My Spirit Animal

Hey folks. I realized I haven't blogged in a while, and so in order to remedy this tremendous disservice I've decided to update you with a particularly juicy story from my life recently. See, the extent to which I'll betray myself for the sake of this blog is becoming clear; I just sacrificed the last of my dignity by using the word "juicy" to describe something besides a fruit.

I have, for a long time, been interested in spirit animals. I'm not talking about the strange fascination that a 12 year old girl would harbor for a horse, or the grotesque emphasis placed so highly on wolves or bald eagles (so memorialized in countless examples of bumper stickers and strange carved oak wall ornaments). No, I was interested in the profoundly deeper side of spirit animals, how our subconscious mind and our most inane and seemingly thoughtless tendencies affect our overall behaviors and how they might closely link us, in some manner, to an animal. Now, I have always believed in a very traditional approach to finding one's spirit animal, namely constructing a sweat hut out of available material, in the forest, and spending a great deal of time meditating and perhaps reading The Economist. And at the end of a long period of time, I would emerge from the hut extremely happy, and be able to say confidently that I know what my spirit animal is.

Instead I decided to embark upon a strange and mystical journey where, by means of a complex series of personal and abstract questions (in a fight, would you resuscitate your enemy after delivering a punishing blow to his/her larynx?), they determined, within a margin of error of .5% that my spirit animal would be a Jaguar.

I was crushed, needless to say. If the accompanying illustration does not completely illustrate my distaste for this choice, let me elaborate: I don't like the jaguar. It's a stupid animal that relies on its speed and stealth to take down jungle creatures, instead of its wit and charm. It's content to hide in the bushes all day waiting for a meal to come by than to just be proactive and take down something bigger than a turtle, like say, oh I don't know, a hippopotamus. It seems content to sit back and let the world pass it by instead of working to positively better its situation in the world, and in the scope of animal history. Many years from now, people will not look back on the jaguar with a pleasant sense of nostalgia. No instead, they will look back and grimace as they struggle to remember whether the jaguar was the one with oval spots or round spots.


Here are some other examples of spirit animals that are so cliché, so steroetypical, and so astoundingly pointless, that the fact that millions of preteen girls descend into a frenzy throws my brain into a series of complicated knots.



The majestic bald eagle.




I've yet to determine what the actual name for the this type of ornamental decoration is.




If Harry Potter cast a hormonal spell that went horribly awry and ended up changing all of his testosterone to estrogen, this would be the spirit animal he would pick.