Jules Winfield obviously never had a hamster

More than two weeks have passed without anything worth to make fun of, but the last weekend had initially some potential. The weather was perfect, sunny and warm, and we managed to spend most of our time outside. I had a couple of hilarious conversations, saw a band I utterly hated (which I sometimes find more entertaining than a good band, because any reason to complain about music is a welcome opportunity) and on sunday me and my girlfriend participated in a pathetic attempt to play soccer as preparation to an upcoming amateur tournament in which we’re probably gonna get raped beyond recognition.

But there’s no such thing as a perfect weekend. This particular weekend, you see, our pet hamster Emma died. My girlfriend is devastated, and I’m not in a particularly cheerful mood either.

To be honest, we had already spent a couple of days in fearful anticipation because Emma was more than two and a half years old - that’s an estimated age of around 112 in human years as far as I understand - and had visibly become weak and lethargic. So when we came home and my girlfriend disappeared into the bathroom, I used the opportunity to quickly check Emma’s cage to prepare for the worst case. As I was standing there, looking down on a motionless ball of fur curled up in a state of never ending sleep, I learned several painful lessons about myself in an instant.

Emma was always my girlfriend’s pet - she insisted on getting a pet, she bought the cage, paid the food and cleaned everything up. It was none of my business. My role included no more than sometimes feeding her, playing with her or laughing at her stupidity. I would admit that I liked her, even ironically call her a “family member”, but never ever “cute”, because there are words in every language on earth which a man just shouldn’t use. Of course I knew that some day in a not so distant future she would eventually die, and we would be a little sad for an hour or two, and you know, fuck it, let’s buy a new one the next day. When I was a kid, it worked. You learned a valuable lesson about life and death and how anything you loved could just be replaced if you just cried loud and long enough.

We’re grown up now, right? We’ve learned much more about death since then. We go to funerals for friends and relatives, and each time we get a little tougher. We can imagine mourning a dog, maybe. Dogs would give their life to you, they will be with you for many years. Dogs have personality, as Jules Winfield said, pigs don’t. I wonder what he would have thought about hamsters. I didn’t expect to develop a lump in my throat over a rodent that was so stupid that it thought of my face and hands as three distinct entities. But the moment I found Emma dead, I knew that Jules Winfield was not the gun-wielding, enlightened philosopher he pretended to be, but a pathetic wannabe gangster talking out of his ass about things he had not the intellectual means to understand. Jules Winfield obviously never had a hamster.

The book we bought said that hamsters need a lot of space to run around. It advised us to built a cardboard enclosure with some hiding places for Emma to explore. She quickly got bored there and preferred her cage. She only used her running wheel when she was alone. Sometimes we would come home late at night and as soon as we stepped into the living room, Emma would suddenly stop running and look at us like she wanted to say “What the fuck are you doing here? Night time is for hamsters.” The book also told us that hamsters don’t like to climb. We spend hours watching her pulling off her stunt, climbing across the roof of her cage, grappling from metal bar to metal bar like a fucking ninja. Humans dream of being actors or rock stars, Emma dreamed of being a monkey. We got it on video, in case you don’t believe me. You can’t just walk into a pet shop and replace something like that, except when you’re a kid.

That night, when we walked out to the backyard and buried Emma in a silent, mundane ceremony, I felt guilty because my girlfriend was so open about showing her grief to me, something I was not capable of. But now, as I’m writing this, Emma already stands proudly among the small group of companions, human or animal, for which I have shed tears.  

Congratulations Emma, you made me cry, and it feels good. We miss you.