Today’s Featured Pet is Amaryllis, and I would die for her.
What does her human companion, Kate, say about her?
Our cat Amaryllis came from the shelter with a very dignified name, but it's kind of a lot so we mostly just call her Kitty. She was a birthday gift for my younger daughter, whose previous cat we sadly had to rehome when my husband was facing his stem cell transplant--no pets allowed in the home for like two years afterward. When he got medically cleared to have a pet again we found this little gray tabby at the local SPCA. She had been put on "chill time" at the shelter because of some overly lively behavior the first time we visited, so we couldn't hang out with her, but we had our eye on her and the next week we went back and she was still available for adoption AND incredibly sweet and friendly. My husband still maintains that her chill time was an unjust sentence. She can be a little feisty and is an explorer both nimble and adventurous, as I think these pictures convey.
She is an indoor cat, but would dearly love to be an outdoor one and occasionally stages a bold and brilliant escape, after which she generally cowers in a flower bed nibbling on a bush and waiting to be taken back inside. She immediately became deeply attached to my husband, who has chronic illness following that transplant and so is probably the member of the family who spends the most time in a stationary position suitable for a cat to sit on him. Accordingly, she does, and she is also now extremely suspicious whenever another human male enters our home. When my husband leaves she will sit by the door and meow plaintively for...quite a while. Her loyalty to me consists mainly in coming around after my alarm goes off very early (to go to rowing practice) and nuzzling me to make sure I don't go back to sleep.
Unfortunately she also occasionally does this at 4:15am on days when I don't have practice but I take it as well intentioned. She is a very good and beautiful girl who treats our whole house like a climbing gym.
On Tuesday I FORGOT to recommend a horror novel!!!! But now I’m here and I have one for youuuuu: Kill Creek, by Scott Thomas:
It’s very scary, very fun, I DO think the female character is a bit “a man wrote this” but that’s just a thing that happens, she’s also awesome in her own way. I totally enjoyed it and the ending was a GREAT ending.
The publisher says:
It was supposed to be a simple publicity stunt: four famous horror authors spending the night in one of the world’s most notorious haunted houses. But their presence awakens an evil that will haunt them long after they leave...
So, you know, it’s another Scooby Doo one. NOT A CRITICISM.
This one got under my skin (in a good way):
I’m on the elevator alone for one floor before the man gets on. He stands in one corner, staring at his phone. I drink my coffee. At the next floor, two more men get on. They flank me, laughing and talking about some game somewhere. I pull my arms in at my sides, try to become smaller. Two floors down, four more men. They take up so much space—their elbows out, their bags overfull with books, their legs spread to balance themselves—that I am pushed to the back of the elevator. I spill coffee on my shirt. Ten seconds to the bottom, I say to myself. Ten seconds. I can handle this.
Just a quick update for those of you who were wondering and asking about our reader who was in urgent need of legal help. Via the help of some of my friends who know how to work the dang phones (honestly, the immigrants-helping-immigrants network is astonishing and humbling), and with some cash help for attorney fees, she has found a great divorce lawyer willing to work w her on fees, and is feeling so much more hopeful than she was before. She has actually got her citizenship, which made everything a lot smoother, and she thanks you for your love and care and prayers. I’m in direct contact with her, and will make sure she can see this through until the end. Thank you so much for being great and ON IT. She (thank heavens) has an account she can receive money in that her husband can’t steal, and if at some point she needs more than I can help with, I’ll let you know more. “Nicole Knows” is a FAMILY, like the Fast and the Furious.
I adored this thing by Danny about his fear of flying and giggled a bunch:
Everyone about to board this large commercial plane with an excellent safety record appears to be very calm. In disaster movies, very calm people are extremely mistaken; the lone voice of concern or agitated drifter is wrongly dismissed as a kook. Because I live my life as if I were being filmed for a secret audience that is always judging me, I know that I would most resemble Robert Redford in Three Days of the Condor; this means I must be right to panic, but there is nothing I can do about it.
This plane is too small, and will be batted out of the sky by an errant wind, or will tip over and drop like a stone if I don’t lean into all of the turns and make sure my weight is as evenly distributed as possible throughout my row.
I can’t see what’s happening, I’m too far away from any of the windows to see the ground, which means there’s absolutely no proof we aren’t currently flying upside-down into a witch’s mountain.
My friend Rachel Vorona Cote has been mourning her mother’s death, on and off-line, and has some really painful and exquisite things to say about that:
During Mom’s last couple of months, my tweets had become something of a public diary, more baldly earnest than ever before. It often felt foolhardy, this attempt to convey via social media what death brings: Twitter couldn’t convey the ambient fuzz hissing inside my head as Dad called the hospice service to report that Mom was gone. Instagram couldn’t capture my dumb, feral resistance to the sight of the funeral director’s assistant wheeling a stretcher through our front door. It was board stiff, my sluggish brain noted, coughing up a few desperate sparks of perception, and there was no pillow. How could I express online the watery viscerality of my knees buckling — accompanied by nausea and, briefly, the urge to protest, to rattle the stretcher like a locked door as I screamed, “No, you cannot take Mom from us!” — and how, instead, I dropped onto the kitchen floor, stroking the ears of my sister’s husky, Anya, with painstaking exertion? As if the telltale shuffling in the next room were innocuous, as if Mom weren’t being stuffed into a bag and carted away? I can hardly articulate these things now, just more than a year later, in words uncircumscribed by Twitter’s character limit.
How am I NOT gonna read about an Extremely Online nun?
Judging from her resume, the polyglot 48-year-old Russian Orthodox nun from Nyack, NY, is very much alive in the world. Not only a productive scholar of Orthodox liturgy with some 57 publications to her name, Larin is also a YouTuber, podcaster, self-sustaining business owner, and a quirky spiritual guide—if also a controversial one. In the intricate and arcane world of Orthodox Christianity, Larin cuts a unique and transgressive figure: depending who you ask, she is either a heretical predator, a “Westernizing” post-modernist and persona non grata, or a refreshingly irreverent voice of much-needed movement in an inert church, a brilliant woman playing to win in a bearded man’s game.
LET’S GET MAD ABOUT MOTHERHOOD AS A POLITICAL SHELL GAME:
Motherhood is a feminist issue. It cuts across race, class, gender, sexuality, disability, migration status, the home, the workplace; its difficulties are compounded by the same.
It’s as though motherhood—in an economically unstable, fearful decade—has become what the housewife was to feminist activist Silvia Federici: a generative system of unpaid labor that props up capitalism, which would no longer work without it. Now that the middle-class single-income family is no longer the norm, mainstream cultural anxieties have turned to the mother, who must bring in a wage while simultaneously performing the role vacated by the housewife, particularly her role raising and caring for children.
This means that one-half of the workforce must be coerced into performing domestic labor in addition to waged labor and assimilating that labor as love.It is no wonder that motherhood is so pressingly marketed as feminine. It’s the feminization of any work that allows us to pay lip service to its importance and then ignore its material conditions completely.
Motherhood is a political category because it puts its workers at an automatic disadvantage, which is almost always steepest among those who are already oppressed. Feminization, in the form of the supposed unique capacity of cisgender women to care for others, is a shim that props up an unstable system. Untethered from gender, we can begin to train our eyes to see the enormity of this care, made invisible and unwaged, and we are told it is something we must cherish and excel at.