Earlier today I ended up in an odd conversation with a 64 year old woman with MS--we talked about many things, but ended up talking about my being vegetarian, which I mentioned as an aside to a pervious topic about cooking for myself.

To which she asked if I was an anorexic. I felt like I would offend her if I said I was, or anorexics in general because right now I'm fat, so I said instead "oh I eat lots of bread! I love food." She did not seem convinced.

Then I tell her I eat eggs and dairy, to try to really sell it, and she says she hates vegans. This conversion is quickly becoming sticky. I want to defend vegans--I think it's important to say something nice about everyone, so I say "I'm glad that they care about animal cruelty--it is very cruel how they treat dairy cows and chickens for eggs."

She seems not to know about factory farming, so I keep running my mouth, and I begin explaining how they only need female chickens for eggs, so make chicks...

And then I'm cut off by some 45ish year old white woman with thin bleached hair and a gummy smile. If I have bad karma, I know I will reincarnate as her, so I try to be kind to her. She says not to talk about this in front of her child. I look at the girl sitting next to her--not quite a baby. In a few more words, it would be revealed she was 14 and going to high school in August. My next moments I'm not so proud of. I should have been more charming or much meaner. I chose a middling passive aggressive approach by telling her to butt out a conversation she wasn't in, which only gave her more ammo. "You're being loud" she replied.

I of course was supported by the elder with MS and another man who wanted to hear me talk more about the perceptive, reactive, and cognative capacity of animals--which I had been previously explaining in my reasoning to not eat meat. He wanted to ask about plants--some of which have reactive and some of which have surprisingly advanced perceptive qualities, but which do not have cognition as we know it. He also thought it was silly for a parent to try to shield a high schooler from knowing about how meat and eggs and dairy is produced.

I felt quite bad for that girl--who should definately also know more about plant's capacity to mimic plants near them in a manner that evidences their capacity to perceive the plants near them.