Food!

Gods, I'm starving. I'm so hungry I could eat a tofu horse. *cue laugh track* Yeah, being a vegitarian has its downsides (for instance, you can't say you're so hungry you could eat a horse) but overall I really don't regret it. I bring this up because lately many people have asked me "since when have you not eaten meat?" (If you're one of the wonderers, I've been off red meat for a while and full vegitarian since...a while ago, I don't know.) I do wonder about people for whom meat is a necessity for every meal. For instance, people who won't eat their eggs without sausage, and who don't believe that a meal isn't a meal if it doesn't have meat in it. They don't view the meat on their plate as the no longer living carcass of some creature--they see it as food. Which I totally respect. I mean, I became a vegitarian after having eaten meat for over a decade, I see meat as food too. I even crave it sometimes. My reasons for giving it up had to do with morals (you put the cow in one end and you get tins of meat coming out the other! smiling man in black top hat demonstrates!), but now that I've gone a while without eating any meat my perception has changed. When I think about eating meat now I usually don't feel any inclination to do so--on the contrary, the thought has become almost repulsive to me, though I can't claim that I don't miss some of my mom's cooking. I don't usually think about it, though--it's just the way things are.
Aargh, this isn't helping the initial problem--I'm bloody starving. We're leaving the library in fifteen minutes--maybe I can convince mom to swing by Antonios or something. Or I could just eat the desk. The world is full of opportunities.

Rambling

Lately, I've begun to wonder about words, and how they came about. If humans evolved from apes which evolved from lizards which evolved from some sad ugly thing that crawled out of the ocean one day and decided to live here, at what point did language form? And at what point did we decide other things had meaning at all? And eventually we've created these concepts in our mind, such as beauty, and color, which only gives us really useless information. Because, as the biology textbook tells us, the definition of life is, and I quote, "a temporary storage of useful energy." That's all we are. But we, as units of temporary storage for useful energy, experience beauty and color and everything, and some of our experiences leave us feeling enriched, and enlightened, and empowered, and other words beginning with e. And that part of life is extra--in order to fufil our duties as temporary storage, all we would have to do is exist, brain dead. We wouldn't need to think or feel or experience the things that we experience daily.
We've started to take these things for granted, too. I mean, there's so much experience in just...biting into an apple. The crunch it makes as your teeth penetrate the skin, the juices running into your mouth...and the taste alone is so powerful it's enough to make you cry. But we bite into apples every day, while thinking of other things, and it just seems so mundane that we don't even notice it. Our attention isn't arrested by such an action. Somehow, apples have lost their meaning to us, and we've thrown them into the bin marked "boring" in the back of our minds, when in truth not just the eating of the apple but the fact that there is an apple at all is extraordinary.
And the less we get out of life, the more it seems like we really are mere temporary storages of useful energy. Which is probably why humans have spent most of their existance looking desperately to achieve more, to keep pushing the envelope and make everything bigger and better and more there, so that we can continue to feel.
I'm not sure why I just wrote that. Maybe it's something I'm trying to tell the world, or maybe it's something my subconscious mind is trying to tell me, or maybe (most likely) it's just me procrastinating even more on that paper due next week. But for whatever reason, there it is.
...And even if the bio textbook is right, bubbles are still brilliant, and I can enjoy my existance as a temporary storage unit while I have it..