This will be an intense week.
As I wrote yesterday, we’ve got a new chinchilla in the house: Chihiro. Her first night passed well, and we’re excited to spend more time with her and get to know her better and better. She’s a bit shy, but that’s to be expected. She’ll adjust well, I’m confident. Chinchillas are resilient and adaptable, but like many animals and humans, they take a while to learn to trust. Chihiro’s not big on being held yet, but she did give me tiny little snuffles all over my beard, lips, and nose this morning. That was very nice.
And within the week, lord willing, we’ll have four more chinchillas living with us. We’re adopting four babies from Michigan; they’re coming from the home of our Matilde Mission partners, Adam and Sally Blacke. (Adam and Sally have been busy working on the mission and just completed a major rescue project. Expect updates, photos, and another appeal soon!) You can donate using our secure server right here.
My wife and I are busy people. We’ve been willing to support the work of others in the animal rights/animal rescue communities for some time, but that support is mostly financial. It’s easy to write a check, however — and harder to make a commitment to devote time. We loved our Matty, and we are falling in love with Chihiro, but we’re committed to doing more, giving more, sharing more. It will mean more late nights and early mornings; cage cleaning and supervising "out times" for the babies will be a chore. But we will be putting our hands and our hearts where our money and our mouths already are.
The chinnies from Michigan are being shipped to us via air. It’s a common practice with chinchillas, and safe when the weather is not boiling hot. (The forecast is that it will be warm but not dangerously hot at LAX this weekend.) We’re still working on flight details, but we expect our babies to arrive Saturday or Sunday. We had originally planned to fly out ourselves and carry the chins on board in pet carriers; we’d even bought pricey, front-of-the-plane tickets to ensure plenty of room for the little ones. We found out later that Northwest doesn’t allow chins on planes (though they do permit cats and dogs) except in the pressurized cargo hold. So Adam and Sally will put them on a plane in the midwest, and we’ll be waiting in Los Angeles with open arms and eager hearts.
At home, we’re frantically getting things ready. The four chins will go in two separate cages, and because we put Chihiro in Matilde’s old cage, we had to order a third cage today. (Some chins are more sociable than others!) Paying to have a 50 pound cage sent FedEx overnight is just one of those costs we’re incurring. Tomorrow the air conditioning guy is coming by to redo all the interior ducts — we need to make absolutely sure that our heat-sensitive little ones will be safe and comfortable, no matter what.
We’re very excited. Updates on Chihiro and the Michigan babies to follow. Pictures too, of course.
Hugo,
As a student who is involved with gender issues, I have been reading several of your last posts and the last one you wrote about the MRA movement caught my attention. While you may be getting slack from some feminist bloggers for saying what you said, I have to thank you for saying it. It took a lot of guts to say what you said and for that, you have my gratitude. Of course, by implying someone has ‘guts’, it is not implying a ‘manly’ thing or a ‘manly’ attribute that is a “rite for manhood”. To have “guts” (to be courageous) is a human attribute that is in all people and is found in both genders. To be opinionated is simply to be human, and while we may not agree on some matters, the greatest achievement, one argues, is to respect your opposition and be open-minded on both sides of the issue at hand. Therefore, I thank you for your last entry.
While there are many people who believe that MRA’s hate women and encourage violence against them, I feel that there is a tremendous amount of stereotypes on both sides of the spectrum. While there is much frustration, anger, and static on both sides, I also feel that these attitudes shared on both sides won’t help us because, anger doesn’t help someone heal. While anger is a natural response to an external stimuli, it only hurts that person if they hold on to it in the long run and when it is applied to a movement (And let’s face it, there are wounded people on BOTH sides), then everyone will suffer. No one “wins”.
To be angry is to be confused and I feel that this is what hinders a lot of beneficial change from taking place in our society. From my perspective, a great deal of the misandry which I study that is taking place (regardless of financial reasons: a lot of women still buy merchandise that has misandric labels) is because many women do not understand men, are often confused by what men do, and often receive misleading and ambigious titles of the male gender. While this is troubling, you need not look far to see the amount of hidden grievings and misgivings that are encouraged and perpetuated by the media that separates individuals into stereotypes and often times unneeded fear, paranoia and disgust with one another.
The MRA’s I have been talking to discuss how society affects them and how society still needs to address issues on masculinity (and how it also negatively affects femininity) that is being ignored. The stigma of all of this is that these men are white, heterosexual and protestant and that many of them are privileged and just don’t know it, but from my time in lieu with the mainstream movement, I have talked with asians, latinos, african americans, arabs, caucasians and all of them had different religions (Buddhism, Hinduism, Jewish, to name a few). And many are also women! While we can all discuss how women and men are affected in our society, I hope that in the (near) future, we will have an organization where it will not look at men and women on different levels and with different ideals, but as equals and how both genders can benefit. I think what we forget is that we often look at things on a collective level and when doing that, we get skewed to believe that ALL members of a gender, or a race, or a sexual orientation, or a political affiliation act in a certain way. If positive change will ever happen where both genders will be looked upon in a positive light, we need to remember that everyone is indeed an individual and everyone has a different perspective on life.
With that being said, I will stop here for now.
~Andrew
Congratulations on the new additions, Hugo! More work, but so much fun and joy — I’m excited for you.