The Full Process (or How to Not Worry by Yeonni)

I don't worry. It has to do with a childhood belief that either things work out, or you give way and find a different place. It has to do with an adult faith that everything is connected and everything is as it should be, as it will be, as it has always been. I can frown and think and stare into the dark of night, but it's theoretical, logical. It's thinking, not worrying. Not when my brother crashed with the bike, not when my dad had a heart attack, not when we stood before the possibility of being tossed out of the place we lived in three weeks time. I get angry and scared and frustrated, but I don't worry.

But it's cold. He's a silly little ball of fur, kind of stupid, often very annoying, and I don't even love him that much. But now I feel it. It's like the hand of death gently resting on my stomach. I feel it, and I keep seeing the image of him curling up in the snow under the window just after I convinced him to go outside for a bit to get some air and exercise, and I keep thinking, how do you live with this? How do people who worry survive? Maybe I'm just sensitive because I'm not used to it. But how do people do this?

So.
Reality check. Worst case scenario: he's dead, and I'll never find the body. No, scratch that, worst case scenario: he's lying somewhere suffering for days and days before he dies, and I never find the body. But that makes no difference for me; I can't do anything about that. Boiled down, only four options exist (where "coming back" and "being found" are the same).

1. He comes back. 
2. He comes back wounded. 
3. He doesn't come back and I find the body. 
4. He doesn't come back and I don't find the body.

In a way, if I don't find a body I can imagine he's alive somewhere, but that's highly unrealistic, and I like knowing the truth more than having vain hopes, so they are ranked in that order. By likelihood of each outcome occurring  ranked by most likely first, I think they're somewhere like this:

1. He comes back. 
2. He doesn't come back and I don't find the body. 
3. He comes back wounded. 
4. He doesn't come back and I find the body.

So my most desired outcome is the most likely. Good. My least desired outcome is second. Okay.

Preparation. If he comes back he will be cold and hungry. Handled. Cat candy all stocked up. If he doesn't come back on his own I will have to try to find him, although it seems difficult. Go looking, put up pictures, post through social media. Not only to find him, but also to be able to say, if things go badly, that I did everything I could.

I was not wrong to let him out. I was wrong to not check on the window more frequently, but I must forgive myself that because it wasn't that cold, and as far as I could tell from the tracks in the snow he hadn't been back to the window anyway.

Possibilities for why he hasn't come back to the window are essentially far too many to handle. But for example:

• Plausible reasons: He may have walked in somewhere and been locked in. He may have been in a fight and/or ran off somewhere.
• Less plausible reasons: He may have wandered into the road and been ran over. He may have gotten stuck somewhere in the snow or woods.
• Implausible but possible reasons: He may have been kidnapped. He may have been scraped up by a snow clearing machine and buried in snow. He may have crawled into a car that drove off with him.
• Ridiculous reasons that for some reason insist on popping up in my head: He's hit his head and forgotten the way home. He's fallen in love with some other human. He's pissed and punishing me for tossing him out.

None of this prepares me emotionally for losing my friend and life partner. Hm.

Preparation 2.0. I don't want to get another cat immediately. That's not only disrespectful, it would also be painful. Being alone is also painful. Hm.

Preparation 3.0. People in situations they cannot control do many things. Like pray. People who lose their friends talk to their gravestones, or their pictures. There are rituals and ceremonies involved in handling grief and loss. It's more difficult if there is no definitive end; sending well wishes to the life after death is kinda odd if you don't know if the person is actually dead. 

I don't believe in the life after. I do believe in some sort of "pool" that what we are go back to, like our bodies decompose into dirt and the air in our lungs return to the air outside. But that doesn't deal with the question of whether the person is dead or not either.

People who are not there cannot hear things you say. People are not emotionally connected just because they want to be. Genetically similar people can react similarly to things, and therefore predict how other genetically similar people might feel or act (like twins), but there aren't that many genetic similarities between Asian girls and male cats. Mothers do not know if their children are dead. Thinking so seems to help them emotionally, but I am not his mother.

Loki is a cat. He doesn't know that I love him. He knows here is food and warmth and friendly protective aliens. He will most likely try to come back, and he may miss me, but he will not blame me if I don't find him, because he doesn't know that I love him. Because cats don't know what love means. I don't know what love means either. 

Loki will not know the difference between if I worry about him or not, or whether I miss him when he is not here or not. I do these things only for myself. Missing someone strengthens your bond to them, and makes you appreciate them. Worrying... doesn't help at all.

Conclusion: Worrying will not help Loki, will not increase his chances, will not make him happy if he returns, will not make me better prepared to face the emotional pain from losing him, will not make either of us understand love any better, and will only be painful. Except for looking for him, the only way to get to any of the options stated above is time passing. Passing that time in suffering changes absolutely nothing.

Preparation 4.0 Final. I'm going to watch some videos and play NDS-games in Korean (that I barely understand 1% of) because it makes me happy and eat tasty food.

Thanks for listening. Bye.

From the Candy Snake

Every move you make
every little step
of your rituals
are like chocolate cake



for my soul, my heart,
like a burning flame
for a moth like me,
whispering the name



of your spirit core,
grand and beautiful,
of your time and love
I pray grant me more.



Don't want sugar cubes,
I'll eat you instead;
won't be satisfied
'til I'm in your head.



(Bet I creep you out
like a candy snake,
but you bear with me
as I flail about.)



Want to wear your skin
what's it like to be
perfect in yourself?
Here's a poem from me:



you're soft through and through,
you're like candy floss;
it can't be washed off.
P.S. I love you.

Crazy yelling Asian girls.

Mucking about on the computer on bed, with the window open so Loki can come and go as he wants. The way the window opens, you can't see my bed from outside, and I can't see out. So I hear the sound of Loki jumping into the windowsill, and the silhouette of his head looking inside. Odd, Loki usually jumps straight in.
"Oh hai," I say, sticking my head forward prepared to cuddle.
The cat turns and looks right at me, very calmly, and the light reflects in its eyes that way it does in cat eyes so they shine. And I realize, it's not Loki - in fact it's a cat identical to my grandmother's cat that died a few months back. With those demon eyes staring at me from about two decimeters away my brain goes "GHOST! INTRUDER! DANGER!", and I get a rush similar to if a stranger would stick their head into my room with a pocket knife.
"OUT!" I yell like a crazy woman at the poor cat, that looks at me with normal eyes now since it's turned away from the light. I fly out of bed, but neither the yelling nor the action fazes it. If it had eyebrows, one would slowly go up and the other down.
By now I've realized it's not a ghost, and it's not there to bite my face off because I took pictures of it a day before it died. Just a new cat I haven't seen around, that's oddly unafraid of crazy yelling Asian girls in nightgowns. So I stand in the middle of the room, and the cat sits on my windowsill, and we probably feel equally stupid.
It shouldn't sit there anyway, inside is Loki's territory that I should protect. So I shoo it a little. It looks gravely offended and turns around and leaves.

King of Games

The movie list will be around soon. I just had to make a small observation of life with Loki:

Cat + strong mint-smelling cooling paste = D: -> XP -> T.T
I put some on my foot (since I kicked a table, how intelligent and graceful) and now he's walking in big circles around me.  Also all the rain makes him really cuddly. Surprisingly, he's not too keen on going outside in the wet, and seems to think that sleeping on top of me at all times increases the chances of the rain stopping.

I'm playing Yu-Gi-Oh again! One of the older NDS versions. I have a feeling I will play it in periods forever :P It's so much fun! Card games are logic and crazy all in one neat organized package of total control over the lack of control xD. Probabilities, you see. Those gnarly bastards. What I like about it, is that there's cards for virtually anything, even ridiculously stupid things, so that you can build giant complex insane strategies that have a probability of one in a million to actually ever come into play, but it doesn't matter because you had so much fun coming up with it! And also you can just throw together a deck based on some basic principle, like, healing yourself, or tossing out the cards in your opponent's hand, and it usually works if you just want to play right now. Pokemon is fun but too simple to do those crazy fun things, and Magic: The Gathering never really hit the spot. My spot, I mean. Tapping things is for tap dancers anyway. Posh and poncy people*.

*opinions expressed in this post is in no way representative of the real life opinions towards tap dancers, by anyone, and particularly not me.

Melodies

Saw a black cat trotting along the road yesterday, carrying a... uh, [sork] so big that the tail was dragging on the ground, it was at least twice the size of the cat's head. Show off.

Listening to Korean radio through shoutcast.com. Partly because normal radio is boring, partly because I like music where I don't understand the words because then I don't get ticked off at stupid lyrics, and partly because listening to it passively teaches me the sounds and melodies of the language. It's also cool to have a normal music radio channel that plays *only* songs in the native language. How many Swedish-exclusive music channels are there? (Not that I'd listen to them.) I've listened to French radio before, but a lot of the music is the same as ours and in English. While it's cool to have like a "universal" language between European countries, I guess that native languages get sidelined. I'm usually not so opposed to that, but it's a tragedy when it comes to music, really. Every language is like it's own instrument. Ever listen to duets by people from Sweden/Norway/Denmark? Chorusing together but in their own language, it sounds awesome.

So if every language is it's own instrument, what instrument would that be? Like, Norwegian would be the ukulele to the Swedish guitar, Italian would be drums and Russian, I think, like one of those stringed square things that lie down and you can play chords on... not the Asian ones, darn it what are they called...

Cuddling with cat > [insert activity here]

Anyone can understand programming, just look at this:

public class Cat extends Pet {

public void getAttention(mistress) {

if(attention==false){
try{
sitOnKeyboard();
if(attention==true)
break;
pokeObject(breakable);
if(attention==true)
break;
chewOnCables();
if(attention==true)
break;
} catch (OverProvocationException op) {
runAwayHide();
}
}

}

public void main(String[] args) {
Cat.getAttention(me);
if(attention==true) {
purr();
}
}

}

Bloody Bird

The silliest things can trigger a big philosophical discussion inside confused heads like mine. I found a newborn baby bird on my balcony today, it must have fallen out of a nest somewhere and was lying there just breathing. Ugly as fuck, but the whole "it's a baby" instinct was triggered nonetheless and my first thought was to protect it from the cat and dog, and find it something to eat. Well, then I realized I can't bloody well raise a baby bird. Neither do I want to. So I was caught in no-man's-land between instincts, the other instinct being "get this crap off my property". Also, birds abandon their babies if they fall out of the nest, as far as I know. Then my roomie reminded me of something important, when I texted her the issue. It's a bird. A bloody 4AM tweeter. Beneath that innocent ugly exterior beats the evil little heart of a flappy crapper. I have at several occasions expressed that their only good trait is eating insects. There is only one type of bird I don't actively dislike, and that's because my shallowness happens to override my bird-dislike - I find it pretty:

The philosophical discussion was: compassion. Is it a trait of a superior race to express compassion towards  even a race we generally dislike? Are we compassionate towards other races because we can afford to be? If humanity as a race had to fight for survival, then would we show a great deal less compassion for species that could be a threat to us? Compassion is somehow something we take very much for granted. Is it a part of being human? Or a part of being Universally Good? Can we really expect that if we'd encounter extraterrestial beings, that they'd have the same traits as we do? That they'd give a damned? Well... it's when I hit aliens that I decided to leave the discussion.

The turnout was that I, after much battling with myself, reached the conclusion that I can't express disapproval of birds and then not kill a baby bird for the single reason that it's a baby. That'd make me a hypocrite. Was it an adult bird I wouldn't think twice. Also I believe my cat is my partner and not my captive and slave and want him to live according to his feline instincts as far as possible - we should both compromise to coexist. So. I opened the door for the cat, with a sense of satisfaction with my conclusions.

Loki promptly picked up the bird and ran in and put it under my chair. No! That's one compromise I will not make! Out!

Kittyproof!

Most of my friends don't have pets, but those who have might recognize the situation of returning to your computer to find your darling cat have posted "+666" on facebook, or watching a VLC movie when cat pushes a few keyboard commands and speeds the sound up by 200%. Easy enough fixes, but also annoying, and windows has no built-in keyboard lock. So, I found a tiny program to do it for me, it's called Kid-Key-Lock. Workes very well with Launchy, and it's free. With a alt+space, k and enter my keyboard and mouse are locked, and with a password sequence of keys that you can choose - in this case the perpetrator's name (that's the cat) - it is unlocked. You can choose to let it display the password while locked if you're just trying to block small children and pets, or if you have extremely bad short term memory.

There is also a shareware version called Pro-Key-Lock where you can customize exactly which keys and combinations of both keyboard and mouse to lock. Probably useful for someone.

Static Electricity Cat meets Harley the Circling Dog

And so there was dog. Cat and dog seems to get along rather well. Cat is immensely, painfully, undeniably curious. If there wasn't for that pesky instinct that says that living creatures six times your own size should be held at sensible distance, cat would be prodding dog's stomach by now, sitting on top of it. But there is that instinct, and so there's a lot of bipolar hissing-followed-by-sneaking-closer going on. Dog is fascinating, but also clearly a latent psychopath, acting nice but possibly waiting to chomp cat's head off. Dog, meanwhile, is mostly confused. Dog tries to stay out of cat's way because obviously the hissing, clawed thing has mental issues, but doesn't have all that much space to maneuver. Bone is a lot better, dog thinks. Bones are simple. Chew.

I'm Batman!

Suggestions for caption for this picture?

 

 (I stole it from a video here.)

  

Poison

So a bit of googling and calculating brings me this result; if my cat of 3kg did any of these:

• ate 220g milk chocolate (as a reference, one bar is usually around 200g)
• drank 12 cans of normal coke (or 8 half-liter bottles, or 2 big 2-liter bottles) 
• drank one 50ml cup of Starbucks coffee (pure, not some latte shit) 
• ate 28g of dark, unsweetened baking chocolate

he would most likely die. I strongly, very strongly, doubt he could fit 4l of coke, or 220g choclate, in his tiny stomach, or that he'd venture to drink strong, black coffee, but the baking chocolate could be a possible scenario I guess. Also he would get kinda sick before it got lethal. This is in one quick dose, but that doesn't mean it's fully safe eating smaller amounts. If it's done often it can also be dangerous since cats take up things again automatically from their own urine and so the poison could stay for a long time in their bodies and build up.

(As a side note, poisonous doses are almost always based on weight, and that's the case in this case. So dogs would have to eat a whole lot more to get sick. An adult, average German shepherd weighs about 11-13 times as much as my cat; that's 11-13 bars of chocolate. I don't know if they do the whole taking up nutrients from their own urine thing, because if they don't the poison also leaves their bodies faster.)

I also found out that the reason cats hate, and I mean *hate*, the smell of citrus fruits is because eating them makes them vomit.  They'd have to eat a damned lot of citrus fruit for it to get dangerous, and most likely they'd have thrown up long before that. Unfortunately for them they can't smell the poison (it's not just the caffeine) in coffee, tea or chocolate, that's actually more dangerous, and they don't always vomit it up if they eat enough to get seriously sick either.

So keep the baking chocolate away from the cat, or the cat away from the chocolate. Considering the nature of cats, I strongly suspect the first is easier.