Friday Cat Blogging: The Eyes of Zebediah Are Upon You

When he spots a cat who is not in motion, Zebediah gets quiet and just stares at her intently for a long time, and maybe makes a short little cooing sound.

When the cats get near, he tries to touch them, by which I mean grab their hair. We don’t let him, but I have to say if the Princess waves her tail in his face, she is just asking for it to be grabbed.

On the other hand, the Goddess has walked right over the two of us while we were nursing, and Zebediah didn’t seem to notice. At least he didn’t wake up.

In other cat news, the cooler weather or a second wind or something seems to have perked up the Goddess, as we caught her up on the counter eating the Princess’s food. This means we have to go back to the old system of separating them at mealtimes, which nobody likes.

Friday Cat Blogging: RIP, Dynamo

On my way back from my walk this morning, I saw the neighbor’s Dynamo cat (not her real name), lying in the grass. I don’t think I’ve ever seen her nap outside (though I did find her happily resting on a box in our garage one morning last month), and when I got close to check I realized she was dead.

Friday Cat Blogging: Catastrophe is Nigh

Princess Cat: I tell you, it’s coming. We may not survive. Crying, screaming, neglect. Water bowls unrefreshed, kitty litter unscooped. Tails pulled. Haven’t you noticed the signs? Belly growing. Instead of her cleaning the kitty litter every day, he is doing it every third day. She sleeps more than we do. Something bad is coming.

Goddess Cat: You’re just indulging in catastrophic thinking. That belly has gone through natural cycles of growth and shrinkage in the past. This is nothing new. There is still plenty of lap to sit on, we are still the center of attention, and it will be so forever.

Friday Cat Blogging: Inept Caretakers

It’s a good thing our cats don’t read blogs, because the Goddess would be thinking:

How did I get stuck with these bozos? I came from Berkeley; why couldn’t I have ended up with someone like Chris Clarke? Oh, he would be all responsible and insist on giving me the iv fluids when my kidneys started failing, but at least he wouldn’t fuck it up and stick me with the needle but somehow fail to even get any of the fluids in.

Just when we thought we had the hang of it, and were consistently injecting the 240 ccs that the vet recommended, we lost our touch. Recently it’s taken us three tries to get 100ccs in. I blame a combination of my husband trying to hold her in a different position and equipment problems. Plus my incompetence.

On the other hand, the having the needle inserted and in place seems to bother her a lot less than the feeling of the fluids being injected, so maybe she prefers it this way.

Nails

Three of the four sentient beings* in this household bite their nails. The fourth uses her scratching post. The Goddess cat always seems a little angry at us when she scratches her post, but our reaction is happiness that she is using it at all. The Princess cat is afraid of her scratching post, preferring to destroy the furniture or the carpet or bite her nails. Maybe my husband and I should try to cure our own nail-biting bad habits by appropriating her post.

I don’t suppose there is any chance that this is genetic, and that the Chocolate Chip will bite off his own nails, sparing us the need for stealth baby-nail-clipping attacks.

*Using the term in my mother’s Buddhist sense.

Waking

Things that wake me, but not my husband:

Heavy rainfall.

The cat throwing up, even when she is doing so next to his side of the bed.

Stomach aches. Being pregnant.

His alarm clock (well, he got up, walked across the room,  and turned it off, but had no memory of doing so).

Friday Cat Blogging: Good News, Bad News

I realized that the Goddess cat can no longer jump up on counters, meaning that if we put the Princess cat’s food on the bathroom counter, Goddess can’t get to it.

That means that we no longer have to separate them at feeding times. We have been alternating: Princess gets shut in the bathroom for the morning meal and Goddess gets shut in the laundry room for the evening meal. Everyone hates that system, but it was the only way to keep Goddess cat from eating all the other cat’s food and 1. getting sick 2. depriving Princess of her food.

So nobody has to be shut away to eat, but it is yet another sign of the Goddess cat’s age/weakness. She has also lost the pleasure of sitting on top of the stove and getting chased off it, but she seems content to get her non-solar warmth from the cable modem these days. Fortunately, the new cable doesn’t get detached from the modem when she is taking her modem naps as often as the old cable did, because she gets quite miffed when I crawl under Mr. Luo’s desk to check the cable and disturb her rest.

Secular Christmas, Part I

I have been thinking about this topic a lot, especially since all the hype about a “war on Christmas” last year and assorted responses that I read in blogs at the time.

I noticed that the idea of the secular celebration of Christmas has a different meaning depending on the audience.

On the one hand, I was reading bloggers (and hearing people in the real world) putting forth the idea that so many of our Christmas traditions are pagan in origin or modern secular innovations that it is unfair for fundamentalists to criticize us for “taking the Christ out of Christmas”.

In a similar vein, for people like me, who celebrate Christmas despite the fact that we are not Christian, it sometimes seems like certain people think we don’t deserve to participate, to which we respond that it is a secular celebration for us.

On the other hand, that line of argument is understandably annoying to someone who identifies with a minority religion (minority for this country) and is sick of having Christmas shoved in their faces all fall and winter long.

Wolfa had a post about this last year that is what started me thinking about the whole issue of “who are you saying ’secular’ to”. I might think of a Christmas tree as secular in the sense that I am not religious and I want to have a tree, but it is definitely associated with Christmas, a religious holiday. (My formerly-Catholic-now-Buddhist mother once tried the “it’s a pagan custom” line on a formerly-Jewish-now-Buddhist housemate. It didn’t go over well.)

A roommate I had during a study abroad stint in graduate school once told me that she thought that public Christmas displays, including nativity scenes, were good because they brought the community together (I guess the topic came up because we were in a village that celebrated a very traditional Easter Week.) I don’t think that at the time I was able to explain very well that the togetherness only works if you assume everyone is a Christian, or a Christmas-celebrating non-Christian. For everyone else, it is an act of exclusion. Stirrup Queens has a post up now comparing the Jewish experience of Christmas with the infertile experience of the dominantly fertile world.

[We INTERRUPT this post to discover that when the cable connection fails it is not necessarily the service provider's fault but perhaps a result of the Goddess Cat nesting on top of the Ethernet jack. Clearly this is my fault, because she can't sit in my her desk chair when I am blogging.]

So, while I personally don’t mind too much if my ob-gyn’s office is playing Christmas music (except that I thought the quality was not that good), and I figure it is more for the benefit of the front desk staff who are there all day, I wonder if they think at all about who they are excluding. Most people around here are Christian or Christmas-celebrators, but it is also a cosmopolitan university town with a lot of people who are not in those categories.

The message/audience issue came up in a post from a year ago that I just read by Renegade Rebbetzin (she linked to it in her most recent post). In reaction to Jewish bloggers who had been posting about how Chanukah was not so important and mostly got attention due to the proximity to Christmas, she wrote a very moving post about why Chanukah means so much to her. (I’m an atheist and that post made me cry. Of course, I’m pregnant. Also, I know a lot of Tibetans whose monasteries were destroyed, which is relevant to her Chanukah musings, really.)

In the comments, however, some people wrote that what bothered them was not the value or not of Chanukah in itself but the way the dominantly Christian American society has picked it up as the one Jewish holiday to pay attention to. That is, the problem was not that Jews over-hyped Chanukah because of competition from Christmas, but that non-Jews over-emphasize it because they can relate it to Christmas.

In Old Colony, most of the residents were not Christians. The citizens of the European Colonizing Country were mostly Catholic or culturally Catholic atheist types, but they were only about 3% of the population. Of the other 2% foreigners, some were from historically Christian countries and some were from other Asian countries. The old mixed-race/mixed-culture families were also Catholic, I think, and some of the other Chinese residents were Christians, but not most (despite 500 years of missionary work). Public decorations included lights on the main street and a large Christmas tree made of Coca-Cola (red) and Sprite (green) bottles (the kind of bottles that are glass with the thin styrofoam coating). I can’t remember if there were any nativity scenes. The public decor for Chinese New Year was much more prominent. There was plenty of resentment of European Colonizing Country in Old Colony, but religion was very far from being the dominant issue (money, corruption, political and bureaucratic power, language, self-determination, race were all far ahead of religion as far as I could tell, though I was just a short-term observer).

All of this is just a summary of things I started thinking about when I wanted to write a post on how I am celebrating the holidays this year. The all-about-me version is coming up in Secular Christmas, Part II.

The Dynamo at Work: Friday Cat Blogging

We have been cat- and dog-sitting for our neighbors this week. One evening, the cats came inside, but then escaped while Mr. Luo was taking care of the food bowls. We were about to go out, and figured that by the time we got home after midnight, they would be hungry and happily go inside their house, but the Dynamo did not show up. This is not unprecedented, so we weren’t too worried, although it was a little cold out that night.

Early the next morning, there was no sign of the Dynamo. I was starting to get worried, so when I saw our other neighbor, I asked him to keep an eye out for her. He knew her well. He came out a few minutes later and said he suspected she had gotten inside his house because there was a broken planter and pawprints on the floor. He was in the process of moving out and had seen her slinking around the previous evening when they were loading up his truck.

I thought he would just let her out, but he couldn’t catch her, so he shut her into the bathroom. Next thing we knew, we saw her in the bathroom window, but there was no sign of the neighbor, and we had no idea when or if he’d be back, since he’d moved out. Finally, just as we were leaving he drove up and we took custody of the Dynamo and took her home.

In the process of accepting custody of the delinquent feline, Mr. Luo tripped on the neighbor’s porch and hit his head, apparently because he was afraid to let his eyes off the Dynamo and watch where he was walking. So we spent the next couple of days alternately musing on her evil nature and laughing at the whole situation.

She’s been good since then. I think.

Cats

I am working on another pgd post, but I want to increase the ratio of rational argument to ranting, so I’ll stick with a lighter topic for now.

Meet the Luo family cats. Both of them are Mr. Luo’s cats from before we knew each other (of course he wasn’t Mr. Luo then, just the guy from dancing who asked me out one night). I had wanted a cat, but a combination of lease restrictions and worry about my travel schedule interfering with cat care had prevented me from getting one. (Oh, it was fear of commitment–and you wonder why I didn’t try to have kids sooner?)

In keeping with the pseudonymous nature of this blog, I’ll call the younger cat the Princess (because I call her that half the time anyway) and the older one the Goddess.

I know comparisons of children and cats are odious, but I will admit that when I started dating Mr. Luo and spending time at his house, I thought of the 1 1/2 year old cat as the eager-to-please affectionate kindergartner and the twelve-year old one as the surly teenager who reacted to every overture with hissing and scratching. This was at a time in my life when I realized I was meeting more women who were stepparents are fewer who had them.

We’re all a little older now. The Goddess rarely hisses at or scratches me. She likes to sit on my lap, or my stomach when I’m lying down. She has failing kidneys, hence the need for me to give her subcutaneous injections of fluids. (And if it took somebody four needle pricks to get half the fluids in me that I was supposed to get, I’d feel like hissing.)

The Princess has destroyed big patches of the carpet and most of the leather on the the pretty second-hand couch and chair I scored a year ago, because the scratching posts just aren’t good enough for her. She had ten teeth pulled this summer because we were too clueless to realize they were decaying until the Mr. Luo asked the vet to do a dental exam the last time she was there. We had boarded the cats at the vet when we were out of the country for a conference. As part of justifying the expensive procedure (”you win the prize for highest bill this week!” said the receptionist), the vet assured me that the Princess’s teeth had been causing her a great deal of pain for a while. So, if your cat has bad breath, don’t forget to get her teeth checked, or you too will feel like a complete cad.

She is still quite affectionate, and gives me constant affection from the moment I open my eyes in the morning, so as to ensure that I do not forget to feed her. Then she doesn’t like to eat much unless I brush her coat while she nibbles. She won’t sit on laps; she prefers to curl up with her back touching someone.

Our landlady, who lives next door, also has an old cat and a young cat: the Diva and the Dynamo. Ours are indoor cats; hers are indoor/outdoor. The Dynamo and the Princess like to entertain us by attacking each other from inside/outside our living room windows.