it's a rule

I struggle to do what's right. What is right? We make up our own rules for ourselves, don't we.

My rules include:
1) Meat is bad.
2) Being mean or cruel, even when it could be construed as deserved, is never deserved.
3) Touching and/or displays of affection with non-family are not needed or wanted, especially in public.
4) Better to be unheard than overheard, aka shut the eff up.
5) No one is ever always right, not even me.

There are many more I could list, rules that I've made for myself and for people in my life. You must abide by a majority before I will let you in my club. It's very exclusive. You probably don't want to join anyway. Only the most dedicated get in. It's a lot of work to be me or be near me.

Today I'm thinking about number 1. (These numbers are fluid, it's number 1 today because it's number 1 on my mind.)

And I'm thinking about number 4 too. Which totally throws out that parenthetical hypothesis as to the numbering system's meaning.

Anyway, I haven't eaten red meat, poultry, pork, or anything related since 1999. A full ten years. (Rule number 6: We're not going to count the time I was in Paris and ordered a croque monsieur, thinking that it was just cheese and bread, not realizing the thick gruyere was hiding a thin layer of ham until I had eaten half, but I finished it anyway because I was ravenously hungry and had no other food options that late at night back at the hotel.) For several years, five I think, I didn't eat fish either. I was tiny, a waif of a girl, pale too, and by the time I started working, meaning I was getting up at an "adult" hour and actually doing real work for at least 8 hours a day, I needed more protein. Beans and peanuts were not cutting it, so I added fish back into my diet, thinking at least they aren't factory farmed.

I should add another rule here: No watching anything on tv or at the theater that will make me sad or angry or that will affect any other rule's stability.

The damn Discovery Channel aired a show about the harmful affects of fishing on our planet and on other animals. It was disturbing. Dolphins, albatross, turtles, they call get caught up in the nets and lines and die, thrown back into the water by the fishermen, unused and uncared for, unmourned.

I mourn them, I mourn everything that dies a purposeless death, everything that lives a cruel and heartless life only to get smacked in the head unceremoniously to become a cheeseburger scarfed down by some unappreciative neanderthal human with no clue as to how that burger came to be. No reverence for nature, no consideration for what's right.

I suppose it's right to other people, somehow they think we have this right, to make the lives of animals into whatever we want them to be, that we own and control this earth and not the other way around.

So I'm struggling with this, with whether to keep eating fish. As of now, I'm buying as much organic and farm-raised as I can. It's more expensive, but I'll pay for my peace of mind.

And for number 4, I need to raise my not-often-heard voice and yell "shut up" at one girl in the office. Maybe not in so many words. That probably wouldn't be right.