On Eccentricity

You all have already met Kiwi. Now you see that she is really a very large cat, a breed indigenous to Kentucky. Well, actually, this breed is very rare, indigenous to our neighborhood, where it was developed by adding various big cat embryos to little cat embryos and stirring them all up together and then we added herbs and spices so the new breed would have a spicy personality. Kiwi hunts in the neighborhood, this is one problematic aspect of her being, because she can eat a dog as large as a labrador, and in fact she ate Rae's son's dog, we think.

On Eccentricity

Far from normal in a land called Nod
I often like the fact that I’m called odd.
But there are times I’d like to be Madonna
and you’ll have to label me a wanna be—
a million of us grow on palma trees.
sexy lingerie is how it’s gonna be.
But on the other hand I think I’ll just be me
and you can see just what you wanna see.
Don’t want a husband and a ranch house, no.
No kids two cats is how it’s gonna go.
I’ll pop Zyprexa till the cows come home
and make my underwear from Styrofoam,
drink black coffee like a lumberjack
and gobble tofu for my midnight snack.

I read a student's essay in the writing center today that was about "self-concept." The idea was that when we're children, we depend on others for our self-concept, but when we become adults we can figure it out for ourselves. We no longer need affirmation or definition and we don't compare ourselves to others. The student ended her paper by saying: when I was a child I depended on others, but now that I'm an adult I no longer do. It reminded me of the thing in the Bible about putting away childish things. But it didn't remind me of me. I mean, my self-concept is so weak that sometimes I think I have a shot at some kind of greatness. Sometimes I forget that I have learned--the hard way--that delusions of grandeur are to be distinguised from actual grandeur. So I almost have to learn the hard lesson all over again.

You think I'm joking but I'm actually not. I'm like Kiwi when it comes to delusions of grandeur. Let me burst everybody's bubble and say that Kiwi is actually quite a small cat. Maybe you guessed this. Maybe you realized that the young woman on the left is not actually a woman but only a photo of a woman. But Kiwi has all sorts of delusions of grandeur. She thinks she's big and bad enough to catch birds, and sometimes she believes it so hard that she catches birds. Last night she brought home a female cardinal, to our consternation. She brought home a male cardinal the first day of the National League playoffs last fall and I told my dad, the biggest St. Louis fan I know, and he thought it was a bad omen for the Cardinals. They did in fact lose badly.

Does Kiwi think she influences world events by catching certain birds??? Like Oskar the tin drummer in Gunter Grass's famous novel--Grass has Oskar essentially believe he's responsible for WWII, or something. And of course we meet Oskar in a psychiatric ward. Are we going to send Kiwi to a kitty psych ward, or the person who attributes human characteristics to Kiwi???

Now, you may wonder why the blogger is writing such weird stuff tonight. As if it's the first time this blogger has blogged like this. There may be an explanation. For lack of better, I will hazard a guess that this blogger has come to think it doesn't matter much what she blogs about.

---Harriet