The sky is high. The Czar is far.
The following home video is dedicated to Anna.
Note how Fanty isn’t terribly perturbed by the maraduing blanket, but the mobile phone I’m recording him with is pretty interesting to him. The power of Nokia technology – even cats get it. On one level or another.
Anyway, I do have more important things to blog about than my cats. And will be getting to them. Uh, sometime.
Good idea, Renee!
Like Jill, I can’t exactly look after a dog right now. But I have always been a dog lover. I grew up with a Doberman, Joy, in the house, and that dog was responsible for many great deeds, including saving my mother from an attacker on the stairs of our old building in Kiev. I’ll never forget the day that Joy was put to sleep, after a long and illustrious twelve years with us. I was in my freshman year at university, and I sat on the steps of the East Campus Union building, crying in the winter rain. I had been seriously depressed in the months following that day and, curiously enough, my depression started to get better on the day that Joy left us. It was as if in departing, she took a small piece of my excruciating sadness with her. Sounds pretty maudlin, but that’s how I have always viewed it. I can’t explain it any other way. It would have been more likely for things to have started to get worse, but they didn’t.
After graduating from college, I adopted, along with my boyfriend, a lovely stray named Zara. We had to give her up when moving to the Middle East. It sucked, but she has a good home now, and that’s what’s important. I couldn’t imagine her in the urban jungle of Dubai, living in a high rise, and I can’t imagine her now in Amman, in our tiny apartment.
I know that if I have a future, dogs must be in it, though. For reals.
Here is a picture of me and lovely Zara:
I don’t have any digital images of Joy on hand, but will have to scan them in the next time I am back in Kiev.
Of course, the timing of Renee’s post is especially ironic for me – since we took in two fat kittehs on the day that she published it. We have named them Fanty & Mingo and really hope we get to keep them (there is some weirdness with their original owners at the moment, since we got them from a person who, the original owners had assumed, would keep them forever). Here they are, in all of their lazy, imperious glory:
Cats are certainly more low-maintenance, though they never seem to think of themselves as anything other than high-maintenance. I suppose this is why we love them. In his book, The World Without Us, Alan Weisman has a few great asides on cats (he’s talking about how they destroy songbird populations – and I agree that it’s an important topic, especially for anyone who thinks that letting pretty kitteh roam outside is perfectly harmless) – among them the notion that they have “trained” us to take care of them.
Weisman’s right. 🙂
I’ve never been attracted to Tom Cruise.
He always hung around the sidelines, going “heyyy Natalia, what’s up?”
And I’ve been going, “Tom, honey, no. You’re a swell, charming actor, you really are. But you also kind of scare me. And the phrase ‘devoted Scientologist’ just doesn’t fill me with profound awe.”
And he’d go, “but you’re tall. And blond. And curiously dating a shorter, darker man. Can’t you see it’s in the stars? What is UP?”
And I’d go, “but Toooooooooom. Remember that ‘Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall’ thing from Mission Impossible 3? Come on, man!”
And he’d go, “whatever, you don’t do it for me EITHER. And you can’t carry off dark hair like my luminous wife Katie, besides.”
And I’d go, “whatever, you took on Brooke Shields and got your sweet ass handed to you! Take that!”
And it was a comfortable situation for all involved.
Of course, Tom Cruise had to one-up me and put on a damn eyepatch:
What the hell is going on here? Did he, like, call up my friends? Did he hack into my e-mail account and find out all of these old G-chat conversations about the virtues of eyepatches and black shiny boots? Is this what’s really going on here? Because, you know, Tom, it was creepy even when Bill Murray did it in “Groundhog Day.” I mean, WHERE do you get off on getting me off?
Did he have a bet with his friends? Does he just want to ruin my life? I need to know. I really do. Because this is low, Tom. Really low. I was looking forward to a decent writing career. A decent life, in fact. A life of a somewhat shabby, trendy respectability, in which people light my cigarettes for me at parties, when I am just drunk enough on good champagne to smoke in the first place. Now you have me all confounded and questioning my own sanity.
I mean, Tom – look, my grandma can’t watch “Valkyrie.” She actually lived under Nazi occupation, she can’t handle this sort of thing. I wasn’t going to watch “Valkyrie” either. It’s not really a solidarity thing, I could never understand how she feels, I won’t appropriate her feelings, I couldn’t even try, but I’d heard it was a bit anti-climactic and was, like, whatever. And then I get dragged to it against my will, and now this.
I used to be able to share all crushes with grandma. I don’t think she’ll quite get what this one is all about though.
But the truly horrifying thing in all of this is that it’s not even about your morally ambiguous character. Damn, I wish I was that deep. It’s about a freaking eyepatch. And the way you, in that one tiny scene that was quickly ruined by the advent of a little blond girl, say “the children?” as you look at your wife when she tells you that “the children couldn’t wait” to see you, or some stuff like that.
It made me realize why you have been earning millions for all of these years. And the truth of the matter is – if it takes one glance and phrase to earn you millions while I sit here gluing my one pair of boots together with some weird black, shiny substance that smells vaguely of turpentine… I just don’t know, Tom. I throw up my hands. The world is too cruel a place for me.
I retreat back to my couch, re-watch “A Few Good Men,” and weep for the freaking universe.
You won, Tom. I hope you’re happy. I hope you’re cackling.
I hope you keep that eyepatch flying, baby.
The comments on Ali Campoverdi’s lingerie photos have swung me back around to my favourite topic – the policing of women’s looks and attire by so-called feminists and feminist allies.
Now, for reference’s sake, Ali Campoverdi has recently landed a job in the Obama White House. She has also posed for Maxim.
So far, from what I’ve read, some of the… choicest reactions to Ms. Campoverdi have come from the anti-Obama, pro-Clinton camp. This immediately reminded me of the sexist comments and outrage that erupted on the day that Hillary Clinton dared to show a bit of cleavage. Now, frankly, I think Hillary Clinton is a fine-looking woman (not that it matters – but I would just like to say that any “Hillary is ugly, lol” comments here are not going to be tolerated, because they’re both sexist and dumb) and detest the attempts to utterly un-sex her – no matter where they originate. People might agree or disagree with this, but the insanely intense focus on Hillary’s appearance and outfits are honestly no different from much of the talk on Campoverdi, I’ve decided.
What’s being discussed here, once again, is a certain standard – what’s appropriate and what isn’t, what’s OK to criticize and what’s not, and, most importantly, who’s “respectable” and who is “not respectable.”
People forget that standards are fluid. A few weeks ago, I was, predictably, being followed and harassed by a man in a residential neighbourhood of Amman, Jordan. As I flipped him off, I heard laughter. Two women on the sidewalk where observing the scene as it unfolded, and clearly found it amusing. They were dressed very conservatively, even for a Muslim country like Jordan, and even though they could clearly see the discomfort and pain on my face, they chose to laugh. Not to admonish this man, but to give him support.
Why? Well, I can only guess, but considering the treatment I regularly get here in Jordan – it just might have something to do with me being blond, obviously Slavic, and hijabless – while in public.
See, I just didn’t fit these women’s standard of respectability. A man treating me like trash? Fine by them.
I honestly don’t see any difference between this incident and the treatment of Campoverdi. Continue reading ““Her tits don’t sag” – on Ali Campoverdi and supposed progressives judging a woman’s “respectability””
Um, asshole? I’m sure that Joan Walsh is just wailing and beating her breast at having missed her chance to be your sex-toy (or whatever it is you think that wives are ultimately good for). Hat-tip to Cara at Feministe.
Natalia A. 