Little Kitty 1995 - 2009

Little Kitty's real name was Shiyung. I'm not sure she knew that. I named her after one of the three sisters of the ruling Orsinate in Aestival Tide, which is Elizabeth Hand's sort of sequel to Winterlong. It's out of print, and it is fucked up.

Anyway, Little wasn't very good at being a cat. She played fetch when she was younger and liked to stand in the shower with me and never learned how to meow properly, making a sort of one syllable grunting noise that usually meant "I'm really enjoying biting this roll of duct tape/box of tampons/book."

I got her 14 years ago to the day. She and her sister-cat (who is not her sister), who had just had their shots and were sleepy and pissed. Little immediately became "the cat" while Pretty Kitty became "the other cat" mainly because Pretty hid all the time.

Some of you first met her at a New Year's party I had a few days later. If you were there, you'll remember that some drunk idiot tried to steal her.

Little was there for the aftermath of Greg, for Michael (whom she was excessively fond of and whose voice she still could recognize on the phone last time I spoke to him in her presence, years after she'd last seen him), and for all sorts of other crap too.

She was there when I was rich, when I was poor, when I had an abortion and when I worked in the sex industry. She was there for the dot.com bullshit, for dreams of Baz Luhrmann (when I went to Australia, my roommate would email to say "the cats think I have eaten you"), and for a stupid fire below our Avenue C apartment where she got drunk on the smoke and staggered around for a few hours after. "Don't worry," the firefighters said, "cats'll survive anything."

And she did. She always had weird medical problems the cause of which was never found. There was the uterine infection and the liver thing (prior to this liver thing just now). She puked a lot. She was messy. Her fur was so thick it turned into little clumps that I swear she should shoot off her body at people at will. She had such massive whiskers I always thought she looked like a sea-creature.

She adored Patty, and drove us crazy in the process, always worming her massive bulk between us on the couch, or trying to by standing on our ovaries first or something. Patty was amazing with her, and I'd laugh and laugh at grooming hilarity, when Patty would use the cat rake on her and the clouds of hair would spin around her like some sort of horrible cat-induced Wizard of Oz thing.

Whenever I was sick, you know, which is often, Little always tried to help by standing on my stomach; my celiac disease does not thank her. When I was sad or scared, I would nap with my head on Little's giant belly. She'd usually let me do it for twenty to thirty minutes at a time.

She was an awesome cat, even if she was stupid (and inventively so), grouchy and too fat to effectively clean herself. She owned every house she was ever in, and loved every person I ever had, just, it seems, on my say so. She was enthusiastic and smug.

She loved broccoli.

Like, a lot. I remember once letting her eat some when Kali was over, and I'll never understand how a cat managed to eat plain broccoli one minute and vomit up acres of cream sauce the next, but Megan was there too and we all saw it happen. It was the most disgusting thing ever and we were all laughing so hard.

Patty and I talk about how Little thunders across the plains of our apartment. Really. She galumphed, and sat on this scratcher we got her which we called her double-wide. If this cat had been human it would have loved Southern food and Elvis, which isn't all that much different from what she did as a cat.

Little could have told you my whole life story. What I look like in the mornings and all the people I ever pretended to be -- it's more than you know. She can't, and I'm sad, and I miss her, but man... dodged that bullet, yeah?

They loved her at the vet, and everyone was crying with me. They were rooting for her and thought she was hilarious.

This is about all I can do right now. I'm leaving comments on but am not having them emailed to me, because I'm not sure to what degree I can process your sympathy.

She was the best of beasties, and if kitty heaven lives up to cliches as advertised, she was so huge they may be having trouble keeping the thing airborne right now.

sundries

Thank you for all your condolences and such about Little. If I look at them, I cry (and thanks for that Ianto-icon double whammy, you lot! Oi! I sorta dug it though). My ability to function comes and goes, this post is an attempt to talk about something else, BUT you really have to skim through the comments as a few HILARIOUS stories from people who knew her have appeared. Please keep kitty condolences in that post, as I'd like to keep all that together for later both because I can't cope well now and because it's a nice record. People LOVED Little Kitty, and it's awesome to see it.

Coming Out in Ireland: "... such tales may be old hat for audiences in New York, but they are still new in Ireland. These scenes, based on the true stories of older Irish men willing to flout tradition by frankly discussing their homosexuality, form the spine of “Silver Stars,” produced by Dublin company Brokentalkers."

NYC'ers try to figure out why they can't get iPhones.

In part because of a discussion going on in another post of mine that I don't (understandably, I think) have the bandwidth for right now, I want to state the following: What turns you on is what turns you on. I'm not interested in vetting what gets people wet/hard/hot on a political (or maybe even any other) basis. How people enact those desires, that can be a very reasonable subject of scrutiny, but here's the thing, lots of what turns my crank is at least potentially politically problematic by the measure of more than a few people (BDSM, my uniformed fetish, my gender identity stuff which can be assumed to be about trying to obtain male privilege (it isn't, although I'm interested in the ramificiations of that) etc). I'm not interested in justifying what gets me hot. I'm also not particularly interested in justifying how I interact with and express what gets me hot, but I will agree that is a reasonable topic of discussion and on days with more bandwidth will probably engage you on it. But what fascinates us sexually is so complicated and mysterious and strange and many-sourced that I'm off-put by the vetting of desire. Examining how we interact with each other, obviously, always relevant. That might me less clear than I mean it to be, considering.

More from the department of non-squicky RPF: [Date redacted], from the Secret Diary of Tim Gunn. Patty found this. It is hilarious and pretty solidly in the commentary/criticism department. I will be saying "Los Angeles continues to not be New York" for a long time.

New hair. New glasses. Patty's clothes:

It's the dinolove graphic I stole from About.com. It makes me smile. So there you go.

Also, old icon that happens to be accidentally relevant since we are ALL the Master right now. (Doctor Who reference for those who don't know).

Where have the sea lions gone? Did anyone ask the bees?