Monthly Archives: July 2007

Friday Cat Blogging: In the Dark Edition

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Like any two inmates confined to the same cell for 17 formative years, Daria and I developed some inside jokes.

Tata: Is your refrigerator running?
Daria: Yes!
Tata: You better go catch it!

That’s a whole phone conversation right there, complete with funny voices and a crank call script pre-dating the Hoover Dam. I didn’t identify myself or say goodbye. Funny, yeah. As years passed, the humor was still lost on other people, like Daria’s mother-in-law Annette when I didn’t realize Daria had left the kids with Annette one afternoon and selfishly went about using that free will thing.

Tata: Do you take peeektures? Well, geeeve them back!
Annette: WHO IS THIS?
Tata: Nobody!
Annette: Why are you calling here? Don’t call here!
Tata: I’ve already called here! What do I do now?
Annette: Hang up and don’t call here again!
Tata: I can’t!

That night, when I explained to my sister that I was the afternoon’s terrifying entertainment, Daria had to lie down to laugh hard enough. I am also a crappy photographer, because these kittens are heart-stoppingly cute. Here they look like dustbunnies, if heart-stoppingly cute dustbunnies I fight the urge to vacuum.

I took this picture and half a dozen unimaginably inferior pictures in the dark, where I knew pussycats were with my Extrasensory Kitten Perception. You can’t tell from this image but Drusy on the left has green eyes like sunlit moss. On the right, Topaz has eyes the color of new pennies. You can’t tell this because the paint behind them is – unofficially – like a suede coat on a handsome man and not pink in the least, no. I wouldn’t paint anything pink. Or anybody.

I’ve Been Memed. I

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Jill from Brilliant@Breakfast tagged me, which would have been more exciting had I not run around for weeks shouting, “Not It!”

THE RULES
1. All right, here are the rules.
2. We have to post these rules before we give you the facts.
3. Players start with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
4. People who are tagged write their own blog about their eight things and post these rules.
5. At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.

As usual, I don’t know what these words mean in this order. So.

1. My thumbs bend backward. I’ll take a picture sometime. You’ll swear I photoshopped.
2. My cubicle at work is surrounded by plastic soldiers and dinosaurs.
3. I don’t sleep. It’s contagious. Y’awake?
4. Air conditioning makes me seasick.
5. Everyone has magical powers. I catch things flying through the air, but only if I didn’t see them coming.
6. What day is it? Ya got me.
7. I have an irrational fear of earthquakes.
8. I’m not melting. All my beautiful Eeeeevil is fine, thank you.

As for the rules: I cannot follow them! I will not tag! If you wish to tag yourself, please do. You have every right to tell the world your front teeth are backwards, but I won’t make you!

Now you know something else about me.

I’ve Been Memed. II

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Little does Phydeaux know I’ve been lurking at his place, too. Shh! Don’t tell him! It’s a secret!

These are the rules:
1. If, and only if, you get tagged, write a post with links to 5 blogs that make you think,
2. Link to this post so that people can easily find the exact origin of the meme,
3. Optional: Proudly display the ‘Thinking Blogger Award’ with a link to the post that you wrote.

As Dot said, “You can lead a whore to culture but you can’t make her wear panties.” Or something like that. Anyway, while it’s charming to be chosen for the Varsity Cogitating Team, I should mention some months ago, my sister Daria introduced a pearl of wisdom we now live by. Feel free to adopt it if this adage suits your purposes: Don’t think – it weakens the team. Let’s sort out a few things, for clarity’s sake. Think of it as the AlkaSeltzer before your bingy-drink-drinking.

I write for and/or fall down at:
Poor Impulse Control. Hi!
Running Scared. Infrequently. I finished the Holland House.
Blanton’s & Ashton’s. They have booze.
AgitProp. BYOBushie.
…so Mr. DBK and Mr. Blogenfreude are RIGHT OUT.

I read a pile o’ blogs every day, some several times a day. The really big ones don’t make sense to me (Eschaton hurts my tiny brain and I’d have to quit my job to read Kos) so I stick to mid-level, middle-to-actual left blogs, art, food and storytelling blogs. (Many of these blogs have the Thinkery logo.) At least once a week, I follow someone’s blogroll to a blog I’m really glad I found. The tricky part can be finding it a second time, because while a great many big thinkers are working in the Blogosphere, quite a few of them don’t need little me to prop up their egos. In no particular order, then:

For straight up monster-stomping goodness, nothing makes smoke shoot out my ears like Brilliant@Breakfast. This is the first blog I read every morning. How Jill accomplishes organized thinking and writing day after day while I’m begging the Caffeine Gods for mercy is beyond me. Moreover, Jill’s passion is contagious. I’m a lot less likely to walk away from political conversations seething and silent than I was before either I found her or she found me.

Enrevanche. Barry thinks about things I don’t or they wouldn’t cross my path. His cat is a humble rock star. I read Enrevanche about once a week. If I skip it, I feel like I misplaced my car keys.

Reading The Unapologetic Mexican drags me out of my cracked-glass-lined comfort zone and into one where my assumptions of ‘normal’ and ‘ordinary’ sound gratingly stupid to my ear – and that is fantastic. I can’t question my ideas – I have to deal with their failures.

Spocko’s Brain is an important read whenever I feel uninspired. One determined, organized person with a good memory can put the screws to bullies, and don’t you forget it!

You must join me in the splendor and fury that is Cripes, Suzette II: Into the Fire. Do not argue the point! You will not prevail! Suzette’s politics differ from mine, which are slightly to the left of Gandhi’s, yet we must order soup, and you must absolutely taste the duck. Taste it! Do not vex me, as this meme will vex Suzette!

It must be mentioned that Sharon at Center Of New Jersey Life is so smart I jog in place to keep up, and it’s a good thing I recently bought new bras.

There you have it. As for Rule #3, I will ask Siobhan to explain it to me slowly and in simple expletives, because I am small and covered with fur. Though there’s Nair.

Say the Mark Is Mine

Posted by Tata on

Part One

Part Two
At the very end of this story, a large contingent of my family is running in circles around a parking lot. It’s like a Chinese fire drill with fewer fumes, but you wouldn’t know it from the silliness. I go home with Corinne. It’s almost a two-mile straight line from this street to my apartment, it’s getting dark and we’re babbling. Stopped at a traffic light halfway home, we’re chattering at each other when the driver in front of us shoves open his door, jumps out and dances between the yellow lines on Hamilton Street. Corinne and I point! We gasp! We make noises like our lung function is imperiled! The light turns green. He slides back into his car. We squeal with glee. He turns left onto George Street at the next light but our delight stays with us.

At home before 9:30 on a Friday night, I’m too exhausted to move and it’s too early to sleep. Then suddenly it’s very late. Then it’s possible I woke up happy Saturday morning.

Damn it!

Part Three

When I Squeeze You You Make Noise

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Slashdot: The Daily Mail reports that thousands of rubber ducks who have traveled the seas of the world since 1992 are about to end their journey.

After escaping out of a container fallen off a Chinese freight ship in a storm, scientists have been followed them on their fifteen year trek. This has turned out to be an invaluable source of information for studying ocean currents. Now it seems inevitable though that they will finally land on the shores of South-West England. ‘[Oceanographer Curtis Ebbesmeyer] correctly predicted what many thought was impossible – that thousands of them would end up washed into the Arctic ice near Alaska, and then move at a mile a day, frozen in the pack ice, around their very own North-West Passage to the Atlantic. It proved true years later and in 2003, the first Friendly Floatees were found, frozen and then thawed out, on the eastern seaboard of the U.S. and Canada. So precious to science are they that the US firm that made them is offering a £50 bounty for finding one.

Apologies: I misplaced the URL for this blurb, but let’s look at The Daily Mail.

THE JOURNEY SO FAR:

10 JANUARY 1992: Somewhere in the middle of the Pacific Ocean nearly 29,000 First Years bath toys, including bright yellow rubber ducks, are spilled from a cargo ship in the Pacific Ocean.

16 NOVEMBER 1992: Caught in the Subpolar Gyre (counter-clockwise ocean current in the Bering Sea, between Alaska and Siberia), the ducks take 10 months to begin landing on the shores of Alaska.

I am SO HAPPY.

EARLY 1995: The ducks take three years to circle around. East from the drop site to Alaska, then west and south to Japan before turning back north and east passing the original drop site and again landing in North America. Some ducks are even found In Hawaii. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) worked out that the ducks travel approximately 50 per pent faster than the water in the current.

1995 – 2000: Some intrepid ducks escape the Subpolar Gyre and head North, through the Bering Straight and into the frozen waters of the Arctic. Frozen into the ice the ducks travel slowly across the pole, moving ever eastward.

2000: Ducks begin reaching the North Atlantic where they begin to thaw and move Southward. Soon ducks are sighted bobbing in the waves from Maine to Massachusetts.

2001: Ducks are tracked in the area where the Titanic sank.

My heart will go on!

JULY TO DECEMBER 2003: The First Years company offers a $100 savings bond reward for the recovery of wayward ducks from the 1992 spill. To be valid ducks must be sent to the company and must be found in New England, Canada or Iceland. Britain is told to prepare for an invasion of the wayward ducks as well.

Duck validation!

2003: A lawyer called Sonali Naik was on holiday in the Hebrides in north-west Scotland when she found a faded green frog on the beach marked with the magic words ‘The First Years’. Unaware of the significance of her find she left it on the beach. It was only when she was chatting to other guests at her hotel that she realised what she had seen.

What a moron!

Science is just adorable.

If I Make A Mark In Time

Posted by Tata on

Part One
Siobhan’s sister is getting married tomorrow. Siobhan’s been spinning in decorative circles for months, which has been bugging the hell out of me. Tomorrow it’s all over and Siobhan can get back to what really matters: Me. And she’ll be glad to, because what could be more important than My happiness?

Speaking of selfish, Mom and Tom got remarried on Daria’s birthday.

Let’s review: on the day before my February birthday, Dad called to say he had cancer. Days after Anya’s March birthday, we learned the cancer was terminal. On Corinne’s birthday, the rest of us were in Virginia taking care of Dad. The day before Todd’s April birthday, Dad died. Last week, I figured, crap, this year no one gets a birthday besides Dara and Daria, but I was wrong. A few years ago, a giant fucking hurricane and the stupid humans charged with emergency response wiped out the civil records for the City of New Orleans, and with it, any official documentation of Mom’s and Tom’s secret-from-everyone-even-each-other hippy wedding.

Yesterday, as actual criminals deserted New Brunswick for the Jersey Shore, Anya, Corinne and I lay across benches in a nearly empty courthouse – because it was funny – waiting for our parents, who are typically two-three hours late for everything. On my way into the building, the cop at the door looked really bored until I couldn’t follow directions but what else is new?

Bored Guy: Where are you going?
Tata: Isn’t that what we’d all like to know?
Bored Guy: Today, in this building?
Tata: I’m going to – I think it’s –
Bored Guy: Family court?
Tata: Room 201?
Bored Guy: Family court? Judge SomeFella?
Tata: No. Judge SomeDude? Judge SomeOldMan?
Bored Guy: Judge SomeOldMan is right at the top of the stairs. Why are you here?
Tata: Wedding.
Bored Guy: I guess you’re here to meet them.

He points up the stairs at my – I assure you – very attractive stepsisters. I begin ascending.

Bored Guy: Elevator’s over there.
Tata: Thanks!
Much Less Bored Guy: I said – elevator’s over there!
Tata: The fat lady said thank you.

We sprawled across the benches. We hadn’t even had time to pass out before their father and my mother came up the stairs at 3:30, the time of our appointment with legal destiny and Judge SomeOldMan. Daria ran up the stairs dressed like one of Christina Aguilera’s back up singers just as the clerk was about to lose patience with our babbling. Anya and I had signed the paperwork as witnesses. Corinne was holding all the ceremonial jewelry until Daria arrived, and Todd was in Los Angeles, nursing a red-hot grudge.

See, in 1998, we heard a rumor. I don’t know why it happened this way, but it did. As the oldest child and the one therefore closest to death, I called home. It was a local call.

Tata: Are you two married?
Mom: What? I…I don’t know what you’re talking about.
Tata: I asked you a yes or no question. I’m not asking complicated questions like how or why.
Mom: I have to go bake something…
Tata: Are you two married? Your innumerable children want to know.
Mom: No. Nuh-unh. Yes. Yes!
Tata: Fine! Thank you! Stop hyperventilating, sheesh!
Mom: I’m sticking my head in the freezer. Rescue me before my hair cracks.

For people allergic to marriage, they’d apparently gotten married twice – at least. The story changes depending on who’s listening and their level of involvement with law enforcement. Mom and Tom met at the commune. Have I mentioned the commune? Yeah, I’ve milked a goat. Anyway, when Daria, Todd and I met Tom, we were the oddly small pre-teens in the alley beside the health food restaurant climbing up the sides of a big man. Subsequently, at a time nobody remembers but before I was released from the custody of primary school authorities, Mom stopped arguing about the getting-remarried thing. They got metaphysical in Martha’s Vineyard before the stars and the sea, more conventionally legal in New Orleans, and now dry and permanent before a judge in New Brunswick. I maintain they should have waited out the seventies for Cher’s dozen farewell tours and gotten married across America, Karen Finley-style, but it’s not like I was present and organizing. No, though I care about things like who’s wearing what metals, I was busy running away from home once a week at the time. So almost twenty years later in 1999, as Todd says to anyone who’ll listen in Los Angeles, “We slapped some rings on them for the whatever anniversary of whatever happened. Then we ate cake.”

Part Two