Gifts

Today I received another present in the mail! I sent seifaiden the book When I Was Five I Killed Myself by Howard Buten, and today I received a book from em, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting by Milan Kundera. With a comment about wanting to send me a Czech author. Actually, seifaiden, if you're interested in other Czech authors, I've been meaning to read Bohumil Hrabal at some point - he's a Czech author and I discovered him by following a link that sammka posted at some point. But I haven't actually read him yet.

And I finished reading the present from ciarajanae, Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami. In the time since I'd last read a Haruki Murakami book, I'd heard several people criticize his writing rather harshly, but reading this one re-confirmed for me how much his writing dazzles me. I think I have something of a preference for surrealist-tinged writing. It's awfully difficult for any writer to rehash Oedipal themes with any originality, because it's been done way too many times, but I think Murakami did a pretty decent job of it. And the extremely graphic cat-torture in this book was, exactly as afro76 warned me, a bit much to handle, but at least mercifully short.

The biggest thing I didn't like about the book was the fact that his example of some random people who were seriously lacking in imagination and the ability to think for themselves was a pair of feminists. I mean, they were rather annoying feminists and he didn't claim they were typical of feminism as a whole, but just . . . out of all the infinite different examples he could have given as examples of unthinking, imaginationless lemmings, why did it have to be feminists? Why did it have to be people affiliated with any particular political position at all? Even though Murakami did not claim that they were representative of all feminists, the fact that they were the only characters in the book who were explicitly associated with feminism tends to rather leave an impression that they were. And also, replying to an accusation that one is a sexist male by announcing that one is actually female quite misses the point.

Kitten Pictures

Yes, it's time for more kitten pictures. In the past two weeks, Stardust has acquired yet another new collar (her fourth in less than three months), a new collar tag (from her rabies shots), a big fluffy cat bed, and a bookshelf that's actually mine but that she seems to believe is her own.

She's also becoming more and more fascinated by water with each week that passes. It's now at the point where every single time I ever turn on the bathroom sink, she instantly comes running and leaps up on the bathroom counter and sticks her paws and head in the water. She tries to drink out of it, but she doesn't seem to realize that she has big pointy ears on top of her head that tend to redirect the stream of water. Invariably, she positions her head so that the water hits her ears and runs off in the other direction from her mouth, so her head ends up soaking wet but hardly any water ever gets to her mouth. She doesn't give up, though! She never tires of the running water until I tire of watching her and turn the faucet off.



( Twelve more fluffy kitten pictures! )

Suicidal Kitten

Apparently Stardust does know how to hiss. She just gave me her first-ever demonstration of it. Unfortunately, she also just gave me her first-ever demonstration of suicidal stupidity, and now she's grounded for months.

I've been letting her out on the balcony a little more often in the past couple of weeks, because I thought she was big enough now that she wouldn't be likely to fit under the balcony railing anymore. She could certainly jump up on the top of the balcony and fall off it, so I was still always following her out there to stand guard over her - but I figured that since I'd probably hear her scrambling onto the balcony railing before she actually fell off it, I didn't have to be actually looking right at her absolutely every second. And today I received a notice that my apartment complex, which has been gradually repainting the balcony trim of all the buildings from dark red to white, is going to start painting mine on Friday, and that I need to remove everything from the balcony before then. So I went out to bring the potted plants in (or maybe I should say "the potted non-plants," since with the help of Stardust knocking them over sixteen times a day when they were inside, and then me forgetting to water them often enough when they were outside, I seem to have managed to kill off every single plant I own and I now own nothing but empty pots and potted corpses). I let Stardust follow me out, since she always wants to follow me everywhere.

As I was moving the pots, a few pebbles spilled over the top of one. Not a lot, maybe ten or twelve, really tiny pebbles, only a few millimeters in diameter. But they made a small clatter, about the same volume of the clatter that might happen if you spilled a handful of toothpicks or plastic drinking straws on a linoleum floor. In other words, pretty quiet. Somehow, though, it apparently terrified Stardust - she scrambled around behind me, and when I turned around, her head and shoulders and entire body had all squeezed under the balcony railing - there was nothing visible left of her but her back feet and her tail. In other words, she had basically already fallen off the edge of the balcony; there was nothing for her front feet to hold onto anymore, and without my intervention, it was really unlikely that from that position, she was going to be able to go any direction but down.

I put the pots down, as quickly but quietly as I possibly could (noise might easily have induced her to finish the leap), and grabbed her back feet, and successfully pulled her back under the railing and onto solid cement. And that was when she demonstrated for me, for the very first time ever, that she knows how to hiss. Yes, that's right - she hissed at me for saving her! Apparently it was a little uncomfortable or something. A whole lot less uncomfortable than going splat on the ground about ten feet below, I'm thinking - even for a cat. Falling that far, I'm pretty sure she'd have at least had some nasty bruises. She has lousy judgment about when to hiss. And even lousier judgment about which is more dangerous to her: a dozen two- to four-millimeter-wide pebbles rolling toward her, or going splat on the ground about ten feet below.

So now she's grounded. No more balcony privileges for her anytime soon. Maybe that way she'll actually manage to live to adulthood.