Many different thoughts to think

So this weekend was slightly depressing. I got food poisoning or something, and I spent all day Sunday dealing with that (v. v. yucky) and trying to figure out how to cheer myself up from food poisoning, a difficult proposition as you will know if you have ever been food poisoned. Eventually I hit upon the ABC sitcom Better Off Ted, and that worked brilliantly for a while. But there are only seven episodes, and I had soon watched them all, and then I washed YouTube videos of Portia de Rossi being awesome, and then I finished doing that and I lay around on the couch for a while moaning miserably. Not much fun if you have ever done it. And then I decided to go to the library.

I love the library.

The library was mostly a success. I got some books about book publishing, about which I always want to know more things, and I got some books about books, which is fun. I decided which ones to get by looking at their indexes for authors I liked, and then quickly reading what they had to say about authors I liked. And if they said things like “Have His Carcase was tedious and awful, and Gaudy Night was pretentious”, or “The Horse and His Boy was racist and sexist and stupid”, or “Oscar Wilde was not a good writer and nobody really likes him”, I put them back immediately and stuck my tongue out at them. Whereas if they didn’t say anything like that, I checked them out.

(Oscar Wilde was a good writer, and everybody liked him.)

Anyway, on the way home, I was driving, driving, driving, and for the first time ever I was glad they put up that stop sign by the golf course. I had pulled to a stop at the stop sign, and a raccoon crossed in front of my car and trembled and waddled towards my front wheels. And it was a baby raccoon. It waddled so adorably. It had a little sweet face. It looked up at me beseechingly like it was saying, Please, Jenny, please do not kill me. I am too young to die. I have not yet begun to live. I have rooted in very few garbage cans. Please spare me.

Of course I could not drive forward with a teeny weeny little baby raccoon staring up at me with “Please spare me” eyes. The car behind me honked, and I quickly decided how it would go if the raccoon didn’t move, and didn’t move, and the car behind me got very angry. I would get out of my car and shoo the baby raccoon away. And perhaps that would not work, and the car behind me’s owner would get out and yell mean things like “CRAZY WOMAN DRIVER” and I would say “You know not whereof you speak! In front of my car is a tiny little baby raccoon! Its life has hardly begun! I cannot kill this tiny raccoon, and you shall not force my car to go forward to kill this teensy sweet baby animal!” It would be very dramatic and exciting. I would stick to my guns and not allow the raccoon to be destroyed. I would say “Shoot if you must this old grey head / but spare this raccoon from being dead”, except I would come up with a better rhyme at the end.

In the event, the raccoon waddled adorably away before the car behind me could honk any more. Phew.

Oh, and then? When I got home? I read a story on my friend’s Facebook wall that was the perfect counterpart to my raccoon event. See, apparently she went outside one day recently and found a bunch of baby birds that had fallen out of their nest and were chirping unhappily at her. If it had been me, I would not have known what to do with them, because I would have worried that I would mess up everything and do things totally wrong; but fortunately she was the one to find them, and she used to work for a veterinarian, so instead of freaking out and standing there staring at them in chagrin before eventually deciding to leave them alone and hope that the mama bird found them and everything worked out okay, she FED THEM TO HER SNAKES. Waste not, want not.