Piroska and Her Sisters
Now Playing: BC Bud and Classic Rock
Topic: My Cat Said
On the evening of my 13th birthday, after my parents and I had driven the last of my friends home from my party, we saw a cat running out of the garage as we parked the car. Somehow we figured out that there were a pair of kittens lying on the floor. They ended up in the house shortly afterward because we knew the mother wouldn't return. The brother was bigger and stronger than his sister, whom we worried about. We fed them baby formula for something like 3 months using an eyedropper, afterwards wiping the kittens with a warm, wet cloth. The brother died one day and his littler sister kept going. I named her Emily.

When my mother finally moved out she took our dog with her and was going for Emily at one brief point. No fecking way was that happening and I'd have stayed home from school to protect my cat. My mother ended up stealing a dog from a friend of hers when she vanished to Alberta.

Emily's popularity preceded her. My father remarried 5 minutes after I graduated from high school and I was whisked to a suburb in the ass end of nowhere (Coquitlam) and she became the family cat. Renowned for her beauty, grace and gentle nature, her likeness was once painted on a plate commemorating an anniversary of my dad and step-mom and proudly displayed on the wall for years. When I left that house, after a tumultuous and far-too-long 3 years, I was not allowed to take Emily with me. I wasn't deemed responsible enough, and, anyway, she likes people, as if there wouldn't be any where I was going. Emily's response to me during subsequent visits was dismissive and formal for rather a long time. In the end, she forgave me. Sometime after her 18th birthday, during an afternoon when nobody else was home, Dad took her to the vet's.

I found solace though the classified ads in a listing from something called Aid to Animals in Distress. They had cats of various ages and sexes for adoption and I arranged a date to see who was available. It was a brother and sister I liked the best and it was the sister who came home with me. I named her Lillian, Lili for short, after the song Lili Marlene which helped make Marlene Dietrich enormously popular.

I'd always include Lili's name on my answering machine's outgoing message and for a while, some people thought I had a secret girlfriend. In fact, I did refer to her as my partner on more than one occasion. Our devotion to one another couldn't be measured. She often licked my head when my hair was growing back after chemo. Ironically, I lost her when she developed lung tumours; she was diagnosed on a Thursday and put down on next Monday. Buried beside the front yard with a note.

In many ways, I felt like I'd grown up with Lili because I found her when I moved from home at 21 and we'd spent 12 years together. She knew me at my happiest.

The month after Lili died I was absorbed with grief, coming home to an empty apartment day after day being neither use nor ornament. At the end of it, the grief settled into mourning and I needed to find another companion. Lili didn't want me on my own. She'd said.

One afternoon in November I went to the SPCA to see the cats, and the one I wanted had an aisle seat. I liked the way she talked to me in a chirping mew. Only 8 weeks old and sitting in a cage didn't seem right at all. Since then, I've heard that black cats aren't as easily adopted as regular coloured felines and I don't understand why. Anyway, this kitten had rich reddish hues and cream brindling mixed with her black fur and that made her a part-tortie.

Her first name is Piroska (pi-ROSH-ka) and it is Hungarian for "little red." I often call her Roska for short and have never been able to discover what sort of abuse I suspect I have been committing against the Hungarian language by truncating her name like that. Actually, the first definition I read said it was an ancient form of Priscilla, a name my friend Helen gave a foundling kitten who disappeared during an Edmonton winter. I wanted to honour that cat and the loss my friend had suffered. Piroska's middle name is Ilyena (il-YA-na), and it's also Helen Mirren's middle name. Often when I say my cat's full name to her she closes her eyes and purrs.

Life with me has not always been a bed of catnip for Roska. She has an entirely different disposition to either Emily or Lili, who would let nothing faze them. It must be the Siamese influence in Roska that makes her hit the deck and hiss at moments when I could've sworn everything was fine. My own temperment displays grace under pressure to the world and something else, dark and unhappy, inside and you can't hide that from a cat so perhaps I've aggravated her sensitivity over the years. It's gotten a bit better since I've figured out that I'm probably going to live and have started smoking pot again. Everybody wins.

Lately, Roska and I have been having fun again. I dropped her food knife off the cupboard and it fell on the floor making a big noise that made Roska and I start. Later on that evening I got her a snack from the fridge and was puzzled by the puddle beside her empty water bowl, imagining Roska furiously tipping out the water in a temper over an unsatisfactory dinner. I asked her "What the hell happened?" and she looked at me thinking My god, she's finally flipped. Each of us as innocent as the other. I looked closer at the bowl and discovered two tiny triangular cracks across from each other on the dish's rim and a trail between them. The knife. Making a big noise.

Breaking rocks in the hot sun...
Topic: News Items
Happy Friday!

Martha Stewart is home from spending five months in the big house for lying under oath. Remember, it wasn't the insider trading so much as the sloppy attempt at covering her tracks that landed her in so much grief. Stewart will have to wear an ankle tag and curtail her activities for another few months. Well, she still has her magazine. Earlier in this saga, there were suggestions, rumours, intimations, that her name might be dropped from the masthead; Stewart's name still appears albeit less prominently.

Stewart has a well-documented history of difficult relations with co-workers, employees, and loved ones, and it could be argued that one does not rise to the top being good to people. Nobody wants to be thought of as nice because that is tantamount to being vulnerable and inconsequential. Women in positions of power are still held largely in contempt because it is presumed that they have clawed their way upwards; whether or not it's true (and Oprah Winfrey, for example, seems to have retained, cultivated, her genuine kindness during her ascent to greatness) is irrelevant. We live in a sexist, misogynist society which doesn't trust women.

I used to watch Martha's show years ago and was enormously entertained by her seductive presentations of gardening tricks, extravagant desserts, and better living although none of it was ever going to be replicated at my house. Martha Stewart Living, Restoration Hardware, Lee Valley, and sometimes even IKEA amount to little more than domestic pornography to people like me who rent their dwelling and whose personal decorating style includes unframed posters on the wall held up with tacks. However, 90% of my furnishings and accessories come from IKEA and I have bottle brushes from Lee Valley, evidence that even the most incorrigible are willing to play along. I bought some MS bedsheets which incidentally don't fit all that well on futons.

Thursday Already
This article in the Toronto Star gave me a good laugh this morning. It's about weddings. Enjoy.

Mark Haddon's Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Now Playing: BC Bud and classic rock
Topic: From the Library
When I read, it's mostly technical documents, newspapers, computer magazines, and political essays and I often feel bereft of soul. To remedy that, I've begun Crime and Punishment, and am enjoying it so much it almost hurts to read it. Also because the edition I've got is an ancient Penguin which originally cost 95 cents. Books like that smell the best and, despite the somewhat sepia-toned pages I wouldn't think of getting a newer print. I just need a brighter light.

What I did finish was Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, discovered during a web search. Somebody I admire raved about it so it had to be read.

The story goes like this: a teenage boy finds his neighbour's dog dead in the front yard and wants to know why this happened. The boy has an organised, complicated way of living with the world; situations arise and accomodations must be made. The thing is, he's incredibly bright with pretty much no emotional coping skills. He understands things about humans and their behaviour but has a clinical approach to feelings. Living with people becomes a bit like participating in some sort of sociological experiment. Which it is. I found some parallels, although the characters are completely different, in Peter Sellars' Chancy in Being There, and more in the character Monk from the tv show. I used to find Monk unwatchable because of his phobias but I've become more empathetic. Chancy broke my heart, as did Christopher, Haddon's young lead. He's a bit like Harry Potter crossed with Adrian Mole in dire need of a joint. That the book is written from the boy's perspective is what makes it so compelling. It's like an exploded parts diagram of life.

I get Christopher. I get that human behaviour and customs don't resonate with him and the only way he can make the world understandable is to break things down into a series of "If-Then-Else" operations and carry on from there. The poignant thing about most humans is their desire to behave logically and their inability to accomplish that on a consistent basis. Humans' lives are largely repetitious, from mundane activities like getting out of bed and readying oneself for the day, eating, travelling, and it's during interactions with others that things get interesting. Christopher hasn't got the wiring to enable him to disregard irrationality in others or to deal with unexpected events or even somebody touching him--it just leads to big freak-outs. The quest for meaning and safety, whether through ritual (counting cars and noting their colours)or through the tangible (like having a special food cupboard) becomes paramount.

Consider the amount of stimulus each person receives during the day, much of it unsolicited and unwanted. Sorting through and interpreting the world's messages in order to make a go of things is hard work and loads of folks either aren't up to it, need assistance in one form or another, or, like Christopher, create their own system. Some people are unable to decipher social cues, and, for example, often can't recognise anger in others or simply don't know how to respond in a given situation. It's akin to being illiterate or being dropped in another country. Christopher's behaviour and ideas make perfect sense given where he is in the world.

What motivates humans to act the way they do? Why isn't having what you want making you happy? Jesus, you just have to look at Paul Martin's face on any given day to guess what he's thinking: I thought this job would be a lot more fun. I've seen the same look on Dubya's mug, too. They're a cautionary tale, the pair of them, reminding us to be careful what we orchestrate.

I'm surprised that humankind has lasted this long, and I don't mean that in a necessarily pejorative way. Our individual approaches to the world are obviously influenced by our experiences in it; even in early childhood you get a glimpse of how things are conducted and for some of us, the trains didn't run on time. There isn't much documentation for being a human and if there is, it's written with the same clarity and ease-of-use as all others.

More Sad Bastards
Mood:  caffeinated
What has happened to make cell phones a good thing? Clearly, they've got portability working for them but phones the size of a box of matches are no less irritating to be around than an army communications phone. It seems like every 2nd person one sees in the world has some kind of phone stuck to their head, oblivious to the serious breaches in their concentration for other activities, like driving. As long as they arrive at their destination, these folks have no qualms about the journey.

I saw one of those idiots last Thursday when I followed behind them on E. 1st Avenue. Guy was driving a pick-up the size of a small pachyderm and I had to honk at him at the 3 way stop at Ontario. It was then that I saw his left elbow smooshed up against the window while he talked and swivelled his head something fierce. Alas, his right leg had evidentally fallen asleep because he couldn't seem to accelerate across the intersection. Traffic was wild; we were the only ones there.

He made another left by Maynard's, negotiating the turn virutally unaided by his right hand, which was waving in the air at one point, so lord knows what other activities he was engaged in. I do thank the cosmos that his next turn was a right onto 4th Avenue because waiting for another lefthand turn wasn't going to be possible. I'd have killed the man first. When I looked in the rearview mirror a few minutes later, he was still on the phone but had now lit a cigarette and was waving that around. It was good for me, too, because I laughed the rest of the way to the Cancer Agency.

This story has nothing to do with phones just driving. I came up the ramp to the parkade's 1st floor and Lexus is backing out of a spot. This floor is reserved for professionals, i.e. oncologists, etc, but not social workers, by the way. Probably not nurses or porters, either, but clearly people to whom I likely owe my life. Lexus is very cautious when they see me despite my obvious use of brakes. It must be terrifying driving something so expensive. The driver gingerly, reluctantly, taps on the gas and crawls toward the downramp at a speed a three-legged dog could outrun, puts on the indicator light because although there's no other way to turn you just can't take chances, can you, especially at the Cancer Agency where it isn't clear who's still got a will to live and you have to share the road with them. When you're driving a vehicle that's so painfully luxurious you think the rest of the world should wait for you. This is akin to the Baby on Board signs that people put in their cars as a safeguard against vehicular catastrophe except that the minivan crowd accomplished more everyday acts of selfishness on the roads. The sign was only out of consideration to others, a way of marking themselves as with containers of hazardous material. "Caution: the person driving this car has had no sleep for months and has a screaming baby with them right now" might have been better. They should let their dog drive.

I kept a suitable distance, waiting until Lexus was comfortably setup in the downramp and then I gave 'er. Jetta produced a satisfying vaROOM and her tires did a little happy dance on the cement sending a few car alarms into cardiac arrest.

A BBC article describes the woes of some cell phone users who can't get their shit together, and it's heartbreaking.

Of course, the day I stand shivering by the side of the road while my beloved Jetta sits fubar, I'll probably wish I had one.

But the printer's only $50!
Here's an article from the BBC about a woman in Georgia who's suing HP for rigging their ink cartridges so that they self-destruct, as it were, before they're truly empty.

I've been refilling my Epson printers' cartridges for years now and naturally I've saved millions of dollars. Mostly what you have to watch for is the sponge inside the cartridge drying out after the safety seals have been removed. Computer chips inside cartridges is not my area of expertise. I buy generic cartridges which don't seem have the chips (the drawback being that the ink indicators may be incorrect).

Nice work going after HP!

Thanks, Paul
Topic: More Quizzing

I'm a Mandarin!

You're an intellectual, and you've worked hard to get where you are now. You're a strong believer in education, and you think many of the world's problems could be solved if people were more informed and more rational. You have no tolerance for sloppy or lazy thinking. It frustrates you when people who are ignorant or dishonest rise to positions of power. You believe that people can make a difference in the world, and you're determined to try.

Talent: 52%
Lifer: 26%
Mandarin: 59%

Take the Talent, Lifer, or Mandarin quiz.

Topic: Moral Politics
For those of us who enjoy taking personality quizzes, here's a link to Moral Politics . Not surprisingly, I'm a Social Democrat, scoring -5 on Moral Order and 2 on Moral Rules. Judging by the Statistics, I'm in a corner by myself with 0.7% of quiz takers scoring as I did.

Off to the library in a short while to collect Please Understand Me II, a book recommended by my friend Trish.

Just for good measure, try this:

While I was at the library, the woman working there told me that I was the first person to say "please" to her, and here it was going on for 5pm. Jesus wept.

Now Playing: RDI
Topic: Charles & Camilla
I might as well come clean and say I'm pleased to hear about the forthcoming marriage of Charles and Camilla, mostly because they've had to wait so bloody long for people to take them seriously. Everybody in the world knew that Diana's selection as Charles' wife was deliberate, and it was her sorry luck to actually fall in love with him.

In 1981, I was in Britain and did not watch the wedding's telecast in it's entireity; I had slept in, slightly disappointing my royalist host. Night before I'd watched the fireworks on tv in a lively pub so I considered my work done.

Here are two different views on the Charles-Diana nuptials from the beautiful city of York, England:

Windsor, and especially the Guildhall area, where Charles and Camilla will become honest people on the 8th of April, will likely be rendered innacessible to residents, with parking and just moving about on foot, actually, becoming a nightmare. Try the #65 bus or leave town for the day.

Friday Report
Welcome!

It's only been in the last two days that I've decided to put a blog together. I have been reading Paul Wells' journal since he started it and now I'm jealous. No. That's not it. I enjoy Wells' blog very much. I think Chantal Hebert should have one, too, but I'm sure she's not a bit interested.

Give me a few hours to get organised and I'll post comments about current events, politics of all sorts, books, film, and social behaviour.

Here's what I'll tell you about me for the time being.

I live with my cat companion, my familiar, in Vancouver, BC.

The rest you'll have to work out for yourselves.