Today hurts a bit
No seriously, my left foot hurts, a new sort of pain I haven’t felt before, right behind my middle toes. But I managed to get through 5 miles, and not a bad time, not a good time either. After yesterday’s great performance, I expected today would be a little tougher. Hopefully, everything will have sorted itself by Saturday.
Meanwhile, everything is working itself out. I have lots of family and friends who are of course very supportive, and in the right way. They don’t tell me what they think I want to hear, we just talk and have fun, and if I need help with something, I know they’re there. One thing bothered me on my run today, and I shouldn’t dwell on things, but this is important.
So, the thing about my vegetarianism, which I think you all already know, it’s not a dietary choice because I think it will make me thinner, stronger, or faster. It’s not a dietary choice based on fashion or popularity. This is about the environment, it’s a moral choice, it’s an ethical choice. That being said, I get some people who say they are vegetarian eat fish sometimes, they are not vegetarian, fish is not on a vegetarian menu, end of. Now, I understand that salted cod (bakala, which I hated eating even when I did eat meat) is a HUGE thing on New Year’s Eve in Southern Italy. That does not mean, under any circumstances I am going to eat it! I don’t eat fish! I don’t care if it would insult so-and-so, or that there’d be nothing else to eat.
This, by far, was one of the dumbest arguments I’ve ever had in my life. It shows a complete disregard for me as a person, my choices, my conscience, my life. This isn’t one of those “do this for me” situations. I made a choice that all creatures deserve to live and that since I don’t require them to die for me to live, then I will not enable their destruction to the very best of my ability. What amazes me is how anyone who reads this regularly could be mistaken for anything else. But in the end, it’s about control, it’s about power. “How far can I get this person to compromise themselves to ‘prove’ that they love me?” But in the end, that’s not love at all. That’s power, that’s manipulation, and all it serves to do is destroy that which you claim to love.
Why did I think about all this? Because running through the port, all the fishermen are out selling their catch, people are buying it, and the smell (the smell of fish has always made me a little sick) and the sight of all these creatures sitting on a table, dead or dying, makes me sad. I accept that I must deal with it, I accept that this is how these people make a living, this is how over 1/6th of the world’s population gets their protein (fish), but I won’t like it. I also won’t participate in it. You’re talking to a kid who bitched out a veterinarian at 6 years old because I found a cat dying on the side of the road, carried the cat over a mile and a half to the office, and they refused to heal the cat, because who was going to pay for it? No, I’m not going to eat fish so somebody feels better. And if that’s what it takes for you to feel loved, you will never be happy, nor secure in any relationship, because people all have a limit with that stuff.
I am going to try to stop complaining about this whole thing, but I feel like I have been keeping so much inside for so many months, because you just ignore so much from others when you’re in a relationship with them. But the other part is, I think I’m realizing exactly why I am upset about these things. Stuff like the bakala show a complete disregard for me as a person. It’s basic respect, and I think I should point that out when I notice it. Because, I don’t think even the person doing it realizes what they are doing all the time. So, maybe my sharing these things can get people to realize what they are doing to others, or that they are in a bad situation that maybe they should get out of. I stood up, and I respected my choices, and my lifestyle, regardless of how angry it made someone else. We should always do the same thing, unless our lifestyle hurts other people intentionally.
Have fun, keep running, and remember; if Gil can run then so can you!
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