Eating Alone

I hear a lot of people talk about not liking to eat alone, but I love it. I grew up in a large family, and was a loner as a child. I never had many friends, usually one "best" friend in each grade. We moved a lot, so I went to a different school every couple of years.

Yesterday, I didn't have any leftovers to bring for lunch, so I went to a local fish and chips joint all by myself. I brought a Guideposts magazine with me. A friend brings me his copy after he's finished with it. Guideposts always gets me teary-eyed with the inspirational, spiritual stories. I have to say though, I'm dismayed at how it's filled with medical prescription advertisements. I don't think I could bring myself to purchase a subscription and pay for that. Anyway, I sat there all by myself at a table with four seats. I really liked the feeling of being all alone, by myself, reading, not having to act any certain way for anyone I was with.

New Topic: I remember when I was young, how the "old" people would complain about things like customer service, and the quality of things, and how it was so much better in the olden days. Well, more and more I'm hearing myself complaining about the same kinds of things. If it was so much worse when I was a youngster, how much worse has it gotten now? It's pretty bad, if you ask me!

And just how people are in general, how they don't seem to think before doing things. Like this morning. The sun was just beginning to rise, and I got off the freeway, and in the right hand lane there was a man and his car broke down. He was obviously out of gas, as he was holding a large red plastic gas can. There was a highway patrolman behind him, in an unmarked dark green SUV. The patrolman had his flashers on (not his flickering lights) and he had the man get into his vehicle, apparently planning to take him to a nearby gas station. I was looking in that direction, but not making eye contact with the patrolman. However, I noticed out of the corner of my eye that the patrolman was making "thank you" gestures to me. I realized that he thought he had my attention and had asked if he could cut in front of me. Lucky for me that I can read gestures well.

So he pulls in front of me, and amazingly, neither one of those men bothered to turn on the flashers of the disabled vehicle. It was a small dark car -- and remember, it's still dark out, the sun is just beginning to rise -- right in the path of traffic coming off the freeway. The cars coming off the freeway round a corner, and THERE'S this car, sitting here.

I don't understand why they didn't do something else, like 1) Maybe push the car one block to put gas in it? 2) Turn the flashers on to warn oncoming traffic?

The way that this off ramp is situated, you can't get back to where the car was at, without going a mile down the road, getting on the freeway again, then fighting through a mile's worth of morning rush hour traffic. Maybe the patrolman was planning to use his flashing lights and go backwards through the traffic over to the disabled vehicle?

I was so puzzled by this lack of using one's brain that I actually walked back over to the convenience store where they were getting gas, to tell the patrolman that they forgot to leave the flashers on, and they'd better hurry back to that vehicle. They pulled off as I got over there. (This particular convenience store is a couple of buildings from my job).

One more thing. I found a website today that made me cry. I have come close to being a vegetarian in my life, but I believe that God provided us with animals to eat their meat. I believe it is necessary to our health. The only thing this website did was make me want to hurry things up as fast as we can, and stop buying meat from the store. It was a short movie about how inhumanely animals are treated. Chickens, turkeys, cows, pigs. I'm sure the group that produced the movie used the worst possible situations they were able to find and put them together, to portray the entire industry as a bunch of abusive humans.

It didn't turn me into a vegetarian. Actually I felt better about what we are doing. We are raising our animals humanely. Our chickens don't have a huge pasture to range free on, and they don't eat organic food, but they aren't jammed into cages together and electrocuted. They can fly and run, jump up onto high perches to roost, sunbathe and take dirt baths. We probably overfeed them. When we got our dairy bull calves, they were so young that they could not use their legs too well. Apparently some young cows are kept in small cages so their muscles cannot develop to produce veal. Ours run and enjoy the sun. When we "harvest" one, they are killed quickly and humanely. They don't suffer needlessly on a long trip to a slaughterhouse packed and crammed in with hundreds of other frightened animals.

Kind of a depressing entry. I've been going through a period of not wanting to talk much to anyone. It was therapeutic eating alone.