So it seems that now I have a pet gerbil. This is mildly surprising given that after college I was pretty sure I wanted to get a cat and finally have a pet with a reasonably long lifespan, a fair amount of intelligence, and the ability to excrete in an appropriate receptacle. But for various reasons I decided that this wasn't really the right time for that, and not too long after I made that decision, a situation arose which made it make sense to adopt a gerbil from some friends. (Not an incredible amount of sense, mind you, since I did end up travelling to New York to acquire this creature. But it made enough sense for me, which I guess means I really wanted a pet of some sort after all, and I just needed an excuse.)

As I was growing up I didn't see any particular appeal to having pet rodents, since of course we had a cat and eventually a dog, both of reasonably high intelligence, which were far more interesting than anything that lived in a cage could be. But my college roommate got a pet rat sophomore year, and since I cared for it when she was out of the country, which was actually rather frequently, and later adopted another roommate's mouse, I got fairly attached to their rodenty charms. When I found out that Cornelius the rat had cancer I was devastated. As I walked around campus all day I saw shadows of him in the squirrels that were everywhere, sitting up and chittering and stuffing food in their cheeks just like he did.

I adored Cornelius so much that I will probably never be able to get another rat because I would want it to be just like him. But it is nice to have a creature around again with the same mannerisms, like nesting obsessively and sitting up and eyeing me and trying to tunnel under every conceivable object and hoard random papers and writing utensils from my desk. There's something very familiar about it, even if Calamity the gerbil is a little less clever and a little more skittish than Cornelius. And it is nice to have another creature to look after, someone who depends on me, even if only for the mundane tasks of feeding and cage cleaning and letting him run around on the desk and bed and preventing him from arbitrarily throwing himself off of tall furniture.

I think in part I like rodents because their compulsions are like mine only more extreme. They are very small furry control freaks. Calamity cannot be convinced to use the nesting box that came from the pet store no matter where it is placed or how it is oriented. It is Just Not Right. On the other hand, when I gave him the lid to the box that my checks came in, he immediately chewed doors in exactly the places he wanted them and used it for shelter all the time. When that box got old and icky, I took it away and gave him the bottom of the same box. He immediately chewed doors in exactly the same places and set up the same nest all over again. It makes me feel bad whenever I clean his cage because when I put him back in he acts all upset and disoriented, and stays up all night scrabbling about until the shavings are piled exactly the way he likes them again. Sometimes when my mind is all turned inside out because my plans have gone awry or something in my life is not just so, I can almost see myself as a little rat or gerbil, sitting up and chittering huffily because my food dish is not in the right place, dammit.

But in real life I am much, much bigger than a gerbil, and sometimes when I hold him quivering in my hands I feel a little scared, knowing how easy it would be to crush him, and I think maybe the one creature in the world that depends on me should be a little less small and fragile. Terrified as I am of my own capacity for harm (negligible as that may be in a world where most people are probably significantly stronger than me), it's no wonder that until fairly recently I was incredibly nervous about caring for or even holding babies. At least rodents can fall from a height and only have the wind knocked out of them for a moment, and can scamper away if their human has proved to be that incompetent at looking after them.