Can I borrow your cat?

No, this is not a joke.  I wish it was. 

A co-worker asked if he can borrow one of my cats for 2 weeks.  Why? He wants his kids to play with the cats. I suggest he takes his kids to the SPCA for a few Sundays, to volunteer & expose them to the pets there.  His answer was “no way! My kids are not scooping poop! If your cat comes home with me, my maid can do that. But I only want kitten ok?”

Well then Mister, good luck in your search for a rental kitten then.

I was playing this scenario in my head over & over again over the weekend.  It is precisely because of irresponsible parents like him, too stupid to impart real values of life to their children, that our society is the way it is – ungracious, impatient, intolerant & callous regard for lives they consider lesser than theirs! 

Our Minister Mentor calls this the ‘golden era’.  Golden era my foot! More like that the stupid generations I say.

Be a better person

We all know that people miraculously fall asleep or concentrate very hard on their newspapers in the train when a pregnant woman, an old folk & someone with toddler walks in.

Yesterday, my encounter takes the cake. 

A very pregnant woman walked in.  A young man was seated next to the door.  He looked at her but didn’t do anything (he was ‘sleeping’ or reading. Eyes wide open, looked at her).  I asked the woman if she would like to sit.  She just smiled.  So, I asked the young man, if he would be kind enough to give up his seat to the woman.  He looked at me, squarely in the eye, and said “Why should I?”  I was flabbergasted.  A lady seated next to the young man, looked up from her newspaper, quickly stood up to offer her seat.  He sat through the journey, nonchalant of his ungracious behaviour. I was sooo tempted to kick those useless balls of his.

C’mon man, that pregnant woman is someone’s wife, mother, sister, daughter!  Will it kill him to stand the rest of the way? Be a man, be a better person!

“Pro-377A”

From Molly Meek

 http://pro377a.livejournal.com/

 

“I love that supple neck of yours.  I could nibble all night.” “Right back at ya darling”

s377A

 I don’t get it.  Why is it CRIMINAL when 2 consenting adult men have sex and it is LEGAL when it involves a consenting adult man & woman?

 Mommy was telling Aunty Irene that anti-gay Christians are fighting against the repeal & organising some walk.  I don’t know much about these Christians’ mumbo-jumbo but I do know what it is like to be discriminated,  to made a criminal just because someone thinks I should be one & not because I did something wrong. 

I know because I am a cat.  I live illegally in a HDB flat since I was a kitten just because some idiots think I am noisy & dirty, therefore must be banned in the HDB.  The reality is, I am quieter and cleaner than the dogs that live legally there.  Illogical isn’t it? Boo! is what I say to these idiots.

And stray cats are killed everyday in Singapore (using taxpayers’ money) because the same idiots say they are dirty & noisy. Now THAT is abomination!

Comment from Beauty’s mommy: Beauty has never been to church so she doesn’t know you-know-who & his son.  But she is an intelligent cat, she can discern what is right & what is plain bigotory.  Beauty supports the repeal.

Jesus Camp – The Docu-Movie

Camp Jesus is a summer camp.  But unlike typical summer camps where American kids play & have fun, in Camp Jesus children were preached to. 

Children as young as five crying, looking for salvation (at 5?!?!?), worshipping to a Bush cut-out, wielding plastic weapons, enacting war against the Muslims.  That IS disturbing.

Camp Jesus is run by Pastor Becky Fischer whose Christian stand is a straight up “either you are with us or against us.”  It is clear that her agenda is – indoctrinate these children to become the warriors in the name Christ, to fight and die for Christianity.  Her excuse – because the Muslims doing the same.

Read more about Camp Jesus on Yawning Bread.

Note: Camp Jesus will screened exclusively in GV Vivocity starting 23 August 2007.  It has been rated M18 without cuts.

“An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.” Mahatma Gandhi.

City of Possibilities or Fluff City

Now here’s an article you will never find in any Singapore papers.

http://theonlinecitizen.com/2007/08/12/city-of-possibilities-or-fluff-city/#more-435

Promise I won’t throw the cat out on the streets

I approached this acquaintance on the situation of her cat.

The cat still hasn’t had any vet visits yet. And she told me she will be moving out of the current flat in April & her new flatmate is not a cat-friendly person. And the flat has too many expensive designerish furniture so it would not be suitable for her to take the cat.

For the other 2 flatmates – one is moving back to where she came from & the other is moving to LA. So where does that leave the cat? The consensus among the three is none is able to take the cat with them and none has managed to work out a solution on what to do with the cat.

She wants to talk to her circle of friends who have cats but she hasn’t run that by her flatmates. One of her flatmates jokingly suggested leaving the cat in the hawker centre so that it won’t starve. I told her my concern is more than just where the cat finds its next meal.

I offered to take over the cat. I will arrange the vet visits, a shelter & eventually find a suitable home for the cat. However, they will relinquish all rights to the cat (I think that is hardly an issue to them). She said she will discuss with her flatmates & let me know the outcome.
Whatever it is, she promised me that they will leave the cat out on the street.

Knowing her, I won’t hear from her for at least another month or so.

This is a rant.

I don’t understand. I don’t understand how Singaporeans with all our affluence and education, are intolerant, inconsiderate and treats life ‘below us’ so flippantly, so disposable.

I am upset that people thinks that as long as a living being ceased to be of benefit to the society, it is alright to kill them off, as long as it is done humanely. First of all, to deliberately cause death to another being just because it serves no purpose is NOT humane no matter what method is employed. Second of all, what values are we teaching our young? That is alright to humanely ‘off’ us when we are old, useless and a burden???

I hope 30 years on, I won’t become another death statistic just because I am old and useless to society. Not that younger Singaporean will care then.

I am upset that we think we can treat our domestic helpers and foreign workers with snobbery. They are looked down upon, shouted at, invisible to us all when all this time we know jolly well we can’t live without them. Not that we care. They are disposable items in our books.

But don’t forget, our grandparents and great grandparents were once the Amahs, Ahmads, coolies. They used to do backbreaking work under the hot sun. Just because we are privileged now, doesn’t mean we should forget where we came from. Where is our humility?

The debate on the HDB’s ban on cats goes to show how intolerant Singaporeans can be. So dogs bark and cats caterwaul. Humans are guilty of bigger crimes. We litter, scream, shout, laugh, sing, play out loud without consideration for our neighbours. But we generally tolerate these nonsense. Why? Is it because we are humans and therefore our lives are valuable and important and animals’ are not? Or is it because animals are smaller & therefore we can speak against them but humans are bigger & therefore to save ourselves from a whallop we swallow the inconvenience in silence?

Just because we have a bigger brain doesn’t make us better. Animals live on this planet longer than we have. And I bet they will be around after we humanely kill each other off.

I question our education. I bet most of us don’t even understand the purpose of education. You may disagree with me but the way I see it, education is not about scoring good grades and making into the university and getting a well paid job. Education is about developing yourself, your mind and your character, to become a better person to serve the society.

A society with intelligent people but without kindness and compassion is not well served.

Yes, I am in bad mood. I’m sick & miserable right now. And I am probably not making any sense here. Hell.

Inspiring

From Sports Illustrated, by Rick Reilly

I try to be a good father. But compared with Dick Hoyt, I suck.

85 times he’s pushed his disabled son, Rick, 26.2 miles in Marathons. Eight times he’s not only pushed him 26.2 miles in a wheelchair but also towed him 2.4 miles in a dinghy while swimming and pedaled him 112 miles in a seat on the handlebars–all in the same day.

Dick’s also pulled him cross-country skiing, taken him on his back mountain climbing and once hauled him across the US on a bike. Makes taking your son bowling look a little lame, right?

And what has Rick done for his father? Not much – except save his life.

This love story began in Winchester, Mass., 43 years ago, when Rick was strangled by the umbilical cord during birth, leaving him brain-damaged and unable to control his limbs.

“He’ll be a vegetable the rest of his life”, Dick says doctors told him and his wife, Judy, when Rick was nine months old. “Put him in an Institution.”

But the Hoyts weren’t buying it. They noticed the way Rick’s eyes followed them around the room. When Rick was 11 they took him to the Engineering Department at Tufts University and asked if there was anything to help the boy communicate.

“No way”, Dick says he was told. “There’s nothing going on in his brain.”

“Tell him a joke”, Dick countered. They did. Rick laughed. Turns out a lot was going on in his brain.

Rigged up with a computer that allowed him to control the cursor by touching a switch with the side of his head, Rick was finally able to communicate. First words? “Go Bruins!”

And after a high school classmate was paralyzed in an accident and the school organized a charity run for him, Rick pecked out, “Dad, I want to do that.”

Yeah, right. How was Dick, a self-described “porker” who never ran more than a mile at a time, going to push his son five miles? Still, he tried. “Then it was me who was handicapped,” Dick says. “I was sore for two weeks.”

That day changed Rick’s life. “Dad,” he typed, “when we were running, it felt like I wasn’t disabled anymore!” And that sentence changed Dick’s life. He became obsessed with giving Rick that feeling as often as he could. He got into such hard-belly shape that he and Rick were ready to try the 1979 Boston Marathon.

“No way,” Dick was told by a race official. The Hoyts weren’t quite a single runner, and they weren’t quite a wheelchair competitor. For a few Years Dick and Rick just joined the massive field and ran anyway. Then they found a way to get into the race officially:

In 1983 they ran another Marathon so fast they made the qualifying time for Boston the following year. Then somebody said, “Hey, Dick, why not a triathlon?”

How’s a guy who never learned to swim and hadn’t ridden a bike since he was six going to haul his 110-pound kid through a triathlon? Still, Dick tried. Now they’ve done 212 triathlons, including four grueling 15-hour Ironmans in Hawaii. It must be a buzzkill to be a 25-year-old stud getting passed by an old guy towing a grown man in a dinghy, don’t you think?

Hey, Dick, why not see how you’d do on your own? “No way,” he says. Dick does it purely for “the awesome feeling” he gets seeing Rick with a cantaloupe smile as they run, swim and ride together.

This year, at ages 65 and 43, Dick and Rick finished their 24th Boston Marathon, in 5,083rd place out of more than 20,000 starters. Their best time?: Two hours, 40 minutes in 1992 – only 35 minutes off the world record, which, in case you don’t keep track of these things, happens to be held by a guy who was not pushing another man in a wheelchair at the time.

“No question about it,” Rick types. “My Dad is the Father of the Century.” And Dick got something else out of all this too.

Two years ago he had a mild heart attack during a race. Doctors found that one of his arteries was 95% clogged. “If you hadn’t been in such great shape,” one doctor told him, “you probably would’ve died 15 years ago.” So, in a way, Dick and Rick saved each other’s life.

Rick, who has his own apartment (he gets home care) and works in Boston, and Dick, retired from the military and living in Holland, Mass., always find ways to be together. They give speeches around the country and compete in some backbreaking race every weekend, including this Father’s Day.

That night, Rick will buy his Dad dinner, but the thing he really wants to give him is a gift he can never buy.

“The thing I’d most like,” Rick types, “is that my dad sit in the chair and I push him once.”

Had another conversation with this acquaintance of mine about her kitten.

She insists that kitten is not really hers. It was her expat flatmate that took the kitten home & therefore the kitten should be the flatmate’s. She just happens to live there & therefore happens to play with it.

However, she does sometimes buy the cat food because the ‘owner’ is a scattered brain. Just the other day, she was telling me they fed the cat bread because they ran out of catfood. I ended giving her the reserve I had stashed for Peanut & Sesame & some cans of tuna (originally meant for Tua Tao).

I asked her again, have they or has she plan for the future of the kitten? Still not vaccinated nor sterilised. No cat food in the flat. This arrangement is unacceptable. I told her if she is unable to care for the kitten, please bring it to my office. One more cat here is not going to be big difference to us.