Why I am a Vegetarian

I do not eat meat (including fish,) and I tend to avoid consuming milk and eggs in their straightforward forms. To some people, this is an affront to the natural order of things. Relax, I am not a radical, but one need not be a vegetarian. Things like animal abuse and the environmental impact of factory farming certainly weigh on my mind, but my reasons for forsaking animal muscle mass are a little more personal than that.
      I worked at a McDonald's during my formative years. Handling those frozen meat patties all the time made me gain a slightly different feeling about my dietary patterns. Before my time working, I loved bragging about how much I loved meat. I thought vegetarianism was stupid. But after making Big Macs with my hands without gloves (they are not required in Waukesha County,) meat started looking gross.
     Soon enough, I gained an aversion to red meat. I could not eat it in front of people; I thought they would judge me, but really, I was judging myself. A few months of going red-meat-less, I went to college (Go Badgers!) and woke up one day with absolutely no desire to eat meat. I literally woke up one day a vegetarian. To this day, I have had absolutely no desire to eat meat.
     Two lessons: 1. I gave up meat as a personal Kosher, and I feel better. 2. I gave up meat because I had lost all desire to eat it. If you ever want to give up something completely, it is always easier to do it when you don't want it.

My Recent Thoughts on Film

The Academy Awards played out last Sunday, and I realized I need to start reading more books.
I have watched so many films the last couple of years, about 2-3 a week, that film dominates as my largest source for narratives. However, I am not sure that is a good thing.
      I do believe film is an art form, undoubtedly the most commercially successful one of the past century. A movie, unlike a book, only takes two hours to watch. This precisely is the problem: all this cinephilia is lowering my attention span. Film too often is a passive experience; we eat popcorn and watch a film. Reading a quality book requires many more hours of dedication and strict focus to avoid shifting one's eyes around the text without gaining comprehension.
     From my own experience, people that read a lot of good books (e.g. if you run your hand across the cover, the author's name does not protrude) are generally better human beings. Thus, my desire to become more of an active reader draws me to a radical decision: I am going to delete my Netflix account. Extreme? Yes. Necessary? Not exactly. A move in the right direction? I believe so.