I think my cat is dying and I'm losing my mind

I've been grieving for my cat for six weeks now. She's alive, but we don't know what her future looks like. Every 8 hours I put drops in her right eye. It looks unchanged (except for that one day I was convinced it was clearing up), a puddle of dried blood clouding her iris. I worry that she's not eating enough, I check her litter obsessively. She's clearly depressed, adjusting to limited vision, and she's wasting away. Most days I cry, away from my daughter, away from my cat, because I need to stay positive for them. I've always cried to Rosie about everything. But not this. It's exhausting.

We'd been to emergency (that day I came home and she was yowling), and we follow up with a regular vet within the week. Did the emergency clinic give us a prognosis, he asks. You understand? They'd told us she was old. It's probably chronic kidney disease. It's probably a heart condition. It's probably a tumour that burst into her eye, she's probably riddled with cancer. But nothing definite. She's old. (She's only 14.)

We agree to do bloodwork to give us an indication of Rosie's overall health. It comes back mostly normal. Strange, he says. Nothing a little dietary adjustment couldn't improve. Still, he tells us to give her all our love and prepare for the worst. (He also tells us about the best Polish restaurant in Mexico City.)

A couple of weeks later, I call about a prescription refill. I send photos so the vet can better gauge the progress of Rosie's condition. He calls while I'm sitting with my mother in the ER, who's suffering a bout of UTI delirium. Her appetite is good, regular bowel movements, sleeping a bit more. (My mother interrupts to say she's not sleeping at all. Not you, mom; the cat.) Strange, he says. Normally, he sees a cat in this condition, it's dead in three, maybe five days.

Twice there have been issues with prescription refills. As if there's a note on her file: Don't bother, expected to die. (I think there may be a similar note on my mother's file.)

Every morning when I wake my first thought is of her. If I sense her in my bed, I reach out to check that she's breathing, and I pet her till the purr comes. Those mornings she's not in my bed, I panic. Has she slunk off to die? I'm crying again.

I am more distraught, or so I tell myself, at the prospect of losing my cat than of losing my mother. It occurs to me that I'm channeling all the stress of recent months (ailing mother, job change, general dissatisfaction) into my worry for Rosie. I'm depressed like I don't think I ever have been. I'm crying again.

I've been reading You Are a Cat!, a pick-a-plot book. In one thread, feline protagonist Holden visits a bookstore, whose previous denizen, Rosie, died. I'm crying again.

We're to see a veterinary ophthalmologist Friday. For two weeks I've considered calling, wavering between begging them to move up the appointment because she might die before then, and putting off the appointment for another week or two to relieve us all of the stress because she might die before then. Certainly, I can't face hearing a medical professional tell us that it's time. 

If she dies in her sleep, I'll bury her under the lilac tree outside my bedroom window, maybe plant a rose for her. I'm crying again. I don't know if this is legal. I ponder how I'll execute this plan without attracting the neighbours' attention.

Something's got to give. My mom's ok, she turns 91 this weekend. The houseplants are still ok. The outdoor garden boxes are beyond all hope. (What god can keep everything alive?)

Update (24.07.29): The ophthalmologist confirms that vision in Rosie's right eye is gone. But the anti-hypertensive medication is working. Rosie's not dying, she's been through a lot and she's tired; she'll be fine. And I'm crying again.

Life was work and also a performance

I perform in art time and in real time, and you can't tell the difference — no one knows how to separate a real act from an art act in my work. 

— Tehching Hsieh

Memory Piece, by Lisa Ko, covers the past, present, and future, with each major section focusing on one of a trio of lifelong friends: respectively, Giselle, the performance artist; Jackie, the techy; and Ellen, the activist. They met as teenagers, bonded over a barbecue.

Giselle's life starts to come into focus for her when she hears about a performance piece that can only be Tehching Hsieh's Rope Piece (for which I will be forever grateful this book introduced me to).

She could not make her mother happy yet felt responsible for her mother's unhappiness. Her coping mechanism was to treat everything like it was a situation, but her performance self and real self had become indistinguishable. Work was a performance; life was work and also a performance. It wasn't that she needed to wait for the perfect idea or invent something new. Instead, she recognized how she could shape her life into the performance itself.

(Perhaps I should treat my life this way: perform as an employee, perform as a writer, perform as a doting daughter, etc. to the best of my ability. Fake it till I make it.)

This is the most interesting section of the book for me — its exploration of art, time, labour, intention, context, posterity.

After months of writing her memories, Giselle had begun to see everything she did as future memory. The mundane could be fabulous; everything became expansive. This made her more daring, because when you saw life through the lens of potential nostalgia, even difficult events could carry the smallest element of fondness for having survived them.

(I think we do this every time we snap a photo.)

In the spirit of archiving the everyday, Jackie pioneers some blog software, but grapples with data management and the battle between democratization and turning a profit. When the dot-com bubble bursts, some of her moral grappling is alleviated. 

But. The novel as a whole doesn't really work for me. It's giving writer workshop. A couple linguistic anachronisms jarred me out of the story (young women were not calling each other "dude" in the early 1990s; similarly "vibe" and "hook up"  appear with clear 2020s usages). It describes the old women of 2040 as if they were the old women of yesteryear. 

Most significantly, I don't understand how we get to that future from here. It's a housing crisis taken to the extreme, compounded by constant surveillance and border checks. Despite the known evils of gentrification, real-estate speculation, property-flipping and vacation rentals, construction industry and municipal corruption, and plain old greed, it doesn't feel right for Ellen's story as a squatter fighting eviction to end up as it does. (At some point I figured that Y2K had transpired as the apocalyptic event some feared it would be. Except even in the novel's reality we know it didn't.) And I'm a little disappointed that aspects of Ellen's alternative living — community building, recycling and waste management, dumpster diving, rooftop-gardening — weren't more fleshed out. 

But, admirably, this novel shows how three women manage to sidestep capitalism. A little.

Giselle said she had stopped identifying as an artist, but she still worked. Art work is work, it's labor. So is working in a café. It's all the same thing.

Something is lost here

But something is lost here. While filmed sex seemingly opens up a world of sexual possibility, all too often it shuts down the sexual imagination, making it weak, dependent, lazy, codified. The sexual imagination is transformed into a mimesis-machine, incapable of generating its own novelty. In Intercourse (1987) Andrea Dworkin warned of just this:

Imagination is not a synonym for sexual fantasy, which in only — pathetically — a programmed tape loop repeating repeating in the narcoleptic mind. Imagination finds new meanings, new forms; complex and empathetic values and acts. The person with imagination is pushed forward by it into a world of possibility and risk, a distinct world of meaning and choice; not into a nearly bare junkyard of symbols manipulated to evoke rote responses.

If sex education sought to endow young people not just with better "rote responses" but with an emboldened sexual imagination — the capacity to bring forth "new meanings, new forms" — it would have to be, I think, a kind of negative education. It wouldn't assert its authority to tell the truth about sex, but rather remind young people that the authority on what sex is, and could become, lies with them. Sex can, if they choose, remain as generations before them have choses: violent, selfish and unequal. Or sex can — if they choose — be something more joyful, more equal, freer. 

— from "Talking to My Students about Porn," in The Right to Sex, by Amia Srinivasan.

(What would it be like to discover sex with a wholly open mind, with child-like innocence, without media influence? Instead, we live in a world where porn is now if not ubiquitous then very readily acquired. Granted, my generation sneaked peeks at girly magazines stashed in their dads' garages and  videos pilfered from adult-only backrooms. Sometimes I think I would've benefited from an education of this sort, beyond the romance and passion modeled for me by mainstream film and television. But it's all so performative, so results-oriented; and even when it's different, it's same same.)

The essays in The Right to Sex cover #MeToo, incels, porn, sex positivity, race, TERFs, sex work, carceralism. Clearly, sex is political. Mostly accessibly written, veering slightly into the overly academic, many of the issues described here are at the heart of today's feminist thinking. Endless questions raised, no clear answers offered. 

Desire can take us by surprise, leading us somewhere we hadn't imagined we would ever go, or towards someone we never thought we would lust after, or love. In the very best cases, the cases that perhaps ground our best hope, desire can cut against what politics has chosen for us, and choose for itself.

Essays
Does anyone have the right to sex?"  
Who lost the sex wars? 

Reviews
Is a new book feminism’s next new wave or yesterday’s backlash?  
Who Gets to Be Desirable?  
Questioning Desire 

I didn't know what I wanted

The Art of Vanishing, by Lynne Kutsukake, transported me across time, space, and culture. Set in the 1970s (odd to call it a historical novel when it describes events within my lifetime), it has a peculiar quality of feeling true to its time — that is, I felt like I was discovering a decades-old novel inspired by real-life events, not reading recent release fiction.

My parents didn't know anything about university. My father hadn't even gone to high school — he'd had to start working right after his father died of a heart attack. More and more young people were going to college, though, and my mother wanted for me what other parents did for their children. Yet because it was a foreign world — a world she and my father were afraid of — they could offer no advice or direct encouragement. As a result, they could only give me mixed messages that reflected the confusion and insecurity they themselves felt. It's good to go to university, but university is only for rich people; you deserve the same opportunities as everyone else, but home is best and there are lots of jobs you could do with a high school diploma; and so on, back a forth.

I didn't know what I wanted, either. I was a mediocre student, the kind who was too conscientious not to do my homework but not smart enough to get good marks despite my efforts. I never failed but I never excelled. 

Akemi leaves home to study medical illustration in Tokyo. At the girls' boarding house where her lodging was arranged, she quickly becomes enamored of its most elusive (and somewhat disreputable) resident, Sayoko, an art student from a wealthy family.

Akemi struggles to assert her independence from her family, to see some of the world beyond her small village and study with the aim of establishing a career. Sayoko on the other hand is used to having her wishes granted, sees no need for school, and aspires to a wholly bohemian lifestyle.

We witness Sayoko bossing Akemi around and taking her friendship for granted, but Akemi is too fascinated to be able to extricate herself. 

Things turn strange when Sayoko meets an older couple. They are "artists" who stage happenings; they stay in Sayoko's apartment, and for a while it seems their lives are an endless orgy of alcohol and cigarettes, possibly sex, and just a soupçon of art. And then they're gone.

When Sayoko resurfaces and invites Akemi to one of their happenings in the wilderness, we see that the couple's charisma has cult-like proportions and things may not end well.

This novel is essentially Akemi's coming-of-age story, focusing on the nature of the girls' friendship, and its transience. But with a firm grounding in 1970s Japanese counterculture, it also explores the nature of art (and its transience) and what it is to live an artist lifestyle. 

Excerpt.
Interview, with excerpt.