Heroin chick still alive after 15 years

I recently saw a picture of someone I knew a long time ago. She had some addiction issues and I wondered if she was still alive. Based on the pic I saw, she is alive and well, and damn, she looks great!!!

She looks exactly the same as how I remembered her from 15 years ago. It's depressing. I don't smoke, drink to excess, do drugs and yet in comparison I look like total crap. It makes me think, why bother trying to be good!!! Why not just get out there and party my head off, get wasted all the time, have a constant stash of unhealthy things. Why bother trying to be healthy at all!!! She looked happy and healthy and yet in the picture seemed to be holding a joint!!! When I pictured how she would look after 15 years of rough living I guess I pictured a homeless looking person. Not some young looking hot, happening chick.

I guess that makes me bitter doesn't it? I don't know anything about her life, whether she is actually happy, or even healthy. It's just a picture, and I don't even know when it was taken! Maybe it's an old pic. Who knows.

I just wonder what the point is sometimes, trying to be healthy and living right. I mean, when my number is up, it's up. I know two people who don't smoke who have battled lung cancer. One of them smoked, but it's been over twenty years since she stopped. I know people who ate lot's of vegetables and avoided process foods, spent time outdoors gardening, and then died of cancer. It makes me wonder if cancer is actually related to anything at all!

Why I became vegetarian

I became vegetarian in the summer of 2000. I had been been exposed to vegetarianism in college, as I was in an alternative program. We used to have weekly potlucks and there was an unwritten rule that you DO NOT bring meat! There were a lot of activist type people in the program, the sort of people that give regular vegetarians a bad name! They would loudly talk about their beliefs to anyone who would listen, and they were extremely descriptive about them. Basically at that time, I thought they were all a bunch of weirdos. I had never been exposed to different types of people, I grew up in the suburbs. Homosexuals, Pagans, fairy believers, activists, you name it, they were all in this program. I wanted some meat at the potlucks and I resented them for us meat eaters not being allowed to indulge. However, making them angry didn't seem worth it, so we all let them have their way.

In the beginning, I thought the food looked gross and weird. There were many colourful salads each week, and I was not an avid vegetable eater. Each week my plate usually had bread, potato chips, cookies and maybe some pasta. However, everything that I heard about eating meat was settling inside my brain somewhere and I started to be conscious about it whenever it was on my plate.

I started to think about that sliced ham I was sticking in my sandwich, and wondering about the pig that once was, who no longer lived, who was about to be part of my lunch. I wondered why lots of small cow bits needed to be in my spaghetti, isn't tomato sauce and vegetables enough?

I never liked meat that had blood in it, rare meat, I think I always found that gross. Seeing veins in my chicken was rather unsettling as well. I was however guilty for the most part of not questioning the meat on my plate for the most part through out my life. My mom cooked supper and I was brainwashed to believe that meat was one of the food groups that I had to eat in order to be healthy.

I became vegetarian when I met my current boyfriend. I was very impressed when he told me he was vegetarian, and I felt horribly guilty about eating meat after that. We were kindred spirits and bonded on a very deep level, and I realised that there was no excuse for me to eat meat.

I'm not a scientist, and I don't have exact figures on the global impact of the meat industry, but here is what little I do know:

• The amount of grain and water it takes to make a pound of beef could feed a LOT of starving people.
• Cows produce methane which is comparable to the exhaust produced from cars. Bad for the environment.
• The waste produced from animals on farms pollutes lakes and rivers.
• Across the planet, forests are being ripped down every day to make room for livestock. They eventually destroy the land making it infertile. Forests cannot grow there again for a while. Forests are like a natural air filter, once they are gone, air quality diminishes.
• Factory farming is how most animals are farmed. This means that they often live in unsanitary, small, diseased spaces and suffer enormous cruelty.
  
• The animals are fed a lot of hormones to ensure they grow as big and fat as possible, which people in turn eat. They are also fed antibiotics as there are a lot of diseases amongst the animals, mostly due to too many animals living in a small space and it not being very sanitary.

I love animals and I believe that they deserve to live happy healthy lives. What happens to these animals is a continuous Holocaust in my opinion. They live in "camps", someone decides when to kill them, they have no dignity, are tortured and eventually murdered. A lot of the meat from their bodies goes in the garbage after it's been in the supermarket for too long, meaning that their death was a complete waste.

A person can be very healthy without eating meat, they just have to educate themselves about healthy eating.