Giving it Up

I do believe that this is the first time in my life I've been aware of people around me not eating meat for Lent. I remember kids growing up giving up candy or swearing or something, and maybe they were eating fish on Fridays... I just don't remember it. And maybe by high school religion wasn't cool. And in college it certainly wasn't cool. And after college, well, I was in New York and hanging around the non-religious-and-cultural-Jews-if-anything-crowd. But now it's everywhere. Giving up meat on Fridays seems a little silly to me, but maybe that's just compared to the other two of the big three (um, Jews fast for 24 hours and don't eat pork or mix milk and meat... and Muslims, man, they don't eat all day for a month. THAT'S hardcore...) Or, because the way I understand it, we're giving things up because Jesus did? I mean, if he died for our sins, don't we owe him a little more than abstaining from Skittles for a month? But this isn't about my religious relativism. It's about how now I've noticed how the whole world is into it-- Taco Bell has special signs that tell you among others things, their cinnamon twists are appropriate for Fridays (because if they weren't... that'd be gross...) and McDonald's has taken out an ad on a street near my house bragging that the Filet-o-Fish is 2/$3 every day, "not just Fridays."
Anyway, the point of this is how out of touch I am with Catholicism. Like when I questioned the man in the bar in Peru, during the selection of the new pope, when he claimed there were a billion Catholics in the world. "No way!" I was wrong. There are a lot of them. Whoops.