And Now, a Poem. Sort of.

I spent a lot of my weekend visiting a good friend of mine, and her utter snob of a cat. The cat in question (who, I should point out in defence of my friend's taste, arrived in our lives with her name already firmly intact) spent much of the weekend whining at us in typical theatrical cat fashion. I'm inside. I'm hot. Feed me. My fur is touching me. Pet me. Stop petting me. Why are you staring at me? Etc. Late yesterday evening, after just enough gins and tonic (gin and tonics just sounds wrong), I composed a song in her cranky honour, to be sung to the tune of Don McLean's "Vincent".

"Xena (Furry, Furry Night)"

Furry, furry night
Paint your kitty blue and grey
Take her on a holiday
Go through the garden underneath the fence

Furry, furry night
Patterns in her stripey fur
Listening to hear her purr
As she sheds her coat upon your couch

Now I understand
Why you sit there hating me
How you suffer the stupidity
Of humans who won't set you free

We cannot not listen
We do not know how
While you stare and say, "Meow!"

Furry, furry night
Paint your kitty blue and green
Put her in a soup tureen
And set it on the sunny window sill

Now I understand
Why you sit there hating me
How you suffere the stupidity
Of humans who won't set you free

We could not listen
We did not know how
We thought you said, "Meow!"

One Man

One of my students invited me to photograph her final project for her Communications class. She and several other students traveled to Center City Philadelphia (an area with which I am only moderately familiar, mostly as home to the Reading Terminal Market and packet pick-up for the Philadelphia Marathon) for an experimental project in nonverbal communication: free hugs. Technically speaking, there was both verbal and nonverbal communication here, as they were both speaking and holding up signs with words written on them, but that wasn't the subject of their experiment. What they were interested in was how ordinary people would react to being offered a hug by a total stranger. Coincidentally, they chose to carry out this experiment on Good Friday.

The title of this post is a homonym for the man who began this campaign in Sydney, Australia--Juan Mann. That is not, to the best of my knowledge, a pseudonym. That is his actual name.

Scenes from the City of Brotherly Love

The free hugs crew sets up outside City Hall.

Bethann bends down for a little stroller action.

Heather gets a surprise!

John from Texas.

Something that doesn't happen nearly enough.

Lennon makes some new friends....

...who borrow our signs....

...and make friends of their own.

Diane and friend.

Bethann and Lennon.

A Delightful Combination of Earnestness and Stupidity

The text of a recent email from a student, who seems somewhat befuddled about the way things work around here:

Is the class(8:30-11 mon) still in room 204? I went last week and ems
people were in there. I can't get into my school email at all so I was
wondering.

My carefully phrased response:

Last week was spring break.

Maybe The Matron is right. Maybe we do need to evaluate whether everyone belongs in college.

Faces of Freedom

(a traveling phot exhibit by U Roberto "Robin" Romano. Now I know why he didn't return my emails for two years. Seems he was a little busy.)

Our Patchwork Heritage

"On this day, we gather because we have chosen hope over fear, unity of purpose over conflict and discord."

(The above image is one of dozens I shot today as my college campus packed itself around television sets, streaming video feeds, and radios to celebrate the end of a very long and shameful 233 years. Thank God Almighty, we are free at last.)

Weather Alert: Unusually High Kitty-Knot Factor

Current temp in Three Feathers is not something I'm going to investigate numerically, but I can tell you it's a plus-two kitty-knot factor (Current kitty-knot standard of 2.5).

Kitty-knot factor is a scientifically accurate way to tell ambient air temperature without removing yourself from under the covers. Just poke your nose out and see how many household kitties are curled up on your bed. A kitty-knot is determined in increments. A full kitty-knot is achieved when said kitty is curled up so tightly you cannot tell which end is which. An extra half kitty-knot can be added if two or more kitties are twined together so as to be indistinguishable, or more than half the given kitty's body weight is draped over yours for warmth.

The kitty-knot standard is the current number of kitties in your household. My current kitty-knot standard is 2.5 due to the extremely large nature of one of the participating kitties (she's also the one with one eye, so it sort of works out even in computations).

Jake.

I lost a dear friend late this week, in a senseless, stupid, utterly preventable tragedy that his family and the police are still trying to sort out, and will be for many weeks to come. His only sister is one of my closest friends, and my heart reels at the thought of what Chloe and her family have lost.

Life wasn't always easy for Jake, and sometimes he made it harder than it had to be--something he and I had in common. But he had a sweet gentle soul, and a bear hug that would literally lift your feet off the ground when you were caught up in it. His giggle was contagious, and he was always finding the slapstick humour in otherwise ordinary conversations: because who the hell slips on toast?

It's unbelievable that I'm standing here speaking these words, and I can't begin to imagine the struggles his family will face as they try to make sense of what happened last night. All I know is that the world has lost something very, very special, and none of us who knew Jake will ever be the same.

All week I’ve been remembering Jake’s favourite joke, the one about Jewish people in China. He never got tired of telling me, and I never got tired of hearing it and watching him grin so wide his hair bounced when he told the punchline: “Sharom!” Which of course, is a politically incorrect version of the Hebrew word for peace. Anybody who knew Jake knows that peace is what he wanted to find in this world, more than anything else, his whole life. Last night, I wondered, as I heard his voice in my head over and over, sharom, if maybe this isn’t just a happy memory. If maybe this is Jake, trying to tell us that he’s finally found it?

Carol, Jerry, his beloved Cher, Peace.

Little brother, Sharom.