My latest elephant journal article

I haven't posted lately, but that doesn't mean I haven't been writing! Check out my latest article on elephant journal:
http://www.elephantjournal.com/2016/08/why-you-cant-answer-the-question-of-caster-semenya/

Goodbye to Pipsqueak

Nineteen years and 1 month ago, I adopted two cats. At the time I was engaged, but unsure of my commitment to the relationship. I already knew there was a chance that the whole thing would fall apart, as it did just six months later. But the cats were a sure thing. I joked that the cats were the longest term commitment I was capable of making, and in the end, they certainly outlasted a lot in my life. 

My cat Pipsqueak, the tiny gray cat in the picture above, died today in my lap. He stopped eating on Monday, and had been on pain medication since Tuesday. This morning, after getting my daughter off to school, I gathered him up in a blanket in my lap and held him as he lay, limp and frail, in my arms. Looking back on it, I realize now the moment that he died, but at the time, I didn’t know. His breath was already so shallow that I didn’t realize right away that it had ceased.

Pipsqueak outlasted 3 apartments and my first home. He outlasted my Saturn coupe. He outlasted my fiancé. He outlasted my other cat, Shadow, by two years. He outlasted 2 of my husband’s cars. For the last 12 years, my husband has woken up and given Pipsqueak a new name, and now we are down to just one cat.

Pipsqueak used to steal food right out of my hand. I had to lock him in a closet or my bathroom when I was eating! One day, as I was eating Pringles, he took a flying leap off the arm of the couch and went straight in the can! I had to grab his tiny kitten back claws and drag him out! He just couldn’t resist those salty parabolas!

Pipsqueak at his fattest weighed 24 pounds. His head was just a wee bit too small for his long large body, but he was also a fat cat for many, many years. 

It is a strange thing to realize that a part of your life is gone forever. With Pip’s passing my last links to my life in the DC area are gone. It was a good life, an independent life, a wild and fun life. Life now is good too, wild and fun but not nearly as independent.

Goodbye little Pipsqueak.

The 9 Lies We All Play Along With

9 Lies We Conspire With To Keep Society Going

9.  Farting is socially unacceptable. In Roald Dahl’s the BFG, the titular Giant comments that it makes no sense to be proud of burping and embarrassed of farting. After all, farting is inevitable, while burping can be avoided. And yes, we generally frown on a big gross belch in “polite” company. But farting is always considered worse than burping. Why, exactly?

8.  Red and green or amber and green are the best colors for stop lights and power indicators. My husband is color blind. If a traffic light is sideways, he can’t tell the difference between a red and a green light. He also can’t tell when his Kindle is being charged or is finished being charged (amber/green). I find it highly ironic that a disability that affects more men than women is not catered to in our traffic light system, especially since it was men who designed the system in the first place!

7.  We swear on the Bible in court. OK, maybe a long time ago, this had some weight or validity. But nowadays who really takes the Bible seriously? In a culture where fewer and fewer people attend church regularly, how is swearing on an ancient book going to make perjury less likely?

6.  Children are innocent and pure. While children are ignorant, they are hardly innocent! Any parent knows that a child as young as 2 can manipulate, lie, and exploit loopholes. This doesn’t make children evil at all. But children are inherently selfish and lack empathy, making them terrible examples of purity and holiness, despite what many people like to believe.

5.  We put kids in swim diapers. This is actually hilarious to me. My daughter’s swim suit bottoms were, by themselves, tight enough to “catch” any poop she might have expelled. As for urine, swim diapers are not absorbent. They literally exist only to give the illusion that a child in a pool is not randomly spicing it up with urine.

4.  It’s not OK to eat every kind of animal. I’m not talking about kosher laws. I’m talking about the aversion in the US to eating horses, cats, and dogs. What’s the big deal? Meat is meat. How is a horse different from a cow or a deer? How is a dog different from a pig?

3.  Money has value. Sure, the US has a large stockpile of gold and precious metals, but our currency isn’t linked to that. Money is valuable only because all of us take the government’s word for it. We’ve all agreed that society works better when we have some random token to facilitate the exchange of goods and services. But money has no intrinsic value.

  

2. Bodies need to be embalmed and encased in expensive wood and concrete coffins. It’s nice that we can embalm people. When my grandmother died, it took us 3 weeks to get everyone assembled for her funeral, and embalming was the blessing that allowed that to happen. But since when is that necessary for every single corpse? And why do we buy super expensive wooden caskets then bury them? Of course, it makes money for the funeral home, but what if we could just rent the casket for the funeral, then bury the body in a shroud?

1.  War has rules. I understand the point of the Geneva Convention and other rules of war. But it is inherently absurd that an enterprise which has as its goal the domination of one group over another by means of deadly force, has rules governing the use of that force. How ridiculous that first you shoot down a ship, trying to destroy it and kill all the sailors on it, but once the ship starts sinking, you suddenly now are obligated to save the lives of those same sailors, even if just to keep them as prisoners of war.