Today, the Shakespeare program that I had been so long anticipating was postponed because of the shootings in DC. It starts tomorrow instead, and honestly, I'm not so much disappointed as I am grateful to be safe today. I'm praying for everyone affected by this horrible emergency. I have asked Jesus to comfort and keep alive those who have been wounded.
For today's challenge, I learned how to drive a forklift. Or, at least, after reading the WikiHow article containing this information, I know the theory. Here, in my own words, is a summary of what I learned:
1. Driving a forklift is nothing like driving a car. Driving a forklift is more like driving a boxy, top-heavy pumpkin in a windstorm through which several cats holding baseball bats are attempting to knock down everything in their paths. Proceed with caution and, if applicable to your area, make sure you earn or steal a licence before trying to drive a forklift.
2. Check the forklift for any damage or espionage-related sabotage before driving it. Make sure you inspect the "hydraulic mechanisms and tire conditions" very carefully, as it is extremely important that they are functional. I don't know about you, but I predict that this would be the downfall of my forklift driving career, as I know slightly more about mechanics than your average blind dog from 13th century Russia does. As far as I can tell from guessing, a 'hydraulic mechanism' might have something to do with water.
3. It is a good idea to read the manual. If my lack of knowledge about the hydraulic-thingy-whatsits was going to be a problem, this recommendation most certainly will be as well. I am, always have been, and always will be an autodidact. This has occasionally caused me some problems in the past, but overall, it's worked very well for me and I think I'll stick with it. I hope that manual didn't have anything important to say.
4. Pay attention to the size and shape of the object you are lifting. Make sure you have the right kind of fork attached to the front of your wobbly vehicle. Check the work environment for obstacles, including but not limited to: dirt, plastic bags, people, plants, ponies, blenders, speed bumps and clams. Only lift the object high enough to lift it off the ground. I was kind of disappointed by this last rule, because that pretty much leaves no possibility for trick and/or gymnastic lifting, as far as I can tell.
5. The forklift is operated by several levers and knobs that control the height of the fork and the speed of the vehicle. Try practicing with sandbags or otherwise boring objects before trying to lift anything or anyone important.
I think I'm set for a fork-lifting career now. Let me know if you want me to lift anything for you!
~Maddie
Musings and whimsies of a sixteen-year-old artist.
Showing posts with label sad. Show all posts
Showing posts with label sad. Show all posts
Monday, September 16, 2013
Thursday, August 29, 2013
In Which Maddie Gets Perhaps a Bit Too Philosophical About Squirrels
Today, my sister and her friend found a squirrel on the road. He was injured. Maybe he fell out of a tree, or got hit by a car. We'll never know for sure. I walked to the spot with my rabbit's pet carrier as fast as I could.
I tried to ask my mom and the squirrel rehab lady on the phone every possible question I could, in the thin hopes that one of them would be met with "oh, we didn't think of that! Let's try it. Maybe we can save him." (And yes, we know a squirrel rehab lady). But, of course, it didn't happen like that. It never does. The fact was, he couldn't move his front arms. One of them seemed to be abnormally small. Because of this, he had been trying to drag himself along the road when we found him, and his chin was hairless and bloody from being scraped along the asphalt as he tried to free himself from danger, or pain, or fear, or whatever was going on in his head. Because his mouth was injured and he couldn't walk, there was no way that he could feed himself. He was an adult, and so there was no way to acclimate him to humans. If we had left him on the road, he would have become live bait. Euthanizing him was the kindest option.
At least, that's what everyone kept telling me. I kept it to myself, but the whole time I was in the car, with his carrier clutched firmly on my lap, staring at his madly twitching back legs and the fear beyond all comprehension in his eyes, I wondered if it really was the kindest option. Squirrels are used to the out-of-doors. Everyday can contain a life-and-death struggle for them. Predators were something that he doubtless understood, something that was in his personal lexicon of understanding. At least he would have had some idea of what was happening to him while crows pecked him to death or a fox made a meal of him.
I'm not saying it would have been pleasant for him. If I could possibly have spared him from it, I'd have done it in a heartbeat. But there is a kind of unspeakable horror that I don't think humans, as inquisitive and thus incredibly knowledgeable beings, can fully understand, and I saw it in his face. It comes with the complete loss of any understanding of what is happening to you. In a sense, picking him up and putting him in my rabbit's pet carrier and driving him to the animal shelter was taking him completely out of the context of his own species. He had no frames of reference with which to process what was happening to him, and so his mind resorted to the only emotion, if you can call it that, that was anything like what was going through his head: the most pure panic I have ever seen. Trying to understand human horrors with a squirrel's mind would be enough to induce wild, clawing, frantic, all-encompassing terror in any creature. Blood, wind, dirt, food, teeth, injury, trees, rain, grass, dogs and running for his life were things that he understood. There was no way to explain to him what was happening. I would rather be ripped to shreds by something I understood than to be subjected to a nameless horror beyond my understanding and then killed. Sure, getting a euthanizing shot is a much less painful manner of death than getting eaten. But when you don't have the ability to understand the former, it's infinitely more scary and horrible.
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe we're all wrong. All human ideas are from, well, humans. The best we can do to test whether they're right or not is to live by them, but we'll never know what "right" and "wrong" really are, anyway, other than by making wild stabs in the dark by ourselves. The only assurance we have that we are "right" is from other members of our own species. This is fine for human matters, but when our choices affect members of other species, we have nothing beyond guesses as to what the outcome will really be in their opinions. All I know is that I wasn't able to ask the squirrel which way that he would have preferred to die, and it made me more upset than I've been in a while.
Because I couldn't get into his mind, and he couldn't get into mine, I did human things to try to make him feel better. I know it's a bit silly because it probably only served to make me feel better when it should have been him, but I didn't know what else to do. I talked to him. I told him what was happening. I tried to stop him from butting his head against the side of the carrier. I quietly sang him the song that my dad always sang to me when I was little and upset. He was so scared that I'm not exaggerating or being fanciful when I say that if I concentrated, I could feel his fear in the air around him. I think that perceiving the emotions of other creatures in that way, human or not, is something that many of us forget to take the time to do.
I decided to call him Hephaestus, after the Greek god. Hephaestus was the son of Zeus and Hera, king and queen of all the gods. When he was born, he had a deformed leg. Because of that, Hera decided that he shouldn't live, and tried to end his life by tossing him off of a mountain. But Hephaestus fell into the sea, where he grew up and learned to make beautiful things, instead of dying, which people expected him to do. I didn't tell anyone else that I'd named him that, because I didn't want them to argue with me and try to call him something else.
I carried him on my lap the whole way to the animal shelter, and as I carried him out of the car I tried to hold the carrier so that he could see the grass if he wanted to. As his carrier sat on the counter, I looked at him, and thought "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry." Maybe he understood me. Maybe he didn't. I tried to communicate the thought by projecting my emotions towards him, which I know sounds stupid to you, but that's because you're human and you're used to communicating through other methods. Animals communicate like that all the time. The last I saw of Hephaestus was his bushy tail, as the volunteer carried him into the back room. When she came back, the carrier was empty, and so was Hephaestus.
I like to think of the world as a web of stories. Everyone and everything is and has a story: you, me, people you've never heard of, snails, that guy you saw picking his nose at the bus stop, your mother, the tree in your backyard, and the pair of shoes you bought at the thrift stop. No one will ever completely know the full story of any single object or person. It's just too much information. People affect people in ways that nobody ever fully realizes. Maybe a man you will never meet was late for work one day because a woman he will never meet bought the last tube of toothpaste at the store the previous week and so he had to go buy some before leaving the house, and he ran so fast that he knocked over a trash can in the park, and a plastic cup from that trash can rolled until it hit the sidewalk, and you saw a woman trip over it and that's how you met your wife. That's what happens when the stories bump into each other.
I will never know Hephaestus's story, or why his bumped into mine. But I'm glad it did, even though it makes me sad that his life ended. From every story that bumps into mine, I try to learn new ideas. That helps me find a spot for myself in the one, big story that is our existence as members of this planet. I'm not going to say which ideas exactly I got from today's story collision, because I want to you get ideas of your own from it.
Good luck with your stories.
~Maddie
I tried to ask my mom and the squirrel rehab lady on the phone every possible question I could, in the thin hopes that one of them would be met with "oh, we didn't think of that! Let's try it. Maybe we can save him." (And yes, we know a squirrel rehab lady). But, of course, it didn't happen like that. It never does. The fact was, he couldn't move his front arms. One of them seemed to be abnormally small. Because of this, he had been trying to drag himself along the road when we found him, and his chin was hairless and bloody from being scraped along the asphalt as he tried to free himself from danger, or pain, or fear, or whatever was going on in his head. Because his mouth was injured and he couldn't walk, there was no way that he could feed himself. He was an adult, and so there was no way to acclimate him to humans. If we had left him on the road, he would have become live bait. Euthanizing him was the kindest option.
At least, that's what everyone kept telling me. I kept it to myself, but the whole time I was in the car, with his carrier clutched firmly on my lap, staring at his madly twitching back legs and the fear beyond all comprehension in his eyes, I wondered if it really was the kindest option. Squirrels are used to the out-of-doors. Everyday can contain a life-and-death struggle for them. Predators were something that he doubtless understood, something that was in his personal lexicon of understanding. At least he would have had some idea of what was happening to him while crows pecked him to death or a fox made a meal of him.
I'm not saying it would have been pleasant for him. If I could possibly have spared him from it, I'd have done it in a heartbeat. But there is a kind of unspeakable horror that I don't think humans, as inquisitive and thus incredibly knowledgeable beings, can fully understand, and I saw it in his face. It comes with the complete loss of any understanding of what is happening to you. In a sense, picking him up and putting him in my rabbit's pet carrier and driving him to the animal shelter was taking him completely out of the context of his own species. He had no frames of reference with which to process what was happening to him, and so his mind resorted to the only emotion, if you can call it that, that was anything like what was going through his head: the most pure panic I have ever seen. Trying to understand human horrors with a squirrel's mind would be enough to induce wild, clawing, frantic, all-encompassing terror in any creature. Blood, wind, dirt, food, teeth, injury, trees, rain, grass, dogs and running for his life were things that he understood. There was no way to explain to him what was happening. I would rather be ripped to shreds by something I understood than to be subjected to a nameless horror beyond my understanding and then killed. Sure, getting a euthanizing shot is a much less painful manner of death than getting eaten. But when you don't have the ability to understand the former, it's infinitely more scary and horrible.
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe we're all wrong. All human ideas are from, well, humans. The best we can do to test whether they're right or not is to live by them, but we'll never know what "right" and "wrong" really are, anyway, other than by making wild stabs in the dark by ourselves. The only assurance we have that we are "right" is from other members of our own species. This is fine for human matters, but when our choices affect members of other species, we have nothing beyond guesses as to what the outcome will really be in their opinions. All I know is that I wasn't able to ask the squirrel which way that he would have preferred to die, and it made me more upset than I've been in a while.
Because I couldn't get into his mind, and he couldn't get into mine, I did human things to try to make him feel better. I know it's a bit silly because it probably only served to make me feel better when it should have been him, but I didn't know what else to do. I talked to him. I told him what was happening. I tried to stop him from butting his head against the side of the carrier. I quietly sang him the song that my dad always sang to me when I was little and upset. He was so scared that I'm not exaggerating or being fanciful when I say that if I concentrated, I could feel his fear in the air around him. I think that perceiving the emotions of other creatures in that way, human or not, is something that many of us forget to take the time to do.
I decided to call him Hephaestus, after the Greek god. Hephaestus was the son of Zeus and Hera, king and queen of all the gods. When he was born, he had a deformed leg. Because of that, Hera decided that he shouldn't live, and tried to end his life by tossing him off of a mountain. But Hephaestus fell into the sea, where he grew up and learned to make beautiful things, instead of dying, which people expected him to do. I didn't tell anyone else that I'd named him that, because I didn't want them to argue with me and try to call him something else.
I carried him on my lap the whole way to the animal shelter, and as I carried him out of the car I tried to hold the carrier so that he could see the grass if he wanted to. As his carrier sat on the counter, I looked at him, and thought "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry." Maybe he understood me. Maybe he didn't. I tried to communicate the thought by projecting my emotions towards him, which I know sounds stupid to you, but that's because you're human and you're used to communicating through other methods. Animals communicate like that all the time. The last I saw of Hephaestus was his bushy tail, as the volunteer carried him into the back room. When she came back, the carrier was empty, and so was Hephaestus.
I like to think of the world as a web of stories. Everyone and everything is and has a story: you, me, people you've never heard of, snails, that guy you saw picking his nose at the bus stop, your mother, the tree in your backyard, and the pair of shoes you bought at the thrift stop. No one will ever completely know the full story of any single object or person. It's just too much information. People affect people in ways that nobody ever fully realizes. Maybe a man you will never meet was late for work one day because a woman he will never meet bought the last tube of toothpaste at the store the previous week and so he had to go buy some before leaving the house, and he ran so fast that he knocked over a trash can in the park, and a plastic cup from that trash can rolled until it hit the sidewalk, and you saw a woman trip over it and that's how you met your wife. That's what happens when the stories bump into each other.
I will never know Hephaestus's story, or why his bumped into mine. But I'm glad it did, even though it makes me sad that his life ended. From every story that bumps into mine, I try to learn new ideas. That helps me find a spot for myself in the one, big story that is our existence as members of this planet. I'm not going to say which ideas exactly I got from today's story collision, because I want to you get ideas of your own from it.
Good luck with your stories.
~Maddie
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