Discovery of the day: kittens like drumming. I started drumming my fingers on the back of a hardcover book and I got the rapt attention of all six kittens, who approached with interest. It wasn't predatory, they didn't try to attack my fingers, they simply gathered and stared. Perhaps kittens are musical.
I actually have things on my mind other than kittens, but they take more work to write down. And kittens are distracting.
_
respond?
10:21:18 PM,
Friday 16 April 2010
-
Using songs I like as ringtones is no good, because I start to associate them with being interrupted. Using songs I don't like is no good either, for obvious reasons. Perhaps using songs is generally a bad idea. The swarm of bees represents how I feel about phones, but that is a bit too creepy, I don't think I'll go back to that. And if I use a generic one I think my phone is ringing constantly when I'm in public places. Hum. Important dilemmas of the modern Erika.
_
respond?
(10)
01:14:27 PM,
Tuesday 13 April 2010
-
It's like running a small business. Erika's Kitten Depository, how may I help you?
_
respond?
04:45:13 PM,
Saturday 10 April 2010
-
...
_
respond?
04:44:04 PM,
Saturday 10 April 2010
-
Beauty at work: Blackberry has a coat of many colors, and is charming and bold, and is everyone's first choice.
_
respond?
(2)
03:58:28 PM,
Saturday 10 April 2010
-
Spring peepers in full April nighttime symphony sound like they are calling to the mothership for a ride home to some completely alien world.
_
respond?
(3)
09:22:20 PM,
Thursday 8 April 2010
-
Having a timer that merely stops ticking is not quite as effective as one that dings, but it's better than nothing.
_
respond?
05:11:54 PM,
Thursday 8 April 2010
-
Usually springtime makes me happy. This year I'm like, wait, slow down, wait wait, leaves, not ready for leaves, omg crocuses are gone already, not ready for warm days, bees, flowers, pinwheels, could you just give me a breather, a couple more months should do it...
I have had some anxiety about time lately, but I think this is more than that: I have shifted my balance. I am not a spring person this year. I am a winter person. It's like a magnetic pole shift.
When I was a child I was a winter person, I loved tromping around in moon boots and snowpants and hot chocolate and seeing how cold I could get without frostbite, but gradually I grew to fear winter and love spring and summer, not even minding the intense heat of a heatwave August.
This year winter was not so much about tromping around outside as feeling safe and cozy inside. The cold keeps things still.
So now comes the time to plant vegetables, and I am terrified of that. Just walking around, the bright sunshine, the new colors and new activity all around my neighborhood, I know it is good, but it makes me want to run away and hide. I want a cave. I don't usually want a cave.
It's bizarre, I know perfectly well it's not me that has to grow and make leaves and things, but I feel like spring is an effort. Perhaps it is that I do need to grow and change in some significant way, that this whole project of self-help and finding my path is working but that's a little scary. "April is the cruelest month": I guess I'm not the only one. I've been feeling hit hard with it this year though.
I have a lot of stuff frozen inside. I'm aware of this, I have been for years, this emotional glacier. Usually if I feel a bit of it melting, that feels good. Now I feel defensive of it, protective of it, like it's needed for the polar bears or something. My neurosis feels genuinely threatened and suddenly it's all like "will no one think of the polar bears?"
I don't have to like spring this year, I don't have to feel it in its poetic fullness, I can be a winter person this year, but spring's gonna happen anyway, and I'd better plant my veggies.
_
respond?
(3)
01:07:49 PM,
Thursday 8 April 2010
-
Oh good, it did get to 90 today. I was like, what the hell, it feels like a hot summer day, but it's April and it has hardly been warm enough to go around without a sweater yet. Cooling off later in the week, if weather forecasts are to be trusted.
_
respond?
(2)
06:05:34 PM,
Wednesday 7 April 2010
-
When they first arrived, they were a fluffy mass of kitten energy. It was hard to tell them apart, which enhanced the effect, and they were at the stage of development when they were still nursing every couple of hours. They would stumble around for a few minutes, often actually falling over, and then fall asleep in piles. Now they have a ton of energy and spend hours learning to run and jump and fight, and I know them by sight and have particular expectations and sometimes concerns for each of them. It's almost a loss though to see them as individuals, it's like I focus on their tiny differences and lose sight of the fact that they all express the Form of Kitten very well, and that is a very good Form.
_
respond?
08:54:58 PM,
Monday 5 April 2010
-
8. Kitten interior decorating. Like making pillow forts, only for kittens. A towel draped over a triangular scratching post creates a mysterious new space that occupies them for hours. Or a cardboard box with holes in. They are easily amused.
9. Making kittens do things they don't want to. This is surprisingly easy. The key is that they are very small, and they basically trust me. Getting them to swallow de-worming concoction was not all that hard, though I had to do it outside the room because their mom freaked when she saw the (needle-less) needle-looking tube I was using to measure it.
_
respond?
08:42:36 PM,
Monday 5 April 2010
-
Skills enhanced by two weeks of kitten care:
- Counting to six. Not just when the door has been open, but reflexively. Helps with:
- Not stepping on kittens. Only screwed up once. It was terrifying. The kitten was fine. I was afraid he wasn't until I realized that at that point in their development, they all had floppy limbs.
- Not breathing through my nose. Wet cat food only becomes more disgusting when you handle it four or five times a day. Tim tells me that being able to turn nose-breathing on and off at will is not something everyone can do. I'm glad I can.
- Awareness of acupuncture points. Did you know there's a spot in the back of your neck that if pricked by a claw causes your tongue to feel funny?
- Communicating with kittens. Kittens are not human. They are not even cats. Some strategies for dealing with prickly behavior, like shoving them off your lap, are counter-productive: they are interpreted as a volley in a playfight. Picking them up by the scruff of the neck on the other hand is remarkably effective, it's like a super ninja move, they just go limp. Nosing them is a good way to teach them that you are a fellow creature, it gives them a good look at your face and seems to be friendly in cat-speak.
- Putting kittens back into the kitten room when they spill out an opened door. This can become a comic routine pretty easily, where as soon as I get one back in, two others have made it out. Fortunately they are not all that speedy, and I've always won in the end. So far.
- Watching kittens playfight. You might think this is not a skill, but my mind definitely seems to think it's as much a skill as Tetris. Every time I close my eyes there are kittens tumbling.
respond?
04:47:33 PM, Monday 5 April 2010
-
Dream: I have just arrived in "Israel" from "Palestine" via a short but bumpy plane ride over a body of water. Since it's important for people in "Israel" to know where to place me even though I'm not actively religious, I go to the Christian Association, which is a loose affiliation of all Christians in the Holy Land. The entrance to the Christian Association is a pink room somewhat like a doctor's waiting area. A well dressed woman of Persian appearance greets me and tells me to take my shoes off. I do, and then she shows me through a hallway which has a tub of water in it. I dip one foot in, it's a sort of baptism. She says "that's enough, you'll want to save the other foot for later". I enter through the hallway and see that the Christian Association has some very separate groups milling around in a medium sized conference room or hallway. The receptionist points to one of the groups and whispers to me "they do things which are abominated in the Old Testament". This group is keeping to itself. They wear black cowls and they all have avocado halves for faces.
Yes, that's right, I had a dream about a secret order of Avocado People. What next, unconscious?
_
respond?
12:26:24 PM,
Monday 5 April 2010
-
Extremely low on spoons today.
_
respond?
(4)
05:31:01 PM,
Sunday 4 April 2010
-
Saw The Story of Qiu Ju recently. It was a strange experience. Apparently if you're Chinese it's a hilarious comedy. If you're me you realize halfway through the movie that there must be jokes that you are missing, but you don't even know where they are. And you're like, "wait, is the main character supposed to actually be stupid?" That made me feel really stupid myself, that it took me so long to get that. Or you see something like an application for a marriage license and the officials start asking "was it love at first sight? was it love at first sight?" and it's silly but you're pretty sure there's part of the joke you're missing-- as the reviewer linked above said, there's a lot of stuff that is more confusing and implausible than funny. That's all totally hilarious, apparently. I think it's kind of funny that it won a bunch of foreign film awards, because I doubt other non-Chinese viewers did much better than me with the Chinese cultural in-jokes. The main thing I got from it was a sense of building uncomfortable tension, like watching one of Woody Allen's not-funny movies. Zhang Yimou's other movies are not so obscure generally, they tend to be big and melodramatic in a way I understand (they are sometimes a bit much, sometimes just right, but I definitely get them). I'm pretty sure that it's just cultural information that I'm missing, that if I had lived in China and knew the stereotypes that were being played with and the typical situations that were being mocked I would be laughing along, but I have never felt so completely cut off from a movie. I suppose an extended commentary wouldn't do any good. You had to be there.
_
respond?
04:12:07 PM,
Saturday 3 April 2010
-
Our driveway has become an object lesson for children passing by. "Why is there water coming out of that house?" An explanation involving wet basements and sump pumps ensues.
_
respond?
02:15:32 PM,
Saturday 3 April 2010
-
respond?
09:13:51 PM, Friday 2 April 2010
-
After a week and a half of playing with kittens, I find this guy all the more impressive.
_
respond?
(1)
07:11:04 PM,
Thursday 1 April 2010
-
The kittens have become much zoomier in the past couple of days, and their claws are long enough to do damage, which makes hanging out with them slightly more stressful. I have a stuffed IKEA pumpkin cat head named Jung that I use as a proxy kitten for playfighting, and they are kind of getting the hang of the idea that hands and faces are not for hitting, but they are still testing out the hypothesis that they might be fairly frequently. Just spent an hour in there and they were tumbling about the whole time, which is way more endurance than they had a few days ago. I have an exercise mat that I use to make sitting in there more comfortable, which has the added benefit of forming a tunnel at the end if I don't roll it out completely. The kittens absolutely adore this and mobbed it from before I rolled it out to when I left. Tunnels are fascinating for kittens, apparently. I brought in some new toys, their first introduction to catnip. The kittens didn't seem to care in the slightest about the catnip, but their mom was really happy. Perhaps it is an acquired taste.
_
respond?
(2)
12:26:18 PM,
Wednesday 31 March 2010
-
Water everywhere where it usually isn't today. Ducks swimming in what is usually the path to the pond, but is now a stream. The pond is in the backyard of the neighbor who lives by the pond, instead of next to it. The roads are all covered with sheets of water. I usually imagine them as frozen asphalt streams, and now they really are very shallow streams. This pleases me. I may have my priorities wrong. Perhaps I should check the basement and make sure the sump pump is working.
_
respond?
02:14:23 PM,
Tuesday 30 March 2010
-
Now that we've had the kittens for slightly over a week, it's easier to distinguish them not just by markings but by personality.
Blackberry (aka Stilton): the Explorer. If there's a nook or a cranny she'll be the first to look into it. If there's something to climb, a sweater or a scratching post, she'll be the first to scale it. If a door opens, she'll be the first through. She was the first to socialize with humans, and is very human-friendly. She's not desperate to be part of kitten-piles, but she's more than happy to play-fight with her brothers. The smallest kitten, but also the most energetic.
Frodo: the Good Old Boy. He exudes social confidence both with humans and fellow kittens, whether he's at the top or the bottom of the kitten-pile. He is the most likely to play-fight with your hand, but is also one of the first to master purring. Purring at humans is an acquired trick, apparently. He tends to wake up from naps squeaking-- nightmares maybe? Do kittens get night terrors?
Cole (aka Soul): the Lap Cat. Cole is very human-centric. He will jump on your lap, look soulfully into your eyes, snuffle your nose, and fall asleep. He's not averse to playing, just a little less into it than the others.
Pippin: the All American Cat. Pippin is a good tumbler, a sociable member of the kitten pile, and starting to be a friendly lap cat. He's the biggest according to the most recent weighing, and has started purring and snuggling on laps enthusiastically.
Merry: the Kid Brother. Often found tumbling around with Doyle. Tags along with the crowd. Slow to approach humans, but happy to join a lap pile if all the other kittens are doing it.
Doyle (aka Dobbin): the Hunter. Doyle's favorite activity is stalking something all the way across the room, usually something imaginary but sometimes a fellow kitten. He is the smallest of the brothers, and seems to be lowest in the pecking order overall and a little grumpy about it. He doesn't seem to enjoy being around people, except as objects to hunt around. I'm trying to figure out how best to socialize him: for most of them being picked up and cuddled works as reward/intimidation/distraction from playfighting, but he just trys to find his way down. Maybe tomorrow I'll give him some quality time apart from the rest, because he does tend to get shoved off laps if any of the others are awake.
_
respond?
11:01:47 PM,
Monday 29 March 2010
-
respond? (3)
03:16:26 PM, Sunday 28 March 2010
-
"I intuit your hatred and jealousy of our thing," he said. "The ineffectual always hate our thing and speak of it as antihuman, which is not at all a meaningful way to speak of our thing. Nothing mechanical is alien to me," he said (amber spots making bursts of light in his shades), "because I am human, in a sense, and if I think it up, then 'it' is human too, whatever 'it' may be."
Speaking of good writing, Barthelme is fun. ("The Report", 1967)
_
respond?
(1)
09:48:36 PM,
Tuesday 16 March 2010
-
I suggest that, for us, the sense of sickness has replaced the sense of sin, to which it was always near allied, and that while we are acutely aware of the difficulties surrounding notions of good and evil, we ignore, though they are manifest, the equally great difficulties surrounding notions of sickness and health, especially as those judgments are applied to behavior. Antebellum doctors described an illness typical of enslaved people sold away from their families, which anyone can recognize as rage and grief. By medicalizing their condition, the culture was able to refuse the meaning of their suffering. I am afraid we also are forgetting that emotions signify, that they are much fuller of meaning than language, that they interpret the world to us and us to other people. Perhaps the reality we have made fills certain of us, and of our children, with rage and grief-- the tedium and meagerness of it, the meanness of it, the stain of feafulness it leaves everywhere. It may be necessary to offer ourselves palliatives, but it is drastically wrong to offer or to accept a palliative as if it were a cure.from "Facing Reality" in The Death of Adam, 1998. _
respond? (3)
03:54:01 PM, Tuesday 16 March 2010
-
"It's just sort of omnipresent. It's like God only it's a hairbrush."
_
respond?
(1)
08:15:45 AM,
Tuesday 16 March 2010
-
I have created a blog for our foster cat, Sponge.
_
respond?
12:01:50 PM,
Wednesday 24 February 2010
-
Something in the basement, probably the boiler, occasionally makes a distinct video game noise, a fwhum! noise. I think it's used in Super Mario Brothers or something, maybe for going down one of those tunnels. Really the exact noise from some classic game, Tim will back me up on this. The first few times I heard it I thought I must be confused as to where it was coming from, because there are no video games in the basement.
_
respond?
(2)
10:41:15 AM,
Wednesday 24 February 2010
-
After a failed Windows 7 upgrade that got my system into an unrecoverable state, I thought, what the heck, and installed Ubuntu as the sole operating system on my computer. And, wow. It is, so far, in every way a superior operating system to Vista. Installation including burning a disk in under an hour. And everything just works. My wireless card, which wanted special drivers in Vista. My fancy audio preamp. The printer. The external hard drive. I'm up and running with no installing anything, no hours of futzing. Nothing breaks when it goes into sleep mode. I have never expected Linux to be superior to Windows for usability. But this one is. Bravo, Ubuntu. Worthy of a "switch" ad. We'll see if there are any frustrations down the road, but the basics are absolutely smooth.
_
respond?
(7)
01:55:53 PM,
Wednesday 17 February 2010
-
respond?
07:20:47 PM, Monday 15 February 2010
-
respond?
07:20:12 PM, Monday 15 February 2010
-
Beach today.
respond?
07:17:47 PM, Monday 15 February 2010
-
I just opened a bank account and had to answer multiple choice questions about where I had lived and my parents' birthdays. And get them right. Creepy much? Ok, fine, I accept that there are services keeping dossiers on me that know more facts about my life than I do, but that's just rubbing it in.
_
respond?
(3)
04:17:48 PM,
Wednesday 10 February 2010
-
Dreamt that I got a bee sting on my finger, and it hurt. Not used to feeling intense pain in dreams. Odd.
_
respond?
08:47:12 AM,
Monday 8 February 2010
-
respond? (1)
10:01:46 PM, Friday 5 February 2010
-
Eggcorn watch: "to segway onto an essentially unrelated topic" (found in the comments to this meta incendiary post that Liz linked to-- so possibly intentional, but still, a use for the segway, at last!)
_
respond?
01:54:46 PM,
Tuesday 26 January 2010
-
The cat is blaming me for the Snow Problem. He's asking whether I've fixed it already every ten minutes or so.
_
respond?
04:25:41 PM,
Tuesday 22 December 2009
-
site & script courtesy of Moss