A few years ago, I decided to go vegetarian. I had never particularly liked meat, and always opted for microwave chicken nuggets over any sort of steak, pork, or venison my family had for dinner. 

I decided to try my hand at this herbivore diet one day during my grade 12 philosophy class where I gave a presentation on the ethics of factory farming. Being 17 and paranoid of any sort of confrontation, I had convinced myself that the few conservatives in my class would somehow take offense to my presentation and accuse me of being a hypocrite.

This was decided an hour before lunch, but forgotten again when my friends and I drove to Wendy’s after class.

It’s interesting looking back now on how this three year fixation on being different lasted until I had an insatiable craving for Arby’s buffalo chicken sliders, and quit being vegetarian on a random evening in the Port Hope Arby’s parking lot. I guess that’s the way things tend to go. 

Year-long fixations and the universal struggles to carve out a personality after living through a pandemic and transitioning from the limbo between high school and university results in many weird, obscure fixations.

Like the time I ran a semi-successful anonymous Bookstagram religiously before one day deciding I actually did not want anyone to know anything about me or my opinions.

Which transitions well into my current occupation running a newspaper, and sharing more about myself than I previously ever thought comfortable.

These past four years in university have spat me out an entirely different person than the girl who first walked into the Student Centre afraid, sweaty, and developing an anxiety problem that has yet to be dealt with. 

Before I came to Trent, I used to drive up to campus from my little compact rural community and sit by the water imagining all the exciting ways my life would change once I was a student here. 

There is no use dragging myself back in time to digest all the ways in which I did not cross anything off that list, but more importantly, the many ways my life here has become so much richer than what I thought possible. That said, I have always been somewhat of a bitch—a facet of my personality that I haven’t managed to hammer out quite yet. 

A bitch in the sense that I don’t really know how to have fun. I partied a lot in my first year, then recused myself for the next two and made no friends; falling into a minor depressive spell. Then my car broke, then I began working at Arthur, made extremely fulfilling friendships, fell in love for the first time, and felt a sense of self again.

However, I’m still a bitch underneath it all. I go to bed by 10 PM, my best friend is my fat cat, I get irritated with loud noises and don’t like leaving my house, and have spent majority of my time over-charging my social battery by dicking around on Hay Day. One of my most complimented articles is just me complaining about students in my major for 1200 words. 

It pays to be a bitch, so I’m coming to learn.

While it’s a habit to fall into my haggard, tired old ways, I’m only 21 once. I should probably learn to enjoy it, so last month I went to a wiener dog race.

My mission as my boyfriend and I fought the mass of traffic heading into Kawartha Downs was to relearn how to have fun. Easier said than done, I came to understand, as we realized we had been bamboozled (not reading the event description properly) as hours of horse racing were the predecessor to the main event.

I used to ride horses as a child, but fell into a different tax bracket and developing class consciousness prevented me from returning to any sort of equestrian competition without a sour taste in my mouth. But deep in my pocket was a loose $5 bill, and I placed a bet on a random horse I thought looked pretty who wound up placing first, and I started envisioning my life as a home-owner with the wealth I presumed would be waiting for me behind the betting counter. 

As I gave my ticket to the woman who had previously yelled at someone ahead of me in line, I was bestowed a whopping $5.50 return for my hard-earned forgotten cash.

Dreams were crushed, but an adrenaline rush was booming. The night was young, I was fifty cents richer, and the wiener dogs began pouring in. 

I cannot properly articulate the amount of dopamine flowing through the crowd as tiny three pound canines adorned in various pirate, bumblebee, FedEx driver, and spider costumes waddled their way around stands. I may have shed a tear, but my boyfriend is under strict instructions to deny this to anyone who asks.

Life really is worth living, as Justin Bieber proclaimed. It’s hard to be a bitch when a brown wiener dog with a pink cowboy hat sniffs your leg. It’s easy, however, when an inebriated father with two young children dies on the hill that yes, his kids are allowed to run onto the track when the horses are racing against an underpaid volunteer. Many such cases, I suppose. 

When it was time for the dogs to be let out, the wooden fence surrounding the track was packed for miles, and I was still under the false assumption that the miniature dogs would somehow be running the entire length of the track.

I could not have been more wrong. The sliver of track that had been marked off for the little dudes were at the opposite end of where we were standing, and between hordes of people leaning over the fence and loud music blasting through some dude’s speaker, we decided to cut our losses before it was over. 

And that was okay, because I pet a dog and won half a dollar. I got to tell everyone I went to a weiner dog race despite not actually seeing them race, billed for it, and treated myself to a pumpkin pie Blizzard from Dairy Queen on the drive home. 

As I laid in bed that night—salt lamps on, Real Housewives of Salt Lake City playing in the background—I thought about how much I hated chickpeas when I was a vegetarian, and how much of an effort it was to eat them every single day. For years I forced myself to accidentally become malnourished and brag about it for the hopes of being unique and different from my peers. 

Admitting that I was born an introverted 65 year old woman was a scary feat and went against everything I had envisioned for myself in university. Pretending to enjoy being a quirky vegetarian was a strange coping mechanism that only prolonged the inevitability of my truth: It’s so much easier to eat chicken and be a bitch.