You are a cat

You are a cat
And I am a person
You can’t wear a hat
And I’ve got no fur on

You are a cat
And I, a human bein’
When your ears go flat
I wonder what you’re seein’ 

You’ve got little claws
Upon fuzzy paws
For you are a cat
And those are the laws

You chase a little mouse
All around the house
For you are a cat
As opposed to a louse 

You are a cat
Not the same am I
Even when you’re a brat
You’re the apple of my eye

You are a cat
As for me, I am not
But despite all of that
You’re the best friend I’ve got! 

You love to eat meat
And to people you’re so sweet
You’re the best little cat
Yes, we all agree

You say meow meow
Of course, you know just how:
For you’re a little kitty cat
Meow meow meow meow meow! 

*Images aren’t mine. I don’t really know anything about them other than the painting is by Louis Wain.

Oh look!

The good folks over at The Kosmopolitan have made the bold and unprecedented move of recognizing a poem of mine as something slightly better than complete and utter rot.

Hails to the Chiefs

1. George Washington
ugly, bad hair

2. John Adams
fat, cherubic

3. Thomas Jefferson
bad hair

4. James Madison 
would love to have seen him make out with Alexander Hamilton

5. James Monroe
looks like a Disney character

6. John Quincy Adams
Ebenezer Scrooge

7. Andrew Jackson
John Kerry, looks perpetually freaked out

8. Martin Van Buren 
ridiculous hair

9. William H. Harrison
even more ridiculous hair, looks like sea creature

10. John Tyler 
lipless, bad hair

Fat Like Me

I wish that you
Were fat like me
I’m just as fat
As fat can be

How very fat
We two could be
If only you
Were fat like me!

In which I debunk cat food propaganda

Cats are hardly a new thing in my life. My parents have had more cats over the years than I’ve had hot dinners. Consequently, it’s not like I was stumped when J and I adopted a cat from the pound two months ago. But because we were only having the one cat, and because it was the first cat we had ever personally owned, we wanted to give her the best we could afford in all aspects of her life. In particular, this meant high-quality food. The gut impulse was Fancy Feast, which Hazel has been greatly enjoying thus far, and which was easily obtainable, not prohibitively expensive, and allegedly fancy.

An internet acquaintance encouraged me to join Catster, a website which is half people who are into cats and half people who are, like, really into cats. I did, and that first night that Hazel was home I browsed the internet for general feeding guidelines — though I might as well have been trying to find general guidelines on whether god exists, because, as you will soon see, people take cat food really fucking seriously. 

…and don’t call me Shirley!

Lisa Belkin, a blogger for the New York Times, has a post on changing trends in forms of address:

Yet my children call all my friends by their first names. Only one couple in our circle teaches their kids to use “Mr.” and “Mrs.,” and they tend to call my husband “Dr. Belkin,” even though that is not his last name, and me “Mrs. Belkin” even though that is my mother.

This is part of the reason for the new informality, of course. Families have gotten far more complicated over the decades; knowing a child’s last name doesn’t necessarily mean that you know what to call his or her parents. Add to that the cultural baggage loaded on “Miss,” “Mrs.” and “Ms.” Whichever you use, you run the chance of insulting someone (especially if she turns out to go by “Dr.”).

Solution? Don’t take yourself so seriously that you’ll actually be offended if someone happens to pick the wrong title when addressing you respectfully. I can’t tell you how many times my husband has been mistakenly referred to as “Mr. Hill” at the grocery store, and while I confess it can be a little annoying for people to mistakenly assume something about your identity, it’s ridiculous to wring one’s hands about the “cultural baggage” of it all. Better to say “Miss” when you mean “Mrs.” — as so many grade school students do — than to take the liberty of assuming a much closer relationship with someone than you actually have.

According to Belkin, young people seem to be making a return to the formality of days of yore, a trend she suggests might actually be troubling:

But lately I have been noticing that my 14 year old and his friends call each other by their last names. Sometimes, for reasons known only to them, they add –y at the end, as in Smithy or Jonesy, but most of the time they stick to Smith or Jones.

This became the stuff of spirited conversation over Thanksgiving at my house this year. I figured it was a “boy thing.” Having never been one myself, I don’t have a great sense of what boys have always done and will probably always do. My brother-in-law, who works at an inner-city charter school, says he didn’t do it when he was a boy, and sees this as a form of intimidation — it is not, he says, an acceptable way for peers to speak to peers. Could be. But it could also be as simple as kids doing something they have rarely heard a parent do — addressing a friend by last name.

How perplexing it is that Belkin should spend the first half of her post talking about how different kids these days are yet proceed to use her, presumably, full grown brother-in-law’s opinion to explain the behavior of her own children. Might I, as somewhat of a youngster myself, suggest that perhaps the kids have started calling each other by their last names in an effort to mimic the British schoolchildren in the Harry Potter series? Or perhaps they just like the sporty feel of calling a chum by his or her last name. Or maybe, as is characteristic of teens and tweens, they haven’t put as much thought into it as their parents have put into overanalyzing it.

Am I the last person on Earth who finds it more insulting to call a stranger or distant acquaintance by their first name than to make an effort to address someone with a degree of respect and formality, but choose an incorrect title or name? 

Like so many other things, this seems to be tied up to a certain extent with identity politics and a breakdown in the 1960s of the divide between the private and public spheres: On the one side are those who want to stick to traditional forms of address and maintain a certain distance from others in public; on the other are those for whom their titles transcend mere signifiers of respect and instead carry their own political messages and those who wish to address the whole world as though it is their good friend. I’ll have more to say about the public/private divide in forthcoming posts, but for the time being suffice to say that I would much rather a stranger mistakenly call me by my husband’s last name than take the liberty of using my first name.

A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving: Children’s cartoon or cultural critique?

A special many of us have likely seen many times already, “A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving” tells the tale of poor little Charlie Brown’s efforts to provide a Thanksgiving dinner for a gaggle of acquaintances who invite themselves over. This 1973 special features a suddenly butch Peppermit Patty, who is almost unrecognizable when compared to her depiction only a year prior in “Snoopy Come Home,” along with a handful of other kids who seem to be fairly new to the series. Something about it has that distinctive ’70s touch seen in Schoolhouse Rock and the like, which isn’t my taste but which does have a certain kind of nostalgic charm, especially around the holidays.

Nobody likes it when a bunch of friends invite themselves over, but Charlie’s got the additional problem of not being able to cook anything besides cereal and toast. Snoopy et al. help out and a veritable feast of toast, cereal, popcorn, and what appears to be jelly beans is served at a large table that has been set up in a field somewhere. Peppermint Patty complains loudly about the quality of the dinner before Charlie realizes that he should have been at his grandmother’s place by now. He rings Grandma up and relays the situation, and the special ends with all of the kids being invited to Grandma’s house for a real Thanksgiving dinner.

Now, not that it’s in any way unique to the Peanuts universe, but where the hell are the parents for all this? They’re not bustling about the kitchen while the child and his dog attempt to cook, they’re not wondering why their children have vanished on a holiday, they don’t call Charlie in to the house when it’s time to go to grandma’s — one has to wonder whether they’re even driving the station wagon in the final scene of the show, or whether Snoopy or someone is at the helm. With the exception of Charlie’s grandmother, no relative appears even in “wah-WAH-wah-wah” form. 

One wonders whether the parents are protesting the imperialist-consumerist Thanksgiving holiday and refusing to indulge Grandma’s traditionalism; or perhaps they’re lounging among naked hippies in a drug-addled haze, too out of it to even realize their children are missing — this is, after all, the seventies. The children do what they can to enjoy the holiday, but ultimately they’re either too young or too poorly brought up to be able to achieve much, and Grandma, that beacon of pre-post-modernism, must save the day.

I sincerely doubt that a Charlie Brown special deliberately included such a damning message, but it is fun to view it in this way, and I like to wonder whether Charles Schulz did feel at odds with, well, all the things I hate about boomerism: the destruction of tradition, identity politics, self-righteousness, revisionism, etc. Perhaps I’ve just been reading too much Evelyn Waugh.