ok I'm back... with a rant about fur

I have always thought that fur is gross. When I was a little kid I remember my mother inherited some fox stoles, that looked a lot like our family dog by the way, and I screamed and made her get rid of them. Fur is just a barely processed carcass and I find it so morbid to want to wear it around. For normal people a distaste for fur is probably not a big deal. Basically you just don’t buy it and you don’t have to deal with it. You could be an activist and make a point about not wearing it or designing with it (as Stella McCartney has done so tastefully). You could be a big self-important ass hole and throw paint at other people’s furs, but that’s the kind of forceful preachiness that is akin to door to door proselytizing. Either way you would not have to actually touch the dead thing. In my world however I HAVE to deal with old rotting nasty furs. In the costume world we have to portray every possible type of person in every possible era. It is impossible to avoid the fact that in many eras and many places fur is not the faux pas that it is here, thus I am forced to store fur in my stock. I have to touch the nice ones as well although I still think that they’re ’icky’. Despite the fact that fake furs these days look lovely and real and store very easily, at work I have five boxes full of stoles and collars and bits of furs... I just slapped the label "dead things" on them and put them up on a tall shelf hoping that if a designer wants to use them that they will be the one sorting through them. Unfortunately, my avoidance of the dead things does not stop them from coming in. People bring donations and think that they are being so generous by giving me new boxes of rotting dead things that they couldn’t sore either. Old ladies sigh as they hand them over to me wishing that they weren’t so "politically incorrect these days". I smile and leave the dead thing in the box until they go away and I can pull out my gloves so as to avoid actually touching it. Right now I have a full plastic bin in my shop waiting to be inventoried and examined for usefulness. It’s too disgusting. It’s like reaching into a bin full of writhing snakes... I lack the stomach for it right now.