Throughout my high school career I met thousands and thousands of people in school, at dances, at clubs, at restaurants, at parties, at the mall, at the movies, through friends...etc. Those few people who stood out the most to me, were those who were predominantly rude or loving.
Rude Ignorance And Loving Wisdom
One event, in particular, that has attached itself very well in my memory, occurred my junior year of high school (2010). I simply strolled down the unnaturally-empty main hallway of my school during seventh period. The hallway was, I would say, about fifteen feet wide, lined with elegant-beige-marble flooring. The hallways comfortably accommodate the thousands of students that slowly group up and migrate around each other in the passing periods between classes. As I got closer to exiting the west entrance, I was bombarded with a group of five jocks. Apparently feeling like they did not have enough walking space, two changed their paths to the right of mine, while the other three were lined side-by-side on the left of my path. As the oh-so-wonderfully popular boys closed the distance between us, the two closest to either side of me shoulder-checked me. These fools nearly knocked me completely on my butt, but because I had, at that point, three years of dance experience under my belt (dance requires great amounts of balance and coordination), I managed to keep myself from utter embarrassment. As if I was an animal I instinctively prepared myself, mentally, to more or less attempt to defend myself from being brutally beaten. Luckily, the boys were, well, boys. Boys are all talk, no game. The superior boys of our school, decided to continue slowly down the hall while one of them called out disparaging-ly, "next time move out of our way you faggot." I knew that they didn't use the word faggot very often, I had known four of them since the first grade. The reason they used that word, was for one specific reason --I had come out of the closet as a result of pieces of poetry, letters, and many other forms of writing I produced for my portfolio presentation in my creative writing class. One of those jocks, who used to be one of my best friends, also was in that creative writing class. Of course to keep his cool status he intrusively dis-reputed my luminous work from the heart, and injected the plague into student body.
A week or two later I, on my own terms, disclosed my sexual preference to my dance instructor because I was having a very difficult time dealing with all the issues that surrounded being so. Her name was Katie, and she had recently got married to the man of her dreams. Katie was about 5'1" with brown hair professionally put up in a bun and a very skinny body (when I say skinny, I mean she was a stick! Dancers do tend to be twig-thin...ohmygoodness, now I am stereotyping!). Katie was easily comforting, caring, and compassionate towards the subject-matter, she was/is much like a saint as she could hold the world on her shoulders with a smile and kind gesture. As if I were her own child that she loved more than anything else in the world, she confidently told me to always be yourself, push further than your own standards for success, and remember: homosexuality does not define who you are, it is only a mere fact about your sexual preference. Staying true to your heart will an auspicious future. Find what you have a passion for and through that you can provoke thought and change minds. --This was the initiation of a drastic change of the way I perceived the world.
Feeling almost meditated (with white doves flapping exquisitely around me) I let those words bore into my heart.For the first time in over a year, I felt whole. I felt peace. I felt love, for others and myself. An most of all I felt like a human-being. For over a year I didn't want to live with what my heart was telling me, though others tended to express aloud the abomination I was, I destroyed myself emotionally more than they did. I was a cheap cigarette that was enjoyed for a couple moments then tossed into the street to forever roll around aimlessly with the breezes until I was obliterated by weather, a shoe, or even a vehicle.
Carnivores and Herbivores
Continuing to create stereo-types, I have come to a conclusion that our personalities directly relate to what we eat. Thus:
Those who eat meat lavishly tend to have the traits of being ignorant of many things in life, having aggressive behavior, and having personal arrogance. As it has seemed to be, those who eat meat with almost every meal, and would dislike almost any meal without the presence of it, tend to be entirely rude.
On the opposite side, those who eat little to no meat tend to have the traits of being well-educated, having compassionate behavior, and being altruistic. As it has seemed to be, those who eat little to no meat, and dislike an abundance of it, tend to be perfectly loving.
My parents are a prime example of my theory. Throughout the beginning of my childhood my father was missing. When he was present he tended to be drunk, which constituted to verbal and physical abuse for my entire family. As he finally got out of his drinking habit, he was not completely horrible, but was still very judgmental of others race, sexuality, religion, etc. It was always embarrassing to be around this ignorant and aggressive behavior, so I tended to avoid him at every opportune moment. Take one guess as to what he favors most in his diet. M-E-A-T. My father absolutely loves him some sizzling steak or steamy pork-chops with a side of slimy hamburger or even stinky Rocky-Mountain-Oysters (bull testicles-yuck!). There was many arguments about not having enough cow in his expected meals. However, my mother has never had a big appetite for meat.
My mother taught me how to be a true gentleman, how to cry, how to love, and how to succeed, and so much more. She is a lovely person who does not criticize anyone for anything. As she taught me very well, there is never a reason to be mean, hurtful, or judgmental of others because what if you were in his or her shoes, and was does it accomplish in the end? You would be really depressed if you were different and others made fun of you. As you could have guessed, my mother is very sparing with her choices of meat. She prefers chicken or turkey over cow or pig, and always has vegetables, a pasta, or a salad to accommodate at least two-thirds of the meal.
Thinking back, those punk-boys tended to go out to the McDonald's or Jack-In-The-Box down the street, eating hamburgers, tacos, and the like for lunch. And on the other hand, Katie always had an organic and meat-less meal when she went out and grabbed something to eat with her proteges after long rehearsals. She was vegetarian. So we can continue to argue that those who eat meat do not promote the well-being of themselves or others as vastly as vegetarians.
Belittling Bums And Morphing Minds
After recalling the many memories of rude and loving people, I was able to correlate the personality of a number of the people with his or her diet. I definitely do not intend to say the every person's diet attributes to his or her personality, but to say that a person's personality tends to rule the choice in diet.
In my diet, I have always tended to avoid eating more than small portions of meat, if not avoiding the subsistence entirely. My identical twin, however, has a good appetite for meat. Growing up, I was always more sensitive and caring about everything, down to even trying to save the ants he would try to kill with a magnifying glass. I always saved my allowance and helped out around the house, while he spent my allowance and destroyed the house. Our personalities definitely had a correlation with our appetite for meat.
After years of finding myself, finding my love, finding what matters most to me, I have changed my diet to accommodate less and less meat. Though I have not gotten rid of it completely yet, mainly because I am still somewhat uninformed of how to get the sufficient nutrients my body needs. Being vegetarian is very difficult. (If you think about it, animals are a part of our moral community-which is defined as any living thing that can feel pleasure or pain.) I have, ultimately, become even more of a caring and compassionate person as I have easily progressed in refusing the repulsive muscle and fat we call meat. To further elaborate, I surrendered over 500 hours during my hgh school career towards volunteering for the elderly because of the nature of my personality, and therefore, diet. I have become almost completely organic, in a sense that I do not contain the normal pesticides and hormones of a typical crop, but I have been grown naturally to be a beautifully grown crop that benefits the environment around it and the people that can make use of it.
Though, I have changed a good amount, not every person makes this sort of change. There are still those individuals in each person's life that love to eat meat more than they could love to read a book, love someone or something, or even to take the time be empathetic or sympathetic of others. And most of those people may never change; they will forever be belittling bums. But those people who will positively affect the community around them (humans, animals, environment, etc.) will forever be morphing minds to think informatively and logically about the world as a whole. Conclusively, those people will create a domino-effect with the current generations to future generations benefiting others, themselves, and beyond! (it only takes one person to inspire the world-Weston Schutt)
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