Day 2 - 2/14/2013

Today I caught and freed a mouse that was mousing up my kitchen. It was a formative and anxiety inducing experience. For awhile, I wasn't even sure if there was actually a mouse in my kitchen. I had no visual proof, and was watching alot of American Horror Story, so I figured what any rational person would -- maybe I'm imagining the rustlings and they are just residual American horror. Not so. I saw the mouse last Friday so I finally knew it was real. After fashioning a wonky makeshift trap (inspired by the liter bottle model in this blog post) that night so I could go to sleep, I bought 4 sticky traps as backup at the hardware store the next day. I set 2 of them out where Lucky couldn't go, then moved them at night when she's in her pen to more open places in case the mouse got ballsy. Today I finally heard a sticky trap moving around and a little squeak. I penned up Lucky, and sat there in the living room trying to figure out what to do. I turned up my music, I poked my head into the kitchen and saw it struggling, I sat on the couch and tried to muster the courage to do something. I finally got a dustpan and picked up the mouse + trap, then took them downstairs. I put them on top of a trash can and did some more soul searching. It was so pathetic and scared, trying to pull its little legs out of the glue...and here I was able to play Mouse God. I read on the back of the traps that you could free the mouse by using vegetable oil and prying them off with a pencil...but what if it came back after I did that? I wasn't going to take my dustpan for a walk any further than the wilds of Astoria Park, and that's not very far away. I imagined it with a tiny hobo sack on a stick, crossing the street and knocking on my door tomorrow. (I watch alot of cartoons too). I thought about just putting the whole trap'n'mouse in a plastic bag and throwing it all away...I love animals and that I even had this idea shocked me. But I was so freaked out by the mouse, I have taken to wearing winter boots when I am in my kitchen and jump every time there is any sort of noise. I was afraid it was going to f**k with Lucky and had nightmares about it getting back into the wall then rallying invisible troops to storm my rice and granola collection. What's a Mouse God to do? I've been thinking about compassion lately, so this pondering was good practice. I'm reading a book on Shambhala a friend gave me, and the TED Talk I had just finished watching today before this ordeal went down related as well. Karen Armstrong, a former nun, was the speaker and she was making a wish for support of a "Charter for Compassion." After studying Christianity, Islam, and Judaism extensively, she points out that they all have the Golden Rule in common -- that at the root of pretty much every religion is the lesson that you should do unto others as you would have them do unto you. She also brings up the important point that compassion should not be confined to your own group, it should be extended to everyone...including your mouse-enemies (my words now, not hers). Eventually I went upstairs, put on my nubby pink gloves (don't believe Martha Stewart when she says to buy them because they will help you groom your pet- they won't), then took a pencil and a cup with some vegetable oil in it back down with me. I walked into the park with my dustpan and crazy gloves, dumped the oil on the trap, then helped the mouse get off it and into a pile of leaves. I talked to the pile of leaves for a little while. I spoke some words of encouragement about making it in the real world, and told it not to come back under any circumstances, then went home. To see Karen Armstrong's TED Talk, click here. You should, it's really good. The thing she said that stuck with me the most is that when addressing a group, she sometimes senses they are opposed to what she is saying, and that's because often people prefer to be right rather than compassionate. I feel better now than I would if I had just thrown the trap'n'mouse away, even though my initial reaction was to cry, scream, and walk away because doing those things would have been easier. Metaphor? Or Dumb luck for the mouse that I am on this current self assigned curriculum? Probably both. So yeah, compassion is good and watching too much American Horror Story has the potential to be bad.