Of Mice and Men

There is a mouse in my apartment.

I tried to catch it as it snuck out from behind the refrigerator, but it was too fast, and it ran somewhere behind the dishwasher.

I don't want to kill it.

It's funny how much I don't want to kill this mouse, which will probably start eating through my cereal boxes and pooping and having dirty mouse babies in my kitchen, and yet I'm dead set on killing any cockroach that crosses my path.
Where, in my brain, is the line between "okay to kill" and "not okay to kill"? Is it some sort of spectrum? Maybe, since sometimes I don't want to kill a bug but then I have to and don't really feel bad about it.
But maybe it's just certain things. Like how ranchers think it's okay to kill coyotes, and I think it's okay to kill cockroaches.

What sort of chemical is it that makes one person fine with reptiles and another want to scream? It can't all be previous experience or long-buried trauma. Sometimes, our fears or distastes are totally inexplicable.
Like people who don't like broccoli. I'm sure nothing traumatic involving broccoli ever happened to these people, and yet they refuse to eat it. What is that?

It seems like such a strange, subtle distinction. So unnecessary in the natural selection - evolution scheme of things.

Furthermore, what makes certain people like indie rock and others like industrial? Or like Bukowski instead of Murakami?

These things seem like evolutionary after-thoughts. Once human evolution ran its physical course, mostly, the only thing left for it to do was to fantasize and diverge and come up with all these random digressions called personality and thought.

And yet, these afterthoughts are what people seem to value most. Personality: the most important thing. I suppose.

Strange, how nature works. And how humans look so little like their birth-mother.