Moving On

Last night I said goodbye to my closest friend. Sometime today her plane will be landing in Chicago. We have known each other practically our entire lives and been best friends since, I think, the first day we met. It's sad for me to think that I don't know when I'll see her again but mostly I feel hopeful, possibly for the first time in my life. I am so happy for her! She and I have both been wanting to get out of West Virginia for as long as I can remember. Now we both finally are. Sure, there is a chance that it won't work out for either of us, but I think it will. It has to.

I don't know if I am really the kind of person who believes in "signs" or whatever you want to call them, but it does seem like things have just sort of fallen together recently. I was accepted for the internship at Farm Sanctuary on my birthday and my friend was offered an amazing deal on an apartment in Chicago on Christmas day. I think it's safe to say that this year we each got the greatest present we could have hoped for. She left today and I am leaving exactly one week from now.

Next week I will be saying goodbye to everyone else. I will be leaving for New York next Saturday and, as pathetic as it is at twenty four years old, it will be the first time I will be away from my family for any length of time. Even during my brief stint in college I was living in Morgantown, only an hour away, and I came home almost every weekend. Sometimes my sister would even come and stay with me at my dorm. I truly hope that this internship somehow leads to a new life but, if it does, it will be hard to walk away form people who have always been so important to me.

It is true that my internship at Farm Sanctuary will only last for three months. So It's not exactly my ticket out of  West Virginia for good but I keep telling myself that once I take this initial step the rest will be easy. For the first time in my life I will be doing something that truly matters to me, something I can really feel good about, something that makes me believe that my life is worthwhile. I can only hope that after this experience I will know what I really want and not be willing to come back here and settle for the life I've had so far.

There are many people here who I care for very much and there are some very good things about this place, but I just don't belong here and I have known that for a long, long time. My goal is to not have to move back to West Virginia after my internship. Either I will love Watkins Glen and decide to stay there or I will just pick a new place and go. Anyone who knows me very well knows that I tend to come up with ideas like this all the time, and so far none of them have worked out. I suddenly decide "Oh, I'm going to go here!" or " I know, I'll do this!" and then later I realize that the idea was ridiculous and I just end up feeling like an idiot. There is a good chance that this one will be no different from any of the others.

The only thing that might make this one different is that this is the first time I have actually taken any sort of step to get where I want to be. I have signed up for this internship. I have paid my deposit. I have packed (at least some of) my stuff. The internship is going to happen. I can only hope that after it's finished I will know what to do next, and be brave enough to do it.


Rachel- Thank you for being such an amazing friend and good luck with your wonderful new life in Chicago!

If Nothing Matters There's Nothing to Save.

I recently read Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer. This is an excellent book for anyone who is new to, or has been considering, vegetarianism/veganism. For more serious vegans, it is definitely still worth reading but you may find yourself getting a bit frustrated with him at times, because he is obviously not an animal rights activist. He is, in fact, just a guy who wants to make sure he raises his kid the right way.

Eating Animals actually began when Foer decided to learn about factory farming in order to determine whether or not he should raise his son to eat meat. I find this very admirable. I wish everyone would think about the way their lifestyle affects their children, and ultimately all the generations that come after them. In most cases, the way you raise your kids will be the way they raise their kids, and the way they raise their kids etc. If you have any doubts about your own lifestyle you should think very hard before you pass that lifestyle on to your children.

I went off on a bit of a tangent there, sorry. This post is not about how people should or shouldn't raise their kids. What I really want to talk about is a story from Eating Animals that Jonathan Safran Foer's grandmother told him when he was a child. She survived World War One by constantly running and hiding from the Germans. She lived on whatever food she could find or steal, which was not much, and toward the end she was very close to starvation. When things were at their worst, a farmer saw her and took pity on her by bringing her a piece of meat. Unfortunately, the meat that he gave her was pork and therefore not kosher. Even though she was on the verge of death, she wouldn't eat it. When Jonathan asked her why she wouldn't eat the pork when she thought it would save her life, she answered "If nothing matters, there's nothing to save."

I loved this story as soon as I read it. I think it conveys perfectly the way that I, and I'm sure many others, feel about veganism. I, like most vegans, have had many ideological discussions with omnivores. These kinds of conversations tend to be very frustrating, because what they usually come down to is the omnivore trying to convince you that you don't really believe in veganism as much as you think you do.

One of the most common question that I think all vegans get asked is the "What if you were starving?" question. I try to be very careful when I answer this one because I don't want to sound unreasonable by saying "Absolutely not! It's never okay to kill an animal!" even though that's basically how I feel. Usually I try to respond by saying that I don't really have that much of a moral objection to someone killing an animal to save his or her own life, but that I would never do it. Most people who I have said this to have obviously not believed me. They either give me a very skeptical look or say flat out that I wouldn't feel that way if I were actually starving.

I'm quite sure that things would look a bit different if I were on the verge of starvation, but I can say with 100% certainty that I would die before I would kill an animal. The reason for this is, if I were to take the life of an animal to save my own, that animal would have died for no reason. My love for animals and my dedication to saving them is what makes me who I am, it's what defines me. If I were to throw all of that away to save my own life, who would I be saving?

So yes, I'm sure being close to death makes people do things that they otherwise wouldn't do. However, I know that, no matter what the situation, I would still have the presence of mind to realize that I would rather die than live with myself knowing that I had forsaken everything I believe in. If nothing matters, there's nothing to save.