Nine Lives?

I may have to re-think the narrative that my cat is dying. Maybe she's just using up one of her nine lives.

Less than two weeks ago I was about ready to have her put down. Since then she has walked away from death's door and shown much improvement.

Katya's latest weigh-in showed that she hasn't lost any weight in the past two weeks. She's still hovering at four and a half pounds, but she's stopped her rapid decline to nothingness. That's the first time since this whole crisis began that she's maintained her weight for any period of time.

Since her abscessed tooth cleared up she's been a much more functional pet. She's eating more or less regularly and her behavior is as sweet as it's ever been. She talks. She walks. She sleeps. She eats. She cuddles. She loves.

Although she's eating, I can't get her to eat any cat food. The only things she'll eat are canned tuna, turkey lunch meat cut into small squares, and meat off of my plate, such as de-breaded chicken from a Chinese Sweet & Sour dish or sausage off a pizza. (I don't usually feed her this kind of stuff, but at this point I'll feed her anything she shows an interest in.)

The vet told me that I have one of the greatest challenges facing any pet owner: trying to feed a sick old cat when there's another cat in the house who will swoop in and eat anything I put out.

Here is what the corner of my kitchen has looked like for the past two months:

This doesn't really give the whole picture, so let me arrange it in a group portrait:

These are the different foods I've tried to throw at Katya to get her to gain weight. Included in the portrait are Whisker Lickins, 9 Lives wet, Fancy Feast wet, turkey lunch meat, Paws wet, Meow Mix Market Select,Whiskas pouches, baby food, tuna cans, and Fancy Feast dry. Once there's some resolution with Katya, I will probably donate most of this food to the pet shelter.

Despite all my efforts, she has lost weight dramatically. That is, until the last two weeks. (Hermione, meanwhile, has been ballooning up thanks to all the new food.)

We still don't know what caused the weight loss to begin with, but at least her will to live has returned.

And while I'm posting pictures of my kitchen, here's the current state of my beer bottle collection:

Wow, I can't believe how much it's grown since September.


But I had a good excuse: My cat was dying.

Maybe.

Procrastinating Consumer

Have you heard about the 270-pound man who was trampled to death a few weeks ago?

No, he wasn't working the rodeo. It wasn't cattle that trampled him.

It was shoppers. At a Wal-Mart. On Black Friday.

Two thousand of them broke through the doors of a Long Island Wal-Mart and stormed the poor security guard who was trying to keep them back. I'm trying to wrap my head around it-- trying to understand how it's possible to put your foot down on top of another human being and just keep going. To feel the squish of his body under you. It's clearly not floor you're walking on. It's a human being. Didn't they notice? And it wasn't just one individual who did this, but enough of them to stomp out a life. Do the people who killed him even know what they did?


I doubt that any of those shoppers woke up that morning thinking, "I'm gonna kill a guy today." Let's give the tramplers the benefit of the doubt. Some of them had been waiting in line all night long. They were restless. They were grumpy. Maybe the people who actually walked on him had no choice. The crowd probably moved as one, people pushing from behind, jostling from the sides. The tramplers may have been locked in position and had no choice but to walk on top of the security guard.

As Lenny on the Simpsons said, "We're going to give the word 'mob' a bad name."

I understand that some people really look forward to the day after Thanksgiving as the "busiest shopping day of the year." That it's the busiest day is actually an urban myth, but the day does have the cultural significance of a Super Bowl for consumerism. Shoppers really get into it. So much so they will trample anyone who stands between them and a few hundred bucks off a flat-screen TV.

For me, being forced to participate in Black Friday would be one of the circles of my own personal hell. I really can't understand people who get excited about this kind of thing. It's like making an event out of scrubbing your toilet. I hate shopping. I hate crowds. I hate traffic.

On occasion I do like to buy stuff, but I'm really not a very good consumer.

When it comes to buying stuff, I procrastinate. I'll consider something for months, sometimes even years, before I finally get the inspiration to actually buy it. The reason that I blog about so many of my purchases is that I don't do it very often. I thought about buying a new car, and even printed out some pages from Consumer Reports, a full year before I bought my Prius. The new vacuum I bought last January was for my new apartment, which I had moved into five months earlier. (I've had this post in my Blogger queue since then, so for the past year I've even been procrastinating about writing about procrastination.)

If I go to the store with a list of five things to buy, I might end up buying two. The other things I look at and think, "Eh, I don't really need that" or "that can wait til later." It's the opposite of the Impulse Buy. It's the Impulse No-Buy.

So it's really hard for me to imagine why people would put themselves in a position to trample a guy to death on the way to buying something. They weren't hungry and clamoring for food. They weren't being oppressed and demanding civil rights. They weren't trying to get on the last helicopter out of Hanoi. Hell, they weren't even waiting to get exclusive concert tickets.

They wanted to buy shit. The same shit you can buy any other time of the year.

Restless Charity Syndrome

This is the time of year when my college does its Combined Charities Campaign and I have to decide which charities I'll donate to over the next year.

There's a booklet that lists hundreds of eligible charities. It's funny to me all the different ways you can define "charity" by flipping through the book.

• There's the traditional sense of giving to those less fortunate than you. Organizations that fight against hunger, disease, homelessness, and child abuse, for example, are pretty straightforward. I don't think there's much controversy about donating money to help starving abused homeless children with AIDS.


• And then there are the partisan charities. Organizations that diametrically oppose each other. For example, I could contribute to gay rights organizations or Christian organizations (ahem, the Mormon Church) that fight against those rights. Planned Parenthood vs. Catholic Charities. Is it really "charity" that I'm doing if someone else is funneling just as much money into stopping my cause?


• There are charities that support jazz, dance, art centers, zoos, gardens, museums, even public radio and TV. I don't have a problem with supporting these things, but it's hard for me to call a donation to public radio "charity." For me, it's more like supporting something that I enjoy.

I usually select four or five charities and have a set amount deducted from each paycheck to go to them. I take this all very seriously and spend quite a while flipping through the booklet trying to find the best balance for my donation dollar. I don't want to give it all to one cause, or even one type of cause. So I'll usually pick one environmental cause, one civil/human rights cause, one housing cause, and one international cause.

While I was looking at my options, scanning things about AIDS, cancer, animal rights, hunger, conservation, adoption, autism, and food banks, one cause jumped out at me: restless leg syndrome.

Are you kidding me?

For all I know, it may be a serious and debilitating condition, but of all the hundreds of ways to donate my money, you want me to consider something that sounds like an affliction from a Monty Python skit?

Oh, Restless Leg Syndrome, do you have any idea what you're up against?