A Boy Named Jane

so almost two weeks ago i move my spay/neuter operation about 1/2 mile away from the homestead and i take in this exceptionally friendly grey and white cat. so friendly that after i released her from the trap, she followed me to my car and made as if to leave with me. the following week, when i pick up another cat from her address, she runs into the cage and the woman who lives there asks if i know of anyone who wants her. evidently she's so friendly she trips them as they enter and exit their abode. i say i'll ask around and fend the cat off as i depart. the next day she runs over when i return with the next spayed cat. i hold her for a moment in the driver's seat, think better of it and release her.

and now. it's five days since i was at her home. in my car--no walking. today, i pull into the driveway and all of a sudden this cat shows up and starts snaking around my front porch. not shying away from any of the dogs and definitely fluffier than any of the grey and white ferals in my neck of the woods.

it can't be, i think. where did that cat come from, i ask the mister. and he says he literally just heard/saw her crash over a series of yards/fences to this one and from thence to the front. whereupon i walked over and just scooped her up. it's her. incredibly dirty, but purring and ever so hungry. so now she's on my lap, having devoured a can of food, availed herself of the litter, sniffed politely at the other cats and the dogs, and she seems quite content. we call her jane.

turns out, though, that jane is not quite a girl, so now she is known as a boy named jane, and his favorite pastime seems to be lying in our arms...

A Treat!

We have this here for no other reason than it made me laugh so hard that I wept! I figure after three miserable, tedious days of standardized testing, we all need a little amusement...

Anxiety

As some of you may know, today is the day Malcolm Gladwell speaks to the Third Years via Skype, and, despite the planning and troubleshooting that has gone into organizing this, I found myself gripped by anxiety last night. Instead of cotton candy dreams, I suffered from nightmare visions of how EVERYTHING that could possibly go wrong during second period today did in fact go wrong in ways that transcended even my most wild imagining. So wrong, in fact, that, in my dream, I ended up fleeing school for the safety of my bedroom, where I burrowed in the comforting bosoms of my furry menagerie. Whereupon I received a series of chiding and increasingly volatile phone calls from Mirman asking WHERE was I, didn't I know I had a class, was I aware that my students were waiting for me? Even now I am in countdown mode for the Malcolm Gladwell Q and A with my stomach in knots and my head

steadily a pounding. Logically I know that even if things don't go as swimmingly as I would like, it's hardly the end of the world, and yet!

What are some things that are irrational sources of stress for you?

http://nycagainstrape.org/art_popup_59.html

Bite Thy Tongue!

As many of you know, for the past four months I've been trapping feral cats from a house down the block--29 so far. What I do is lure the cats into a humane trap and then transport them the next day to Fixnation, which is a nonprofit organization that spays/neuters and vaccinates the cats all for free. I then release the cats back on property they came from.

Just last week I managed to get 5 female cats spayed from their home. You might not be aware of this, but the potential damage from 5 unspayed female cats is horrific. Because cats can reproduce several times a year, and kittens mature quickly, just 2 feral cats (the wild offspring of domestic cats) can quickly become 2,000. In fact, the feline reproduction statistics are staggering. 2 uncontrolled breeding cats produce: 2 litters a year, at a survival rate of 2.8 kittens per litter. Continued breeding will produce 12 cats the first year, 66 cats the second year, 2,201 cats in the third year, 3,822 cats in the fourth year, 12,680 cats in the fifth year, and on and on . . .

Pretty awful, wouldn't you agree?

Now the people who live in this house are definitively NOT helpful. In order for me to entice the cats into the traps, they need to be hungry, which means these people need to NOT FEED the cats on the day that I am trapping. It's not that hard, right? They know I'm coming, so they just skip the breakfast and dinner for the cats for ONE day. It's not like the cats are going to starve. In fact, the cats can all have dinner after I'm done trapping around 9:00 pm.

Do these people facilitate the trapping process (which is VERY wearying!) by withholding food for one little day? No. Of course not. In fact, each person in the house blames the other for feeding the cats, and one of them even keeps placing massive platters of tasty wet food down NEXT TO my traps, AND their dog keeps sticking his snout in the traps and setting them off as well. Is it asking too much for them to just keep the dog in ONE evening for a few hours and to wait to feed? I don't think so!

And yet, in order for me to continue trapping, I need to be polite and accommodating so that I can have permission to go onto their property. It literally drives me temporarily insane! All I want to do is lambast them for their selfish irresponsibility, but I have to smile and make nice...

When have you had to bite your tongue in the name of diplomacy when all you really wanted to do was point out all the ways in which someone or something was just WRONG!?

http://www.textually.org/tv/archives/images/set3/ANGRY%20FACE-1.gif

I've been thinking about accountability lately. We all know there's a difference between right and wrong. Right to be nice to people, wrong to step on someone's toes intentionally. Right to be patient with students, wrong to be testy. Sometimes, though, people do things that are really

wrong--wrong as in breaking the law wrong. Sometimes the people who do particularly awful things don't end up going to jail because they leave the country or create a false identity.

Sometimes these people manage to elude the consequences of their crimes for decades. Let's say that during those decades these people manage to live perfectly upstanding lives. Maybe they volunteer for charities. Maybe they are gainfully employed. Maybe they are uniquely talented in some way. But many years ago, they committed some criminal act for which they were not punished.

The question is this: If someone commits a crime--one for which they are found guilty in a court of law--but they flee instead of doing their time and are caught decades later, should they still be held accountable for their earlier crime? Or should the fact that they were "good citizens" cancel out their earlier crime?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/crobj/3367993034/

Save a (Literary) Life!

I recently rented Hamlet 2, which was very silly and a little uneven and had excessive amounts of profanity in it, but was overall quite entertaining. I know most of you haven’t yet read Hamlet, but basically, by the end of this play, EVERYONE is DEAD. In this movie, though, thanks to a time machine, Hamlet travels back in time and manages to save everyone he loves from his or her untimely demise. Silly, yes, but overall, very cool.

So, of course I’ve been obsessing over which characters I would save! Methinks I would rescue Boxer from Animal Farm, Tess from Tess of the D’urbervilles, and maybe John Proctor (The Crucible) or Ethan Frome (Ethan Frome). And definitely Lily Bart (The House of Mirth)! I think all of these characters, with the exception of John Proctor, who kind of earns most of his hardship, are such victims of fate--prisoners of circumstance, punished for things so beyond their control--and they are all such GOOD people at heart. Look at Boxer--he is so impossibly sweet and kind and trusting! It kills me every time I get to that chapter where the BAD THING happens to him! As for Tess, for those of you who like a BEYOND tragic character, this poor girl suffers so much, yet with such grace and dignity and it’s all so unjust! I just want to swoop in, wrest Boxer from evil Napoleon’s grasp and place him in a verdant pasture where he can chomp on as much fresh grass as his horse heart desires (and where I can rub his nose) and as for Tess, if I could just transport her to the 21st century, so she just wouldn’t have been used so horribly, I would be so happy! It does occur to me, though, that Boxer wouldn’t want to come with me, which is even more tragic...

Which brings us to the question of the day--if you could save any character from literature, classic or contemporary, who would it be and why?

Ze True Talent--Ephemeral and Transcendent

A while ago the mister and I were lost in the abyss of

excessive summer television, finding ourselves even

so desperate for entertainment that we watched a few

episodes of America's Got Talent. While some of

those contestants are truly talented, none of their

acts was what I would consider one of a kind. My

mister, ever inquisitive, went trawling on the Internet

in quest of what types of acts emerge victorious in

other parts of the world. And so we found Keniya

Simonova, winner of Ukraine's Got Talent. I know

the idea of watching an 8 minute youtube video

is fairly daunting, but TRUST ME, this will be worth it.