I’ve been trying to write something to post here all day (Thursday), but have been thwarted. By my own damn self, mostly. I spent some of the morning answering emails about something I hadn’t intended to work on today, but I also spent a lot of it looking at Upworthy videos and following threads. There was one on whales that I followed to the documentary’s page and then downloaded the documentary.

Then I got an email from a friend asking if I had time for tea. I responded that I needed to work on my blog, which was true, and then I felt guilty enough to actually work on it for awhile.

I was about half-way done when it was time for lunch. I saw that the documentary had finished downloading and decided to watch a little bit of it while I ate my pumpkin ravioli.

I ended up watching the whole thing. It was about Sea World; how they get their whales and treat them and about the deaths of several animal trainers. Sea World maintains that they were all due to trainer error. Former trainers in the documentary dispute those claims and tell about how the animals are treated.

I was horrified and I will never set foot in another Sea World or any park that holds marine mammals in captivity for entertainment purposes.

I finished the documentary and tried to go back to writing, but ended up doing other little tasks instead, filling the time until I went to pick up BamBam to go to speech. I took a notebook with me and did my best to finish the blog piece while I waited for him.

I tried to type it when I came home, but spent the time kind of roaming aimlessly around the house. When Sparky came home, he immediately asked me what was wrong.  I was agitated and I didn’t know why. Actually, I didn’t realize I was agitated. Once he pointed it out to me, I knew why. The documentary. I was still thinking about it.

It had me thinking about those poor trainers, put in harm’s way so that Sea World executives could make more money.

It had me thinking about those poor, beautiful animals crying out for help. Crying out for their babies. And going crazy with frustration.

It had me trying to reconcile in my head how people do such atrocious things.

And, in the end, it had me comparing them to other groups that we have kidnapped from their families, transported and held in tight quarters with others whom they didn’t know and who didn’t speak their language, forced to perform acts they didn’t want to do just so we’d let them have a little food, punished when they didn’t perform to our satisfaction, and flat out lied about how they like to do these things for us.

So, I decided to push the blog I was working on out to next week and write about this instead.