I Knead a Little Love

Only one of a feline's fascinating - or, if you're a hater, "odd" - habits is kneading its paws against a soft object - very often the tender flesh of a nearby human being. This "kneading" is almost always accompanied by loud, rattly purring, and sometimes even by a little drool. That purring is involved would make the action seem to be borne out of contentment, but what of the sharp, sometimes aggressive, pricking? As Freud would have it, the genesis of this baffling behavior harkens back to the feline's kittenhood, from a time when kitty was nestled near its warm mother and - assuming its mother wasn't some abusive shrew - was blissfully content. Not surprisingly, the impetus for this particular happiness comes from feeding time; kittens knead their hungry little paws against their mother's belly in order to stimulate milk flow. The mother cat relies on the kneading - and the resulting piggy purring - to know when her kitten has had enough. When an adult cat salivates and/or kneads its paws against a human's softer parts, it is deeply content and is associating the contentment with the old kneading action.

unfortunately, this kind of love can cause a little unwitting damage ... say, in the middle of the night when an adult cat decides to wake up a sleeping human by expressing her love in the most basic way she knows how:

Out of the shower, I couldn't figure out at first why I had such odd red marks on my belly (please, please, not a reaction to the C.O. Bigelow's Lemon Body Lotion!!) until I got a load of Little Miss Innocent stretching her guilty white paws out on the bed.

Thank you, Heifer. I love you, too.

When Life Gives You Lemons ....

...make Body Lotion.

Smells like a fat slice of lemon meringue pie - with just a hint of milky cold cream in the dry down -leaves behind a healthy sheen and keeps my winter-parched skin soft for hours. My only reservations: all-natural ingredients or no, it's ridiculously expensive for the amount of product you get (and I just bought the travel size); it would also be nice if the scrummy scent lasted longer than a couple of hours but at the moment, with buttery soft lemon-and-cake-scented hands, I'm kinda fine with it all (ask me again, though, once the novelty wears off and I start to wish I'd just bought the $2.99 quart of Queen Helene's Mango Cocoa Body Butter). Lemon-scented body lotion; it's really all about the little pleasures... thanks, C.O. Bigelow; you've made post-bath time such fun...

...hmn. maybe I do miss reviewing cosmetics after all.

No Darn Wonder

This is pretty belated, but kudos to Peaches for posting this excellent article about the ongoing riots in france. It's exactly the sort of deeper analysis plus answers I was looking for from the beginning and after reading it several times, I have to agree with Doug Ireland - it’s just no damn wonder. What is perhaps most striking to me in the article are the paragraphs on the truer translation of the phrases Sarkozy used to denounce the youths involved:

...But Sarkozy only poured verbal kerosene on the flames, dismissing the ghetto youth in the most insulting and racist terms and calling for a policy of repression. "Sarko" made headlines with his declarations that he would karcherise the ghettos of la racaille-- words the U.S. press, with glaring inadequacy, has translated to mean "clean" the ghettos of "scum". But these two words have an infinitely harsher and insulting flavor in French. Karcher is the well-known brand name of a system of cleaning surfaces by super-high-pressure sand-blasting or water-blasting that very violently peels away the outer skin of encrusted dirt -- like pigeon-shit -- even at the risk of damaging what's underneath.

To apply this term to young human beings and proffer it as a strategy is a verbally fascist insult and, as a policy proposed by an Interior Minister, is about as close as one can get to hollering "ethnic cleansing" without actually saying so. It implies raw police power and force used very aggressively, with little regard for human rights. I wonder how many Anglo-American correspondents get the inflammatory, terribly vicious flavor of the word in French? The translation of karcherise by "clean" just misses completely the provocative, incendiary violence of what Sarko was really saying. And racaille is infinitely more pejorative than "scum" to French-speakers -- it has the flavor of characterizing an entire group of people as subhuman, inherently evil and criminal, worthless, and is, in other words, one of the most serious and dehumanizing insults one could launch at the rebellious ghetto youth. Kerosene, indeed

Racism in too many other countries is at once silent and shrieking, fixed at both poles for the same reason: it isn’t considered to be any big deal. So, again - it’s just no damn wonder.

ph-ph-ph-ph-phases

Oh, that Heifer. She is the weirdest. She provides me with such joy, with such amusement, with such hair-covered furniture and vomit-stained carpets, and occasionally, a little inspiration for a blog post when i haven't got much else to say. My roommate's friend's lover's mother tired of her as she hit her teenage years and 5 years after she was trundled to our Washington Heights apartment, squalling in a zippered messenger bag, she streaks through my living room, gnaws on my fingers, kneads her paws onto my back like a masseuse and nestles into my side in a tight stripey ball, purring all the while. She has her wild moodswings, her destructive turns, and, curiously, goes through phases like a child - choosing to only sleep on the plum colored velour cushioned chair near the window for three weeks, ignoring it to sleep only underneath the window seat, and then picking up a brand new fascination or habit seemingly out of nowhere. Bored at two in the morning, trying to calm myself down from a keyed-up night at work where my coworkers flung wadded up papers at each other at intervals all night and i found myself compulsively swearing over my chicken enchiladas, i give you - in no particular order - a Best Of catalogue of Heifer's various phases:

• The Toilet Fixation Phase - By far, the funniest and weirdest. When Heifer was a teenager, she came hurtling out of nowhere each time a toilet was flushed to stand on her hind legs, paws draped over the edge of the bowl, to stare at the water as it swirled into oblivion. This phase lasted for a few months. Freak!
• The Straw Phase - Heifer took to stealing our plastic drinking straws out of the glass canister on the kitchen counter, carrying them around in her mouth and chasing them throughout the apartment. Tired of having to pick up her collection of gnawed plastic straws every day or so, we eventually put the glass canister up on top of the cabinets to keep them out of her reach. our plan worked until one night, a great crash came from the kitchen - Heifer had leapt to the top of the cabinets to retrieve her precious straws and knocked the entire thing to the floor where it lay in a crushed glass mess. This phase ended abruptly as we banished all plastic straws to the security of a drawer. And that was that.
• The Nesting Phase - before leaping on to the bed to sleep with me (also a thing that ebbs and flows), Heifer took to making several trips around the apartment to carry her various toys onto the bed so as to have them around her while she slept. In the afternoon I'd awake and find a strange assortment of delights on the edge of the bed: a bedraggled cheep cheeping fish, a cloth mouse, a wavy plastic ring, a velvet pouch (something that was mine that she appropriated for her own use), and several pens. The collection varied according to whichever "toy" she was most "into" at the time. This phase lasted, also, for a few months and now she tends to drop her toys on the rug near the foot of the bed before she cuddles next to me for the night.
• The Stealth Attack Phase - for a while, Heifer was very fond of hiding behind doors or corners and leaping out at me as I passed, wrapping her front paws in a bear hug around my leg. When she realized that I was too slow to give her much sport - a few weeks - she grew tired of this game.
• The Music Critic Phase - I love to sing in the shower and usually sing something from a musical - most often, it's "Little Shop of Horrors" or, more recently, "Spamalot". Heifer simply cannot abide my singing and for a few months, when I would sing the reedier notes in my pathetic warble, Heifer would shriek and - no joke - leap up onto the edge of the tub to caterwaul in protest, stopping only as I stopped my own caterwauling. Brat! Lately, however, she has given up and allows me to sing as badly as I like - she merely stays out of earshot.

Heifer's More Recent Fixations:

• The Paper and Plastic Bag Phase - after years of not giving a crap about bags, Heifer has recently suddenly begun to care and will crawl halfway into a bag to inspect its contents, her ass and tail the only part of her that stick out. (she never finds anything).
• The Blanket Tunnel Phase - Heifer now likes to tunnel under the blankets with me and curl up into a ball, completely covered by said blanket and forming a strange lump under the covers. She apparently needs no oxygen because she can stay under there for hours, purring and protesting with a meow or a bite if i move too often.

I've said it before and I'll say it many, many more times: Heifer. Is. A. Freak.

oh, jesus

What's going on in France right now is pretty damn nuts, and like most people, I'm disturbed by the unrest that has spread and as of yet shows no clear sign of settling. I say "like most people" because in an attempt to dig a little deeper than most American media would allow - and not speaking French well enough to make much sense of the French papers or blogs - I very foolishly visited the most recent crop of AOL chat boards. I don't know why I'm shocked any more when I read such bile - posts so awful that when I tried to click on them again they'd been removed by the AOL community (thus, no linking). Smug, righteous, and ignorant all in the same breath; in one corner viciously denouncing Islam and in another, blaming Bush's war on Iraq for the entire history of French sentiment about Arabs in the first place, curiously seeming to (or at least at the time I read them) avoid the whole wrenching "morte pour rien" issue. And perhaps just as sad; if only I could say I'd ever encountered such bigoted idiocy through the cold remove of AOL boards....

Thankfully, the New York Times has got a really excellent article up on its site today about the whole mess; extremely thorough, managing to get past the equivocative standards of journalism and flesh out the issue socially, without being sensationalistic or partisan. Thank you, Craig S. Smith. As for the message boards (surely not confined to AOL) ... oh, jesus.

"Do you hear the people sing", indeed...?

some hot cross occipital buns for the poor little gamines, sil-vous-plait

...and it shall be, as was my trip to England in 2003, a thing of utter and complete dorkdom, of scholarly pursuits amid the drugstore browsing, scenery breathing, train riding, baguette-eating and nonna visiting. tracking down spots from Les Miserables and Phantom of the Opera in Paris - the bridge above the Seine from which Javert flung himself; La Rue de Plumet (if such a rue exists), l'Ecole de Saint Denis (suivez il guide!), L'Opera Garnier - and, when trekking to Montreuil-sur-Mer, Montfermeil, Digne and Toulon fails due to time and convenience constraints, I shall feed my other inner geek and travel to the Dordogne - Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon country - on my way from Paris to Rome. Lascaux, Le Moustier, La Chapelle-aux-saints... of course, I can't hit all of them but at least one... at least one... the plan is, as of yet, still nebulous - coordinating trains, eurorail passes, figuring out exactly where the hell things are and how long it takes to get there, finding affordable hostels - but I am beginning to feel a little giddy over it all...

it will be mine. oh, yes - it will be mine.

I'm Number Two! I'm Number Two!

As if I wasn't feeling accomplished enough after cleaning the bathroom with Dr. Bronner's Peppermint Soap and drowning 4 loads of laundry in suds, I've just discovered that - all potty-mouthed connotations aside - I'm Number 2 in google searches for people with my name. Out of close to 300 hits, I've been moving up steadily through the ranks since starting a very enjoyable theater critic gig a couple of months ago. First, I was number 13. Then, number 8. And now I'm numbers 2 and 3, with and without quotation marks surrounding my name. For years I've longed to be googleable in the way my peers were googleable; type in our names and call up an on-line resume. Aside from that Argentinian woman, I am now one of the premier OIs on the internet. And as I'm on there for fairly positive reasons - as opposed to my father's friends who, as he's learned through his brand new discovery of google stalking, appear in felon lists - this is a lovelier thing than it is scary. Not too bad. Not too darn bad....