Cat vs. Human not a Fair Fight

Anyone who knows me well is acquainted with my charming cat, Fiver. He is a sweet, personable little darling who loves to be petted, kissed, carried about, and all other activities you might imagine the perfect cat indulging in. He comes when he is called, plays with toy mice, sleeps on his back with his feet splayed out in the most adorable fashion, and keeps himself clean. All first time visitors to my home are captivated him. But cat perfection comes at a high price. When thwarted Fiver is a mighty foe indeed.

Due to the age and advanced girth of a couple of our cats, Eric and I have been forced to put the cats on a special, and may I say expensive, diet of prescription pet food. Our other cats realize that change is a part of life and partake of the pricy food with minimum fuss. But not Fiver. He is wagering a war of terror against me that I have no hope of winning.

After the offending food has been rejected, Fiver proceeds to follow me around the house, mewing in an imperious tone most people reserve for Nazi sympathizers. He then pushes all my books and papers onto the floor, looking me straight in the eyes the whole time. While I gather my scattered belongings Fiver sharpens his claws on whatever paper has flown free, effortlessly ducking the book I throw at him. He then starts dive-bombing my ankles, nipping my heels and running away before I can retaliate. If I even look toward his food dish he runs toward it hopefully, triggering the rest of the cats to do so as well, tripping whatever human might be in there path.

It only gets worse from here. He amps up these activities, throws in a bit of vomiting, and makes all work or even avoidance of work impossible. I can’t even go to the bathroom without him jiggling the doorknob, a la the raptors in Jurassic Park. Sometimes Fiver pretends to be sorry for causing me so much pain. He jumps in my lap and cuddles up sweetly, only to wrap his dagger claws in my hair or scrap his vampire fangs across my skin at his earliest convenience. During all this Eric blissfully watches football; all but unaware of the torments my soul is going through. He might throw in a “bad Fivy” every once in a while, but somehow this has no effect on the vengeful cat. The end is always the same: Fiver gets the food he wants and I am shamed that a cat has more willpower than I have.

To all of you who are doubtlessly rolling your eyes and thinking how you would never be some cat’s bitch, I dare you to withstand Fiver’s Old Testament like wrath. He is worse than any plague of locus or river of blood.

Breaking of my summer fetish

Every Friday at 11am the lazy peace of Indianapolis is shattered by a shrill, spoon bending shriek: the emergency siren is once again being tested.

Firehouses, police stations, and designated emergency centers broadcast this impossible loud keening for one minutes, turn it off for thirty seconds, and then on again for another minute. My house, which is a stone’s throw away from a fire station, is hit particularly hard. Windows are open, the cats are playing in the yard, and my defenses are down. The siren strikes. Like a victim from a Twilight Zone episode I look toward the heavens, wondering what I have done to insight the god’s wrath. The air is filled with crackling electricity and my ears overflow with sound. Cats crowed into the house, spooked like a herd of cattle during a lightning storm. They stamped into the bathroom, the only place you can shut out the booming voice of safety. I have conducted many a phone conversation in that windowless haven, seated on the edge of the tub, surrounded by mewing.

But now I’m away from home on Friday mornings, working away in a windowless office or classroom, and I miss the earth cracking reminder that it’s 11am.

Not that I ever disliked the siren. Every Friday I looked forward to its razor sharp sounds, anticipated but never expected. If I happened to be away from home during its sole I would later remember and feel a dull pang of regret, like that experienced when you forget to listen to your favorite radio show or tape a beloved weekly sitcom. The siren was a symbol of my inclusion in a shadow country, the land of people not immured in school, office buildings, or retail outlets at the productive hour of 11am.

Before last summer I was not even aware this siren existed. It did not belong to me; it was as far from my understanding as voluntary genital mutilation or cannibalism. It was not part of my culture. But now I have made it my fetish, claimed it as my own, and I am loathe to let it go.

We are made of memories

On my way to campus I pass a small white house that reminds me of my great-grandparent’s place. It’s small and neat, if a bit rundown. Black shutters adorn the windows; shutters that will actually shut if need be. The lawn is long and rolling, with fruit trees dotted throughout. If I crane my neck I can see the top of a detached cellar, with a door you can actually slide down, as alluded to in many nursery rhymes. I can’t see it, but I imagine a small bee hive in the back, like my great-grandpa used to have. One of my most enduring memories is of my great-grandpa in full beekeeper regalia searching for a fresh honeycomb for me to suck on. If I could get close enough to the house I bet I would see dozens of humming birds, an outside table for descaling fish, and an intimate circle of rusting lawn chairs of a type that have not been produced for over fifty years.

I share these sweet scented memories with my grandpa and my mother. They never mention the small white house with black shutters, but I know it preys on their minds. At every opportunity they both drive me by my great-grandparent’s old place, now a gravel-filled trailer park. We don’t talk, but everyone’s thoughts are the same. My grandpa was born in that house. I imagine his heart was close to breaking when he had to sell it to pay for his parent’s funerals.

We three are the last living people with any memory of the house. My grandfather is almost 90 and my mom is 50. At some point in the near future I will be the only person left to remember the rhubarb patch, the gas tank I would ride like a horse and the kind old lady across the street with a never ending supply of ribbon candy. When I’m gone the house is gone like it never existed.   

Reading is for Suckers

I hate it when people brag about the things that make them different. My particular pet peeve is people who love to mention that they don’t watch TV. I don’t mind that people don’t watch TV, more power to them, but I doubt that people who actually don’t watch TV (for an extended period of time. I’m sure all of us have given up TV for a couple of days or weeks or even months) feel the need to brag about it or lord it over everyone else.

Me: Did you watch the new version of As You Like It on BBC last night?

Annoying person: I don’t watch TV. It takes away from the literary experience.

Me: But it’s a play. You’re supposed to watch it.

Same annoying person: Whatever. Did you catch that readers theater production of The Shinning last night at the coffee house?

OR

Me: It sure is nice out today.

Another annoying person: Since I don’t watch TV I don’t really notice things like that.

In my PhD program most people don’t watch TV, mostly due to lack of time, so what is the person who likes to be different than everyone do? Say they never read! In fact, they hate reading! Never mind that this rebel has spent the last ten years of his life studying to be an expert in literature, writing, and teaching of the same. Forget the fact that he must spend hours everyday reading just to stay afloat in his classes and not lose his assistantship. Since he never reads he must learn through osmosis. I bet if I crept into his house late at night I would not find the TV blaring or a video game system binging, but a man huddled under the covers, flashlight trained on the complete works of Trollope.

Grad school update: Nothing of note

I’m half-way through my 1st week as a grad student and instructor at Purdue and nothing has gone horribly wrong so far. I spend way to much time worrying about parking, the main occupation of most people who attend a university. Today I arrived on campus five hours before my 1st class because I was worried I would not be able to find an available spot. I still barely got one.

I also spent 40 minutes trotting about looking for a pop machine that actually had water. One said it had water but gave me Coke, 4 had no water at all, and one charged 25 cents more for water than for Coke, which was 25 cents more than I had. Coke is trying its hardest to addict the new generation, a trap I cleverly avoided by walking a mile out of my way in evil heat. I bought a bottle of water so big I have to use two hands to lift it.

While my students were doing group work yesterday I played around on the web, checking my email and such. Only later did I realize that my computer screen was broadcast to the whole classroom via the enormous projector behind me. I like to think my class was so busy working that they noticed nothing.

My office mate, an established grad student, has yet to make an appearance. I imagine she is a fun, ironic person who can’t be judged by her kitten posters and wicker cornucopia of fruit. I rather envy my friends who ended up in vast rooms with 20 desks pushed up against one another. No kitten posters or baby pictures on those desks.

Foucault and I so get each other

My self-esteem took a plunge earlier than usual this semester when Foucault’s “Of Other Space” was assigned as pre-reading for one of my classes. This sparsely spaced seven page essay had me gasping for breath and praying that I could pick out one understandable concept to impress my professor and admiring peers.

When it comes to dense philosophy I always start out so optimistic, sure this is the time that I’m going to crack the smart people code on a first reading. But Foucault is unforgiving and a bit of a tease. Here is the sad little progression of my hope dying:

“The great obsession of the nineteenth century was, as we know, history.”
(Good, good. easy to understand. I am so into Foucault!)

“The nineteenth century found its essential mythological resources in the second principle of thermodynamics.”
(Not too bad. I can always look up that second law. Something to do with pulleys?)

“The present epoch will perhaps be above all the epoch of space. We are in the epoch of simultaneity: we are in the epoch of juxtaposition.”
(Mmm, I understood all those words. Epoch is a type of cumquat, right? A philosophical cumquat. And Juxtaposition was the title of a Piers Anthony novel. It had a unicorn on the cover. Unicorns are cool.)

“One could perhaps say that certain ideological conflicts animating present-day polemics oppose the pious descendents of time and the determined inhabitants of space.”
(Polemics? Is that an Indian tribe? Maybe I should have been an archeologist. I miss the first sentence. We really understood each other.)

 I better end this post so I can go read Foucault about five more times. Or maybe I’ll watch a couple hours of Friends reruns. My brain really needs a break from all that polemics.

The carelessly burning house and low expectations

Last night the house next door caught on fire for the second time this summer. I can understand once, but twice? That just seems careless. Being woken up by a fire truck is a bizarre experience that I can only link with being abducted by aliens. Your once dark and quite bedroom is flooded with whirling colored lights and a strange humming/sucking sound surrounds you. I fully expected to levitate out the window, night gown trailing and hair flowing. There were no sirens, due either to the late hour or the fact that the firehouse is less than a block away. Rumors are flying, but I blame a disgruntled neighbor who finally snapped after years of seeing the man of the burning house doing lawn work wearing suspenders and no shirt.

******************************

The head of my PhD program gave my class a small speech about how statistically only half of us will gain our doctorate and how only half of those people will be able to secure a job in academia. I assume his aim was to kill any high expectations we might have, but what he actually did was fill us with hope. After he left we all grouped together and buzzed happily about the stats he had just quoted. Fifty percent of us will get jobs! This is much higher than the estimates given us by our Master’s program. We all tripped to our offices with star filled eyes and dreams of professorships at liberal arts colleges in warm climates. Our expectations are low but our dreams are high.

Why I’m glad I was a high school freak

One advantage of having been a freak during the formative years is that you have very little to reproach yourself with. You never threw the art geek’s books down the hallway, wrote slurs on an ugly girl’s locker, or pelted the poor kid with rotten eggs. You may have been on the receiving end of these and other atrocities, because god knows kids could teach the IRA a thing or two about terrorism, but that only made you sensitive and more likely to write outsider poetry and bildungsroman novels. So buck up and look at the horror of high school as the only time in your life when you were firmly on the side of good.

Despite what John Hughes and Sweet Valley High novels teaches us, not every freak wants to be the pep squad captain and run with the popular crowd. Those kids were mean. I wanted to be as far from them as possible at all time, even when they were separated from the pack and acting like decent human beings. Like a cat inviting you to scratch his belly, they could strike at anytime. My friend Phillip swore he was friends with one of the most popular kids at school; and he was, at church. Outside of that holy environment this boy mocked and maligned my friend as badly as he did the rest of us, and Phillip was forced to pretend he did not see any of it. I was happy with the other freaks, an accepting society that cared little about what you wore or where you lived. Not that outsiders don’t have levels, but they don’t carry them to extremes. You may not eat lunch with the girl that slobbers but you don’t bump the food out of her hands either.

I was only deliberately cruel to a classmate once and the guilt of it still burns 15 years later. As a transfer student halfway through my freshman year I was desperate for companionship, desperate to not always be seen alone. I was scooped up by two girls who inhabited the bottom of the social ladder and was happy for their friendship and the protection traveling in a group always brings. And then, a couple of months later, I was brought into a larger, more socially acceptable group (still freaks, don’t get me wrong. Popular kids have never been interested in me.) and I took it without a word of explanation. I just stopped going to lunch with my old friends. Bad, but not horrible. My new friends had the same classes and interests as me; we were more of a fit. My old friends were Pentecostals and as such were not allowed to see me outside of school. It lead to many lonely weekends. But once, a couple of months after my defection, one of my old friends approached me in the hallway and smiling, called me by a silly, affectionate nickname she had made up for me. I breezed past without a word, I cut her so hard and deep that she never even looked my way again.

This is a silly story, I know. Compared to the abuse hailed on this girl by almost everyone in the school my actions were insignificant and forgettable, even by the victim. But to me they were hateful, and harsh beyond anything I had ever and have ever done since then. As soon as I did it I knew that I had done an unforgivable thing, betrayed the trust that girl still had for me. And how do those kids, all rational adults now, who made my life and your life between the ages of 5 and 18 such hell feel? Do they have a thousand such episodes as I described above to live down? Or do they just chalk it up to youthful exuberance? Even today my social group is made up of the same people who would have been my friends in high school. When given a choice I still choose the freaks. So I don’t have an ex-popular kid to poll, to ask if they regret their actions. But I do know that I am, and have been since I cut that poor girl when I was 13, so glad to be a freak and not one of the cruel, popular kids.

Larkin: more than a pretty name

NPR is finally pulling its weight and has introduced me to poet I should have found a long time ago: Philip Larkin. This foul-mouthed king of librarians caught my attention by writing a poem about death, animals, loss, and regret without being sappy or sentimental, preachy or maudlin.

The Mower

The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found
A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,
Killed. It had been in the long grass.

I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.
Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world
Unmendably. Burial was no help:

Next morning I got up and it did not.
The first day after a death, the new absence
Is always the same; we should be careful

Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.

This poem is lovely in its honesty and simplicity. Larkin does not play games or give us clever images. It is a unadorned story about a simple event and the complicated knot of feelings that come with it. This poem will be with me for many days.

 

Clones would eat you and everyone you love

Science-fiction writers are really worried about clones. Every person who has ever put pen to paper about a time far, far away has some sort of clone theme. Clones are taking over the world. Clones are being abused. Clones have become sentient. Clones have always been sentient. Clones are being used as forced organ donors (very popular!). And I’m not just talking hack genre writers, but real writers: David Mitchell, Kazuo Ishiguro, Kurt Vonnegut. It seems there is a deep seated fear/pity for clones in our society that I have yet to pick up on.

I understand the robot craze. Who could not hate/love robots? They are big and metal and have clamps and pinchers that seem made (and indeed, must be) for clobbering humans. But humans are not really afraid of robots anymore. We make movies about how cute and funny robots are, or stupid action flicks that make me more afraid of the director than the “killer” robots (take that Alex Proyas, director of I, Robot).* Robots have been around for too long, they are nostalgia, not fear. But clones, clones are the wave of the future. Or at least the new imagining of clone-as-victims is.

During the 70s there was a rash of clone movies, like The Boys From Brazil, in which clones were scary enemies, much like robots of the 50s. If you really wanted to push it you could say that Invasion of the Body Snatchers is really about clones, a move that was remade in the 1979, 1993, and 2007. So people have been worrying and writing about clones for a long time, the only change is that we seem to now be worried about the ethical issues of birthing clones, issues raised by Asimov about robot over 50 years ago and exacerbated by the cloning of a sheep in 1997.

I recently read an article that said this switch from clone-as-enemy to clone-as-victim showed that our society is getting more progressive and less afraid of new cloning technology, but I must disagree. The clones in these movies and books have the same intelligence (or at least the potential for intelligence) and emotions as regular humans (or “purebloods” as Mitchell calls them) but are treated as we treat cattle today. So the evil of clones have shifted from the clones being evil to the people who makes them (that’s us) being evil. This is much more insidious and powerful. It’s easy to dismiss evil clones from outer space taking over our lives, but not the idea that humans would misuse their power over dependent beings and ignore their intrinsic worth.

Not that I think all these writers and directors are secret right-wingers looking to curry favor with Bush. It’s just human nature to look at a situation and imagine the absolute worst outcome. And clones are also easy metaphors for other social ills and beings, as this post itself shows. I enjoy clone fiction and movies (except when that horrible Michael Bay is involved) but robots still seem scarier. Clones are nothing but molecules in the laboratory to me, something still hundreds of years away from being a threat. But robots are on every street corner, store, and in my house, just waiting for the chance to jump me. And don’t even get me started on zombies.

*clones can also be “funny,” as Multiplicity and Austen Powers shows. But I prefer to look at those as isolated atrocities.