OK, so here's what it comes down to: I skipped about the 'Net a bit, reading a lot of the arguments for keeping cats inside all the time, and I freely admit that some circumstances actually demand it, and at some times it's necessary, and in many cases it's a perfectly happy and desirable way to have a feline in your life. But the arguments against letting a cat outdoors are all about the terrible risks a cat runs being out of doors. These articles speak of how old-school cat owners 'like to think of cats as being independent and free-sprited', as though that were some kind of propaganda, an urban myth that we convince ourselves of, and not something a cat will shove down your throat if you start treating them like a kind of small, agile dog. This view, they say,, must be gently but firmly put aside for the good of our little Fuzzles. To make an obvious parallel argument, people should never, ever, under any circumstances, climb into a car. After all more people are killed because of car wrecks than any other reason. It's for our own good - and it might curb some of our mobility and life choices, but hey, we'll live a good long time, right?

Sure, you say, but we're people, and we're responsible for ourselves. Cats aren't, *we* have to be responsible *for* them.

Here's my response:

No.

Your cats aren't your pretend-children-who-never-grow-up-and-always-need-you. I don't care what you say. That's what dogs are, I will freely admit. Dogs are dependent family members, they will need to be by your side till the day they die, and when you have one it's a full time job, you've got to have an eye on them *all* the time. A cat can be raised to be fully dependent on you, sure, and a lot of them will be happy little creatures all their lives. And maybe you even believe that there's no minimum home size for a properly raised indoor cat; that in the right circumstances they could be happy in a place the size of a cardboard box.

Again, that is a negatory.

I don't know a lot about the methods of keeping indoor animals, but I do know exercise is one thing a happy animal can't live without. And according to my estimation of the muscles on a cat, they need some place bigger than my 30 foot trailer to move around in. Being indoors all the time was never an option for any cat that wanted to be with us. Fortunately, although we move a lot, we live on Rennie campgrounds, a far more animal-friendly environment than most burbclaves of the world, even the ones that require you to keep your pet indoors.

Yes, I keep my pet indoors when it's required. Pix will live to get over it.

I think the reason we go on and on about the safety features of the home being the best choice over the dangerous outdoors is because the 'people' side of the relationship is far more important to us than, say, the cat side of the relationship. In a word, the cat is emotionally our child, and if they die after only seven years we'll be sad. Therefore a cat that lives 20 years is better than a cat that lives for 5 years.

And maybe a cat would choose to live solely indoors if it knew better. Depends on the cat. But I tend to think not, because most of them *don't* choose it. People do things that shorten or risk our lives all the time.

So what is a cat, to a person? As opposed to my dog, who can't do this, my cat is my friend whom I trust, and who trusts me, because he wants to, not because he has to. A cat is different things, of course, and all I can say is that I try very hard, when figuring out what a cat is, to look at the cat itself. Not what *I* think it is, or what it is to me, what it *is*. To felipomorphize, if you will - not 'personality' per sey, as in how does it act, but what does it *like*? What does it want? What does it *see*? How attached to me is it? How well does it deal with change, with the world?

I loved Miss Tabitha dearly, but it was pretty clear she was a divorcee - she'd been abandoned. She was sociable and polite, but she kept a cool distance from most people. It made her excellent as an indoor-outdoor cat; she was home-loving, but wary, mature and streetwise, though I confess she did get pretty territorial around the neighborhood cats, and I preferred keeping her in at night so she wouldn't beat up on them - or on my roommate's black Lab, a twitchy, barky pile of nerves who viewed her with terrified respect. Is it bad to raise a cat to have that kind of self-reliance? As long as they have a balance of love in their lives, I think it's an excellent aspect of personality, and something cats take to very naturally, if you can encourage it.

Because of course, that's what they are.

So Pixillation Jones is asleep right now in my inbox, and later on he will be outdoors, and here is something that can be taken to the nearest financial institution: if tonight he gets run over by a car exceeding the 5mph campground speed limit, or manages to encounter an owl big enough to take him, or has some other awful thing happen that results in his death or permanent disappearance from my life, then it will be as the death of a loved one in a traffic accident. I will grieve and and grieve and wail and hurt, and my choice to let him outside that night will lodge inside me like a shard of glass - but I won't change my mind or regret his life. I can't live every day terrified of what would happen if he wasn't in my life, any more than I could do so if I were married to a fisherman, or a cop, or a fireman. Or if I had a child who was of age. There is no certainty in this choice, but I won't be fool enough to act like there is.

My mother had a good saying for times like this: you pays your dime, and you takes your chances. Thanks, Mom.

OK, I think I'm done now. Thank you kindly for letting me go on. And, well, on.:)

Current Mood: busy

So Pixil comes with us on walks. Sometimes he doesn't make it all the way, but I walk with him while he investigates new things. It's fun to watch him, and to play with him when he asks me to. Yesterday he discovered another young tabby in the tall grass. I watched while they ignored each other until a bunny ran by - then all bets were off.:)

I thought I would only let him out during the day, but that turned out to not be such a good idea. During the day at Sherwood there were a *lot* of dogs, and, as the place is still formulating their pet policy, a lot of dogs ended up off-leash during the day. Maybe most dogs wouldn't be be interested, or capable, of getting a hold of Pixil - he's a terrific climber, and I've left his claws intact, but dogs are aggressive; most are bigger, stronger, some are faster, their restraint is likely to be low when they're already unsupervised and running loose.

The night, oddly enough, was safer. There's less traffic and fewer people, and most dogs and possessions that might attract the curiosity of a kitty are packed up. In the dark cats have the advantage - their night sight is ten times better than the best night vision equipment the Army can make, and much better than a dog's, making them effectively invisible most of the time. If spotted, their ability to break line of sight and hide is greatly increased, and their natural desire to hide, stalk and observe of course dovetails nicely with the night. We sometimes forget that they are nocturnal, but cats never do, do they?

They nocturnal predators to fear at Sherwood would be coyotes, who can track by scent, owls, whose stealth and night vision surpasses any cat - and other cats. I wasn't worried about coyotes, as they would be much more interested in avoiding man-frequented areas and raiding the garbage bins left behind in the patron campgrounds, all deserted during the week. I worry sometimes about owls, though Pixil has the natural camo of the tabby, and an owl big enough to hunt a cat even Pixil's size would be uncommon.

I'm not saying it's all been perfect. There turned out to be several feral cats on the Sherwood site, and I was awakened at night twice by the sound of cat fighting. Each time I bolted straight from my bed to the door, followed closely by Strider, who shot out into the dark, with just enough barking to let everyone know where he was. Both times Pixil returned to the door, Strider proudly trotting up for praise and treats, which I was not too sleepy to heap upon him.

The third time it happened the sounds were pretty fierce, or possibly just closer to the house. This time I held Strider's collar at the door, and we saw two shapes skirting the circle of the porch light, Pixil running away from a large black cat. Strider's collar tugged in that direction and I released him. He tore off towards the disappearing cats, Pixil darting a moment later from under a parked car back towards him. Pix crouched a moment to let Strider reach him - Strider sniffed him once, then tore off after the black cat. I took Pixil inside, while Strider silently pursued the feral up and down the row. He never caught him, of course - an excited Strider is fearsome to any cat, but his sight could never have found a black cat at night even when he was young.  Still, I doubt the feral wanted any part of such shenanigans; I never heard another peep outside at night, though Pix took this attack from a fellow feline rather hard, and spent all next day sleeping in the cabinet. Every new fair has its own encounters, and Pix knows it.

Pix does have a harness which he wears whenever he's out, of course, and also a small 20 foot cable which I keep him on when we're new at a fair, or when we're in a place that doesn't allow off-lead cats and he wants to sit outside. But the cable would be dangerous if we left him alone on it as we might with Strider, even if there's no danger of entangling himself. A cat on a lead isn't a dog; its agility is curbed, it cannot run or climb, and it has no proper defense to attack from any predator. It's simply a staked-down target that nothing has found yet. Also I admit Pixil has every cat's gift for entangling himself, no matter what's around.

So, when we are at a fair where it's allowed I introduce Pixil to the grounds, make sure he knows to avoid things he should, and gradually let him off-lead as he become more familiar with the surroundings. I also make sure he's properly fed, and doesn't miss coming-in times for meals; a tired and hungry cat will make mistakes others won't.

Anyway, the method (if you can call it that) seems to be working so far. Maybe the secret is lots of love, gradual introduction to new environments, and and early fixing to keep them home-loving, but I think it's more complicated than that. Like my practice of leaving my purse alone in my cart sometimes while I shop, I suspect it works because of conscious practices that we create to augment our natural tendencies, something which is much harder to cultivate, but generally works better than listening to conventional wisdom.

In fact, conventional wisdom is coming to mean "That thing you fall back on if you can't think of something better." Does that make me an apostate?

It's no surprise that people have strong opinions about how to raise pets, as they do about raising children. It follows that periodically we'll run across people who can't quite get behind our pet philosophy. As a cat owner I don't usually have to deal with such things, but yesterday I mentioned I had to get back to my cat and let him in, and got a response that said I was clearly a thoughtless and irresponsible cat owner.

That this attitude was born of zero knowledge, or reflection, should have instantly disqualified it from consideration as criticism, but you know how things can get to you. So this morning I find myself running over the process by which I keep a cat. It's hard, because I was raised with this process, and moreover it has no formal structure, as it was invented by my mother.

Mom isn't a dog person. She loves them, but to her they are, well, slaves. From her end, the beauty of cats is their aspect of self-sufficiency and independence. Like dogs, they rely on us for food, and they acknowledge us as family, butt there the similarity ends, and a philosophy that treats cats like a form of dog is doomed right off the bat.

I'm not saying you shouldn't ever keep indoor cats, or walk them on a leash, I'm saying you'll have to take a cat's road to get there, not a dog's.

Anyway, I was raised with indoor/outdoor cats. I know plenty of people whose cats were lost or hit by cars or eaten by - well, whatever. None of those cats were ours, my mother's or mine. say what you will, all of our cats lived long lives, and died for reasons unrelated to being outdoors. You can skip the next bit if you don't care, but I want to think about them all this morning.

*************
Grey came to us when I was maybe four years old, with his sister Tinkerbell, who remained feral all her life. She lived indoors, mostly in the ceiling of our basement. Tink deliberately left my mother when she moved to Virginia, the stress of the move was to much for her, and she was connected only to the house, not to us. She got out, and refused to return. My mother called and called into the trees of the neighborhood at night. She could hear Tinkerbell and see her eyes but she refused to return. She was well over sixteen at the time, and eventually my mother had no choice but to respect her wishes and say goodbye. Grey was very attached to us, especially my mother, and stayed with us until his death of kidney failure at the dignified age of twenty-two.

In college we had two cats, Nerf and Li Po, but these were kept by my boyfriend, with his philosophy. Li Po was deaf, and so indoors by necessity, and she never showed much interest in going out. Nerf was a tom, a call I believe had more to do with my boyfriends sympathy against castration than anything else. This, combined with the idea of also keeping him inside, and fixing Li Po so he never got sex anyway, made him redress, fixated on escape, and, of course he sprayed until the house stank. The boyfriend was never much troubled about housekeeping, and this all worked fine for him, but I resolved to do better and always fix my cats. Nerf turned out to have feline leukemia, possibly from birth as he was a stray, but he was hardy and vital, and my friend had a strong belief that if an animal friend had not given up it wasn't for him to destroy it. Nerf went on treatment when he was two,and lived a long life, considering. My friend loved him greatly, and they were very close. One day when he got home Nerf did not come to greet him. On a pillow in the bed Nerf raised his head as he came in, so my friend gathered him onto his lap and talked to him, said after he had a shower they would go to the very. When he got out of the shower Nerf was dead. A cat will normally crawl off somewhere to die; to me it was a testament to their friendship that Nerf waited to say goodbye. He was ten.

Li Po never caught feline leukemia, and lived several more years before dying of natural causes. I could never tell if she was happy per sey, as she was kind of insane, but she seemed content enough.

A few years after this I moved into an apartment in Atlanta. My roommate had an indoor cat, Rhiannon, and while I was there she acquired a black kitten, Alexander. These were both indoor cats by her preference, but both died when they got out and were hit by cars. This was several years apart, and my memory may be playing tricks about Rhiannon, but Alexander definitely died that way, about a year and a half old.

After that I took a studio further in town, and struck up a friendship with a young cat who was often near my home. I later discovered this was because her owners had abandoned her, and moved away, taking their other three cats with them. I cursed them to a deep pit of purgatory, and a few days later, on a chilly evening, I picked her up and brought her inside my threshold, leaving the sliding glass door open. I explained that, if she wanted, she could come in here sometimes as long as she used the litter box, and if she stayed I'd feed her. She went away for a day to think about it, then apparently decided it was a good deal, especially since she was pregnant. I had her fixed as soon as possible, but she bore a bulky scar all her life. She stayed with me for six years, but when I eventually decided to go to Maine and work the boats we found her a home with a friend of my aunt's, a gay interpreted hairdresser who called her Dutchess and kept her inside and treated her like a queen until she died three years later from a blood clot; I believe a complication from her surgery. Her name was Miss Tabitha.

Since then there have been no other cats except a roommate's, one that got fe leuk from the cheap inoculations at Pets Are People Too. My roomie decided to have him put down, but couldn't bring herself to be with him when he died. I went instead, and stroked his fur and gave the nod. The attendant pushed a plunger, and he laid his head down. I hope I do it for any animal I have to say goodbye to. There hasn't been a cat since Miss Tabitha, thirteen years ago.
**************************
When Gregg and I got together we were in a tiny trailer we couldn't pass each other in, with a sixty pound dog. When we finally upgraded last year I invoked our agreement: I could get a cat.

I had spent a lot of time thinking about this. Cats aren't dogs. Dogs love *you*, and will follow you anywhere. Cats love a place. They get very attached, and if that place goes away they get upset. I wasn't going to be able to get a full grown cat and expect it to just adapt to the traveling life.

I was going to need a kitten. Which was totally all right with me; I don't love kittens less than cats, even if they are more work. He was going to have to like dogs, and Strider was going to have to like him. Him, because I needed the outgoing resilience of a boy, and a girl might be too shy - call that negotiable on an ad hoc basis.

So when Chris Osbourne discovered a bunch of kittens last year on I-35 we went over for a look. I had tried not to have ideas about the fur, but I love Abyssinians, so the largest kitten, a tabby with ticked fur caught my eye. They were all healthy and friendly, but I thought this one was a bit more outgoing. Chris's chihuahua had taken a liking to the litter, so with several weeks of dog grooming and loving behind it, we figured the kitten had about as good a chance at Strider as possible. We tentatively called it a girl and took her home. The vet corrected us later, and we named him Pixillation Jones. (Pixil, as in pixie-like, mischievous, not Pixel, as in granulated.)

Shit. I wrote all that thinking it would lead up to a proper explanation of exactly how you raise an indoor-outdoor cat not to die. I still can't quantify it. All I know is it's not about tossing the kitten outside with a bowl of food. Pixil was indoors for the first six months of his life, and during that time I worked hard and loved it. I'm sure I wasn't perfect, I doted way too much and spent to much time worrying about whether he liked whatever litter I'd bought, but he got lots of love and attention, and he still does, when he wants it. I started putting him out on a lead at six months old, daytime only, and our neighbor's dogs checked him out and let him alone. Then we started going for walks together.

It's not true you can't go for walks with your cats, I used to do this with Miss Tabitha all the time. With you as a mobile base,a cat with roam freely within a certain area of you. Pixil took to it at once, stalking us through the woods as we rambled about with Strider, periodically running past us into the brush ahead, occasionally taking a swipe at Strider's tail. I progressed slowly from there to having him outside while we kept the door open, to roaming about with him and showing him the places to avoid (like the raptor yard)to simply letting him out when I saw that the neighbors free-roamer, Puma, was out. Puma was not totally on board with being the big brother to my little guy, but Pixil persisted.

I really have to send some money to Wikipedia. It has helped me so much in just the last week. I was wondering what the business was about Trayvon Martin, but of course all you can find right now are rants and polemics and pre-decided accounts. The press seems to have decided it's newsworthy, but they don't seem eager to dwell on the facts. One of the things on which I really feel the US press could take a page from the BBC: the BBC website has every update of a story equipped with links to the previous articles, so you can get the background and see exactly how a story developed.

Anyway, as happens when you live without TV, and only NPR on the radio,I was feeling so out of my depth on young Mr. Martin that I wasn't interested in trying to hunt up the story or try to glean the actual facts of the case. Still less was I into joining the misinformed masses, each spouting whichever facts made the story what they wanted to see.

But then my aunt was on the evening news, demonstrating for justice for the poor kid who got killed, and with no fanfare I turned automatically where I always turn: I looked the kid up on Wikipedia.

In a few paragraphs I got the facts of the case, and I could see clear as a bell why the laws of Florida made it difficult and undesirable to arrest the shooter, but also that there were plenty of unanswered questions on both sides. I don't think any side is going to come out looking good in the end, but I think the questions are now going to be asked. I do know that it's perfectly infamous for the new Panthers to put a bounty out on the shooter's head, a clear hate crime repaying an unestablished hate crime. It's also pretty clear that Mr. Zimmerman was not above telling his neighborhood watch to look out for young black males, and at night it seems like he mistook a 6'2" high school kid out buying Skittles while visiting family in the subdivision for an outsider 'obviously on drugs', as he told the police, casing the neighborhood.

You know what? I know a lot of the reason this story is big has to do more with luck than any clear cut quality of the story. I don't care. If it hadn't been this poor kid's tragedy getting paraded in front of the nation it would have been some other poor kid.
There's all kinds of questions to answer. They need to be answered. But they won't ever be answered by a bunch of political posturing and finger pointing, and demanding punishment when you don't know what happened yet. What did do some good was enough people demanding an investigation that there may actually be one, so I don't want to hear how the 'media circus' doesn't do any good. Now let's shut the fuck up and get to work, shall we?

We just got back from a caroling gig that we traveled up to Atlanta to attend. It pretty much took up the whole day. We were part of what must have been the biggest private Christmas party in Atlanta. We drove up to a mansion, parked on the street, and walked past a live Nativity - Jesus, Mary Joseph, angels, live sheep, goats, ox, shepherds, - and camels. Yes, fricking camels. Top of the drive had a fellow hooking real reindeer up to a sleigh for one of the best Santas I've ever seen. There was a circulating magician for entertainment, half a dozen videographers, and a pianist for the baby grand in the drawing room. And us. For the occasion we were not one but TWO teams of four-part carolers, to sing from 11 to 6, with a bit beyond to hang out and sing with the pianist. There were literally dozens of catering staff, at least four bar-tending stations that I recall, a guy making balloons, a table with a couple of girls baking fresh Tollhouse cookies in a handy stove for passers-by, and endlessly refreshed tables of food - one set in the courtyard for the kids, the other inside for adult guests. Of which, I may say, there were well over a hundred.

The rather nice part about this particular gig is that, unlike many large parties at which we are hired to perform,

1) there was not a single speaker spitting out canned Christmas music - we were there to provide it, not compete with inferior versions of it - and provide we did, with gusto.

2) we were not only allowed, but *invited* to partake of the food, and also the open bar (with a fair enough note from Fiona not to over-indulge).

This is something that, even above the paycheck, I value in a client. The ancient tradition of hospitality for musicians, especially carolers, is one I have held dear since before I ever performed, and paycheck aside I can't help but be put off just a bit by clients who have us stand for hours on their cold front porch to sing and welcome in the guests, but ask us 'please don't touch the food', and stare for a moment if we ask for a glass of water. The owner of the home was a tall Southern gentleman, who hosted the party with his wife dressed in matching Santa suits with white fur. His wife's version was a trim dress with a short skirt, which she wore quite handily despite having about ten years on me. (She also sported a pair of awesome red pumps with heels made of sparkling red crystals. I wanted them so much.) They greeted us carrying their Pomeranian, a sweet and gentle little creature who licked my nose when I petted her, and made me feel very friendly towards them.

In short, we could hardly have had a better place or circumstance in which to play for six hours, and if I was looking for a supersize dose of Christmas I could hardly have asked for a bigger, or more representative, example of the genre. It was a beautifully thrown party in an unbelievably large and only slightly overdecorated manse. We sang very nearly non-stop, using our usual tactic of swapping out voices when one of us got tired of singing the soprano, and as singing always does, it restored my spirits greatly. It was lovely to spend time in such a large and beautiful home, and reflect again that I'd hardly know what to do with such a place if I had it myself, and that by far the best way of enjoying it was to come to parties at it, where I got the best of the place without having to clean it(or hire anyone else to clean it), or worry about termites or thieves or careless rings left on the furniture. We finished up in high spirits and came back to RealityLand.

We're home now, tired and not nearly as throat-sore as I expected, and snuggling into a quiet night with my dear old aunt.

Night night!

Current Mood: complacent

I've been hearing about this book for ages, so I decided to read it. My first thought upon finishing it has been that perhaps I should have read it as a teenager, because spending three days as an adult listening to this poor little rich boy whine about his life using the same five superlatives over and over was as accurate a portrayal of Hell as I could manage to imagine, except actually being the poor bastard who was having such a hard time of it. But Salinger originally wrote the book for an adult audience, not children, so I might have gotten more of what he originally intended out of it.

See, Holden is not actually what teenagers get out of him: he's not a 'typical teenager' voicing the angst of his age. Holden is supposed to be mentally ill, having a breakdown that began with his brother dying three years ago, exacerbated by having no guidance through his grief, and brought to a point by his family's repeated expectations of academic excellence without regard to his mental state. He stopped growing emotionally when his brother died, so although he's reportedly very smart, and in fact going to school with people two years his senior, he has the emotional maturity and reactions of someone who is 13. His nature is currently defined by an overwhelming dissatisfaction with and inability to connect with nearly any person, institution or action he encounters, even ones he initially likes or later misses. In short, Holden is a caricature of teen angst.

The novel falls down in two places for me here. First, the point of view is presented as that of an exceptionally perceptive young man, but in fact Holden is so eaten up by his own negativity that his opinions are the highly skewed vision of someone dealing with mental issues that have nothing to do with what he's commenting on. As such, the idea that his opinions can be thought of as at all representative of an observant or insightful point of view is dismaying. I am tempted to accuse Mr. Salinger of flattering himself via his own character, by casting himself as a brilliant mind tragically stopped in its own flowering.

What happens instead is that we get Salinger's impression of what a sensitive, intelligent boy might say if he were in the midst of a nervous breakdown, dumbed down to be more accessible to a larger audience, so we simply get a teenager's skewed, disaffected vision of the world with only the nominal blessings of other characters to imply that he is at all exceptional. I just don't buy it.

Second, Holden is portrayed many times as being thought of as a promising young writer, among the best of his class. But his style is so relentlessly banal, repetitive and full of poor grammar that it is difficult to imagine him earning the kind of favor his teachers seem to heap upon him. The character has been sent to the best schools, and English is his best subject; one would assume he knows how to construct a sentence. The story being related is presumably one that the character cares about, one he might be putting forth his best efforts in relating. Instead he apparently chooses to write the way he verbally speaks, a way in which he admits he expresses himself most poorly, and in which he has gotten his worst grades. The resulting syntax is nearly tortuous to read, like listening to a piece of music being played by an out of tune instrument.

Holden's reactions are typical, not exceptional, of what Salinger portrays (versus what he intends): an emotionally stunted and mentally ill young man caught in a cycle of entering and dropping out of school. Holden cannot be blamed for being in such a state: he has experienced emotional damage. What removes him from the ranks of exceptional young men is that he in no way seems to understand where he stands. In the end Holden is still in the same frame of mind he was in at the start of the book, he is no further in his self-knowledge than he was before. With no goals, no perspective, his intent to return to school is not likely to meet with any greater success than it did before. It is a portrait of a character 'as is', stuck in a mental dead end, the only hope implied in a process of therapy which hasn't begun yet.

I think this book attained a status and a niche the author did not originally intend, and become so many things to so many people that he is right to not only have remained utterly silent about the book, but never to have written a sequel, and denied all attempts by others to do so, or to turn the story into a movie. My guess is that if such a thing should happen, the inconsistencies of the story as read versus the story as written may be further pointed up to future readers.

Sadness this morning. Last fall Gregg and I were invited to the wedding of a couple of friends of the faire, John & Amy. They got married on a beautiful autumn day on the shores of a lake. The party afterwards was full of fun and music. This morning John is dead, complications with organ failure. I can't imagine what Amy must be going through but my heart goes out to her.

I don;t really have any deep thoughts, that's all. I can't imagine what it would have been like to lose Gregg our first year together. We make the use of the time we have, I know it's not forever. Godspeed, John.

The Zen quote for this today gives a frame to things on my mind lately.

Causes

Causes are complex and have different time scales. The efforts of the individual are not the sole determining factor in the individual’s condition in life, because everyone is part of the nexus of society and nature and the continuum of time. It is common for people to attribute causes wrongly because of misperception of real relationships.

Every cause is the effect of something else, and every effect is the cause of something else. What may seem like a curse may be a blessing, and what may seem a blessing may be a curse. Hardship is a blessing when it spurs effort and development; ease is a curse when it increases complacency and self-indulgence.

- Muso Kokushi (1275-1351)

Muso wrote the work I keep nearby and turn to the most for instruction and comfort, Dream Conversations. For him, instruction in enlightenment meant acquiring a sense of proportion and an appreciation of matters that do not affect us personally, but are nevertheless vitally important. He was a smart guy.

Current Mood: contemplative

Do I have a bumper sticker on my cart that says, "How's My Shopping? Call 1-800-GET-A-LIFE" ?

Maybe I should.

I'm not going to get into details, but when I shop, I occasionally walk away from my cart to get things. This is deliberate and considered, the act of an experienced shopper rather than a beginner. Because of a host of factors both psychological and historical that I won't go into, I have my own system of protecting my purse involving staying alert, making eye contact with people nearby, and not presenting a target (not to mention buckling my purse securely into my basket). I'm not saying it's better than constantly holding it clutched to my bosom, but it has worked flawlessly for me for over thirty five years, and among other things allows me the freedom to step away from my basket for a moment, depending on what else is happening in the store around me. I realize this is not what conventional wisdom recommends, but what I do has always worked for me, and for the longest time, amazingly, nobody has seemed to mind. Certainly no one would consider walking up to me and, without preamble, lecturing me on how I should treat my own things. But in the last five years perfect strangers have been doing just that, as though suddenly consumed by this new discovery that sometimes people steal purses.

The problem I'm talking about is not perfectly polite people who have said "I'm concerned for your purse", but people who, without even an attempt to be polite, start telling a perfect stranger how to act. What disturbs me most is the stern and imperious tone of these strangers, very absent of any air of helpfulness, but very much in the manner of people who will be quite offended if they don't see a marked improvement demonstrated forthwith.

A woman behind me in the checkout line got positively adamant because I was standing in front of my cart while paying my grocery bill, my poor little bag left helpless to her critical eye, and interrupted my transaction for a lengthy slice of her mind. "I could steal your purse!" she scolded me, loudly. Now, as I already knew, this was very much not the case, as she was blocked by several carts behind her, and me in front of her. I realize that if I'd told her this she'd have said that wasn't her point - but I rather wonder why it wasn't.

To quote an extreme example, last fall in North Carolina a pair of old biddies sidled up to me in an aisle and *hissed* their warning at me. Yes, hissed: embarrassingly audible by the only other person in the aisle: a black man, who was in fact across the aisle shopping next to my purse. He was in a leg cast, had a large dressing over one eye, and was obviously post-op. I looked at him apologetically and thanked the old busybodies for what I can only call their concern, but in that case I regretted not saying more.

I'm afraid women have been subject to this helpful kind of harassment for generations: no one would dream of stopping a man in a parking lot and demanding to know why he hasn't locked his door, nor interrupting a stranger trimming his hedge to inform him that he has no security system, and is therefore placing his wife and family at risk, even if he is. I don't want to be rude, but I want these people to know, without the above lengthy explanation, that I would prefer they didn't bother me. "Thank you, I'm fine" might work. "Do I know you?" is the best suggestion I've had so far, but I'm open to others.

Current Mood: pissed off

Go straight to the empty and free and vast, with no pondering what to think. The previous thought is already extinct, the following thought does not arise, the present thought is itself empty.

- T'aego


There are times when so many things in my brain are spinning at once that I forget to slow them down. It always amazes me when I go to that place in the center and say "stop", and they all do. I feel like a magician who has just performed a great trick.