What’s this? A deep, eloquent message about the value of patience? Well… no, not exactly. More cat photos! And yes, I know I posted some of those last week, but these were taken around the same time as the last two from that post, and I really don’t want to hold off on the cuteness of Diane being unbelievably patient with Zuko. You’ll see what I mean.
Do I have the energy to write a real post this week? …no. Is anyone complaining? It means you get more cat photos, so I sincerely doubt it.
When you have four cats, successfully keeping track of all of them can be… challenging. So this is just a quick chronicle of my such efforts after I woke up on Friday. Yes, I’m just making up an excuse to post more cat photos. Are you really going to complain?
Starting space: bedroom. Hey, look! Arwen’s here!
That’s 1! I wonder where the other cats are…
Second stop, the kitchen, to find food, because it’s not like Cat 1 is moving anywhere anytime soon. Might as well pop my head into the living room; see if anyone’s there.
2, 3, 4! I guess counting is easier during nap time, huh?
As a bonus, here’s a picture from the next day of all four together:
Pretty much what it says on the label. The sky is beautiful, I’ve spent an excessive amount of time staring at it lately, I took some pictures, here are the highlights.
This is sort of a random mini-rant, but it was amusing (befuddling) enough to be worth sharing, so… on with the post!
I tried blue cream soda last week. And it was pretty good! But I have a few questions. Primarily, how can a soda have “natural and artificial flavors” when the flavor is “blue?”
I mean, at least now I understand what Percy Jackson meant about blue food now — this tastes like regular cream soda, just bluer. “What does ‘bluer’ taste like?” you wonder. I’m sorry to say I really have no idea how to explain that, or even how it’s tasteable, but apparently blue is both a color and a flavor, and I think that’s hilarious.
The mysteries of soda flavoring…
This year has been a lot. Pandemic, protests, election… and it’s not over. There’s still battles to be fought. There probably always will be, to be honest.
Just remember: you can’t fight if you don’t take care of yourself, first. So give yourself permission to breathe, to take a moment and rest so you can keep carrying the banner. Whether that fight is politics, finances, family or your job… breathe.
(Note: I definitely didn’t take this picture, but I have no clue who did. Credit to… Pinterest, I guess.)
Anyone who saw the title of this post and went “she’s posting more cat pictures, isn’t she?” go ahead and give yourselves a round of applause. It’s the beginning of NaNo and I have an essay I need to finish before starting on that, so, yeah. Cats. Relaxing a whole lot more than I am.
Sometimes getting up in the mornings is hard when there’s a cat leaning on me, but they’ll accept replacement pillows.
And sometimes, getting up is really hard.
So we’ve Mom’s been sorting through the bookshelves in the guest bedroom, deciding on what we should get rid of (yes, gasp, I know, but we need shelf space for more books!), and for a period of time all those chosen had been relocated to the living room. This was the result. (Note: the cat is not going anywhere. Ever. He just likes getting in the way and being too cute to remove.)
No matter where you go in the world, there’s a local mythology, and in each of these mythologies, you’ll find a creation story. Why? Well, to put it succinctly, they’re an attempt to rationalize the world around us.
Humans have a natural curiosity — that’s why we have science and exploration. Of course, there was a time when those weren’t as advanced as they are today, but the yearning to understand was always there. These stories are so abundant because though mankind wasn’t there to witness when many parts of our world came to be, we knew they couldn’t always have been. To explain these, we speculated.
While tales of creation vary from culture to culture, there are certain constants: earth, water, and humans, as key parts of every civilization, as well as the frequent use of a higher power to explain how these were formed. In a time predating the science to formulate theories like the Big Bang, it’s unsurprising that the general consensus was, “Humans couldn’t possibly have done this, so there must be something bigger.”
There are other themes in common, as well. For example, take the Iroquois, Hebrew, and Norse creation myths (“The World On The Turtle’s Back,” “Yahweh,” and “Odin and Ymir,” respectively). All of these stories set up a dichotomy, not necessarily between good and evil, but between opposing entities. “The World on the Turtle’s Back” is a conflict between two brothers, Othagwenda and Djuskaha; the Hebrew tale is about the humans disobeying Yahweh’s command not to eat from the tree of knowledge of good and evil; and “Odin and Ymir” is primarily centered on the gods defeating an evil frost giant. This is likely because mankind cannot conceive a world or time bereft of conflict, and therefore it features in our attempts at explaining the world around us.
There are many differences between the creation stories. According to Iroquois legend, a vast body of water existed before land, and a woman fell from heaven. In “Yahweh,” land came before sea, and humans were fashioned from earth. “Odin and Ymir,” in complete contrast to the other two, suggests that neither earth nor sea existed at first, but after the other realms came to be and Ymir was slain, his body was used to create the earth, his blood the sea, and his skull the sky, and the gods later formed humans from logs.
Despite this, there are, as I’ve suggested before, many common themes, due to the universal truths of our world and of human existence. It is, after all, because of curiosity, one of these human truths, that these stories were written in the first place, and continue to be told. For the people of the past, these stories were products of their yearning to understand the world. Now, they’re shared because of our yearning to understand those who came before.
Usually, I try not to do multiple weeks of cat photos in a row. That said, this week has been havoc, so… cats.
Most impressively, the rare non-food-related instance that June was close to Zuko without growling!
