234. Man in the mirror

 


I have a treasonous resting face. Whatever is going through my brain at any period will be transmitted 100% to the face continuously, non-stop. Whether it is joy, sadness, confusion or blankness... you'll get it all. It's problematic.

This week in the office we found that a mouse had been caught by one of those sticky pad traps. I hate those traps and I've removed them from the floor, but this one was replaced by a janitor. The poor little guy was stuck in there and we were told to put it in the trash. I did, because it was the morning and I wanted to have my team get on with their work. Talk about the Stanley Milgram effect. If facilities would've told me to kill it I may have. Later on, my conscience woke up.

I went back to the trash, jumped in, took the guy and cut as much of the trap as I could. He was left with some cardboard shoes and a big section of cardboard in his back. Looked a bit like an origami turtle. I saw him wander off and I had two thoughts.

One possible outcome was that he found his way back to his nest, and with the fibrous armor he now had, he would be deemed worthy of the mouse crown. He would rule his clan with dignity and always warn the mice about the duality of giants.

Another outcome I imagined was that a starving squirrel could try to eat the mouse but got all messed up and sticky and visible. Then the squirrel would be easily caught by our resident hawk, Hank. Hank would bring the sticky mess to the nest and choke on it and Hank the hawk's kids all would die of starvation. An ecological disaster in our patch of greenery, all due to my "good" deed of releasing this abomination to the world.

If I was thinking about this story, my face would betray me the whole time, thinking of joy with the mouse king or sorrow with the dead hawk kids. And I'm constantly daydreaming, even when an employee is telling me something important. I definitely put out some confusing cues out there. So for this whole week, people have been "Are you ok?" and I've had to answer simply with "Sorry, just thinking of the mouse."

Ain't I a special kind of simple?

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