary school where I was the captain of the quick recall team, constantly told people that I was going to make them spontaneously combust (like I was Marnie from Halloweentown), and had the (actually kind of justified) nickname of "The Human Dictionary," I wasn't very well-versed in conducting normal social interactions, which rather hindered my making friends. Sure, I wasn't completely deficient--c'mon, I wasn't homeschooled--but I think a deaf-mute probably could have made more friends way faster than I did. I had a tendency to antagonize and patronize people as a defense mechanism--I had read Lord of the Flies, and I knew it was kill or be killed, even in public school (hell, especially in public school)--so even if I did manage to socialize with others, it often didn't end well. This was particularly the case when I interacted with the opposite sex; I stayed in the "boys have cooties" phase a tad bit longer than most other girls.Yes, I made an enemy of almost every male who crossed my path, but I only had one arch nemesis: Craig Martin. (*Note: That's not his real name; it has been changed in case he ever happens to read this, which is doubtful. But if you knew me in the sixth grade, you will know exactly who I'm talking about. Also, on a side note to the side note, I had to browse a baby names site to find a suitable alias for this guy, which reminded me of how the fad in the sixth grade happened to be browsing baby names sites, for whatever reason. Is this Google+? Because I just came full circle.)
I'm not really sure what it was about Craig Martin that irked me, but I absolutely loathed that kid. It may have been because I thought he had a crush on me, which A) was a pretty outrageous concept at the time, considering my lack of fashion sense and my offensive manner of communicating with others solely via insults, and B) freaked me out a bit, as boys were definitely not my favorite group of human beings at the time (in fact they were probably second to last only to carnies.) He was also rather stereotypically redneck, which I found highly disagreeable--though it's true I can lapse into a pretty embarrassing southern drawl if I'm not careful. He wore an exorbitant amount of camo, constantly talked about hunting and four-wheeling and other mysterious hick activities, and he also happened to have a neck that was actually rather red in color. In reality, Craig was probably a very nice boy who never tried to offend a soul, but to me, he was rude and crude and full of faulty redneck logic that I simply had no patience for. And as the year progressed, our rivalry got more and more heated, to the point where even our teachers noticed our constant feud--they would make sure to keep us as far away from each other as possible when they assigned seats, and made sure never to put us together for group projects. Our battle seemed somehow larger than the sixth grade, more like a battle of cultures, a battle between right and wrong. We were like Israel and Palestine, Mario and Bowser, Conan and NBC. It was a battle of epic proportions--okay, maybe not that intense, but it certainly felt that way to me. I wouldn't have been surprised if we had quipped to the death; I could have foreseen the headline: "Sixth-Grade Girl and Boy Insult Each Other into Heart Failure."
The day was like any other day at Noe Middle School on 6 Pacesetters: kids were chatting amongst themselves because the teachers didn't actually bother to hold their attention, and this chatter was audible everywhere because half of the "classrooms" in the school were just spaces enclosed by bulletin boards on wheels (I kid you not.) I was sitting in social studies, where our teacher usually just played Metallica and forced us 11-year-olds into arguments about politics, just minding my own business and reading a book, when I realized that the chatter was getting much louder than normal. The decibels in the room were climbing so quickly that you'd have thought someone had whipped out a new Pokemon game or scantily-clad pictures of some Nickelodeon star or something.
Well, they were scantily-clad pictures, all right.
Of a deer.
Being undressed.
And by "undressed" I mean sliced open, gutted, and skinned. In the most graphic and gory manner you can imagine. Looking at those photos, you'd think whoever killed that deer was a sociopath who was practicing his murder techniques on woodland creatures (I know, I watch too much Criminal Minds, sue me.) I had known several people who hunted deer and other animals, and it had never particularly struck me as upsetting before, but these pictures filled me with rage and disgust. Especially when I finally saw who had brought them in for this sick show and tell: Craig Martin.
I instantly got the urge to punch Craig in the face, but, seeing as I'm not a violent person, nor could I probably inflict pain on anyone larger than an infant, I refrained from such tomfoolery. Instead, I began to snatch the pictures from everyone's hands, scolding them for looking upon such heartless material. All I could think of was Bambi's mother, sprawled out on the ground, a bullet through her skull, her intestines oozing out onto the grass, and little Bambi observing from the trees, orphaned and now destined for a lifetime of therapy or gang activity, or maybe like the deer version of Dexter. It was appalling. It was grotesque. And it was all Craig Martin's fault.
I took the photos over to Craig's desk and slammed them down menacingly. "What are these!?" I shouted.
He looked bemused at my horror. "Pictures of my hunting trip from last weekend. We gutted open a great big doe. Isn't it awesome?" He asked this with full knowledge that I most certainly did not think it was awesome. I seethed.
"How could you defile the corpse of this poor mama deer!? You are a psycho! You're heartless! This is absolutely disgusting and you need to put these pictures away right this minute or I will tell Ms. Pollock that you are causing a disturbance!" (I used to be a huge tattle tale. Once, in the third grade, I tattled so much during a single recess period that when there was finally something legitimate to tattle on--fifth graders making little kindergarteners box each other--my teacher wouldn't even listen to me.)
He began taunting me with the photos, enjoying his sadistic power to disturb me with the gore. "Look at this one! Cool, huh? I think that's her spleen! Oh, and see this one! We're cutting the skin right off of her back!" My face got hot and I was practically in tears. For a minute I thought I was going to morph into the Incredible Hulkerina. And honestly, thinking about it right now, my anger was about 10% caused by Bambi's mother's slaying and about 90% due to Craig Martin's relentless teasing.
We went back and forth with our argument for several minutes before Craig did the most insensitive thing he could think of. He took the deer's skin, which he had brought in to show to everyone (and possibly to snuggle up in if he got cold), and he threw it on top of me. It was like I was a yapping bird and he threw a blanket over my cage to shut me up, which was already rude enough, but to use the very skin he had torn from this poor animal's body? That was just crossing the line. Actually, that was crossing lines, plural.
I gave off a rather loud and sustained shriek, silencing the rest of the classroom, and then I yanked the blanket off of my head and threw it back at him with the force of my entire body. My hair, of course, was mussed up, tears were falling down my face, my clothes were disheveled. I looked like Bear Grylls after a battle with a hyena for shelter from a stampede (has he ever done that? If not, he totally should.) My disorderly appearance and my rage teamed up to make me feel like a tribal woman, putting me in touch with my one-eighth Blackfoot Indian heritage, and my heart yearned to avenge the death of this creature of nature.
"That's it!" I howled. "I'm going to become a vegetarian!" I used the word like it was a weapon, like I was verbally giving Craig Martin one big middle finger. "Because of you, Craig Martin, I am never going to eat meat again! I'm going to save animals! I'm going to save the world!" I know, I was ambitious.
"Oh really?"
"Yes, really!"
"Good luck with that, Christine. Ha!" He doubted my commitment and my self-control. But he had another thing coming.
I went straight home after school and finished the package of bologna in the refrigerator. Well, I thought, it makes more sense to just start this whole vegetarian thing tomorrow, clean slate. And this is perfectly good bologna. And I love bologna. This bologna can't be sitting around the house when I'm trying to go veg! It's gotta get eaten. And so it was. Along with several other meat items in the refrigerator.
I sat my parents down that evening and told them of my intentions to become a vegetarian. My mother was concerned--"But how will you get your protein?! That can't be healthy! You'll be anemic!"--but mostly my parents were skeptical of my seriousness. "Yeah, okay, Tina, you're gonna be a vegetarian. Right."
The first few days passed with everyone at school and at home treating me like I was trying to change ethnicities rather than eating habits, like sooner or later I would realize that it wasn't going to happen and I would just give in and stop trying to be Asian.
But I didn't.
I kept going meatless.
And kept going meatless.
More to prove to everyone else that I could actually make such a bold decision and stick with it, rather than to save the animals. But I certainly put on the PETA persona those first few months, doing all kinds of research, writing papers on animal cruelty, joining mail lists, taking pledges, and just generally being a psycho. I was probably pretty unbearable to be around--well, more so than usual, at least.
Eventually my rivalry with Craig Martin simmered down and evolved into more pity than hatred. He "asked me out" (whatever that was supposed to mean in middle school) the next year and cried when I turned him down. Poor guy. Then he went to high school and became some crazy intense jujitsu master or something, presumably ditching many of the redneck attributes for which I despised him so much. Funny how people change.
But though Craig is no longer my arch nemesis nor a huge hick barfly on the horse face of the planet Earth, I remain a vegetarian. Probably from not having eaten meat for so long, I now find the concept of consuming flesh to be quite peculiar indeed. Even though it's probably one of the most natural elements of any ecosystem, it seems rather unnatural to me. Then again, I'm generally known to view normal things as odd (e.g. swimming, drinking alcohol, crying at movies, etc.), so my vegetarianism is really just another feather in my freak cap. In fact, I probably have enough feathers in my freak cap to qualify as a Native American chief.
So the next time you eat a meal with me and realize that I have no meat on my plate, you won't need to address that elephant in the room, because you'll already be one step ahead.
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