Ukrainian Blue Friday Round-Up

Face it, you’re never going to wear that sweater. Or use that bag or read that book again (since you couldn’t finish it the first time). Don’t stand there lecturing yourself about how the sweater would look great with a brown turtleneck. It doesn’t. You’ve tried that. Clothing is where imagination and reality play chicken and reality always wins.

But keep keepsakes even if you’re the only person who can imagine why you’re keeping them. An old boyfriend made me a Bob Dylan mixtape which is, for some completely inexplicable reason, sitting on my desk at this moment. I haven’t played the tape in nearly forty years but it’s here, labeled with his curious left-handed printing and it just seems like a dear thing. So I keep it. Maybe I’ll put it in a drawer.

Today, a local nonprofit of some prominence announced that it was pausing its activities in order to figure out what to do next. This is so unusual and so mature. I’ve never heard of an organization admitting that they weren’t happy with what they were doing and needed to, essentially, ‘go out and come back in again.’ They might have thought that but not said it out loud. This whole new bit about transparency? I really like it.

We have determined that our foster cat is what is known as a Russian Blue. He is full gray with green eyes and fur that is short but double-layered, like a sled dog’s. You’ll see Ukrainians holding Russian Blues but now, gladly, they’ve changed their names to Ukrainian Blues. Hercules, that’s his name, is a very cordial and fearless cat, unafraid of big dogs, and mindful of his place. He’s going to move on at some point and I’m beginning to think we will miss him.

“It’s no skin off my nose” was an often-uttered phrase in my house growing up. That, along with “live and let live’ and ‘makes me no never mind’ formed the family’s social policy. So, I am baffled by people going out of their way to torment trans kids or their parents or essentially criminalize saying the word gay or making any kind of deal out of a person’s gender identity, like it’s anyone’s business except the person whose gender identity it is. All of this right wing mongering right now – it’s just a royal crock. It’d be easy to brush it off if it wasn’t actually intended to hurt real people just trying to live their lives.