the theory of cat love

lila

lila showed up at our house about this time last winter.

she was wild and her fur was matted. we couldn't get near her.

i started putting out food for her and talking to her nicely.

she warmed up and now she's the perfect housecat.

but she refuses to come into the writing house. i'm not sure why.

so this is a shot of her through the glass of the door, waiting patiently outside for us.

we think she's a norwegian forest cat.

i have a number of friends with whom i have a relationship that i call "cat love." these are friends who i don't see often, but exchange sporadic flurries of emails with maybe once every year or so. they're friends with whom, despite the long periods of time where i don't talk to them, as soon as i do, we're right back at a very comfortable level of closeness, as if months or years hadn't gone by.

i recently had a couple of gmail video chats with one of these friends. we met in macedonia and now she's living in the US. we had only emailed a couple of times in the past few years and hadn't seen one another since she and her husband (he is that fulbrighter who had to flee albania when it collapsed in a pyramid scheme) came through to visit us on their honeymoon trip in 2003(?). but we arranged to do video chats and jumped right back in to our skins as old friends--joking and laughing, even though our lives have moved on and the topics are different than the ones we joked and laughed about in the good old days in macedonia.

i call it "cat love" because it's how cats are. if you're not there, they're totally cool and go about their cat lives just fine, sleeping comfortably and not thinking of you or pining away for you. but when you come back, they're totally there for you and it's as if you were never gone.

now if there's "cat love," there also has to be "dog love," right? "dog love" is the fawning kind. the drooling, overly excited kind. the kind where the more you are rejected, the more you love. i have "dog love" for P at what possessed me. she doesn't even know i exist, but i still eagerly go back for more, like a slobbering dog. and feel totally validated when we post on the same thing (tho' i didn't see her post 'til after my post). i was just so proud that i found and shared the same cool thing she found and shared. i was, in my own head at least, validated in my level of cool hipness. just like a slobbering dog who finally gets a dog biscuit after making those eyes and begging ('cause those kinda dogs are way cool and hip).

and because i don't want to be an idea thief, i will give co-credit for the creation of this idea to my old college friend jill, with whom i struggled through russian class, once drove in my little gold fiero to an audition for into the woods in chicago and formulated this theory. she is my first "cat love" friend.

emergencies call for emergency measures

i slept like total crap last night. my mind whirling with the "to do" list for today to prepare for the arrival of my sister and her new boyfriend.  partly worries about a couple of my invoices that went missing in the customer's new accounting system, which has meant that i paid a whole lot of travel expenses with my own money and am rather desperate to be paid that money back! partly my VAT report (why is one of those eternally hanging over me--i need an accountant). and partly husband's snoring. he goes in streaks where he snores something awful and this is one of them. then, sabin came into our bed after a bad dream and she's gettting big, so it was crowded, plus then i froze because she's in the middle and kicks the covers off. it all added up to crap sleep.

but, then, i unexpectedly got this in the mail:

it came from a good friend who i used to work with. it was like he was totally psychic and knew exactly that i would need the smile this gave me this morning. thank you, michael!

musings on the blogosphere

over the past few months, i've been hanging out (a lot) in front of the internet. i found out that it was HUGE. i found out that you can find tons of cool stuff out there. that there are people who have a lot to say. i've read a lot of what they have to say and now i've become a bit more selective than i was in those heady early days back in january.

i had actually created this blog back in 2004, but hadn't done anything with it in more than 3 years, so part of what i did was come back to it. i can actually see, reflected in my own writing here since the beginning of 2008, the effect of those other blogs i was reading. i tried on some of their voices on my way to finding my own. and i did it all for myself, not ever expecting anyone else to find their way to it and read it. now a few people have and i find that i like it! it's fun and it pushes my thinking and improves what i'm reading out there myself. and that is very cool.

which leads me to musings on what it means to get to know someone. to become friends. can you do that by just writing and reading? or do you need to meet face-to-face? i thought about the authors i love. even when it's fiction, i think that often there is a lot of the author there in the writing . i feel, in some sense, like i know barbara kingsolver or siri hustvedt (my recent complaints about being a bit tired of her notwithstanding--i do still like her stuff very much). if i met either of them, i feel we'd have no trouble having a conversation. i have a sense of the manic personality that was dostoevsky and would have loved to hang out with him and partake of the madness. just as i would have loved to have known in real life (not just through books)--dorothy parker, alexander blok, anna akhmatova, constantine cavafy, franz kafka, anton chekhov (i could go on and on). i've been lucky enough to correspond with some of the authors i love who happen to still be alive--dubravka ugresic and andrei bitov--and although we've not met, we had plenty to talk about because in a sense i knew them through their work.

is it the same with blogs? to me it seems that it's perhaps even more so, because often people are so personal in their blogs. you can get a sense of them through the stories they choose to tell. that will either speak to you or it won't. i've found that now, after 3 months of intensively reading a huge array of blogs, i've gotten a better sense of what speaks to me in this new medium. at first, i was dazzled by all of it. now, i have narrowed my focus, gotten more selective. i read blogs of people who i'd like to know in "real" life, not just in the blogosphere--people who challenge my thinking, people who make me feel like being a better person, people who make me want to feel generous of spirit, people who i'd like to have over to dinner.

the blogosphere has been a place of healing for me over the past few months, as i recovered from my previous job. it is indeed a wonderous and interesting place. i feel as if i've found some friends here. maybe this is human evolution in action and i'm not only witnessing, but partaking of a cultural, social, evolutionary shift in the way humans interact and find their way to one another.

catching up

so, i'm back home from wonderful oslo (i know, that's copenhagen's phrase--wonderful copenhagen, but i'm appropriating it for oslo). it's friday night. sabin and i just played a fun drawing game and now she's watching friday night t.v. and since i'm not that keen on it, i'm looking at all the blogs i've missed out on over the past nearly two weeks--one without internet and this week where i was working.

my german friend gabi, who i met while studying in kazan in 1994, has a blog and i just discovered that during my offline time, she actually wrote about MY blog on hers! thank you gabi!! how cool is that!?!

we met while we were both studying russian at kazan university (she was much better than i was). she lived with aida and diljara, two young girls who were lucky enough to have their own apartment. i lived with an ancient old soviet apparatchik who would wax philosophical about stalin with tears in her eyes after a couple of shots of vodka every evening. so, you can imagine that i spent a lot of time with gabi and aida and diljara, drinking endless cups of tea from the samovar and talking and going for walks arm in arm. those were truly wonderful days. it was winter when we arrived in kazan and we saw spring come and begin to be summer. it couldn't have been more wonderful...to see the world thaw and turn green around you, together with great friends who you laughed and made music together with.

gabi and i have managed to keep in touch...at times sporatically, over the years. but, it has always been a friendship that was instantly back to the same level of closeness as soon as we were together, no matter how long we'd been apart. i have to give her a lot of credit--she's been the one keeping up our contact over all these 14 years--writing wonderful REAL letters that came in the mail. she was a bridesmaid at my first wedding in the US and sang at both the wedding and reception. i can still picture my uncle who had been in germany during WWII, standing there with tears in his eyes, as she sang marlene dietrich songs at the reception.

and these days we're talking a lot more online after i left my job (and remembered what was important) and after she and her son, benjamin, visited last fall.

as she says on her blog, i went on her honeymoon. that sounds like a totally weird thing to say and an even weirder thing to do...but to defend myself, gabi and i had planned the trip together first, had gone through the whole invitation/visa process and THEN she decided to get married and bring along her husband. so actually, he came along on OUR trip, as i remember it. and, she and i are still together, but she's not with him anymore....so that speaks for itself. wouldn't you say? :-) and it was a wonderful trip...sailing on the volga on an old river cruise vessel from the 1950s...on "local" tickets, purchased for us by our friends in kazan. to this day, when i catch a whiff of esteé lauder's white linen breeze, the perfume i happened to have along on the trip, it transports me back there instantly, to those leisurely summer days along the volga.

what's wonderful about gabi's blog is her level of raw honesty...she shares her innermost thoughts and revelations. it's sometimes shocking, but mostly it's very revealing and you're left breathless at how brave she is to share herself in that way. go and read her, i guarantee you'll want to keep going back. and, on top of it, she's a professional musician and makes podcasts of her music available on her site!