Today's rambling: Berry's not sparkly this time
Written on July 11, 2001 at 5:33 a.m.
while feeling a bit

(Downhill spiraling...you've been forewarned!)

Me again?!

Yes, dammit. Why? Because I can! BWA HA HA HA!!!! The world shall quake at the Mighty Berry's feet!!!

I've been swearing a lot in my diary lately. Dunno why...sometimes it's just because I think the sentence sounds funnier, and sometimes it's just because I can't think of a more polite word to use. Is that not sad?

Anyway, I forgot to write things in my last entry, and while normally I would just add those forgotten things TO the entry, this time I felt like making a whole new one! *beams*

First off, back on the animal topic for a bit, because I need to get it out of my system. I was watching Moorpark 24/7 on Animal Planet tonight, and they showed something that's made me seriously consider not ever applying to that college. Ever since the show premiered, I'd been interested, and so I looked up information on the Web to find out more about the college. It's a two-year thing, very intensive and all, but one sentence said: "Students are required to euthanize animals..." Well, that's not a direct quote, but they were saying that students had to kill birds and rodents and things to feed to the carniverous animals.

That in itself made me hesitant -- how can a person who claims to love animals as much as I do willingly kill a defenseless critter? But I was thinking they meant a literal 'humane' killing, such as an injection.

Nope.

On this particular episode of Moorpark 24/7, a two second-year students demonstrated the art of 'pigeon pulling'. Do you get the idea of how this 'euthanization' is done? If not, here it is blunt and brutal: you pull their heads off. Now, they didn't actually SHOW the head being pulled off, but they showed the girl stick her hand into this blue bin (her hand was holding the pigeon), and next there's this grisly crrrrrrack sound. I can't even explain it to you. It just made me shiver.

Just about all the first-year students there were crying (the girls especially, obviously), so at least I know I wouldn't be the only one unable to do something like that....but honestly, if it came down to it and I was holding that pigeon in my hands, I would be hard pressed not to take the poor thing and RUN from the facility. Silly as that sounds, I couldn't subject it to decapitation!

And how is pulling its head off humane? Can we try that for our criminals on death row? "Well, Bubba, it's your turn to go. Hey, Fred, keep a tight hold on his shoulders and kinda pull back--yeah, that's right--now Zed, you'n me are gonna take hold of his head and pull..."

Get what I'm saying? If murderers can get injections that make their deaths painless, what about animals? Okay, I guess it wouldn't be very cost-effective to use injections for the hundreds of animals that need to be killed (probably on a daily basis), but...ugh, I can't even get my point across! Well, maybe I have. Hehe...

I could handle the dead animals and toss them as feed or whatever. It would be sad, but there's no use mourning over something that's already dead, right? But to kill it with my own hands...to me, that's no better than murder, and melodramatic as it sounds, I would probably never get over that sort of guilt! I realize that animals kill other animals in the wild, and I have no issues about that. They need to do it for food. And one second year said that she had to rationalize it as "I'm not doing it for myself, I'm doing it for the tiger", which is probably a good way to look at it, so it doesn't feel so much like murder...

Give me my herbivores. I'll pluck plants from the ground any time for you!!!!

So then after everything that happened tonight, I was looking for a place in Berks County that might have hamster shows. Didn't find any, but I did find the Humane Society of Berks County, which was really cool. If I had a car, I would be volunteering there. But as it is, I just bookmarked it in case they ever get any chinchillas....pet shops sell them for hundreds of dollars, but the rate at the Humane Society is $25. Whee, affordable! Except, I'd still need a cage...

But that wasn't the point of that paragraph! I was going to say that I found a whole bunch of animal rights links...and the first one I went to just screamed, "Look, Berry! Here are people like you!" So here's the link, so you can all look at it and think, "Berry, you're not THAT extremist, are you?"

I'm not the perfect candidate for being an animal rights advocate. I still eat meat. Granted, it's not much compared to what most people eat, but I still do eat it. And I consume dairy products, which could very well have come from abused farm animals. So in that respect, I don't think I am as extreme as a lot of the animal rights people. I'd love to become a vegetarian, for the health aspects especially, but I don't have the willpower to convert, especially as veggie burgers tend to gross me out! And if I were to go WAY extreme and turn vegan (no animal products at ALL), I'd have to drink soy milk, which makes me gag! So there's really no happy medium for me at this point. Maybe eventually, I'll find it!

I wish I had my own farm, with my own milk cow and my own chickens. Then I could consume dairy products on a regular basis and not have to wonder if the animals who made the stuff were abused. Because on the Berry Farm, they'd all be happy! *giggles*

But honestly, reading all that stuff served only to depress me. Yes, the people who made that site are like me, but I don't like to dwell on the bad things that happen to animals because it really gets me down. I don't like reading about cruel hunters, and vivisections (where the animal is cut open while its still alive)...it activates that 'Save the world and end all suffering' button, and then when I realize I can't 'save the world', I just get depressed and think of all the bad stuff that goes on daily, and no one seems to want to stop it.

So I don't dwell on it. Unless the information is slapped in my face. And then I get that same disgusted fascination and read the information, and totally regret it later!

In an effort to distract myself, I started reading other Diaryland diaries. As Fate would have it, most of the ones I read were all depressing. A friend who wishes she could persuade a friend not to commit suicide, another girl who's fighting an eating disorder...someone who moved to New York to go to college and found the city to be rather unwelcoming (to him, anyway)...What happened to happy entries? I did find one talking about Harry Potter and 'Alan Rickman porn' (*is still giggling over that one*), but it seemed more like a correspondence with another diaryland writer she's friends with, so unless you read the other diary as well, you wouldn't have ANY idea what the girl was talking about! She was cheerful, though...

I get embarrassed when people ask me what sort of music I like. My parents both listened to Oldies (50's, 60's, 70's) while I was growing up, and so I listen to that music. I love it. It may be cheesy, it may not have angry-hate-the-world lyrics, but it's my kind of music. Gary Puckett, the Grass Roots, the Buckinghams...I just love all of it! And yet if I was to say to an average person that I liked to listen to Oldies 98 rather than Q102, they'd look at me like I was a pod person.

And what's so wrong with Oldies, anyway? What, just because it came before your generation, it's a bad thing? Or is it because the lyrics don't have 'fuck' every other line? And maybe because the music is upbeat, and who in their right mind would want to listen to upbeat music when they could listen to Limp Bizkit scream and whine as if the members actually had talent or something?

Sorry, angry attack there, hehe. You can take your angry music and play it all you want, but I don't like to be an angry person. I may not be happy all the time, but I don't like to purposely make myself angry by listening to screaming men who are apparently making 'music'. They should make a new category: "Screaming". There's no singing value to it, it's just screaming.

Ugh, I think I'm definitely in a depressed state right now. I should have known this was coming...I've been having a few fairly good days, but depression was bound to come sooner or later! Then again, it's not as if today was a good day, what with an almost-attack by a mental-case German shepherd, an email from Daddy Dearest, and Mum's meeting with her lawyer and a financial counselor later today...

Okay, now I'm feeling hopeless. Should I be writing this? I feel like now that everyone has me penned as being this really funny girl, I shouldn't write sad things such as depression and despair. Maybe I shouldn't have tried to be funny in the first place, then no one would've labeled me as such! But I'll be better within a day or two, and my natural 'Berry sparkle' shall shine again! Right now, though, there's just so much weighing down on me. Will I keep the house? Will I be able to keep the animals? What will happen to me if the house is foreclosed? I need to get a job, but I don't have a car! I need a car but I don't have a job to pay for insurance! I'm feeling pressured to go to college, but I don't know where my life is headed! I want to work with animals, but I'm too scared to euthanize! I have no friends to talk to here, and the only REAL friend I have is thousands of miles away!

I need to stop, before I get myself crying. God doesn't give us more than we can handle, they say...He's either got a lot of faith in me, or whoever made up that quote was lying through his teeth.