Eating Zen

As if feeding the cats was not already time consuming enough, now they are on different diets. Jaws is having issues with her aged kidneys, and we have put her on a low protein diet to which we have to add a couple of different supplements. Naturally she prefers the food that the other cats are getting.

While atara has taken on the bulk of the cat feeding duties, I will occasionally dish out their food if I happen to be in the kitchen at feeding time, or if she specifically asks me to handle it. I admit that I am avoiding the duty a bit because it has gone from a task that used to take seconds to a minute or two, to a task that takes 5+ minutes twice a day.

I am not sure why I avoid it, other than convincing myself that sitting behind my keyboard is somehow time better spent. The feeding ritual actually provides a nice counterbalance to the rest of my day. It is a simple task, with predefined steps, and a known end result. Being the intense focus of three hungry cats through the whole process also adds a certain degree of empowerment to it.

It also has nothing at all to do with Zen - I just felt like throwing that word randomly in my subject line.

Politics and Press

A local mayoral candidate is being raked through the muck for something that he did not do; more specifically, he is being beaten up by the local media, and every fringe group with an agenda for comments that he did not make four years ago. What he did not say was that he was tired of being accosted by aggressive, drunken native panhandlers whenever he goes downtown.

His wife said it on Facebook four years ago. She added some comments about educating the panhandlers and putting them to work as well, though worded in a way that expressed more frustration than good intent.

Somebody recently dredged it up, and there has been a flurry local chatter, calling him every brand of *ism that one can associate with such a comment. People have been demanding that he apologize, and issue statements outlining how he is not racist. Apologize for what? I may not like the man, nor his politics, but he is literally innocent in all this. His wife has already issued a statement of apology.

I acknowledge that he could have handled this better from a PR standpoint, though his "ignore it until it goes away" smacks very much of our current mayor's way of dealing with controversy. The difference is that our current mayor has usually had the press on his side for some reason, while this guy is obviously dealing with a hostile media.

On the other hand, I applaud him for refusing to even dignify the whole thing with a response. This is a non-story that the local press are chewing and re-spewing over and over, not because it is true, but because it is titillating. Every time I think I have reached peak cynicism, something like this comes along.