Broken fence.

I met a new animal over the holidays!

With the MC speaking, a trainer led onto the stage a sleek, graceful serval on a leash. I had never seen a serval before. It was as if someone took a cat, covered it in cheetah spots and elongated everything so that it could sashay and leap like nobody's business.

Yet it was nervous, oh so nervous. There was a shy slink to its gait. When the trainer was about to throw something for the serval to pounce at, it looked back at us. The glance lasted less than a second but the expression was so humanly insecure. The eyes were afraid and the face was reserved. It immediately turned back to pounce at something that landed a few feet away and gobbled it up off the floor.

It looked at us again, so alert. We were just told how high servals can jump when the trainer raised a stick with ball on the end. It sat and looked up the ball, hesitated, but gave in to the trainer's insistent beckoning and compressed for the jump.

There was no point to the jump. It jumped for the sake of jumping. There was no need to jump. But jump it did, with all its effort. It almost touched the ball, not quite, and flailed its legs at the top. Still, we went "oohhh".

Servals in the wild would never jump like that.

It was kind of disturbing to watch. That moment defined its captivity. I'm sure the trainers take good care of their animals, they're all environmentalists, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about the animal's dignity. The serval is supposed to be a majestic predator with unparalleled senses, but the jump reduced it to a passive specimen of entertainment.

Every move was trained. Every move was done in obligation. Every move, except for the frightened glances Those moves were the only real moves.

It is really ok to raise animals in captivity as long as they are treated right? Is it better to leave them in the brutal wild where they will fight for survival fervently until death, or is it better to shelter them until they lose their natural characteristics?

I don't know. I might prefer the former, though it seems more masochistic, because it's more natural, more free. Then again, I don't know if that is really more natural. Struggling in the wild seems natural compared to anything related to humans, but it seems unnatural compared to the state of nature before the fall of man. Plus, if nobody took in that serval, I would've never met it.

Would I give that up if it was my choice?

Mirrors are terrifying.

Well, that's only true late at night when my perception is a little numbed.

Think about it: something totally inanimate and insensitive that spits back your precise image in real time. Physics aside, that's freaking mystical. It doesn't observe like an artist but presents you with yourself exactly the way other people would see you. No, I correct myself: exactly the way YOU would see you.

Seeing myself in a mirror feels sort of unnatural sometimes. Even the closest natural thing to a mirror is the surface of a still body of water, and that kind of thing killed Narcissus.

Mirrors only scare the living daylight out of me in the dark of night. (No pun intended.) If I'm groping around in the dark, half asleep, for a way to the bathroom, the last thing I want to see is a moving figure. Like my friend said, "It's like 'Whoa, there's a person.'" And that person looks exactly like me! How would you feel if somebody walked into the room looking exactly like you?

You know what's scarier than a reflection that looks exactly like you? A reflection that DOESN'T look exactly like you. I'm always picturing the possibility of the mirror reflecting NOT me. Darn it, imagination, darn you to hell. But come back when I need inspiration.

Crap. Now I'm paranoid. Ok, I'm going to bed.

Hey look, another blog.

It's late but I can't sleep (or I don't want to; I can't really tell anymore) so I'm going to make a blog. I don't know what it will be about. It will probably a be a random assortment of my thoughts in the wee hours, since my thoughts tend to run most rampantly and freely in the wee hours. Maybe one day I'll read these posts during sane hours and have a good laugh.

I haven't yet decided whether I want any followers (but what good is a blog without followers? Well I would argue that a blog's existence can have meaning without followers, even if it only adds to the massive archive of the internet and once in a blue moon come up as one of many search results.) <- Insane late-night thought Exhibit A.