It has been months since your last visit and already it is time again to have a conversation with metal utensils in your mouth. A waiting room with parents and their kids who have gums for teeth take up every seat and floor space. The the only television in the building that has no channels plays the same infomercial for healthy brushing and demonstrations of flossing until the next patient has lost their patience, just in time to be examined orally.
The dentist speaks a scientific gibberish about each of your teeth, tells you that you have a geographic tongue, and you think to yourself that you have not been French kissing anyone, and then you get a report card and oral hygiene gift bag for your mouth to prepare for your next visit in three to six months. You have done a check-up every time you opened your mouth in the mirror. Looks clean.
Shopping for the necessities can be easy since you know where to go every time. Being a shopper is an existence that challenges your ability to buy only what you need. That and the circuitous paths you end up having to take no matter how many people are in the store. It is only a matter of time before you have to return to the store to resupply or to make a new addition to that shopping list you thought you had down pat.
Obligatory and gratuitous at times, you end up making time and fitting people into your schedule that accommodate their needs more so than yours. Interviews take the cake when it comes to inconvenience. Set up the call, set up the place, set up the time. A day is only so long before you have to work on and finish the next priority in your pecking order. Say what you need to say and let us divide and conquer as soon as possible.
Drive-thrus and takeout lines included, restaurants create this atmosphere of "when do I get to eat?" too soon and too fast. It is a jungle with booths and high-top tables where the waiters and waitresses are the next highest up in the food chain. You are just happy if the appetizer gets to you on time before the family next to you gets the check.
Dining out seems to becoming a rare occasion and the convenience of someone delivering is a bit more immediate than a meal you get right from the kitchen when dining out. Then there is the weight in values of quality and price and whether or not your patience can tell the difference. Sometimes you just want to rent a restaurant that gets your meal time right.
Chances are that the court case you are in are clogging up the courts. There could be more important issues that need to be settled and you have a case that is possibly petty. If the case is serious but no one on the jury can come to a consensus, jury duty becomes an uncivil dispute. Always be on the side of justice, of course, but your vigilante side keeps gnawing at your heels and tells you to make it a swift justice for all.
Getting a good night's sleep is one of the most enjoyable and blissful sensations you can have. The only time it becomes a problem is when you do not want it to happen. That project that is due sooner than you know it sneaks up on you and your spending sleepless nights, and more than you should, to complete it. Sleep no longer is an adversary, it is the enemy you live and work against. If only you could be permanently nocturnal.
You are driving along and the gas gauge is inching its way closer and closer until it can cover the letter "E." A pit stop at the gas station is needed but oh so annoyingly inevitable. If you were a car manufacturer, all cars would be engineered with technology that makes them run on air. The next upgrade will flight, but you know it takes baby steps.
Family is important but so is your sanity. Old friends from school reenter your life but their company does not feel the same. How many of them remember your name? How many of their names do you remember? You only see them maybe twice a year at the most, and both your memories should be solid after all these years, but the awkward get-together and holiday visits can grow on you in overwhelming vacation planning ways.
You could have your own functional and lovely apartment. Nothing is wrong with the interior, furnishings, or amenities at all. It is the return that gets to you that is so tedious that your apartment becomes everyone else's apartment. The only escape is to visit another apartment, to make you homesick again and forget how sick of home you were in the first place.
To have perfect privacy without the interference of the outside world or the inside world would be a miracle. There is no avoiding the foot traffic or the face-to-face encounters of the public eye. You only get so much me time before you have to forfeit it to construct your social life again. Being human is hard but not impossible.
Going places is half the battle.
An apartment complex, a townhouse or where ever you call your home away home, there are moments where you miss being a dependent. The rules were straightforward if not fair under your parents' roof, which gave you some expectation to follow in your life. Now that you have your own place, there comes this hollow loneliness that arrives with the independence you sought after and finally received. It is a catch-22 situation. You know your parents will be there to support you, but you do not want to have to lean on them everywhere you go and for everything you do. Living on your own can get lonesome.
Some frustration comes with the territory of owning your own place. Figuring it out on your own empowers you but a word of warning would have been nice to hear coming from the parents who have been around the block many times before you. This only makes you angrier on two accounts. First, you feel inferior for being young and no one takes you seriously because of your age. Second, the adults who humor you or listen to either are somewhat helpful or not at all, even if they had been in the same situation. The adult world is a weird mixture of cruel and kind that makes your first response one of anger.
GiphyBuilding a social life inside and outside of work can be challenging when you are busy paying rent and everything that comes with it. Family is already included but the power to choose on your own and make up your own mind can be overwhelming. Do you eat out by yourself or order takeout and stay in for the night? Should you go to a networking event or catch up with old friends? You did not have the choice of where you grew up or the friends you would make, if only for a short time, who are on their own life paths. Having to make your own choices can be uncomfortable on your own terms without family to oversee your next step.
Usually, in the form of existential angst, stress can take on many forms in your newfound freedom. You start to question the price of milk and gas. You complain that the roads are always under construction, derailing your commute to work. You are stuck in line during your lunch hour waiting to order lunch and might be late for an appointment soon after. Whatever life can throw at you, it is winding up a precision curve ball right across your home plate. When life is out of balance, the only thing left to do is to acknowledge the stress you are under, now and potentially later.
GiphyAll the other feelings are washed over by the greatest feeling of all: complete freedom. There is this confidence that you did not have before. The home you make for yourself is going to reflect the lifestyle you will lead with. Walking around the house naked is second nature to you now. Passing gas and enjoying your own body odor? More power to you. Under your roof, your rules apply to one person, and that is you. Just make sure the landlord does not have to break them.
Moving out is not always easy, but what makes it easy is how you move in.
Of course, I'm sure your next question is "Well, why did you stop?" My answer is I was living at home and not always doing my own grocery shopping. I didn't want to make my parents shop extra or buy things just for me. Every so often, they'd give me some money and I'd get some things for myself, but overall, it wasn't easy. I also wasn't eating healthily enough without the added protein of meat consumption.
That being said, I still do not eat red meat unless it is served to me at a family gathering. I do not buy beef or pork. I do not eat it when I'm out at restaurants. I eat as little as possible even at family gatherings. I do not eat red meat.
Someday soon, once I'm a better chef and can afford to experiment with more foods, I would like to cut out chicken as well, and possibly fish too. I've just started going to the gym and sadly, chicken is a very cheap source of lean protein, so I'll be eating that for the foreseeable future until I can find a high-protein veggie substitute that I can eat every day.
That being said, even though I will eat chicken and fish at this point in my life, I still prefer not to. I would say I have chicken or fish with one meal per day, if that. I usually don't eat any sort of meat on a typical day.
If you've been debating cutting out meat or at least reducing your meat consumption, here's a few reasons you should and a few things I've learned in my two-year quest to stop eating meat.
It is believed that around 70% of Amazon deforestation in Brazil can be attributed to cattle ranching, as cattle ranching requires huge swaths of land for grazing. If you care about preserving the Amazon, reduce your beef consumption.
In 2015, Texas alone required between 251 to 276 millions gallons of water per day for all livestock operations, including watering the animals, feedlots, and other on-farm daily needs. Freshwater is an increasingly finite resource, and many HUMANS (Flint, Michigan) don't even have access to safe freshwater. If you care about water preservation, it's a good idea to eat less meat.
Pigs are one of the most intelligent animals. They love to play, they feel love and loneliness and sadness, and they're just as smart, if not smarter, than our domestic dogs. Cows are also considered to be emotionally complex individuals and have been shown to cry for their babies when they're taken away, as well as showing extreme feelings of joy. This is why I cannot and will not eat red meat anymore; I cannot justify killing such intelligent animals for my own consumption.
There are countless publications and documentaries that expose some of the inhumane treatment of animals in the meat industry. Often times, former meat workers will share their experiences about what they've seen in factory meat farms. It's disgusting and unsettling. Give less economic support to an industry that sacrifices humanity for profit.
Eating more than a certain amount of red meat per week has been shown to increase your risk of colorectal cancers, or cancers of the stomach/intestines/rectal tract. If you have a family history of any sort of intestinal cancer, you might want to consider cutting out red meat and reduce your risk.
Brands such as Boca, Morningstar, Quorn, Tofurkey, Gardein, The Impossible Burger, JUST, and Beyond Meat have developed incredible animal-free products to replace a lot of the foods we eat as omnivores. Two of my favorite YouTubers, Jenna Marbles and Julien Solomita, are longtime vegans who found the Impossible Burger so close to a real burger that Julien, who only went vegan in the last few years, was almost unconvinced that it WASN'T meat. JUST has produced JUST Egg, a plant-based egg replacement product that cooks, looks, and tastes like scrambled eggs.
With so many meat alternatives, there isn't much need to eat meat every day or even every meal.
Many people speak on their personal experiences of going vegetarian or vegan and the wonders it has done for their health journeys. Some doctors will even prescribe vegetarianism or veganism as a means of weight loss or health maintenance for their patients, because it's generally more whole foods-based and healthier overall.
From my intro paragraph, yes, I did have some moments of weakness where I HAD to have chicken nuggets. Overall, though, there was a great amount of satisfaction in ordering something meat-free at a restaurant despite my temptations and knowing no animals were killed to be on my plate.
Cows and pigs are my third and fourth favorite animals, respectively. Of course I can't eat them. I can't eat cute things.
I'm sure I haven't convinced you to give up meat entirely, but even going one day meatless is better than nothing. Save these cute farm babies, save your health, and save your environment.
What I mean is when dimensions slowly start adding to your binary world, when we learn to see the same things through different perspectives, it feels like a kaleidoscope-a new world each time you flip it! A reckless addict could have a heart-wrenching story to tell or a seemingly harmless teetotaler could have stumbled on a dark track, it's difficult to fathom.
Ironically we live the most colorful days of our lives in the monochrome, binary state of mind! As adulthood unfolds it's unseen cards, our brittle world of faith and beliefs is blown off. The time we realize the only way to survive is to unlearn what we learned; and then starts our struggle to settle on one side of the scale. Times when picking a color to paint the room becomes an impossible decision to make but you exactly know what university do you want to go to. Times when we don't know whether to judge a friend for his habits or love him for all the good times. It seems like a tug of war between our emotions and ego (yeah the so-called "self-respect"), the fear of exposing our vulnerable selves.No definite solution to these dilemmas right?
Nevertheless, we all keep going, managing to steal our little 'shots of awe', appeasing the tempest risen within. This is because deep inside we know this is just a phase- in between the blacks and whites of the zebra crossroad that leads to the paradise of our dreams.
It's funny because I can find you 30 songs in like two minutes that depict killing and robbing and assault on worse levels than Cardi ever reached. A lot of this heat for Cardi came from those people who only listen to rap music that is appropriate enough to play on the radio but don't ever pay attention to the other side of the rap industry.
Let's be clear here that all you people comparing Cardi's newest controversy to Bill Cosby are WAY out of whack. Cardi never raped these men, never even had intentions of sleeping with these men. She saw an opportunity and she took it.
Criminal as it was, she never raped or sexually assaulted anyone. So get out of here with that Bill Cosby comparison nonsense. Here are other rappers people refuse to recognize for their crimes that are way worse than Cardi.
Armed robbery, kidnapping, child neglect, sexual assault...need I go on?
No RIP here for this piece of work. Not only was his music trash, so was he. With multiple felony charges, some of the most notable are assault against his girlfriend, tampering with evidence, and witness harassment..
Charged with aggravated assault with deadly weapon and drug charges and a few other crimes he spent quite some time behind bars.
Sexual assault and child pornography. Disgusting human being.
Sent to federal prison for weapons charges.
.
