Friday Nights

She has just spent the entire day shopping for tonight. She has picked out a nice, glittery dress, one that will reveal most of her body instead of cover it up in this cold time – it is okay, she convinced herself that a few star jumps will do the trick. She picked out a nice, tall pair of high heels in fluorescent green to suit her lack of clothing, and had just been to the hairdresser who licked her hair so straight that no spillage of drinks will affect her later tonight.

She then came home and applied some fake tan to her body just in case she had to take her clothes off later, and immediately put on her dress and heels because she cannot wait to head back out dressed in them. She then looked at herself in the mirror – fantastic! She bent down, pulled open the drawer fatigued with the weight of cosmetic products, and began to layer varied creams and powders to acquire a complexity decent enough for photographs. After all, many boys will see these later on for months, so if she does not score tonight which is doubtful, she will keep scoring for weeks after.

She had no time to have her nails done. Rather, Vanessa’s Nail Art did not have any appointments. She never went anywhere else. So she purchased a packed of fake nails before she was home to apply herself. After all, her slender arms did not want to be seen by her side if they had not had any fake nails attached to them. She checked her phone – thirteen texts, four missed calls and some new Snapchats. She was tagged in a Facebook post, it turns out her friends could not wait for her any longer, so they left without her. She was to meet them at the club. She waited a little longer for her phone to charge some more, gathered some of her little belongings in her purse and called a taxi. Her night ahead would consist of giving love to strangers and receiving love from creeps.

I have spent my entire day at university. I have been working on my four final artworks all month, finessing them and making sure they will have a profound impact on others in the same way that the idea of them had a profound impact on me. I spent my month’s money on bits and pieces to place in them, on final prints and on supplies. I presented them to my teacher and to my peers and they were all overly content with the visual display of pieces of my mind and the ways in which I executed them.

I headed back home – I could not wait to dress down to the comfiest of pants and the warmest of jumpers. It was, after all, the second coldest evening of the month, leading up to winter, and I just recovered from a cold, and I need to be better by next week because of a final presentation taking place for my English class. I need all the warmth and comfort I can get. I have been, after all, working quite hard this semester, and all of my work paid off, now I need to finalize some other pieces of work for other subjects, and invest the rest of my time to winter school.

I had free time now, so I put the movie Mr. Wrong on and laughed and cringed at the many scenes involving Ellen Degeneres acting like a heterosexual. Inevitably, due to the lack of sleep I had the previous nights, I fell asleep and woke up to many other movies premiering on television, because Friday nights are accommodated for in that sense. I checked my phone – a few Snapchats, a few notifications. I placed it on charge for later tonight.

Ritually, I prepared myself to head over to my grandmother’s house with my family to hang out with our relatives, watch some horror flicks and laugh at things that happened in the week. I would return home and read a little and head off to bed. And I would not have it any other way.  

Maya Angelou

I have always had the misconception that life is infinite, that those alive who I admire who are out of my reach would one day be in my reach, and that there is plenty of time for everything. Yesterday, I was proven wrong. I should have known that there was a particular reason for my solemn evening. 

I saw a trend on Facebook, a little notation on the right side of my web browser that said 'Maya Angelou' - without reading any further, I was content for one that my main source of inspiration was being mentioned, atop all other things in the world, in a place where intellectual muses are usually overlooked. So I briefly revelled in that moment alone. Then, I read on, and I could literally feel my intellectual realm shatter inside me. All that I stood for, education-wise, was shaken with an internal earthquake that bounced off and away from the richter scale.

My one academic muse was dead. She had left the earth. She was gone. That was it, all she had worked for, all she had achieved, all the lives she had touched, it would now mean that it would not matter after the media has used it to their benefits, until an enthusiastic poetry teacher or educator or literary or historical genius dropped her name out of the blue, connecting it to the topic at hand, and her name would penetrate the ears of many and slip away, sticking only with a couple or a few students who will, not for long, focus on her name because they will feel that it will be best to return to the task at hand so as to pass and one day reach near the level of Maya Angelou's impact on the academic world.

Eighty-six years, and in those years she achieved more than what most cannot achieve had they lived thrice that amount. I am bothered. I am saddened. But above all, I am grateful. I never had the chance to meet her. I never had the chance to live up to my fullest potential so as to get some mere form of recognition from her, nor had I ever had the chance to write her a letter, all of which I should have done, and I wish I had done. Time slipped away. And upon looking for an address for contact, I have found these two things, both of which illustrate how quickly a chance can escape:

Sorry, the person you were looking for is no longer available, more like. I am grateful that I lived in a parallel world to her, so that at least I did not have to look in a mere history book to stumble upon her. I hold up high the values her work has nestled in me about my appearance, about my womanhood, about my curves and my femininity and my voice and how I can impact the world too, as a future educator.

I am grateful for Dr. Maya Angelou and her impact on the world and myself. And though I never had or ever will have the chance to show her my gratitude, I will always carry her story with me for future generations and I will always remember her many gifts.

“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” 

- Dr. Maya Angelou

A Brief Moment without Wifi

Earlier today our internet was momentarily cut out, so I asked my sister if she could imagine what life was like without the internet. “No!” she exclaimed. “I was six!” It seemed to her so long ago, when in reality it was only thirteen years. I remember it quite vividly.

We would sit, my sister and I, outside of the house, and I remember a time when I told hr a scary story about Johnny and how he ate someone’s liver and how that someone came back to haunt him – ending it with a scream because the story itself was not that scary. So she screamed even louder and ran inside crying. We would ride our bicycles outside with our neighbor, Kira. We would play with the Vortex I received on Christmas. We would tend to our pet roosters and recall rhymes and tongue twisters such as ‘Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers’, I still remember it to this day.

We saw the sun an awful lot. We watched little television, watching only cartoons when it was switched on. We read comic books and were read fairytales to every night before we slept. We would call friends on the telephone and discuss anything and everything that happened outside of school hours. We would draw and write. We would play boardgames like ‘Connect 4’, and I would always win and I once had the entire game-board smacked into my face by my sister because of her jealousy and I remember holding my cheek in my hand and walking into my bedroom where mum was popping a boil on my grandmother’s back and when I removed my hand from my cheek the blood multiplied due to the amount of tears that I cried. We played with Barbie dolls – I owned an equestrian Barbie and I mostly liked the horses and the stable that it came with so I would unpack it, spread it out on my lawn and live a life that I did not have, packing every little piece back up and storing it amongst the mice that never seemed to die in the garage.

Then our Playstation One came along, and we would spend more hours on television. We would play the demo disc that came with it more than the actual games – I was particularly interested in the dinosaur character that roared and walked yet stayed in the same spot. I would zoom into his frightening expressions and make him roar and move him around the screen with a dark background. We would play Time Crisis and Point Blanc with the actual remote-control gun and we would play Tarzan and cry from horror at the scene of the rampage and never passed that level because of how horrifying it was. We would buy illegal copies and hold them as though they were more valuable than gold and we would play each game so many times that they would become scratched beyond repair even if we handled them with care every time. We would watch my father play Doom or Abe’s Odyssey or Driver. And still we had no internet connection, no connection to the world out of reach of our own, yet a strong connection to the world directly outside of our doors.

She could not recall all of that. The cameras we used where we had to wait for our photographs to develop rather than see their previews instantly. We took final photographs, not many of a repeated pose altered each time to accumulate perfection. We went to the video store to pick one movie to rent all week, a new-release that we would watch over and over again. We researched things in the library, collecting many books and putting together information found in them. We bonded, made bonds and broke them each within reason, unlike unreasonable broken or created bonds with people we may never have the chance to meet. We had time to treasure things, and we all moved in a slow, steady pace.

And then the wifi was connected again. We spent three total hours wondering why certain devices would not connect, changing the password and memorising it, and all of the sudden life without the internet was forgotten again, and life became fast-paced and rapid. 

Gravity and Colds

I have never been as mesmerised at a bodily occurrence as I was with the banging sensation of one's elbow until now, mid-way through a terrible cold. 

For two nights I was unable to lay down simply because my head was clogged with gallons of mucus and it just felt as though I was drowning when I lay horizontally, not to mention my blocked nose. Now that I am four days into my cold though, I have had only one blocked nostril at a time when I lay down, so now I sleep in my bed again and not on the uncomfortable thing that is our new sofa, which is convenient seeing as though the heater in my bedroom knows its bounds, unlike the heater in the lounge area which loves to watch the world burn. But the topic of heaters is not why I am writing today. 

I am writing today about the odd occurrence that happens while one is sick and laying down. To achieve what I am about to explain, one must have only one of their nostrils blocked. They then must choose a side to lay down on, preferably the side of the blocked nostril so as to allow a sufficient amount of air to flow through the former, and one must lay there in that position for about ten minutes, or until one feels the difference between the two halves of their faces. When that is the case, one must then fulfil the experiment and turn their bodies to the other side, the empty nostril, and that is when something strange happens. 

That gallon of mucus then, losing its hard texture, slithers down one nostril to the next, glides down the canals of your sinus on to the next canal. And there it sits just like it sat in the latter nostril, and it slowly begins to harden again. Overnight, despite however many times you move and despite how hardened your mucus becomes, if you turn in your sleep, the mucus will shift. It is the most bizarre feeling, feeling as though somebody has screwed your face open and is pouring gravy in your facial canals. This is even stranger now considering I have not caught a cold in two years time.  This all feels new to me. 

And as strange as this sounds, I will savour this mucus moment. I have no sense of taste nor a sense of smell nor any sense in my head, on that matter, for wanting this to last longer simply just to revel in the strange feeling it brings. 

The Internet and How it is Better than Television

As of late, people are expounding the negativity of the internet so much so that they are missing out on the greatness that it provides.

From the shelter of my home, I have been able to, without the need to sit in front of a television and witness all of its advertisements and annoying animated voices contained within them, research the topics that I write about daily and procrastinate freely. Today I researched about Elliot Rodger and his crimes and by the time the six o'clock news on television popped up, I knew more about the topic than the news reporters. And I confide in that. It boosts my sense of independence and it boosts my level of intellectualism, in that instead of being exposed to one narrow news report, I am able to look at over ten of them, critically analysing them and piecing together pieces of information that are updated and more accurate than a story received at ten in the morning. 

As for my free procrastination, well. Procrastination also contains negative connotations, though it is my daily necessity. I procrastinate to piece things together in my mind, in order to find links between things and to keep myself entertained whilst on top of things. Some people enjoy adventuring through a rainforest, hiking and being exposed to strange animals. I like to surf - surf the internet, expose myself to varied things at fast rates. Whatever I want, whenever I want. And as quickly as I search, I can flick back to the work that I am meant to be doing, and I will also finish that. 

Totally irrelevant to my work but very relevant to my lifestyle away from the computer was my research and stumbling upon a YouTube channel that features creative alcoholic beverages. Soon enough, after watching the creation of different shots and the conglomeration of alcoholic flavourings, I received enough inspiration to piece together fragments of my next, or next next birthday party: a Tetris dress-up costume party with watermelon kegs. Had I not been using the internet, I would have probably cut a cake, taken a few family photographs and sat down with a Corona, staring at a pile of grapes and plums.

What I am trying to say is that the instant availability of multiple ideas stimulates brain activity. We become active curators of the intake of information, rather than the passive intake of a presentation of information - television - so instead of looking through someone's binoculars, we not only create our own but we also look through our own and we share our own with others whilst we look through theirs so as to allow the creation and sharing of multiple perspectives, a much more constructive way of deconstructing things.

If I was to think of one thing that would entice me to watch television apart from a horror movie whilst my cousins are over, it would be SBS. SBS is the equivalent to internet searching, except it provides documentaries that are more in-depth, and not necessarily narrated by Morgan Freeman or David Attenborough. 

Elliot Rodger's Loneliness

There exists so much social distance in our lives today that the fear of rejection within young adults and adolescents alike have risen to the point where they would rather kill than be rejected – as is the case with two news reports I was exposed to today.

The first, a young man stabbed to death a fellow classmate who refused to go to the prom with him. That state of refusal is understandable, that emotional impact t could have because for one thing, that young man would have built up so much courage to ask a girl to accompany him to the prom, a place where all are judged for their attire and for their accompaniment. To have all that courage built up, and to have it all come crashing down at a speed of rapidity had a dramatic effect, resulting in the loss of an innocent life who was found dying on a staircase.

The second, a young man ploughed through cyclists and shot at random college attendees before shooting himself, due to the fact that he was a twenty-two year old virgin who never acquired enough attention or acceptance from peers, that he felt the need to kill them, to ‘make them suffer, just as they made [him] suffer’. Six innocent lives later, the seventh not included because it was his own, Elliot Rodger definitely has made more than half the world's population suffer - women.

This just goes to show how messed up our society is, how messed up the thoughts we are drilling into the minds of our young ones are. In most of Elliot's twenty-two uploaded videos on his YouTube channel, he speaks of loneliness, of hatred and of sexual desire, three recurring themes which hinted the results of his killing spree. It bothers me significantly how his parents warned authorities and they simply spoke to him and found out that he was a really nice boy. Of course he would he, which crazed sex-obsessed person with killing on their mind would give themselves up before they do some damage? Certainly not Elliot.

A week ago, he posted a video titled 'Being lonely on Spring Break sucks', then 'Why do girls hate me so much?', 'Life is so unfair because girls dont want me', 'Balcony Vlog, reminiscing about childhood', 'My reaction to seeing a young couple at the beach, Envy', and finally, 'Elliot Rodger, Lonely vlog, life is so unfair'. His video of 'retribution' was taken down from his channel, and re-uploaded by many others. What one witnesses is the build-up of the subconscious, cruelly crafted by our society.

There are many people out there with a burning hatred for all of humanity simply from the affect of one person on their mentalities. I would know, because I am one of them. I can thus relate to Elliot in the sense of loneliness, of sexual desire and depravity, and for being overlooked despite there being nothing wrong with me - however, there is a large difference between myself and him in that I do not, nor do I wish to ever, act on my hatred of humans, nor do I hate all of humanity on a large scale due to a few humans. Yes, I hate the situation and not the person, and nor do I expect people to perform in the way that I would like them to. Killing thousands, millions, billions of women would not have brought women closer to Elliot, and that was his dire mistake. 

It is not okay to assume women are objects. It is not okay to assume that because you are a 'gentleman', that all women that you choose should swoon over you. It is not okay to assume that every obsession you hold against someone is requited and that if it is not you must abolish them from existence. Elliot thought that he could claim ownership over 'beautiful women', that he could walk into a sorority house like a child walks into a pet-store and choose any girl to leave with in the same way that child would choose a particular fish. Life does not work like that, and people who believe that it should, should seek medical help immediately.

What is more important, though, in the wake of these events, is that we should change our society. We should teach not only our little girls to avoid being raped and not to avoid talking to strangers, but our little boys to not be those horrible strangers and to not obsess over little girls who say no - because no means itself and nothing else. Women are conscious beings. They are conscious of their desires and not only the desires of the snakes protruding from the pants of desperate strangers. Their choices in men or women alike should not alter the way others feel about them. Every woman has agency over the abyss existing in between their thighs. 

Loneliness is not an excuse for inflicting pain. Exclusion is not an excuse for inflicting pain. Sexual desire is not an excuse for inflicting pain. In fact, no form of reasoning that came out of Elliot's mouth in his videos or in his manifesto had made his murderous decision righteous. The fate of one should belong in the hands of their maker and nobody else. Left out? Find other people. Feeling like you need some sexual assistance? There are a lot of people who choose to make money in that way, I am sure you can afford it. But what Elliot should not have been able to afford was the right to guns, and the right to the taking of lives. #YesAllWomen

Turning to Others for Help

Through my painfully long journey towards acquiring the attention of one for all of the right reasons, I continue to acquire it for all of the wrong reasons. This is the case especially when a few peers turn to me communicatively in order to connect with me to access my brain's linking of thinks so as to make sense of the essays that they need to write.

I still remember the day that a person in a class of mine found me on Facebook, and added me. I spent minutes looking at their profile pictures in an attempt to see who this person was and it came to my realisation that they were from my fiction class. Thinking that it was for some strange romantic endeavour, one which I would not have consented to, our discussion eventuated in him needing assistance with his essay. I told him that I would not mind reading over it once he had written it, and those were the terms that were agreed on. A couple of days later he messaged me asking me if I had firstly read one of the novels that we are required to write an essay about, and secondly if I had picked out any good quotes for him to use in his essay - wait, I had not agreed to this?

It is disappointing that this is so. It begins with compliments, "you're so smart!" or "you're so nice!" or, my favourite, "can you make [my essay] sound a bit smarter and better so I can pass?" It is all pure laziness. It is a classic case of paying the nerd to do you homework, however nowadays it is done with bribery via compliments. I have fallen for none of those compliments, and though I thought that at one stage these people actually cared enough to have me be something more meaningful to them than an academic slave, I will think no longer of them. Thank God that class is over - literally.

I am not as intelligent as they think me to be. I put more effort into things than most, thus my level of intellect should not be mistaken by my willingness to achieve. I believe anybody can achieve what I have, and that if one does not pursue one does not acquire - I am not, in saying this, legitimising the pursuing of a 'smarter person' to lure into writing your essays. An essay is an idea produced by its writer, how is one meant to bring forth their idea if it is being supplied by someone else?

It is rather cruel to put somebody through this. Ancient days of asking for a favour face to face have died off, and now people communicate socially in order to up their antes, to improve their chances of passing beyond who they communicate with by doing nothing but pleading. This is reminiscent of somebody 'ghosting' an article for a small sum of money - the host of that 'ghost's' writing then revels in the celebratory acknowledgement of something that they paid for. That is no different to my current circumstance, one which I shall abolish immediately.

Nobody should have to go through this gross misuse of intellect. I am beginning to question the point in offering someone assistance, offering my services to others. As a future educator I am content with assisting those who ask me for assistance, but I will not 'ghost' their work on my behalf only to watch them carouse on my efforts.

The Possession

If you watch a scary movie in a dark, silent atmosphere as you sit on the floor with your feet sticking out underneath a long double bed, you begin to realise that despite how awful the 'horror' is portrayed in the film, especially in instances where ketchup is obviously used in substitute of blood, that you believe whatever is being shown to the extent where anything else is possible.

Midnight, a cold winter evening and I was sitting in the middle of my two male cousins. The one on my left, Jacques, is two years younger than the one on my right, Jean. We decided to watch Children of the Corn on my phone after I had won my very first poker game, reeling in every single chip. We migrated to my grandmother's bedroom, placed some cushioning made up of three fluffy quilts below where we decided to sit, and placed my phone up against a tissue box on the edge of the bed, our feet dangling below it, getting swallowed into the abyss of the Boogeyman's lair.

The volume was not a problem, nor was the really small screen. As soon as we turned all of the lights off, our vision honed in on the very screen and we were immersed in the movie immediately. Soon after, my sister decided to finally hand us the iPad and we continued watching the film on that - a bigger screen, but lower volume. Regardless, after a few more minutes we were immersed into the poorly produced film.

Halfway through a boring scene in the cornfields, I turned to Jean and explained to him an aspect of my day, or something along the lines of that - I cannot recall due to my prominent recalling of what was to happen next. He said, "look at them in the window" out of absolutely nowhere. Not taking anything into account, I stared above the iPad's glow at the window to find nothing there. "What?" I asked, this time curious. He then proceeded to deny the fact that he ever said anything, and his face showed no sign of a lie. Jacques then squealed "I heard you say it too! You said "window"!" But Jean denied it again. I held onto Jacques' arm and screamed a little, playfully punched Jean on his shoulder and told him to drop it. "I didn't say anything," he repeated, and crawled towards the mirror.

"They're here," he said, Children of the Corn still playing in the background. It was still pitch black. "Take a photo of him using flash," Jacques whispered to me. "Hurry!" And I did, wishing that I did not, for right in the corner of the photograph was a strange white orb. Jean then proceeded to walk out of the room for no apparent reason. Jacques and I looked up the meaning of a white orb, and found it to represent 'a guardian angel not from God'. We could not get out of the dark room any faster. We ran to where my sister and Jacques sister were taking leg-puppet videos and decided to tell them all about it, holding the door shut before Jean returned.

"You're over-analysing it!" said their sister, Layal. "You guys are funny."
"We're serious!" said Jacques. "He's possessed!"
The doorknob started to turn and we all squealed. I started filming. The door kept shaking, we kept squealing, and then everything went silent again.
"Oh my God, what is going on?!" Layal exclaimed, her tone changing from suspicious to fearful.
"We told you!" said Jacques. "GET AWAY FROM ME!" he yelled out the door to Jean.
We remained hidden in the room from Jean until his mother came to find out what all of the fuss was about, and Jacques explained it to her, while I filmed Jean. Jean kept turning his head to my grandmother's dark room as though he were talking to someone.

It is interesting how you believe anything if the atmosphere is right. It turned out that it was all an act as a form of revenge towards me winning the entire game of poker for the first time, wiping Jean's chips clean and taking hold of them in a conquering manner. I still think Jacques considers this entire thing to be the total opposite of a joke, to be a total act of reality, and the photograph makes me align with his view.

Breaking the Ice: Why this Saying is, in Itself, Broken

When I hear the cliché "break the ice", I panic. I panic not only because of its idiocy, I panic not only because of how inapplicable it is to my real life situations, but I panic because if breaking the ice really does involve one little thing like burping in front of the other or using a silly pick up line, then I have the entirety of Antarctica to break.

I find that I cannot confide entirely with others unless they are my direct family members - my sister, mostly, my mother and my father. There is no shame between my sister and I. We sometimes forget that we are nude in front of one another whilst in the middle of getting dressed and needing to address an imminent issue, despite the nude person usually always being me. And that is a norm in my family, not in front of my father of course, we do not have 'norms' like that, unlike the family recently discovered in New South Wales to have consisted of members created by the act of incest. No, our family simply believes that there are other gene pools out there that we must mix with - after marriage.

Regardless, though, what I am trying to say is that I have been brought up to believe that behaving in nasty manners such as vomiting or a diarrhoea attack or farting or loud burping are things that are embarrassing to one, but one will not be embarrassed about these things in front of family members, even if some of these things are natural or are inevitable at times. I have become so accustomed to that, that I cannot imagine doing any of these in front of another. And that should not be so - I should be able to express myself freely to others in every way. 

But diarrhoea is an embarrassing thing. Urinating next to someone in a public toilet stall is an embarrassing thing. A toilet bowl fart that happens in that public toilet while you are meant to be only urinating is an embarrassing thing. Vomiting unexpectedly. Leaking period blood. Forgetting to book a wax appointment. Being so sick and not being able to shower and having someone mistake your hair for being wet. All of these I take into consideration when I think of experiencing them in front of a person other than a direct family member.

Though I am ashamed to allow my perfectly normal bodily functions to do their part in front of outsiders, per se, I know that one day I will look back on this post and giggle hysterically as it will be a thing of my naive past. Until then, I will have to chip away parts of the North and South Pole of ice between myself and my future potential lover(s), otherwise the likeness of the Titanic will happen to me, but not in the sense of me breaking physically.

Oil Spills and Pelicans

There are not a lot of things that I am grateful for in my life, unfortunately, especially when it comes to members of the human race and their wrongdoings. But with every mistake, lessons are learned, and this is the case with major oil spills such as that of BP's on the 18th of October, two years ago.

More than two-hundred million gallons of unrefined oil was spilled into the Gulf of Mexico over a course of eighty-seven days, affecting sixteen-thousand miles of coastline, killing over eight-thousand animals in a span of just six months. A big commotion happened, people swore never to buy petrol from BP again, the media had things to over-exaggerate and I had another reason to hate the world, as did many other animal-rights activists, while in the meantime slaughterhouses were and still are operating in the background.

Two years later, people are purchasing petrol from BP again, nobody has brought up the massive oil spill and some of the affected pelicans have recovered - yes, recovered. How? Well, with the help of some amazing individuals, too heartfelt about the situation at hand to not care.

A couple of hours ago, I came home and decided to have an early dinner and watch some television in the meantime. There was nothing interesting on, except for a documentary on SBS and I thought that that would be enough to satisfy me in terms of my daily dose of television. I cannot recall its name, but I can recall what was shown: a pelican cleaning operation at Fort Jackson Oiled Wildlife Rehabilitation Centre of Louisiana. These people have dedicated a fraction of their lives to save pelicans enveloped in oil from BP's oil spill, and have treated these pelicans enough to self-eat, made sure that they are capable of surviving in the wild again, and have released them. A similar documentary to the one I watched is HBO's Saving Pelican #895.

And almost immediately, mid-chewing a Lebanese Cheese pizza, my faith in some aspects of humanity was restored. I felt as much joy as a clean pelican being released from that rehabilitation centre. I felt as though humans were all responsible creatures who had the ability to empathise for other beings that they, in one oil spill or another, hurt. This toxic waste, for the sake of money, killed so many pelicans who in attempting to preen themselves died from the virulent toxins found in the oil, or simply drowned in it. And while BP paid its due of forty-billion dollars in court, these volunteers paid the due for all of humanity to these animals, showering them with water and love, and making sure they have regained the ability to fend for themselves again.

Over thirty-thousand additional people volunteered to assist in the cleaning of the Gulf when the oil spilled, too, which was not spoken about to the extent that it needed to be at the time for me to have known that for a fact rather than having to read about it now, two years later. These unnamed and unacknowledged people are people who we need more of on this planet. We need to assist these wonderful beings in the absence of Mother Nature. We need to give animals the care and respect that they need in situations of our causing. We need to treat animals the way we want to be treated if we were voiceless.

You do not need to be an animal-rights activist to care that thanks to these people, we have saved eight-hundred and ninety-five pelicans that would otherwise have died from our hands - you just need a heart.






References:

11 Facts about the BP Oil Spill

HBO Oil Spill Documentary Article