Dying for Love

I was thinking the saddest commentary of all on femalekind was that Dian Fossey acted alone. Then I reconsidered. For who's to say that women of a thousand different races haven't left their people for another species to live with and protect? Clearly, its failure to catch on with a great many other heavily-documented white women signifies little or nothing at all.

Here I make a mental note to embed a link to a Google search for "women who fight poachers" at "protect," a task which I am in no position to perform at this moment as I am writing in a notebook with a pen. Ironically (?), my S.T. Dupont Paris fountain pen which was a gift and with which I've been writing these entries since March ran out of ink while I was writing "mental to" and I'm now on the last of the dozens of itsy-bitsy little bit of ink cartridges that were part of this marvelous gift. And it's a Friday and I'm already home so I can't get to that fountain pen store in Tribeca for new ones...quelle catastrophe!

Listen, it's hard. It's hard to plan a day trip with being away from the cats on top of all the logistics involved in making one day, back and forth, anywhere, happen--Jane Austen was very right about this--clearly requiring more and keener, less cat-centered minds than mine. Especially when there are perfectly good notebooks and (many) other pens strewn throughout the whole apartment.

I also need to remember to put a Google link for "females who fight poachers" inside something about how maybe not all the females who do so are women. Meaning, human women and thereby doing something to redeem "femalekind" in the first sentence. And also definitely not meaning that some women who do it are really transsexuals. Although some of them very well might be, if at all possible that's not what this part should say.

When I get around to typing these words to post on Reading Les Misérables at Work and I do that Google search for "women who fight poachers" for the link, I don't expect to find entries pointing to long lists. Anyway. But it's hard. What can we do? It's hard to leave the home--Cosette, still sitting in a morning dress on her bedroom windowsill, one pitched battle, with massacre, one desperate escape and one history of the Paris sewer system later: Cosette is still in the house! I feel as if I could go and see her sitting there, worried tears and joyful meditations chasing one another in her downcast eyes which seem to sparkle, from below. Typical behavior in the young female principle--and very appropriate, too. It's better for Cosette to be at home. Picture, her ex-sister, Eponine, who went out, who lost her home, is lying dead beside a pile of rocks with one breast showing. A Top Corpse in World Literature, but still.

I'll have to revise that first search, I guess. But I couldn't have been more than twenty when it seemed to me I realized I didn't have it in me to be a naturalist like I had always hoped to be. Not just because of the science studies involved--although this became the huge consideration--but really because I didn't believe I could stand to watch wild animals die all the time as a result of human stupidity. It would have made me so sad, crazy-sad. Would I have snapped and fired at poachers? Who cares? It never had the chance to happen. Now, I'm an older woman. No one needs me in a window: all those seats have been taken. I too can go out, now.

But I'm not going to no jungle with a shotgun to guard monkeys from armed men trying to kill them for their aphrodisiac properties. Yet. Mother.