Me and the Cat

I have adopted a cat.

Or I have been adopted by a cat.

Or, perhaps more likely, I have been suckered by a cat.

Kaylia has a cat. A rather elderly cat by the name of Missy-May. the cat had belonged to a former co-worker who had decided to remodel her home and wasn't interested in having the cat (whom she had had since the co-worker was in her early teens) around during the process. Kaylia, upon hearing that the cat was bound for the pound, offered to take care of her, and as such became the new care-taker of Missy May.

During this time, I was out working in Taft, so Missy-May provided some companionship for Kaylia, and the two became fairly tight.

The cat was not a fan of me, however. Whenever I was around, which was only for two-to-three day visits during the first couple of months that the cat lived with Kaylia, Kaylia's attention would be focused on me rather than the feline. Viewing me as an interloper, the cat was more than happy to make her displeasure with my presence known through showy displays of bodily excretions and the occasional use of claws.

For my part, I tolerated the cat. Kaylia liked her, so I would put up with her.

Then I came home to stay. The cat was just as thrilled as you would expect, and outbursts were the norm for the first few days, and then she seemed to accept that I wasn't going anywhere and that she'd have to live with me. The cats dislike for me was helpful in some ways - when she needed to be taken to the veternarian, I could put her in the travel cage without worrying about incurring her distrust, for example.

But she eventually got used to me, and after a while, it was common for the cat to jump onto my lap while I was sitting on the couch, or to climb onto me to sleep when I was in bed. For my part, I essentially tolerated her, I allowed her to sit where she pleased, and I would feed her when necessary, but I was also just as happy to be where she wasn't.

But in the last few weeks, things have begun to change.

A few weeks ago the cat stopped eating, and rapdily became disturbingly skinny. This followed several months in which she would, for no apparent reason, vomit up her food. We couldn't figure it out at first, until I found some wet cat food in a closet and gave that to her in place of the dry cat food that she had been eating. She had no problem launching directly into the wet food and no problem keeping it down, and so a trip to the store resulted in more being available.

She also has begun to show the signs of pain in her joints, and has begun having a hard time jumping to and from places that were once quite easy for her. And she clearly walks with a wobble that is not-quite-a-limp. Now it should be mentioned that she is 15 years old, quite old by cat standards. This is perfectly normal, and is probably arthritis setting in. Still, between the not eating and the wobble, it's hard not to feel some degree of compassion.

And so it is that I find myself driving home on my lunch breaks to make sure that she has food, I have a mental map to the nearest veternarian facility worked out, I have been the one to spearhead the project to keep her fed, I am the one who puts out a comfortable blanket and turns on the heater for her, and I find myself paying attention to see if she wants a lap to sit on and giving her a hand up.

Mind you, I still don't call her by her name. She is still simply "cat" to me. And whenever I speak about her with Kaylia, she is "your cat" not "our cat." I can still put up some token resistance.

Nonetheless, knowing that the cat is getting older, I find myself more and more concerned with making her as comfortable as possible and trying to help her improve her health in the hope that she might have a bit more time being relatively healthy and happy (or whatever the cat equivalent of happy is).

Good lord, I've become a sucker.

Do You Believe in Magic?

Have you ever had one of those over-bearing co-workers who was so absorbed by their need to be a unique little snow-flake that they would do anything and everything to draw attention to themselves and make themselves look special*?

Some years back, I worked in a store in Modesto, CA with a fellow, let's call him Skippy, who described himself as a witch**, complete, he claimed, with the ability to cast spells. Now, I have worked with people with a wide variety of religious beliefs, and I generally don't spend much time worrying about them. But this guy was obnoxious. If a customer was not in the store, he was doing something to draw attention to himself - singing, or telling stories, or exaggerating the closeness of his relationship to somebody by whom we were supposed to be impressed, or, as often as not, he was talking about his alleged ability to cast spells.

Being the sort of person that I am, I began asking questions that were reasonable, but seemed impertinent to Skippy. It started simply by asking him to describe a spell. Ready to impress me with his knowledge, he explained that he could cast a spell that would make someone itch.

"Really?" I asked, "how would you do that?"

"I look at you, and then I say that you look like you're itchy. Maybe I'll say that you shirt looks itchy, or I'll say something about itchy hair, or something."

I stared at him blankly for a few minutes, and then said "that's not a spell."

"Yes it is."

"Well, a spell would involve magic, right?"

"Yes" he beamed triumphantly.

"So, you just described really crude basic psychology, you know, simple suggestion. There's nothing magical in that. It's about as mundane as you can get." I looked at him, waiting for a reaction.

His response: "Maybe you just don't understand what magic really is. Magic is all around us and part of everything we are."

There are probably a lot of people who would think that his response was somehow wise. The problem, though, is that it is faux-wisdom. It's a sound bite that might make someone sound deep or "spiritual" to a room full of half-drunk college students, but is actually completely devoid of meaning upon examination. If magic is all around us and part of everything we are, then magic is literally everything, and any term that is defined so broadly as to include everything is a term that ultimately has absolutely no meaning and is completely useless. It's like the people who define God (with a capital "G") to mean "love" or "goodness" and not "Judeo-Christian concept of an omnipotent spirit that glares at humanity." Just because it sounds good while one is stoned doesn't mean that it actually makes any damn sense. Statements such as this are wisdom vacuums, sucking all wisdom away and leaving a wisdom void in their wake. People who spout such things are prone to patchouli poisoning while under the influence of Deepak Chopra books.

Nonetheless, Skippy continued to talk about his magical powers and his ability to delve into the mystical arts. Meanwhile, I rolled my eyes frequently and occasionally cast an itch spell on him for good measure.

Oooooh! Such dark arts I weave!

Finally, one day, I began asking questions again. I don't recall the exact route of the conversation, but it was the usual back-and-forth of him claiming magical powers, and me claiming that he was full of it. By this point, most of the other employees at the store were at least willing to pay lip service to this guy having some sort of power, and he really wanted me to believe. So, I put it in simple terms: I would believe when he provided evidence.

"What?' Skippy asked, "do you want me to cast a spell on you?"

That wasn't quite what I was thinking, but I gave it a moment's reflection and figured that it would work.

"Yeah, sure. If you can cast a spell on me, I would have to concede that you have the ability to cast spells."

He hesitated for a moment, and then said "I...um...I don't have the ability to do that."

I figured he would have a cop-out of some sort, that he would say it was against some sort of magical code, it would be an unethical use of power, or something along those lines. So, I asked if he was unwilling to do it for an ethical or moral reason.

"Well, no." he said, trying to look confident and failing, "you don't believe. Your lack of belief in magic will shield you from a spell, so it just wouldn't work."

So, the only way for me to believe would be for me to have evidence, but the only way for him to provide evidence would be for me to believe. In other words, there was nothing to what he was claiming, it was all basic psychology fueling an illusion in people who were willing to be fooled, and deep down he knew it.

I felt a bit bad about this. On the one hand, the guy could be obnoxious, and his claims were pretty damn tiresome. But in retrospect, I can see that the guy felt like he had very little in the way of solid friendships, and his job as an assistant manager at a store in Modesto, while not bad for a guy in his early 20s like Skippy, fell far short of the glamour and excitement that he really wanted and that few of us ever achieve. He felt insecure, and his claims to this "magical lifestyle" was the thing that he had chosen to mark himself out as special and distinct from the crowd. And here was this smart-ass college student dismantling it.

I lost touch with him years back, but I can sincerely say that I hope that Skippy has since found something that excites him, and has made better social connections. He wasn't a bad guy, just an insecure one.

At the same time, I had already proven myself to be the sort of person who was going to ask questions and not accept faux-wisdom as an answer. So, while I probably could have handled myself better, he was also pushing the matter by trying to win me over. He bears some responsibility as well.

So, yeah, we were both being dicks.

In the end, we became friends of a sort. He stopped trying to push me to believe his various stories, and I stopped being overly analytical of everything that he said. We had some good times even after I stopped working there. But, as happens, we eventually fell out of contact.







*Which is, of course, completely different than those of use who keep blogs and announce our thoughts to the world. I don't have a giant ego in need of stroking, not at all. Move along, there's nothing to see here.

**There are, of course, actual witches, people who are members of various different religious groups which claim that name. I have met many such people over the years, and when I tell them about this fellow, they invariably roll their eyes and say something to the effect of "yeah, we attract a lot of those people, but they don't stick around long."

WIZARDRY!

A few posts back, I posted a link to a story about a substitute teacher who had performed a magic trick and been fired for wizardry. If you are curious, the link is here:

http://www.tampabays10.com/news/local/article.aspx?storyid=79533

Well, Surprise, surprise, the story wasn't quite kosher:

http://www.tampabay.com/news/education/article511648.ece

Which leads me to an interesting topic - the confirmation bias.

The confirmation bias is the tendency for us to accept information that agrees with what we already believe to be true, while ignoring disconfirming evidence. We all tend to be very good at seeing this when other people are doing it - when someone else thinks that a particular politician is far more honest and honorable than their record indicates, when someone is convinced that a particular group conforms to dubious stereotypes, when someone believes a crackpot hypothesis about how the world works in the face of devastating evidence otherwise (such as that the world is flat or that disease X is a result of a government conspiracy), and so on. It's not so easy to see the confirmation bias when we are the ones being biased.

I know plenty of people who believe that "Intelligent" Design is scientifically valid, that homeopathy (not to be confused - as it often is - with naturopathy or herbalism, which sometimes works) actually works, that homosexuals choose to be that way (and are therefore sinners deserving to be punished, and not simply different people), that any particular political or economic system (communism, capitalism, democracy, oligarchy, anarchy, etc.) will work flawlessly and solve all of our woes, that the only predictor of wealth is hard work and that circumstances beyond the individual's control have nothing to do with it, that Keanu Reeves is a good actor, and so on and so forth. And these are smart people, for the most part, not given to foolishness as a general rule. Yet, they believe these very ridiculous things. Why?

Well, that brings us back to the wizard teacher. It's ridiculous story on its face, and I should have had my suspicions aroused by the very silliness of the entire thing. Why didn't I?

Simple - I look around myself and see people not only espousing beliefs that seem rather odd to me, but trying to force those beliefs on others. Whether it be people trying to force creationism into science classes, raising my insurance premiums by pressuring insurance companies to pay for therapies and procedures that do not work or are less effective than cheaper procedures, trying to amend the constitution to enforce bigotry based on superstition, or trying to pressure bookstores and libraries into not carrying books that they think or "sacrilegious".

So, when I hear about a teacher being fired for "wizardry" after showing students a simple magic trick, that fits in with my view of my fellow humans. So, even though the story is clearly loopy, I fell for it. It confirmed my bias, and I didn't bother to look deeper. But I should have.

And, in the end, this is the only way that we can deal with the confirmation bias - to be aware that it exists, and to admit when we have been had by people peddling a false story that fits our world view.