A rock and a hard place...

I never thought I'd be writing this particular entry I'll be honest!  A while ago I gave up alcohol.  Not sure how long now...but something like a couple of months.  I'd not really given it much thought, other than that I wasn't really feeling all that good physically after drinking and I don't like the way that alcohol dominates so many of our society's social gatherings.  Not a biggy really and I've had no trouble with it.

At new year, I resolved to give up swearing...since it's become a very overused method of enunciating my feelings these days and the kids find my insistence on their 'non swearing' a bit hypocritical.  Fair enough.  So I've given that up too.  (Not been entirely without mishap so far, but less than one swear a day...so pretty good considering).

I also resolved to give up sugar.  I've been talking for a while about not really enjoying the meat eating thing....but Daile talked me into sugar abstinence first...which makes sense.  So...again, no problems!  I decided that I'd try to make more vegetable dominant meals anyway, and transition slowly away from meat altogether. I don't really know all that much about nutrition, so I'd sort of committed to make the effort to prepare things for helping me to avoid the sugar.  At the art school for example, I think I was eating half of the biscuits that I buy for my students.  I reckon that's about right since they were still going down when the school was closed on holidays but I was there painting, only half as fast!

Two days ago, whilst I was looking at a website about vegan meals, I noticed a comment by someone that said she'd been a vegan since she watched the documentary called 'Earthlings'.  So I looked it up. It's on YouTube..and I've put a link at the end of this post.

I found this to be very moving.  I've seen this kind of footage before, but for some reason, it didn't really connect with me in the same way.  I felt that, having seen it, I couldn't in good conscience continue to eat animal flesh and eat or use animal products, The decision to commit to this has, I suppose, been 'about to happen', since I was already thinking about this kind of thing, nutrition, health, getting older etc. But if you watch this, it's kinda hard to ignore the fact that you are what they call a 'Species-ist' (like a racist or sexist) if you don't make the connection.

There were lots of images that were shocking and I admit I was moved to tears on a couple of occasions.  This image shows an animal that has had it's skin removed for the fur...and it's STILL ALIVE!  The movie draws a parallel with the holocaust, and I kept imagining the same treatment being meted out to humans and how I'd feel about that.

So, I'm now attempting to be VEGAN on top of the other recently given up stuff! Please take a look at the movie and consider how YOU feel about this...  Earthlings movie link