by Diane | Mar 31, 2017 | Reflection
This isn’t just one of my favourite comic strips, it’s a way of life.
I’ve almost always had cats, and currently have two old-to-ancient ones in my home now. They are sweet, and soft, and love me unconditionally (but more so when I’m feeding or petting them). They greet me at the door when I come home, and curl up with me when I’m cozy and when I’m sad (well, more like when I stop moving).
But kittens, they are not. Their version of playing is to rub their heads blissfully against their catnip toys and to curl up on my chest in the middle of the night so I dream of suffocation. I’m not even tempted to adopt kittens, opting for older, more sedate cats, and yet the power of cute is undeniable.
But did you know there are a lot of kitten pictures and videos on the internet? I KNOW, RIGHT?! Even better, a subset of the catosphere involves people who open their hearts and Instagram accounts to rescue cats needing temporary homes because shelters are full, or not equipped to deal with the very young or ill.
At some point pre-election, when the news led to anxiety and insomnia, following accounts that document the lives of foster cats and kittens became my way to self-soothe. Some accounts I later unfollowed, but the ones that stuck were the ones that told a story – or more accurately, many little furry stories, one adorable picture and caption at a time. They remain a comfort when I want an escape from the news of the day or the sadness of losing someone I loved, so I’ve come to embrace my crazy catladyhood.
One of the first stories I encountered was little Ollie, an impossibly tiny orange kitten found in a window well with badly infected eyes. The pictures were initially difficult to look at, but he got medical care and a foster home through New York’s Beth Stern (Howard’s wife) and he’s now a beautiful ginger living a pampered life with fellow blind former foster cat Wonder.
There was the time Nikki from Las Vegas was on a TNR job – that’s trap neuter release, a way of managing feral cat populations – and caught three blind kittens in her traps. The frightened feral siblings were just young enough that she thought she had a chance of socializing them and making them adoptable. As the weeks went on we witnessed the setbacks and successes, and watched as she sent Sunny and Russ off to their loving forever homes.
And we cheered when Nikki, who has fostered hundreds of cats and whose frequent refrain to commenters is “NO I’m not keeping him/her”, adopted Stella herself, unable to break the bond they’d developed.
Nikki also shared the journey of Bunny, who was rescued from difficult circumstances and nursed back to health. There was a period where it looked like the half-bald, underweight kitten wasn’t going to make it, but she now lives fluffily and healthily in a cat version of Disneyland with her forever family, who have built cat climbing walls in their loft apartment.
Cindy from Seattle shared with us little Lucy, wobbily navigating the big world with a mysterious neurological issue, and broke our hearts with the news that she had succumbed to a seizure. The animal rescue world has many heartbreaking stories, and while the accounts I follow focus on the happy journey from vulnerable rescue to adoptable kitten, the endings aren’t always happy. But we’ll always have Cindy’s pep talk to Lucy keep us going:
My current love is Ducky (aka Dove), one of seven #theWhitekittens fostered by Vancouver Islander Kristi — who is as kind and welcoming to her followers as she is to her cats. Her latest batch of mostly white babies were surrendered by the woman who had rescued the mama cat, after mama lost interest in feeding them. Ducky in particular was dangerously underweight so Kristi supplemented her kitten food with bottle feedings. Now the tiny fuzzball with permanent bedhead outweighs at least one of her sisters and is heading out for adoption this weekend, along with the rest of the adorable pack who sleep together, beg for food together, and do yoga together. Kristi’s word for what I’m feeling is shappy — sad to lose the virtual connection to these lovely creatures, happy that they will get permanent families of their own.
Shappy is what I feel about the animal rescue world, too. There are far too many adoptable animals everywhere, and too many heartbreaking stories, and too many awful people. But the foster parents of Instagram are all heart, and the kittens of Instagram make even the darkest days feel a little better, one purr at at time.
by Diane | Jan 6, 2015 | Reflection
I don’t know why this 2008 bodybuilding forum thread suddenly started circulating on Twitter the other day, but I’m so happy it did when I needed a laugh (though, warning: offensive insults throughout).
But after I wiped away the tears of laughter and the tears of recognition that humanity is doomed, I realized it was a perfect example of how not to communicate. You can be as right as rain — as right as, say, someone declaring there are 7 days in a week — and you can still basically lose the battle if you can’t get your message across in a way your listener can absorb.
Josh never did seem to get that working out every other day means working out 3-4 times a week, aka an average of 3.5 times a week — not 4-5 times a week, aka no good lord that’s so wrong.
We see this all the time. We do this all the time. Everything is polarized, from politics to our TV preferences. We often feel we have to state everything in extremes to cut through the information overload. Todd VanDerWerff, formerly of The AVClub, has noted that bad reviews get more hits than glowing reviews, but nuanced reviews in the middle get far less than either. What’s wrong with you if you don’t LOVE THE WIRE MORE THAN ANYTHING IN EXISTENCE? (Really – I’m asking.)
Our social media feeds are generally comfortable bubbles where people more or less agree with us. So when we encounter a contrary opinion or counter-factual argument it feels like everyone – and therefore The Truth – is on our side.
The result is we can be that extreme and don’t need to craft our arguments, because we’re not really trying to communicate anyway. We’re just trying to shout down dissent and demonstrate the secret handshake that allows entrance into the club of People Like Me.
Years ago at the Banff TV Festival I heard David Shore of House, Family Law, Due South, etc. talk about an exercise he used to make his writers do: to write a scene from the antagonist’s point of view, ensuring the opposing argument was well fleshed out. Not to use in the final script, but to ensure they weren’t writing straw men.
Sometimes you’re debating with someone who thinks there are 8 days in a week because the first day doesn’t count (I think that was Josh’s argument, anyway – it was a little hard to follow such wrongheaded wrongness). Sometimes you’re talking to someone who just wants to whip up the smug frenzy on a bodybuilding forum. Sometimes, though, as Shore pointed out, you’re talking to someone who has the same facts you do and has come to the opposite conclusion. Sometimes The Truth doesn’t pick a side.
Don’t worry, I’m not coming to the conclusion that the number of days in a week is up for debate. But it’s not hard to come to the conclusion that insulting someone isn’t the recipe for him to have – or admit to — the epiphany that his brain muscle wasn’t working so well when he wrote his original post about workout frequency. “Oh yeah, sorry, I get it now.” Not gonna happen after he’s been ridiculed.
And so often (hi Richard Dawkins) being a jerk is a recipe for even those who agree with you to wish they didn’t. I mean, I firmly believe a week has 7 days but when the R word was slung around freely I almost wished I could make the 8 day theory work.
These are known features of our weird brains: we select facts that support our opinion and reject those that don’t, and our opinions get even more entrenched the louder our opponents shout them down.
It takes a special kind of person who doubles down on his wrongness and posts a picture of a calendar to (dis)prove his wrongness. I like to think most people in Josh’s position would have at least at some point thought “oh yeah, duh” to themselves, created a new profile and slunk away. But the way most people responded to him gave him no face-saving out, no benefit of the doubt … which it turns out would have been an unearned benefit but still, starting from that place allows for more civility and more understanding.
Instead, the debate started at Defcon 2. A simple “every second day is fine, and that means you’d be working out 3-4 times a week, not 4-5” would have sufficed to both answer the question and point out the So Not The Truth. In my happy fairytale land, Josh would have said “Thanks!” and Twitter would have had one less hilarity to pass around 6 years later.
It reminds me of another Banff TV Festival moment: when the Alberta Culture Minister denigrated Canadian television, and the Canadian television industry responded in a way that only those who already agreed with them would listen to. I wrote about it at the time, in Echo chambers and missed opportunities.
How often do we (aka People Like Me) rail against the stupidity of anti-vaccination proponents, climate change deniers or Rob Ford supporters? As long as we’re not talking to them, only preaching to the choir, it’s all fun and games and choral music. But what if we actually want to be heard?
![Beyond a poppy]()
by Diane | Nov 10, 2013 | Reflection
When I was growing up, I believed Remembrance Day was about the World Wars, about remembering history so as not to repeat it. Vietnam was the recent past, and Korea was in there somewhere. But school focused on the “big ones,” and many of us had grandparents who fought in WWII so it was personal to us, in a distant, elder storytelling kind of way, and WWI brought us In Flanders Fields, the date 11/11 and the moment of silence at 11 am.
My Grandpa MacDonald repaired tanks and would animatedly tell stories about his war adventures — none of which I can recount because as soon as he started on the “boys tales” my grandmother would whisk me into the kitchen to play Scrabble with her for “girl talk” as I strained my ears in vain to catch snippets about tank wheels escaping down hills and starving villagers eating tulip bulbs. It took an iPhone app decades later to make me stop hating Scrabble.
I did know that Grandpa had helped liberate a Dutch town called Eindhoven, because the letter from the mayor thanking the surviving soldiers always hung in pride of place on his kitchen wall. My child brain felt a disconnect between his apparent affection for those days and the horrors of war I’d read about, in school and in my too-young Elie Wiesel phase, plus the muted references to Grandpa’s shell-shocked re-entry back home.
War is simple to a child: it’s bad. I suppose I grasped that atrocities had to be stopped, but in my mind the equation was something like two Very Bad Things colliding, and the ideal would be to stop the Most Very Bad Thing before it provoked a war somehow. That’s the child’s prerogative, to leave a lot unexplained on that “somehow.” I thought war was in the unenlightened past, and that when the last WWII veteran died, Remembrance Day would die too.
As an adult who has fewer answers than the child I was, I don’t quite know what to do with Remembrance Day. I still remember my grandpa, for whom war was a life-defining experience. I remember the lessons of that war, such as the lines I wrote after a trip to Dachau, echoing a quote of Wiesel’s:
I find hope in remembering the past, realizing that it’s part of us today, and understanding that we have the power to choose light over dark, day over night.
But the hope is tempered with a more adult confusion about the meaning of modern war. When the world is in a protracted state of war against terror, when Canadian soldiers were recently dying overseas in a war where I’m not sure we should have sent troops, when Canada’s treatment of veterans is regularly questioned, what am I remembering now? What is the hope, now?
It can only be that we don’t ask for the sacrifice unless necessary — and that’s a lot unexplained on “necessary” now — and that we honour those necessary sacrifices made, right?
Right.
