To preface the following, I don't intend to condemn anyone for eating meat. I've only been a vegetarian for half a year, so I don't have much ground to stand on and I definitely don't want to deter anyone from their own eating habits.

Vegetarianism is like learning to ride a bike. It's extremely difficult, depending on how you approach it. When I decided to become a vegetarian—at the last Warped Tour of my angsty little life—I chose to be lacto-ovo vegetarian in the sense that I would eat absolutely no meat from any living thing, including fish and crustacea, but still consume dairy and eggs. Eventually, I'll try to cut those from my life, too. If you want to continue eating meat guilt-free, I suggest you don't read the vegan pamphlets peta2 hands out. Others may choose to ease their way into the lifestyle. For example, eliminate red meat from their diet, and so on. But I am a person of extremes, which is why the AC in my car is only ever either at Hoth cold or sun inferno, never in the middle. I just don't believe you can enter any form of commitment, really, with half a heart.

"Oh, I'll be a vegetarian for a month, but then gorge on chicken nuggets as soon as it's over."

What are you even trying to prove with this? *Sighs*

You don't get into a relationship saying, "I'm going to stay with this person for exactly two and a half months, and then we're done." I don't see any necessity to do this with anything in life, especially not with long-term things, like vegetarianism.

Now, I came to college as a lanyard-proud freshman the fall of 2013, maintaining the same diet as seemingly everyone else who ate meat, save the occasional McChicken-McDouble combo binge every now and then, which would always reduce me to a pathetic blob, rolling on my friend's carpet, crying. That was normal; it had always been normal. Getting food in the caf was a no-brainer and it was easy. Is there some form of sustenance in this? I don't know. Slap it on a kaiser roll and call it "food." I didn't care what was in it, whether it was pink slime or ground-up gym mats. It was food to the world, so it was food to me.

It wasn't until July 21st when a veganism pamphlet with photographic proof of the horrors of factory farms contrastingly paired with colorful, uplifting recipes made its way into my hand and then into my mind. I could no longer do it. 20 years of eating animals under the notion that, if I wasn't doing the killing, it was okay, repulsed me in an instant. The meat industry works on supply and demand. We want it, we get it. And I wanted it.

Coming from a family where meat is, I guess, law, there wasn't really too much for me to eat the first few weeks of my new-found vegetarianism. Granola bars, scrambled eggs with spinach, onions and tomatoes, and cheese pizza basically sum up my summer, which isn't healthy. Being vegetarian in a small, rural town is difficult. What made it even more difficult was the fact that I am, in addition to an extremist in regards to how I like my air conditioned, also very untrusting and skeptical as a result of my vegetarianism.

I won't even eat chowder if chicken powder is in the base, or a potato chip because if it has duck fat in it for some reason. (For God's sake, Lays, I feel like you just threw duck fat in your recipe because there wasn't any meat substance in it until I reached the end of the nutrition facts.) I'm that conscious of what I eat now. Omelets in the cafeteria? No chance in hell, because the spinach is directly in front of the bacon and ham, which, more often than not, mingles its way in, unnoticed.

There's always the vegan/vegetarian section, but the quality is here-and-there, oftentimes leaving its trusting patrons disappointed with dry tofu or curry-heavy chickpeas. I will admit that it has its days, sporting fresh black bean burger patties and just-right seitan that makes actual meat seem inferior. These days, however, are infrequent, leaving vegetarian students like myself with whatever cereal is available or pasta, which gets old really quick. Also, as all Lycoming students must know, Dining Services likes to experiment with the food we need to eat to survive, often leaving it inedible. Some possible, albeit out-there, options may include Oreo-crusted chicken, straight soy sauce in a soup bowl, or space-age asparagus floating in a tray of galaxy. Granted, those are a bit more exaggerated than the orange tempeh I had recently, but still strange to me nonetheless. Flavor this sensibly, please. I don't want to have to choke down toothpaste tempeh. But these are only the struggles of the vegetarian in the cafeteria.

Date nights have become a little trickier now that I'm vegetarian. My girlfriend and I used to go out and split a dish, but that's no longer as simple for two main reasons:

1. I don't want to limit her because of my diet.

2. Restaurants, it seems, cannot comprehend meat alternatives.

Thank the universe for salads, though, and the option to take meat out of your order. Salads are usually safe, but cutting meat from your order is difficult because most dishes focus on meat as their selling point.

"Cool, angel hair pasta. Yeah, this is ... great. Oh, there's chicken underneath! YAS!"

I'll admit, about three months in, I bought a plate of General Tso's because I was sick of eating desert-like tofu and kale smothered in butter, as if that's the cafeteria's only way to make it seem appealing. But about halfway through, I felt the same sensation—the same internal guilt—I felt at Warped Tour this past summer. If you don't know me (and you probably don't), I take things extremely personally and subsequently beat myself up over the most minuscule detail. What I had done struck me so deeply that I gave the rest away, brushed my teeth, and sulked.

Yeah, people can feel emotion over seemingly pointless things. Maybe those pointless things are sharpened for them, personally, whether by choice or through the passage of time. Though I still regret it, I feel it was necessary because it reassured me that vegetarianism was something I wanted to pursue, not only for the animals I empathized with, but for myself.