Vexed Cat Comes Out Swinging

Photo of Thelonious Atkins proving she's actually red.

I did go to Drewes and buy some meat and thus can add these items to the list of things Thelonious won’t eat: cooked turkey, raw ground turkey, cooked ground beef, raw ground beef, and raw chicken. Nor does she drink half-and-half, eat Campbell’s Chunky beef stew, or eat chicken broth with flour and white bread in it. She also doesn’t eat crab meat or baby shrimp (but Tom is eating quite well lately, as Thelonious’s rejects have gotten fancier).

She wants to eat. When I show her a can, whether or not it’s open, she says, “Yum, that looks good,” and follows me into the kitchen. But when she smells it, then it’s, “Oh. No, I don’t like that.” When I eat, she stands up puts her front paws on my leg, hoping for a sample.

I had scheduled a massage for this past Saturday morning and, until 9:55, was under the impression it was at 10:30. Then I looked at my calendar and saw it was actually at 10, so had to rush out of the house in a panic.

The first tui na massage I had was really excellent, but the couple since then have struck me as perhaps a bit too therapeutic (i.e., painful), which is also what shiatsu is, in my opinion.

The compact fluorescent bulb that died did not say ENERGY STAR on it, so I remained just bemused. I took it to the hardware store for disposal. Special message to the Skipper: I did end up replacing it with another CFL, despite saying I wouldn’t, because I happened to have one around.

This thing where Walgreens gives you a CD of your photos in digital form along with your prints is very good, allowing those of us with film cameras to show off our cats without investing in scanners.

I am reading Emily Raboteau’s very fine (first!) novel, The Professor’s Daughter, which has a mixed-race main character and achieves one shock after the other in its examination of racism. I remember seeing David Cronenberg’s Dead Ringers, which is partly about drug addiction, and really feeling the horror of it. The Professor’s Daughter is like that, and also hypnotic and vivid. (Requiem for a Dream, another movie about drug addiction, belongs in the same category.)

Saturday evening, Tom and I saw a collection of Bill Maher’s New Rules segments. (“New rule! Each piece of fruit does not need its own individual stick-on label.”) We also saw Apartment 12, which was pretty terrible, but Mark Ruffalo was in it.

The new issue of The Sun featured a good interview with Sam Harris, who wrote The End of Faith. He says that some percentage of Muslims do want to kill us and we’re naïve if we think being tolerant will make them like us, but that the answer is not war and that whatever the solution is, we can’t do it by ourselves.

In the end, he thinks moderate Muslims will rein in the others. Therefore maybe the best thing is to go make friends with a moderate Muslim or two. That would probably be a good antidote to thinking there’s only one kind of Muslim. (I suppose one could make friends with a moderate Christian for the same reason.)

I did hear an irritating thing on KQED yesterday. A woman who is the head of a big Muslim organization here in America said that part of her group’s work is to assure Muslims that Americans aren’t godless, even if we aren’t Muslim. That seems quite insulting to atheists, and rather condescending.

I think we’d be much better off if we had less religion, period. When is the last time an atheist beheaded someone on webcam?

Maybe it was the interview with him that said that when people feel religious fervor, they assume it confirms the existence of God, which (I say) is exactly the same thing as saying that feeling scared proves there is something to be scared of. There might be, but feeling scared isn’t the proof of it.

Thelonious had her second acupuncture session today. It wasn’t as easy as the first one. She took a swing at Dr. Fong and yowled some, along with hissing. But after the needles were in, she eventually relaxed.

Yesterday and the day before, she ate almost nothing. I took a photo of her standing in front of eight plates of food. Dr. Fong said to syringe-feed her during this crisis period: squirt food into her mouth. That will probably be rather traumatic for all involved. I bought more towels today (on sale), as this will be messy, judging from what it’s like to give her a small amount of slippery elm mixed with water.

There are two good things about this development, however: I can give her whatever food I want, so it will be wet Eukanuba Low-Residue, which is what she really should be eating. Also, I didn’t have to put out a million different kinds of food when I left for work today. I put out one kind that she has eaten a bit of lately, and mixed it with warm water to make it gloppy, and that was that. If she eats it, great. If not, it doesn’t really matter, because I will (at least attempt to) squirt food down her later.