The_Notebook_13

  “You won’t make a difference.”

And indeed, the only difference I seemed to be making, at this moment, was the broken silence of a sleepy classroom during recess. The fourth year of my vegetarianism wasn’t so different from the first, especially my surroundings. I had stopped propagating the message of pro-vegetarianism somewhere between the fiftieth and hundredth conversation with a pro-meat friend.

  I am an expert storyteller. I try to make sense of the world around me, and take out color lenses to process unidentified object. Harari or Gladwell, I don’t remember which, said human power comes from the ability to tell stories, stories of human rights, money, law, and future. The lenses are solidified glass, distilled from the each of our boutiques.

  The first story I told myself was the environment. I wish my parents would use less tissues, this is ecofriendly, that is not. Everything was either green, eco-passable, or red, not. The whole world was processed through this lens, and for quite a while.

  The next story, which used to be only a single piece in the Animal Rights line from its Go Green collection, was vegetarianism. Upon reading “Eating Animals,” I was convinced that vegetarianism was first in line of problems I had to solve as an environmentalist. Thus started my lunchless schooldays and boxes of vegetarian instant ramyeon.

  Humans are expert storytellers, with different world views. My college counselor teacher understood the world in the language of physics. Another physics teacher valued hard work over anything else. It took me quite a while to understand that people have different world views.