Paper Fruit

I remember school lunches in elementary school in Georgia. My most potent memories are of Thursdays, when we had the option of chocolate milk, and food stuffs like foot long hot dogs (which I hated then, and still will not eat hot dogs to this day), beefaroni, spaghetti, tacos, and mashed potatoes. A lot of beef, a lot of starch. I remember when we got a salad bar, too– but I also remember that every kid mostly ate toppings and dressings when we got that, not the actual lettuce (bacon bits, sunflower seeds, olives in ranch dressing, anyone?) But at least there was a pretense at health– there was always a fruit cocktail or vegetable in one of the tray slots. When I moved to Florida and encountered school lunch at the middle school, it was something of a culture shock. I was presented with two options: taco bell bean soft tacos, or square pizza, with fries as a side to both options.

Check out these pictures of school lunches around the world, and it’s absolutely fascinating to see the amount of processed food, and other garbage, that is being fed to kids. Awards of Shame go to France and the USA here. What the heck guys? Malawi, Sweden, and Korea seem to be doing well in terms of diversity on the plate.

I still can’t deal with the smell of corn and red peppers cooking together, due to the imprint of the stink of mexicorn on my sensory memory. . .

. . . but still good. Image is too big for my theme, check out the link.

Are you?

I don’t have any pictures to post of Ichabod, my parents’ cat, but I want to remember him today. Because today Ichabod left the world. He was in pain, and my parents made the decision to put him down. A few days ago he crawled into my parents’ closet and started keening, and he didn’t purr when my parents petted him or tried to give him his favorite snacks. They took him to the emergency vet, but they couldn’t figure out what was wrong with him. Then Monday they took him to his regular vet, who was similarly baffled. They ran some tests, nothing came back conclusive. Last night Ichabod spent the night wailing and unresponsive and so this morning, first thing, my parents took him in to the vet and put him down. I know he will be missed. He slept between their pillows every night, and took naps with my dad every day. He went from lap to lap while they watched TV, and would start howling if my parents left the room while he was asleep and he woke up alone. He was one of the most friendly, loving cats I have ever met and he will be missed.

Ichabod came to us in the spring of 2004. I was working at the Enzian theater in Winter Park, Florida as part of an internship. The Florida Film Festival had just concluded, and the doors were standing open so people could take film reels in and out. I was alone in the office doing paperwork.

Out of the corner of my eye I saw a flash of movement, and then I turned around in time to see a cat jump on my lap. He meowed at me and started purring with his tongue stuck out at me, impossibly pink against his gray muzzle. He was very thin, his fur was ragged, and his ear was torn up. He had fleas. His coloration, steel grey with patches of white, made him look like a tired old man, but he had large, beautiful green eyes. I noticed he had been declawed and this concerned me paired with his fighting wounds and general state of emaciation.

I called John, and we agreed this cat needed us. We took him home and put him in our laundry room, where he ate ravenously, drank a bowl of water, and went to sleep. That night we took him to the vet to ascertain he didn’t have FIV or Feline Leukemia, and when he tested negative we named him Ichabod because of his long legs and decided that we would try to make it work with our cat Penelope.

After a flea bath, a de-worming, and several days of solid, uninterrupted sleep, Ichabod’s personality emerged. He always wanted to sit on everyone’s lap, purring, rubbing them with his tired gray head, and making a tiny fluttery sigh ever time a hand touched him. He loved people and loved being around them. Unfortunately Penelope did not love being around him and when it became obvious that Ichabod and Penelope were not going to get along my parents generously volunteered to adopt him. 

Ichabod became part of our family, and for five years he sat on laps, cuddled, gave stinky cat-breath kisses, and yowled for attention whenever he didn’t feel like he got enough. He relentlessly sat on tables, against my parents’ rules for all other cats that had ever been in our house, but his homelessness and need for love weakened their resolve to keep him off the counters. He loved to sleep in the sunlight when he wasn’t on peoples’ laps, or under my father’s electric blanket.

We will never know why he was abandoned, or how old he was, or what went wrong with him. But we do know that he had a wonderful life with us for the five years he was in our care. I’m happy Ichabod found me, and I’m happy my parents took him. He was a bright soul, who loved to live, and now he is at peace.

“The better I get to know men, the more I find myself loving dogs.”  Charles de Gaulle

On the day that New Hampshire legalized gay marriage, I also read this article over at The Huffington Post. It is getting increasingly harder and harder for me to maintain my faith in humanity. Perhaps describing things as inhuman, such as radio hosts advocating psychological and physical violence toward transgender children, is the wrong way to think about it. Besides the fact that the pejorative “inhuman”  is an inherently speciesist term, especially given that apparently animals have moral codes, more and more I think perhaps kindness, sympathy, understanding, and acceptance are the “inhuman” traits.

Sometimes I think all the goodness in people comes from our animal ancestry, and whatever changed when we got opposable thumbs and developed frontal lobes and walking on two legs or whatever the heck else makes us different from our ancestors– that’s what’s wrong with us. There are just so many people doing awful things that I can’t help but feel that goodness is the aberration, and cruelty, hate, and violence are the norm for our species. Factory farming, callous environmental destruction, animal breeding for pleasure, terrorizing women and the people who help them, denying rights to those different than us, being assholes to kids (one host advocated beating a gay male child with high heeled shoes), shutting down state parks, an eight-year administration in this country based on fear, torture, and worldwide cowboy-swagger bullshit and the backlash against any sort of change to that, it is all so overwhelming.

It is hard to remember sometimes that there are green places in this world. It is hard sometimes to take a step back to think about the expression on a cat’s face when she rolls around in the sunshine, or remember that there are people who do have more love than hate inside them, that there are hopefully many more people who think those radio hosts are despicable rather than amusing. 

But then also there is the truth that even if you come home at night to a person who loves you, or people who love you, that you have something special and unique and you are lucky. No matter how many hugs you might get there is suffering out there of intense, unknowable magnitude–human and animal alike. And it seems like trying to make a difference is so abstract, so impossible, as to be laughable.

But it is not laughable, not if one person’s, or one animal’s, life is improved by kindness and love. Despair is unhealthy. It takes us to a place where we cannot act. But sometimes it is hard to fight, when you know there are people in the world who “look forward to when [transgender children] go out into society and society beats them down. And they wind up in therapy.” 

I need to be better about doing my part to make the world not suck quite so much.

*Update: over at the Post Punk Kitchen the thread on this topic generated this letter by one of my favorite posters:

Dear every right-wing goon in the country:

Love,
Everybody else

The murder of George Tiller has been bothering me since its occurrence Sunday, gnawing at my mind and making me really angry and afraid for the state of this country. I have been feeling like I did, to some extent, after 9/11. Terrorism does its job– it makes us afraid– and that is how I feel. I have been posting articles on my Facebook about the whole thing but I’m going to stop, it’s not the place for that. Instead here I am going to compile all the links I’ve found, crying out against this latest war crime. Because that is what Dr. Tiller’s murder is. 

Planned Parenthood advises the U.S. Government on how to Deal with Terrorists 

One Woman’s Story of her Late-Term Abortion

Tweets of Hate 

Randall Terry, Being Hateful

Remembering Dr. Tiller

A Ray of Hope 

What America would America be like if the people who think the murder of Dr. Tiller was righteous and justified got their way? 

What was “Tiller the Killer” really like?

It goes on, and on, and on. . . .

I put a LOL-ed up version of Aeschylus’ The Suppliant Maidens here. It’s even less exciting in the original!

Instead of just posting random links and insane rambling, this is just going to be a sort of state of the union-ish update.

1. I finished the semester having read all the Jane Austen catalogue except for the last few chapters of Persuasion (I was unpersuaded to finish it) and most of Sanditon. Also I finished teaching two great classes full of students who I already miss. It was a good semester overall, considering I managed to kick butt at ancient Greek, read a ton of Austen, and finish a personal writing project that I’ve been working on for a long time. 

2. I went down for a week to visit my and John’s family and cleaned out my closet down there. It felt good. Now I basically have family heirlooms that I don’t have space for right now (dishes, mostly), a one-person hammock that you have to bolt into the ceiling, my yearbooks, my diaries from middle school, and all my baby stuff. Other than that I am moved out. I also had some revelations as regards my personal life which have been productive, and it has inspired me to try to work on some of the personality traits I am less proud of. 

3. I have started the summer semester. I got completely and utterly overwhelmed within two weeks with the course of study/teaching I had set up for myself and actually had a bit of a breakdown yesterday. I emailed my professor and she kindly reduced my workload. That should be helpful. I am still going to have to work all day every day, but things are looking better. I have a lot of work instead of an impossible amount of work now, and on the upside my class this semester is awesome. They are reading and are either actually into the Iliad right now or they are excellent actors.

4. I have been very social of late, owing to the fact that I am going to be moving soon, and my dear friend Raechel is going out of town for about two months. This is contrary to every instinct I possess but I have been enjoying it for the most part. That said I am looking forward to going into my standard hibernation mode again.

Other than that, the usual– role playing, hanging with my two bad cats, and thinking about my next writing project. I think I’ve decided what I’m going to do next but I would be writing about a location I know nothing about, so research will be challenging!

Mr. Holmes? Is that you?

I realized I never linked my new blog on this one. I have a new project going, translating Plato’s Apology. I’ve decided to create a blog out of it, where I post both results of said efforts and commentary on my experience doing the translating. It’s been motivating me very much, and I hope to use it after I finish the Apology and move on to more, uh, scintillating material.