Hypersensitivity

I'm not sure I can adequately describe how I feel after the morning I've had so far.  Feel free to read this and say, "Oh, she is SO hypersensitive I have no idea how anyone can be around her."  Sometimes I don't know myself.

On Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings I volunteer at a no-kill animal shelter about 20 miles from here.  There's a school zone a few blocks from it with one of those flashing 20mph signs.  Today a cop was hanging out on the side of the road.  As I approached him, he stuck his hand out the window and pointed down to the pavement a few times; I assumed it meant he wanted me to slow down.  So I did.

Obviously to some of you this doesn't seem like much, but I have this terrible guilt when I'm corrected by an authority figure.  I mean, he didn't even follow me or anything, but it still tweaked me to the point where I felt bad for having been "that person" who needs to be told to slow down in a school zone.

Anyway, I got to the shelter this morning and tried to put it out of my mind.  I walked some dogs, gave a little extra love to one who can't play for two weeks because he's being treated for heartworm and got in my car to go home.

A good chunk of the 20 miles between the shelter and my home is a two-lane state road with a 70mph speed limit.  I ususally go between 70 and 75mph in the left (what I was taught was the "fast" lane).  I was coming up behind a Lincoln in the left lane that must have been going, like, 60mph...cars were passing it on the right.  Unfortunately, as soon as I decided to be one of those cars, a D.O.T. truck appeared in the distance just over the line of the breakdown lane.

In this state you're supposed to move over a lane if you're passing a stopped vehicle on the side of the highway.  I couldn't pass the slow Lincoln on the right fast enough to get back to the left lane and give the truck its space, so I ended up passing right beside this D.O.T. truck (and its driver, who was standing next to the driver's side door) at about 60mph.  The driver had to move around to the front of the vehicle to avoid me.

So I got about 4 seconds of his enraged face filling my windshield and his mouth twisting into just about every disgusting name one can call a female as I passed.  It was harrowing to see him so angry at me. 

Maybe if either of these occurences had been it for my day I wouldn't have minded so much.  But I'm on the superstitious side, and I think bad things come in threes and the third one is usually the worst.

I continued on my way, now very eager to get home and driving a good deal UNDER the speed limit in the right lane when I pulled up behind a tractor-trailer.  It had open slats all along the trailer and was stacked to bursting with pillows.  Their stuffing peeked out of every slat all along the length of the vehicle.  Except as I got closer I realized they weren't pillows...they were live, white chickens.

I got physically ill.  Not from any kind of smell, but from the sight of hundreds of chickens stuffed haphazardly into their crates.  Wings, beaks, feet and bits of flesh and feathers were protruding from every angle and fluttering wildly in the wind.  I could see their eyes blink against gravel kicked up by the spinning tires; I could see some with a few inches to spare attempt to peck themselves clean.  And I may be overreacting, but all I could think about were those drawings in our history textbooks of African slaves piled into wooden ships and the descriptions of the cattle cars Nazis stuffed their "undesirables" into, where people were packed so tightly one could faint from lack of oxygen and stay upright.

All that suffering just to go somewhere else to die.

I was stuck behind that repulsive vehicle for eight minutes before it pulled off the road and onto another.  I came home and threw up my breakfast.  I'm still trying to soothe my stomach as I write this.

It was...it was just an awful morning for me.  I'm trying to focus on Buoy right now, who is happily chewing her Nylabone® next to me on the sofa.  I wish My Husband was home so I could tell him what happened.  He'd hug me and tell me "It's alright," and that he loves how sensitive and that it's an advantage and not the weakness it feels like at this moment.  But he's at work, and will be for the next ten hours, so I'm telling you.
I tell myself I don't have the "strength of will" to be a vegetarian or vegan.  I know, deep down, that if I subject myself to chickens having their beaks twisted off in hatcheries or pigs being slaughtered with a nailgun to the forehead or cows being rolled with a forklift from one pen to another because they can't stand I will never touch animal flesh again.

So what do I do?  I avoid those visuals, those descriptions at all costs.  I COULD be a vegetarian.  I actively prevent myself from living that life.

But as I sit here I remember those chickens, and I've never felt so spineless.