Cat posting, per ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
springheel_jack
Sep. 26th, 2017 08:57 pmI can't stand the annoying non-photo posting on here, so I am going to add the photos once this copies over to LiveJournal.
springheel_jack wrote about still missing his cat Charlie, who was an excellent cat and always looked dignified and like he had a serious mustache. It made me realize I still miss my first cat Rilke very, very much, though she died in 2012. She made it to 18 or 19, which seems long in the land for a cat, but I would have cherished her rack of fragile bones and snaggly hair for longer, happily. She was the first cat who was MINE, not my family's. I got her from the Columbia Humane Society shelter in Missouri when I was in my third year of grad school, at age 26, I think. I was ignorant about what kittens would grow up to be, so the shelter staff deliberately did not warn me that I was picking out a long haired cat. I would never have done that on purpose! I looked at all her litter mates, but the others were boys and had either blue eyes or one blue eye and one green, and I thought that meant they might be deaf... plus, I just have a hankering for female cats, even though on average, the female cats I've known have been less lapcatty and loving than the male. Pickier. More aloof. She was adorable, though, as shown below.
She kept me company through my master's thesis and much bullshitting and beer drinking with fellow grad students, pictured below with my first personal computer, a Mac SE, I think.
And as a youngster in my next grad school apartment, after the excellent cheap house I rented with a friend. Man, I loved that place. The landlord offered to sell it to me for $39K in 1995. That would certainly have been a different life... Oh, well, it probably had a fucked foundation or something.
Then I moved back to Chicago after orals and worked at my old high school half time for a couple of years while finishing my dissertation research and deciding after a couple of interviews and being semi-sorta on the academic job market that what I really wanted to be was a fucking public school teacher, for political, union, and general fun reasons. (It is still true, that whatever gripes I have about teaching and the political pressures on it, it is still fun to create assignments and then to do models along with the students working on theirs, and I get to do art and write and draw and think, for pay... today, we did a Socratic Seminar based on Common's "Letter to the Free", reflecting on the NFL #takeaknee protests of last weekend, Charlottesville, and Black Lives Matter... it was the first Socratic Seminar of the year, and despite hiccups because these kids haven't done them before, it went okay... some interesting stuff. I like my students a lot.) And then I moved to Oakland. Here she is at age ten or so, deliberately in the middle of my Xmas wrapping, because that was always a good time for her. Ah, the joys of curling ribbon.
I still miss my girl. Devlin, my current girl, is a lovely, sweet, gentle cat with boundless affection despite having been a feral kitten. But Rilke was my first.
springheel_jack wrote about still missing his cat Charlie, who was an excellent cat and always looked dignified and like he had a serious mustache. It made me realize I still miss my first cat Rilke very, very much, though she died in 2012. She made it to 18 or 19, which seems long in the land for a cat, but I would have cherished her rack of fragile bones and snaggly hair for longer, happily. She was the first cat who was MINE, not my family's. I got her from the Columbia Humane Society shelter in Missouri when I was in my third year of grad school, at age 26, I think. I was ignorant about what kittens would grow up to be, so the shelter staff deliberately did not warn me that I was picking out a long haired cat. I would never have done that on purpose! I looked at all her litter mates, but the others were boys and had either blue eyes or one blue eye and one green, and I thought that meant they might be deaf... plus, I just have a hankering for female cats, even though on average, the female cats I've known have been less lapcatty and loving than the male. Pickier. More aloof. She was adorable, though, as shown below.She kept me company through my master's thesis and much bullshitting and beer drinking with fellow grad students, pictured below with my first personal computer, a Mac SE, I think.
And as a youngster in my next grad school apartment, after the excellent cheap house I rented with a friend. Man, I loved that place. The landlord offered to sell it to me for $39K in 1995. That would certainly have been a different life... Oh, well, it probably had a fucked foundation or something.
Then I moved back to Chicago after orals and worked at my old high school half time for a couple of years while finishing my dissertation research and deciding after a couple of interviews and being semi-sorta on the academic job market that what I really wanted to be was a fucking public school teacher, for political, union, and general fun reasons. (It is still true, that whatever gripes I have about teaching and the political pressures on it, it is still fun to create assignments and then to do models along with the students working on theirs, and I get to do art and write and draw and think, for pay... today, we did a Socratic Seminar based on Common's "Letter to the Free", reflecting on the NFL #takeaknee protests of last weekend, Charlottesville, and Black Lives Matter... it was the first Socratic Seminar of the year, and despite hiccups because these kids haven't done them before, it went okay... some interesting stuff. I like my students a lot.) And then I moved to Oakland. Here she is at age ten or so, deliberately in the middle of my Xmas wrapping, because that was always a good time for her. Ah, the joys of curling ribbon.
I still miss my girl. Devlin, my current girl, is a lovely, sweet, gentle cat with boundless affection despite having been a feral kitten. But Rilke was my first.