Cats - Mammals of the Feline Persuasion

Cats

I have a cat. Her name is Pepper. She is somewhat of a malcontent. She doesn't eat the cat food we leave out for her anymore. We can only presume that she has found another source of nourishment. j

I quite like cats. Fluffy and all.

Apparantly, declawing cats is a thing. Taking their claws out via surgery. The human equivalent would be chopping off the last joint of all your fingers and toes. And then walking around on them. 
There is another option. You can get these little rubber things and put them on your cat's claws so they won't scratch up your couch or whatever. Makes it look like you've painted their little claws.

...

Cats is a terrible theme.

Cats. That's a musical, right? Yeah...

C A T S  ~  You can make SAT and AT and AS and SAC and CAT and CAST and A

Catdog. That's a super hilarious cartoon about a double ended animal. One end is a cat and the other is a dog. Kate laughed so much when she saw it first that it looked like she was aphysiating. It's pretty funny but not death-worthy. Would recommend.
Horrible Quality Episode of Catdog

Right. Well. Cats.

Yeah. I'm done.

- Orla

Back to School - A Three Stage Process

There are generally three stages to my back to school experience:

1. Idealism
2. Loathing
3. Realism

Idealism is the stage immediately before school starts that continues for the first week or so (it's over for me now). The end of the first weekend usually brings it to a close. This stage is characterised by ambitious goals and resolutions, general optimism and a miss-placed belief that "School isn't so Bad". It is. School is Bad.

Loathing is where I crash too after the high of idealism. The realities of school hit me, perhaps a little too hard and I gain a deep seated belief that "I hate School". Interestingly enough, my standard of work never really drops perceptibly between these stages, which may tell you something about where my motivation comes from. This stage is characterised by complaints and bad-humour, general despair and a miss-placed belief that "School is Bad from Top to Bottom, Devoid of Good." It isn't. It had good points.

Realism is the stage I have not yet reached this year, the stage I spend most of most school years in (4th year was a bad year. I reverted back to Loathing pretty quickly and stayed there. Not fun). In this stage, I am aware of the good and bad points of school and am able to look at them more or less objectively and reach a conclusion that "School is Manageable". Which it is. This stage is characterised by complaints and realistic goals, a level enough mind-set and the realistic (I think) belief that "School is Manageable" and it's going to be fine.

Anyway, on a less joke-y note, (WARNING: this gets kind of dark and serious) the thing that's worrying me most about this year isn't the school work. I generally find that easy enough, if time consuming. It isn't the people. I've got enough friends to be able to not care about everyone else. It isn't the exams. I find those easy too, and they're ages away.
No. What's worrying me is myself. I used to have a whole awful lot of faith in myself and in my ability to deal with the everyday grind of life, and school, and silly teachers and homework and all the rest. Sure, why wouldn't I? I'm a Good Student. I get good grades. Of course I can manage everything about school. All the time.
Then 4th year happened. And shit hit the fan. And all sorts of Not Fun things were going on and I couldn't deal.
And how I'm worried. It worries me every morning.
You can miss days and miss work and space out in class in TY and no one really notices or cares, especially if you're a Good Student who can bluff pretty well. But not in 5th year. If I miss a day this year, I'm going to know all about it. Not just from my parents, but it'd be a lot of work catching up. I can't afford to let it happen again.
But knowing what I know, I know it's not a choice. People don't choose to quietly fall apart inside their heads, completely ignorant of how to put themselves back together. That's not a choice. And I don't know what choices would lead to that happening again.
So here I am, trying to avoid something bad happening. But I don't know what causes it, except in broad strokes. And I sure as hell don't know how to avoid it happening again.
It's like living your life bare-foot. Having a bare-foot mind. You have to step carefully and slowly all the time in case you step on something sharp and awful and Not Good. I have to step carefully in my mind when I'm trying to get something done. I have to think about it enough that it'll get done, but not so much that it'll stress me about and make me feel sick and won't get done.
It's a tricky business. 

So, yeah, school. I'm really hoping this year is going to be okay. I'm hoping Loathing won't last too long, because I'm not sure I'll be able to stick it for much longer.

Role Models and Apologies

As I'm sure everyone present is aware, I have committed a heinous crime. I have failed to produce a post at the allotted time and for this I will have to pay the price.

I'd like to say I have as good a reason as Aoife (who maybe sorts kinda didn't deserve a punishment...?), but I don't. I just forgot. I was so happy thinking about meeting some friends of mine today that I forgot all about it. It's not like I didn't have it planned in my head or anything. Terrible business.

So anyway, my apologies to all our myriad fans, and mine in particular, who were doubtless distraught when my post failed to appear yesterday. I will try, in repentance, to make this a particularly good one.

Role Models

I don't think I've ever been terribly into role models. I've had rivalry with my sister. I've had ambition. I've wanted to achieve something because I saw someone do it and wanted to do it too. But for most of my life, I don't think I've ever looked at someone and thought "I want to be like them," not even in a small way. For most of my fairly short life people have told me I'm just grand the way I am and it's only recently, I think, that I've started to see my shortcomings clearly.

For starters, I am not a very nice person. Many people would tell you that it's not very important to be nice. I don't mean I'm not generous or giving or selfless, I like to think I can be all of those at times, I mean I am not nice. It does not come easily to me. People exasperate me, even when I feel sympathy for them, even when I am helping them at cost to myself. I am particularly unkind to my friends.
In niceness, I have a role model. My mother. She is unfailingly nice. She is a pleasant person almost all the time. Only once or twice have I seen her be anything less that extremely nice, the most recent of which was when she was gearing up for working four night shifts in a row (which she hates because she never sleeps) and she was taking me to buy school books and I made a weary sigh. She told me in no uncertain terms to cop on to myself, and she was right. She is a nurse. She spends every day helping people and enjoys it.
She is a better person than me and I try to be more like her in this regard.

I worry too much. I stress about little things, and it's not good.
In this, I have a wonderful role model. My brother is spectacularly laid back. When I say he's my role model in laid-backety, I don't mean to say I'd like to be exactly like him, more that I'd like to be more like him.  I don't think his degree of laid-backety is completely wise or helpful. Still, a bit more would probably be good for me.

I'm not sure either of these are strictly role models though.

I think, perhaps, that the idea of role models appeals particularly to children. A person to look up to, a goal to be reached, someone to whom you do not currently stand up.

Little snot that I was, full of my own importance and ability, I don't think that idea ever appealed to me particularly. I was too sure of my own worth and abilities.
And now, now that I can see my flaws, I don't think I need the goal of another person to know how I want to improve myself. I feel like the window of role models has passed for me.

By this I don't mean to say any of the other girls are childish. I think what they're talking about is an admiration for a person and a trait that that person has, but maybe not, strictly, role models in the sense I am thinking of them.

Role models have never really been a thing for me, and it doesn't look like they ever will be.

Yours in apology,
                           Orla.

What is a Bad Book?

Okay, I have a number of things to address.

1. In answer the the question Danielle was actually asking:
I'm not sure about Dear Beatrice? I think I agree with Kate, I like Dear Bitches better, but I think I like our present name better than both of them. As for The Fellowship of the Blog, it's pretty okay. I think we should stick with Cool People of Every and Any Nationality unless something cooler and more relevant to us specifically comes to mind.


2. Apparently we're responding to each other's posts now? Well, I sure got the short straw didn't I?
     Subsection A: I agree with Kate largely on the subject of romance, though, I'll admit, sometimes I just   
                           want to read a stupid teenage romance, regardless of literary value. I haven't read The
                           Time Traveller's Wife, so I can't really give an opinion on that.
     Subsection B: Dude, Kate, Divergent isn't that bad. I didn't find it overly predictable either. Maybe your
                           illness temporarily granted you super-human powers of deduction? To be honest though, I
                           mostly enjoyed the world-building in it, not so much the characters or story. Maybe I'm
                           of a DM than an author.

3. The main part, Bad Books.

Now, aspiring author and rampant reader that I am, the idea of a book that is "bad" is sort of unpleasant. I've actually had a discussion on this subject. If books are art, and art is subjective, is there such a thing as a "bad book"? Surely the goodness and badness of books is just as subjective as the goodness and badness of paintings and music?

Well, I'm not sure I can subscribe to the completely-subjective-art way of thinking about books. There is such a thing as bad writing, definitely.

Anyway, I'm going to talk about the decline of a series of books that I enjoyed when I was younger.
Artemis Fowl.

The premise of the Artemis Fowl books was, I think, really good. The idea of the child genius and the fairies and all. It was good. And the story was good. Artemis had something concrete he wanted to achieve and you followed him on that journey. But in the latter books that premise and that concise story structure sort of disappeared. Suddenly Artemis and co. were saving the world all over the shop and he had much less defined motivations.
That's not the worst of it though. Eoin Colfer became awfully fond of his deus ex machina (for those who don't know: god from the machine, or basically just any improbable plot point where a problem is solved by a previously unknown device, character, mechanism or skill).
In the earlier books the magic had very defined parameters and didn't go outside them. In the last book there's suddenly Black Magic. Woooooh, scary. Now Eoin can do whatever the hell he wants and just say, cuz Black Magic.
And that, boys and girls, is bad writing.
You can use basically any means to get your character into a tricky spot and your readers won't mind, chance, incompetence, the efforts of other characters, whatever, but as soon as you use anything other than the character's own skill or intelligence to get out of the situation, your readers will be annoyed.

In answer to the question posed on Danielle Tuesday, I think I could commit to something for seventy-four years. It's easy to get into the habit of things, I think. Some things sort of become part of the fabric of your life after a while, and then it's easy to continue them.
I have a penpal, and, no kidding, I could write letters to that guy for seventy-four years. 'Bout 90% sure he has no way of finding this.

Alright. Weird happenings.
I was going to talk about this story I read on the interwebs about a family who just went missing. Poof. They found their car with new toys in it. No one in sight, and no evidence for where they might have gone.
But, internet citizens that you are, I'm sure that you can all find plenty of strange and inexplicable occurrences if that's what you're into. So, instead, I'm going to discuss some celestial oddities I've seen with my own eyes.

I'm no UFO fanatic, lets just make that clear, I'm quite sure there's a reasonable explanation, but what made this fun to see was that I didn't know what that reasonable explanation was. And neither did any one I was with either.

I spent the last week in the back arse of nowhere, which made for some enjoyable stargazing. You could see the Milky Way right across the sky, and when you can see it like that, it's easy to understand why people thought it was a river in the sky.

One night, my sister and I were lying on a lounger outside the little farmhouse we were staying in and we were looking at the stars. We saw plenty of shooting stars streaking across the night, gone almost before you realised they were there. We saw the few constellations that we can recognise between us, Orion, the Plough, The Little Bear. We saw planes, strangely ostentatious as they flashed brightly. We saw satellites moving slowly from horizon to horizon.

And that's where the strangeness happened. For those of you who have never stargazed, a satellite looks largely like just another star, except that it moves. It's an disconcerting sensation to look up into the sky and see to almost identical specks of light, separated only by the fact that one moves and the other doesn't, when you know the vast differences between the realities of what causes those lights. One, a man-made machine of metal orbiting a couple of thousand meters above my head, reflecting the suns light into my eyes, the other a huge ball of reacting gasses light years away producing inconceivable amounts of light and heat, only a tiny amount of which is reaching me.

It was in this rarefied frame of mind that we noticed what we had presumed was a satellite. It had been maybe a little brighter than your average star when we first spotted it. It wasn't very long before we realised that it's brightness wasn't constant. One minute it would be quite bright and very visible, the next it would fade until we could barely see it. We were perplexed. We had never seen anything like it.

Perhaps it was a satellite and was rotating in such a way that it was reflecting an inconsistent amount of light.
Perhaps small wisps of cloud were veiling it from our sight.
Perhaps it was a plane with un-regulation lights on it.

And...perhaps it was something stranger still.

- Orla

Paranoidly Posted

Greetings intrepid readers,

My name is Orla and I will be the narrator of Sundays. Sundays are good because I'll have the whole week to worry about how my post is terrible compared to everyone else's!

I write poetry and I just finished a three week writing course, so now I have some ridiculously high standards. There were some very talented prose writers in that class.

I am fifteen, so I'll probably be the youngest contributor to this collab blog. People tell me I come across older than that, most likely due to a reasonable vocabulary and general sensibleness. I am generally not silly about important things. Projects, however, are the bane of my life.

I like to write. I write poetry mostly but I have a couple of short stories in my head and, as they say, everyone has a novel in them. My poetry is apparently quite dark. It just seems honest to me, mostly. I guess I could be accurately described as an angsty teenage poet.

I also like to read. I don't read exclusively in one genre, but I do tend to read a lot of fantasy, and, more specifically, a lot of high fantasy. I'm sort-of-not-really reading James Joyce's Ulysses at the moment. It's...an experience.

I am currently teaching myself Chinese. 我 不 是 很 好

I like music a lot, but, unusually, I'm very easy going about what kind of music I listen to. I can enjoy basically any music a lot.

I play video games. Not too much at the moment because I am inexplicably busy. I find that I don't have enough time for them even though I don't have a lot of other things going on. It's the summer holidays goddammit, when am I going to have time?

I have a horrible habit of over-thinking things, which I am doing right now. It usually takes me a while to get to the stage in a friendship where I'm not analysing everything I say. And everything they say. And general body language. And all sorts of other completely irrelevant information.
Making new friends is a tiring experience.

Hopefully it won't take me too long to get comfortable writing this blog.

- Orla