vegetarian carbon-dating

When people ask how long I've been a vegetarian, I have trouble answering. I know when I decided to be a vegetarian; it was at summer music camp the year I was eleven. (And sometimes when people ask how/when I decided to be veggie, I like to start off my reply with "Well, this one time at band camp..." just to tweak them.)

But I didn't actually eliminate all meat from my diet at that point; it was mostly red meat at first. I continued eating chicken and turkey for another couple of years, and even after I decided to cut those out, there were a few more years during which I ate things like chicken-noodle soup (deluding my naive teenage self that there wasn't any actual chicken in it) and similar. It was probably around the age of 16 or 17 that I started getting serious about reading labels and avoiding anything with any meat products in it, including Oreos (beef fat) and almost all canned soups (chicken broth) and marshmallows (gelatin).

And I had to go to college and break out of my timid shell before I could really become comfortable doing the kind of quizzing of waitpeople that a vegetarian has to do, all kinds of "is there chicken broth in this soup? is there meat in this salad?" and so forth. Even now, sometimes I still get to feeling a little guilty when I ask things like, "do they grill the veggie burgers on the same grill as the meat?"* and, in at least one deli that I know of, "can you ask the kitchen staff not to toast my bagel" because I happen to know that they "toast" bagels by putting them on the meat grill.
* though I don't like veggie burgers anyway so this is usually moot.

So, the answer to how long I've been veggie is really "it depends on your definition." I generally choose to say that it was around the age of 15. Which means I can now say I've been a vegetarian half my life! Wow.

dream

The other night I dreamt that anotherjen lived in a large commune-like house with a huge number of kids and their unseen parents. Almost all the kids were nonwhite. Jen was trying to convince me to move into a room that had just come vacant, so she was showing me around, and there were kids just everywhere, running around playing, yelling, etc.

So Jen took me into the vacant room and it was of a strange shape, very long and narrow. She was trying to show me how a bed might fit in this corner, and there was a washer/dryer over here, and the huge bookcase taking up the middle of the room could be moved over, etc. And I was thinking that I didn't think I could bear to go from having my own whole apartment to just having one room of my own and the rest shared; and anyway I had just moved and moving is so hard and I didn't want to move again. But I didn't want to say any of this to Jen for fear of hurting her feelings.

I have a few ideas what this might mean, but I'm not really sure. It was weird. I thought I was over all my moving-related anxieties! We're settled in for good! Really, I swear! Sigh.

In other news, I have a post about work stuff to write, but it's going to be friend-locked. I pretty much lock all my work-related posts now, even the innocuous ones, ever since the whole getting fired for complaining about my job on LJ thing.