I would like to talk a bit about the phenomenon of being actively uninterested in something. I brought this up once on Twitter, but I did it sweepingly, scornfully, winefully, and “right after a bunch of people I knew had declared active uninterest in something,” which is the award-winningly cheeseheaded way to bring things up. This has left me sheepish about bringing it up again—but the thing is, it’s something I DO want to discuss, not something I want to scornfully dismiss in a Twitter post while a bit fruited.

So FIRST, a better description of what it is I want to discuss. It’s when there’s a major event people are interested in, and other people are volunteering that they find it boring and stupid. I’ll start with the example that makes me wince when I remember my own demonstration of this very behavior: there will be a major sporting event on the horizon, and people will be talking about it and Twittering about it and Facebooking about it and posting pictures of themselves in shirts and facepaint, and OTHER people will start mentioning that they themselves find the whole thing ridiculous and lame and they “don’t even know who’s playing.” (*RETRO WINCE*)

Or there will be an awards show coming up, and people will be discussing nominees and hoping certain ones do/don’t win and making plans for awards-watching parties, and OTHER people will volunteer that they think it’s stupid and lame and they don’t even know what kind of award show it is or who is nominated.

Or there will a celebrity wedding planned, and people will be talking about dresses and ceremonies and whether they might get up early to watch it on television, and other people will tell the air that they think it’s the stupidest thing to be interested about, ever, in the history of time.

I have been thinking this over, wondering specifically about MOTIVATION for such remarks. Certainly I can see that if someone were asked “Who do you like in the game?” or “Who do you think will win for Best Actress?,” someone could say politely, and with a trace of embarrassment at being asked about a topic they don’t know anything about, “Oh…I don’t really follow…those. Who do YOU think?” But the phenomenon I’m talking about here is VOLUNTEERING the information, unasked, announcement-style, often with a bit of an unpleasant tone.

The trouble with exploring this phenomenon further is that, as I’ve mentioned, I’ve done this volunteering-of-info myself. (I hope not recently—but it can feel so different in the volunteering-the-info position, I think it’s actually possible to not notice oneself doing it.) So because I’ve done it myself, I’m motivated to find a gentle spin for this behavior, but I can only think of one: that the excited discussion about something one doesn’t care about can make one feel left out. I’ve had the experience of kind of WANTING to be excited about something so I can participate in the excitement—but I’m just NOT. Declaring that NOT-ness to be the case can be a combination of (1) acting like one doesn’t MIND being left out, certainly NOT, absolutely FINE with sitting over here by myself, and (2) hoping to find others who were also quietly feeling left out, who will now speak up with relief that they’re not the only ones. (Although in that latter case, that’s kind of an icky club to start: The Cutting Down Other People’s Interests Club. I definitely see the appeal of such a club, and have belonged to many, but it doesn’t help with the charitable spin I’m looking for here.)

But that’s the best I can do, spin-wise, and it’s not a justification that works to mollify the people who are excited about something. If you haven’t had that experience, try this: Think of something you’re passionate about. Get it firmly in your mind: is it an event? a hobby? a book or movie series? a cause? Imagine discussing it happily and excitedly with other people who are passionate about it. So much fun! So interesting! Then imagine someone coming over and volunteering, unasked, that what you’re excited about is of ZERO interest to THEM, and/or that they think it’s stupid and lame and a waste of time.

SUPER annoying and hurtful, right? Like someone throwing a bucket of cold water on everyone for no reason. So unnecessary! Why would someone do such a thing? Why not just go find a group of people talking about something they ARE interested in, instead of trying to STOP a conversation about something they’re NOT interested in? Plus, sometimes the person is advertising their own ignorance as if they’re proud of it (“I don’t even know who’s playing,” “I don’t even know who’s nominated,” “I don’t even know who he’s marrying”), which makes it even more annoying and dismissive.

Which leaves us with the question still: Why DO people ACTIVELY express non-interest? What IS the motivation? And more interestingly, to me: Considering that most of us have been on the receiving end of such volunteered non-interest and know how it feels—why do so many of us nevertheless do it ourselves when it’s something WE’RE not interested in? I just spent a whole post failing to find good spin, so if you’ve got some I’d love to hear it.

You know how you can keep criss-crossing with another shopper at the grocery store? I had an especially awkward one this morning, because she was also driving right behind me most of the way to the store, and we parked just a few spaces away from each other and then walked into the store in tandem, with little “Am I going in first or are you?” glances and hesitations, and THEN we kept criss-crossing.

We wisely stuck to wry little smiles until we were at the far end of the store and could dip into the stash of Awkward But Friendly Verbal Acknowledgements of the Situation. There aren’t many of those, so you don’t want to use them up in the first few aisles. First she brought out “We meet again!,” and then I used “It’s like synchronized swimming!,” and then she pulled into the checkout lane next to mine and remarked that it had taken us almost exactly the same amount of time to complete our shopping, and I agreed that it had.

But remember we were parked near each other in the parking lot. I was hoping my checkout lane would be faster, because my car was farther back. But no, she was first, so I had to walk past her to get to my car. I used “It was a tie!,” with a friendly little laugh—which was fine. I mean, she’s not going to tell the family about it at dinner tonight, but it wasn’t an embarrassment of a remark.

But I realized on the way home (with her car once again behind mine) that what I SHOULD have done was get a running start out of the store, and then fly the cart past her while yelling “RACE YOU HOME!!!”

When I wrote the post about the Stephen King and Ernest Cline books, I realized how unusual it is for me to read two books in a row by men. I DO read books by men, but I’ll bet it’s one book by a man for every ten to twenty by a woman—and most of the books by men are non-fiction. I identify so much more strongly with the female point of view, and sometimes I find the male point of view alienating and upsetting: I can end up feeling I was happier knowing LESS about how some of them see things. (WHAT IF THAT’S HOW PAUL SEES THINGS??)

It’s even more extreme with blogs. With a book, the story might be more the point than the author; but with a blog, it’s usually ALL person’s-eye-view. I’m trying to think if I read even one single blog written by a man, and I don’t think I do. (I do read two comic-strip blogs by men ((Bad Machinery and xkcd)), but that’s different.) It’s similar on Twitter, where I think I only follow one guy. Total. Everyone else is a girl, I’m pretty sure. It isn’t a policy: it’s that I check out a guy’s blog or Twitter stream, and it fails to appeal to me enough for me to subscribe to it.

I know that back in my Single Days it was considered awfully cool and sexy for a hetero girl to claim to get along better with guys than with girls. I believe I said it myself, probably repeatedly, probably while flipping my hair, probably while hanging around with a group of guys and avoiding the girls. And I MEANT it, too! But that was full-on flirting/seeking when I did it, because it turns out that if there’s no opportunity for a romantic relationship, I’d WAY rather talk to a woman. (If it’s about romance, then I’m really more of a GUY’S girl. You know, not like those OTHER girls.) And even when I was single, I didn’t read more books by men, and I don’t think I would have read more blogs by men or identified more with the male point of view.

But I know this is not the way things are for ALL woman. (Not everyone is exactly the same! I am a brilliant statistician and observer of human nature!) I know there are MANY women who read pretty much only books by men, or follow just as many male bloggers as female bloggers, or whatever. So here’s what I’m interested in knowing: Where are YOU on the spectrum? Are you in the market for a romantic relationship or not, and has that affected where you are on the spectrum? What proportion of the blogs you read are by women/men? What proportion of the Twitter accounts you follow are by women/men? What proportion of the books you read are by women/men (and are they woman’s/man’s-eye-view books, or more like non-fiction)?

I read two books recently: 11/22/63 (the new Stephen King) and Ready Player One (Ernest Cline).

The Stephen King one was exactly what I like to read from him: basic suspenseful-and-somewhat-supernatural storytelling, without the need to repeat nonsense words over and over in parentheses and/or italics to try to make them creepy. Or rather, only a LITTLE of that. (But I never did find “Jimla” a creepy word, despite his efforts. It felt to me as if he didn’t actually find it very creepy either, but was trying to.)

It’s a time-travel/do-over book, which I like. If someone described the plot to me, though, I’d feel a little pre-bored: someone goes back in time to stop Kennedy from being shot. The Kennedy assassination is a good event to try to stop because it’s so classic—but because it’s so classic, I’m already tired of thinking/talking/hearing about it. That faded quickly as I started reading, because the book isn’t really about the event he’s trying to stop, it’s about everything else involved in trying to live in a different time (he has to go back 5 years before the assassination), and it’s about the various issues involved in trying to change the past. There are only a couple of yucky/scary scenes, and they’re typical of a scary murder mystery or something (and you pretty much know how it’s going to go, so you can skim without missing important things), not the Horrible Horrifying Horror I might be already dreading when I start an S.K. book (not like I could complain if I found some, considering it is A STEPHEN KING BOOK).

As usual, it could have used someone to go in and take out two to three hundred pages, but it’s not as if my skimmers are broken. I did wonder why the narrator kept agitating about leaving Lee Harvey Oswald’s kids fatherless by killing him, since he knew Lee Harvey Oswald was going to get killed shortly afterward anyway. I objected to the love interest, a 6’2″, 150-pound charmingly klutzy blonde virgin with huge tracts of land, who loves! sex! that is, as soon as our narrator introduces her to it, and keeps referring to herself in the third person. I never felt as if she were real or as if I could see what was special about her other than her looks. I felt the same about the narrator, though: he seemed like an idealized version of the author a man: A writer! A master engaging teacher who really gets the students to CARE! Tall and slim and handsome and resourceful! Free of flaws! A good dancer, and attractive to busty blondes! So wow!

So. I liked it. I thought the ending was good and made sense. I even recommended the book to BOTH my parents, and I would never recommend “a Stephen King book” to them.

Ready Player One, on the other hand, I recommended to Paul, and to 7th-grade Rob. I think the only reason it’s not on the Young Adult shelf is that most of the references are to 1980s stuff. It’s for people who grew up in the ’80s—but it’s a young-adult fantasy (high school students are awesome! and smarter than adults! and fully able to take care of themselves! and they know what’s wrong with the world!) so I thought geek-in-training Rob would like it.

The plot is set in an impoverished future, when guys born in the 1970s are in their sixties and starting to die off. One of them is a Bill Gates / Steve Jobs type but way less socially functional, a multi-billionaire who dies leaving his entire estate to whoever finds an Easter egg (a little surprise hidden in the software) in his giant virtual world. The whole world looks for it, and five years later no one has even solved the first clue. We tune in just in time for a high school student to find the first one, and to watch him and his friends fight a huge band of grown-ups trying to cheat their way into finding it first.

I liked it fine, but I did a lot of skimming: if we’d been talking about Benetton Colors and slouch socks, it would have been more the ’80s I remembered; Atari games and D&D are not tune-in points for me. And the young adult shelf is not part of my usual prowl, so I was rolling my eyes at the dialogue. But I still thought it was pretty good, and I think it would be AMAZING for someone who got the video game / D&D stuff, and/or for anyone who likes young adult dystopian fiction.

Yesterday I had William work on his disastrous room for awhile. It’s a room he shares with Henry, but the mess was pretty much ALL HIS. I set what I considered reasonable goals: “I need to be able to walk to your bureau to put away your laundry, and I’d like to be able to walk to your closet to get out your next-size-up clothes.” I was so pleased with the results: he made a large difference, bringing his room from “It looks like people stood in the doorway and threw trash into this room” to “This is a messy child’s room.”

Then I emptied his trash can. There were BOOKS in there. COINS. Clothespins and combs and hangers and SOCKS. It was not QUITE that he just picked up everything indiscriminately and put it into the trash, but it was CLOSE to that.

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I had a dream the night before last that I had a romantic fling with a friend’s husband. This dream is sticking with me in two ways: (1) I feel stressed, as if I DID have a fling or had at least thought about one; (2) he seems cuter to me now.

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A month ago there was a fraudulent charge on our credit card, and the credit card company closed our account. It was a big mess: we had things set up to auto-pay, and we had things where we’d authorized a charge but the payment hadn’t been charged yet, and we had returns in the mail, and we had things we hadn’t even remembered were set up to automatically renew/charge, and so forth. We still don’t have it straightened out, since some of our auto-pay things (1) wouldn’t let us change the card but then (2) automatically took off the auto-pay when it hit a non-useable credit card number and (3) didn’t say so, so we got these “PAST DUE PLEASE PAY NOW OR ACTION WILL BE TAKEN” notices. Because when a card doesn’t work, it’s obvious that a customer who has paid early every month for ten years has turned to a life of crime.

Anyway.

This morning the credit card company called AGAIN, to say there’s been ANOTHER fraudulent charge and they were closing our account AGAIN. I started CRYING to the guy on the phone, because it’s just so DISCOURAGING and so FRUSTRATING. I asked whether there was any OTHER option—do we really have to do this AGAIN? Sorry, no other option. I asked how we could prevent this, and he said by only using the card with companies we trust. ORLY. Thanks for the HOT TIP. I’ll stop giving it to any old place that asks me for it, then! Well, but it wasn’t that bad: he did say it in the context of “That’s all I can say, because it’s not a question even I, a credit card fraud specialist, can answer.” He was sympathetic, but what I wanted was something more like “Here is the answer: don’t use it for Company X anymore, because they have a bad employee who’s stealing card numbers.”

Having cat-related death thoughts lingering at the top of the page makes it look as if that is still my current frame of mind, and partly it is, but it’s more that (1) I got the new Stephen King (11/22/63), and (2) Henry is sick with something that means he wants to sit on my lap and read books / play video games / talk about fighting imaginary monsters all day long, which is par for the course except that he’s too sick to go to preschool or my mom’s house so there goes the time I usually blog.

So. We all continue to be sad about Benchley, but some of the “I HAVE HAD A GLIMPSE THROUGH THE CRACKS OF THIS DAILY FACADE INTO THE UNFATHOMABLE DEPTHS BELOW” feeling has faded. Plus, we are coming up on Kitten Season, and we are planning to place a soft furry kitten bandage on the Benchley-death owie, so the anticipation of that is helping as well.

I am anticipating it with somewhat less joy than the children are, because in my experience kittens are darling little pains in the tail/pocketbook, and pre-trained/vaccinated/fixed adult cats are where it is. But the children have never had a kitten and will love everything I dislike (wild careening! skidding across countertops, knocking everything in their path to the floor! racing right up my standing body!), and the kitten will be a cat soon enough, and in the meantime I can enjoy the cuteness of a kitten as much as the next person, so it won’t be all bad.

Hm. It seems a little tactless to be talking about kittens so soon. Well, I don’t think I would be if it weren’t for how the idea of it seems to cheer the children, and also because of how lonely our other cat seems: she walks around, looks out the window, sits mopily in my lap, walks around a little more. She’s good with people, but she’s a cat’s cat and always preferred to hang out with Benchley. Without these factors, I think I would be more at the “Why bother to get a new pet, when it will ONLY DIE???” stage still.

I keep mentally composing more posts about Benchley’s sad end, but not wanting to seem as if I don’t have this in perspective. That is, I can think of many, many life circumstances I could have endured that would make me want to shake someone who was going on and on about a cat.

This, though, is the perfect place for the Hopkins couplet carefully learned in high school English class: “It is the blight man was born for, / It is Margaret you mourn for.” If you daydreamed about cute classmates through that class instead (and who could blame you with all the twisty poem phrasings to untwist), the poet is telling Margaret that when she’s sad about things dying/ending, what she’s actually sad about is her own eventual unavoidable death.

It’s not that the death of a cat is so extremely terrible on the spectrum of terrible things, it’s more that it can bring to the forefront of the mind all those things further up on the spectrum. So it’s that I’m sad because our cat died, but it’s also that I’m horrified to realize that DEATH IS REAL, IT ACTUALLY HAPPENS, IT WILL HAPPEN TO ALL OF US AND IT MIGHT NOT BE A PEACEFUL OLD-AGE DEATHBED SCENE EITHER BECAUSE TERRIBLE DEATHS HAPPEN ALL THE TIME. I know this already, but it sits on the surface of my mind like oil on the top of water: it’s RIGHT THERE, but it never sinks in.

It’s been large-application horrifying to realize how many death-related thoughts end in “Well, but at this point it’s irrelevant.” My worst fear is that Benchley was injured but not killed by the car, and then died because we didn’t find him in time—maybe after quite a long time of lying there suffering. It’s newly startling to me each time to work through that chain of upsetting thoughts and run right into “But at this point, it’s irrelevant. Either way, it’s over.”

It’s a comfort in some ways (he and others are not suffering NOW, even if he and they suffered THEN), but a horror in other ways: THERE IS NO GOING BACK, EVEN IF A DIFFERENT PATH WOULD HAVE COME OUT DIFFERENTLY. And this happens with so many things: every thought path where things could have gone a different way (if he’d happened to take a longer nap before going out, if the car had seen him in time, if the car had left one minute earlier or later that day, if we’d been on the scene when it happened, if our cat Feather could have communicated to us where he was) or where there is an objection to his death (but he was so young/healthy/strong, but he was so scared of the road and didn’t go near it, but it was so much more likely that he was just trapped somewhere, but I didn’t expect it, but it was just an ACCIDENT)—ALL of them end the same way, with irrelevance. It still did happen the way it did happen; he is still dead.

The way the body lingers awhile seems crazy. When we found Benchley, he looked like himself. There was his fur, still glossy and plush and familiar. There was his ear, still a thin triangle with a fluff of fur inside. There were his whiskers, still sticking straight out. There was his tail, fluffy as usual. It’s hard to accept it: we look at a body, and our eyes/brains are telling us two different things simultaneously: “There he is” and “No, he isn’t.” Instead the body should vanish, or turn instantly to dust like a staked vampire on Buffy. The slower route is horrifying and comforting, showing us that the same materials just cycle around endlessly, that nature is busy all the time taking care of it. But the sudden disintegration would make more sense.

While not wanting to reduce a pet’s existence to “being something that makes a person go ‘hmmm’,” I can see how one of the many good things about having pets (let’s save the many bad things, such as peeing on things and needing expensive medical care, for a less emotionally vulnerable time) is that they provide us with opportunities to get used to…well, to Margaret. Or to an important relative of Margaret’s. As a parent, I’ve been finding it tremendously helpful to have this chance to explain things I hadn’t realized the kids were wondering, or to correct things I hadn’t realized they’d thought. And to give them as gently and lightly as possible their first exposures to a message we all need to understand but that I don’t want to tell them: “This happens to everything. (This will happen to you.)“

I’m afraid we found Benchley’s body, in a large dense shrub in our yard. I’d looked there once already, but he’s only visible from one angle, and his fur is the same color as the brown leaves under there. We looked again this afternoon after seeing our other cat hanging around that area.

The most likely is that he was hit by a car, but we had trouble getting close enough to the body to see. I mean, we were able to confirm he was dead, but I think he’s been there since Monday/Tuesday so we didn’t want to…… Anyway.

We’re all sad, of course, but the children are resilient:

Me, weepily/carefully: “*sad news*”
Them: “*sad*…*pause*…Can we get a new cat?”

He was a very nice cat, so I’m sad—but more than that, I feel so grateful to KNOW.

It took awhile for us to realize our cat Benchley was missing: he’s indoor-outdoor (microchipped and collar-tagged), and in nicer weather he’s outdoors a LOT. He was originally a street cat the shelter felt could be domesticated, so we went into it knowing he was more wild than usual—but he’s adapted very nicely to home life. He jumps onto laps, he purrs and snuggles, he likes to be scritched, he likes having a food dish available.

He likes snuggling tum-up.

But now we haven’t seen him in at least two full days, and William says it’s two and a half: I’d been counting from the last time William saw him, which I’d thought he’d said was Tuesday morning, but William says it was Monday night. Benchley often goes out for a long time, but he always comes in to eat.

The first fear with an indoor-outdoor cat is that he’s been hit by a car, but Benchley gave me scars the one time I carried him in the direction of the road. Accepting the possibility of a car-hit is part of the complicated decision involved in choosing to let a cat go outside, but I think the statistical chance in this particular cat’s case is low: he had a childhood on the streets, as it were, and he continues to be extremely careful with roads.

The most likely with this particular cat, I think, is that he was being a Furry McNosyBritches and went into someone’s garage or shed, and has gotten closed in. We had a little problem with our neighbor back when we first got Benchley, because not only would he visit their yard, he would walk confidently right into their house and be difficult to remove. That issue was resolved with the consistent application of spritz bottles, but it doesn’t mean he hasn’t gone somewhere else. He’s also curious and brave and kind of dim, so he’s the sort of cat I can picture ending up in the inner workings of a wall or something.

My biggest fear is that he is somewhere we COULD have found/saved him, but that we won’t think of it until it’s too late. (Well, and after reading Marie’s neighbor story, I’m also worried about that.) I’m remembering when Paul and I first moved in to one of our apartments, and we couldn’t find one of our cats anywhere, and he turned out to be wedged in a corner behind the water heater, completely vertical and upside-down. I would have expected him to yowl or meow or make scrabbling sounds, but he hadn’t at all: when we found him, he was absolutely still and wide-eyed, and didn’t make a sound until I had to pull him out of there by his tail. (I called a vet first to ask for extraction advice, and that was what she recommended. It felt very Odd and Wrong to do it, and/but it totally worked.)

But I’m also remembering when our new kitten was missing, and I was repeatedly and senselessly searching the house and then agitating about it on Twitter, and someone said her new kitten was lost once and they found her in a drawer. And I called the kids, and we went around opening drawers, and THERE WAS THE KITTEN, IN A DRAWER. It was like MAGIC. So I’m hoping if you have a “We thought there was no point looking there, but THERE HE WAS!!” cat story, you’ll share it.

I would also welcome stories of cats turning up a week (or whatever) later.

I hated Elegies for the Brokenhearted immediately, on the very first page. So I can’t really explain why I persisted with it, since I don’t strongly enforce my “give it 30 pages before giving up” policy in such cases, but I DID persist, and soon loved it so much I was skipping computer time to read it, and snapping irritably at children who interrupted me, and thinking about the characters while making dinner.

(image from Amazon.com)

I can’t explain why it worked for me. It has so many things I dislike in a book, starting right away with being written in the second-person singular (“You were such-and-such,” “Your father was so-and-so,” etc.). The second major issue was that it was in the form of letters to people. (Though this is the very thing that helped with the first issue: I hate being told that _I_ did something I DIDN’T do—but clearly she was talking to someone else.) The third major issue was that the narrator was the dreamy drifter type, which I don’t usually find appealing. The fourth major issue was the prose style: two pages in, I said to myself snidely, “A hundred bucks says the word ‘lyrical’ will be used on the cover.” (I won that bet.) The fifth major issue was that it fed right into my mid-life crisis: “WE ALL LIVE MISERABLE POINTLESS SELF-DECEIVING LIVES, AND THEN WE DIEEEEEEEEEEE.”

Nevertheless, I loved it. LOVED IT. It took me more than a dozen pages to hit my stride with it, and with each new section (there are five sections, each addressed to a different person) it took a few pages again. The narrator is addressing each of five people in her life who have died; after the first one, I started putting my hand over the birth/death dates at the beginning of each section, because I didn’t want the clue of how old the person had been at death.

Normally I struggle with short stories because I get upset when they’re over (I like series best: MORE than a whole book, not LESS). This is sort of like short stories because it’s five separate “You”s she’s writing to, but it’s actually a novel: in the background of each person she’s writing to, she’s writing about how her own life went, and the stories start to tie together. I love stuff like that, where you gradually piece together a bunch of things. I was tempted to start again at the beginning, so that I could fit those earlier parts into the parts I’d patched together since then.

Our library system also has Hello, I Must Be Going by the same author, so I’ve put in a request for it. (That’s a test, for me, of a good book: do I immediately seek out other books by the same author? And in this case I’d barely closed the book before I was at my computer.) If I like that one too, I’ll probably order a copy of her third book (A Jeweler’s Eye for Flaw) and donate it.

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Speaking of donating, I have some ad revenue to spend, and I like the idea of using it to make you read something I liked. So I’ll buy a paperback copy of this book for one person who wants to try it. I always feel awkward about leaving a comment on a post when I wanted to comment on the content but I DON’T want to enter the giveaway, so let’s do it like this: I’ll choose one random winner from all comments that MENTION wanting to win a copy. I’ll pick someone on Friday the 23rd, probably in the morning sometime.

[Edit 03-23-2012: Winner is StephLove!]