Jinx is 21 years old. Melanie, his first owner, got him in 1993 and he came to live with Amy, Kitty Girl, and I in Oakland in 2006. When Amy and I parted ways and I moved to San Francisco I left Jinx and Kitty Girl with Amy. Every Friday, when I would go to my weekly therapy appointment, I would arrive to Oakland a couple hours early so I could hang out with the two of them at Amy's apartment, taking a nap on the couch while they slept on my legs and chest. When Amy moved in with Steven, I took the cats into the small apartment on Valencia that I shared with Chris. After a couple years I moved back to Oakland and took the cats with me to a large-for-a-studio apartment just west of downtown. The cats and I lived comfortably there for a year and then Quintin took the cats for the summer of 2012 while Dara and I were in New Mexico, and by August I had officially moved to Indiana to start the program here. The cats spent August and September at Amy and Steven's flat in San Francisco, and then in late September, with the help of Dara, Amy sent the cats via airplane, SFO-->Cleveland-->Indianapolis, and I picked up them up and drove them to my apartment in Lafayette. Kitty Girl died last September and since then Jinx and I have been living the life of bachelors. I never intended to have cats or be a cat person, but that is what has happened.

Jinx is 21 years old. He's skinny and kind of scraggly these days. He still yowls frequently, though not as habitually as he used to. He mostly spends the day sleeping and during the warmer months he settles onto the blanket on the porch. These days it's gotten cool in Indiana, and Jinx doesn't want to go outside. Some days he sleeps on the couch, and sometimes on my bed. Most mornings he gets on my bed around six and most mornings I'm happy to see him, and invite him to lay on a the pillow next to me. When I get up I floss and brush my teeth and he'll sit on the little blue rug in my bathroom or just outside the door and wait for me to finish. I'll watch him in the mirror sometimes and he's usually looking around at the things in the bathroom: the metal trashcan, the dripping toilet, the shower curtain. Rarely does he look up at me, or the parts of me that I think are important, like my eyes or my head. I feed him, and then either start making breakfast for myself or if there's time, do some sitting on the floor of my bedroom. Either way, he'll go back to my bed, climb up the little stair case that I made him, and lay in the imprint of where I was sleeping. It's not unusual to come home after work and school, eight or twelve hours later, and find him sleeping in the exact same spot I saw him last. "Hey buddy," I'll say, and sit down next to him, and kiss him on the top of his head and scratch his ear.

When people come over, on a random Tuesday night or sometime during the weekend, he'll usually be sleeping on the couch. They will sit down and pet him and say thinks like, "Jinx is such a sweet cat," or "You're so nice Jinx," but I know that Jinx used to be an asshole. Now in his old age, dependent on me to take care of him, unable to bully other cats and too rickety to jump and run and cause trouble like he used to do; no longer capable of being an alpha male with no more cats around to set his identity against, he lets himself be babied. Maybe this is what he always wanted but now that Kitty Girl isn't around, he does the things that she used to do. When it's cat food time he'll yowl. He never used to say anything or seem particularly interested in food. I can pick him up and sling him over my shoulder which he never used to let me do. And when I'm moving around the apartment, working some on the couch and then moving to the office, he'll follow and make a bed for himself close to wherever I am. None of these behaviors are unusual for a cats but they are unusual for Jinx. Thus he changes, like we all are capable of doing, based on what the situation dictates. Without Kitty Girl Jinx has become a sweet old cat. I was worried about how he would adapt to not having her in his life, after 20 some years, but he, above all else, is a strong and resilient creature. I am lucky to have him.

In the qualitative methods class I've been taking this semester I've done a couple observations on the #3 Lafayette CityBus, the one that stops directly in front of my apartment. After a good four weeks of reading about observation, some history of qualitative research, practicing observations on campus, and writing up these observations, I went and rode the 3 around in a loop, sat, took notes, and did my best to practice "low-inference" observational techniques, i.e. observing and describing and interpreting with as little judgment as possible. Instead of saying the little girl looked excited, a (not particularly skillful) low-inference observation would be something like: the little girl with long brown curly hair in the puffy blue jacket bounced up and down in her seat and smiled. Fiction writing teachers call it "showing, not telling", and when it comes to gathering material one can use for later analysis, the more in-the-moment assertions of value we can remove from our observations, the better. Of course we can't entirely remove the act of inference all together (for multiple logistical, linguistic, and philosophical reasons), so one does their best to minimize how much we bring into the act of observation. 

This pruning of judgment/opinion/preference reminds me of some of the directives that S.N. Goenka uses when discussing Vipassana mediation. That when practicing Viapassana, a kind of full body observation (Vipassana translates as "to see things as they really are") that amongst other things, one develops sensitivity to what's going on in the body on a moment-to-moment basis. Part of this practice is to regard sensations "equanimously," meaning that we can observe pain (such as sitting still for hours on end) as much as we can observe pleasure (such as eating a piece of cake), and that to observe them with equanimity is to learn how to react more evenly to the constant cravings and aversions our lives generally consist of. "Just observe" says Goenka. Of course this, like low-inference observation, is very difficult to practice with a monolithic consistency, and failure is frequent. Thus, part of the meditative practice is to not to dwell on these failures and start again.

Or even in terms of writing, one thing I do when I write is stay wary of language that contains unexamined judgments. This could be as simple as limiting the use of adjectives in the sense that most adjectives overtly assume some kind of intrinsic value (e.g. happy, sad, fluffy, red, green), or in the case of writing about people, avoiding attempts at describing the "inner" motivations of anyone, including myself. So as, descriptions of another person's behavior or what they said at a given time is fair game but what they might have been feeling or why they might have done something is not. Granted when I begin to talk about larger, faceless entities such as "the media," I get a little bit sloppier in my writing (since "nobody" will get upset) but generally I try to write within these constraints. I also have to remove the word "that" a lot from my writing but that's another problem.  But anyway, the basic directive is to try and describe what I know for certain, the "facts" of what happened, and avoid speculating on the unseen or unheard. This means my job as a writer is to observe and report rather than "creatively" write. Or as John Cage wrote,"Privilege of connecting two things remains privilege of each individual (e.g. I: thirsty: drink a glass of water); but this privilege isn't to be exercised publicly except in emergencies (there are no aesthetic emergencies)."

Bluebird

You can’t expect
the milk to be delivered
to your house
by a bluebird
from the picture book
you looked at
at the age of four:
he’s much older
now, can’t carry those
bottles ‘neath his wing,
can hardly even carry a tune
with his faded beak
that opens some nights
to leak out a cry
to the horrible god
that created him.

Don’t think I’m
the bluebird, or that
you are. Let him get
old on his own and
die like a real bluebird
that sat on a branch
in a book, turned his head
toward you, and radiated.
               
                    -Ron Padgett

A brief note on the protests in Hong Kong, a.k.a. Occupy Central; that late last week there were reports of counter protesters inciting violence and sowing confusion. Stories such as this one in the New York Times and this one in the LA Times were typical of the stories published by large media outlets on Thursday and Friday, the headline in the Times article reading: "Some Hong Kong Residents, Weary of Disruptions, Find Fault With Protesters’ Methods." To say nothing of their cause, the reports of violence initiated by other residents are revealed later in the articles to be suspected paid agitators. And so, when it comes to big, wide open protests such as the ones taking place in Hong Kong, it is remarkably easy for a few "bad apples" to break some noses or windows and give those who are watching events unfold reason to turn away. In my own experience during Occupy Oakland  this was indeed the case, as these instigators often got much of the media attention, or as they say, "if it bleeds, it ledes."

Civil disobedience is not a new tactic, and it has been used in the past to varying degrees of success i.e. the Civil Rights movement or India's independence from Britain. Sympathy for a cause, which in turn translates into policy, can be won when the cause is presented in a way that moves the public. In more recent history, Donald Sterling's sale of the Los Angeles Clippers and Ray Rice's banishment from pro-football are clear examples of how quickly things change when put under intense public scrutiny. That said, it's much easier to judge the rightness or wrongness of an event captured on video rather than the complexity of a massive political protest. My point in making this comparison is that the powers that be are well aware of how quickly opinions move and how easily these opinions can be swayed. Insert a few trouble makers and people quickly find a reason to no longer pay attention to this or that. More bluntly: it is much easier for federal, state, and local governments to encourage trouble, infiltrate movements, and destroy them from within than it is to negotiate.

Divide and conquer tactics like these were developed to topple enemy governments and are now being used domestically just as the weapons developed to fight terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan are ending up in the hands of local police forces (see Ferguson or the West Lafayette Police Department's armored troop carrier and its recently acquired collection of M16 rifles). The tear gas being shot at the protestors in Hong Kong is the same tear gas being used in Missouri and Oakland (Literally. Like, it's the same brand). And while I could dive further down the conspiracy theory rabbit hole, the reason I bring all this up is to underline the danger in believing the muddied truths of contemporary journalism, especially when it comes to representing the motives of those who don't have PR people to write their statements for them. Thus, I read the reports from Hong Kong that speak of confusion and a disagreement amongst protestors with a grain of salt, and I wonder what movements like these can do better to steel themselves against these inevitable divide and conquer tactics and the unsympathetic media coverage they will attract.

**

I could go on but I'll stop here. Chances are that if you agree with me you already did, if you don't then whatever I write is not going to change your mind, and if you have no idea what I'm talking about you already stopped reading by the middle of the second paragraph. Over the weekend I went down to Kentucky to visit my uncle who had major heart surgery a couple months ago. On the four+ hour drive there I was listening to the Daniel Kahneman book Thinking, fast and slow and he talked about the findings of a study in psychology that found that even if we know better, statistically or factually, we don't change our beliefs. But, the study found, we change our beliefs when we're genuinely surprised in a real life situation, such as when we see somebody do something totally "out of character," or at least, our idea of their character. But anyway, I digress. Have a lovely week,