The Former Anne Spollen's Author Blog Is Being Retitled to "Notes from Living Upghetto": Character Study With YA Comments

Monday, December 14, 2009

Character Study With YA Comments

The teenagers who come to our house spend a huge percentage of their time with the cats. That's probably because a) there are five cats to choose from and b) all our cats are crazy.

As you know,I find teen comments very amusing and if you are reading this blog, you probably do, too. (I also swipe their comments freely when I write)I thought I'd put them together to create a YA guide to our cats.

Of course, there are the kittens. Only about six and a half months old, they are the only ones that don't occasionally hide for a nap when the house is filled with teens.
But they are very different; Cami, the one to the right, is "completely emo" -- she nurses on nubby blankets, shatters the fragile peace with the dog by sticking her own nose into Mazy's nostril, and trying to steal food from Jade, the senior cat. She is very, very needy. They call her over by going, "Aww, where's the little emo kitty?"

Her sister, Coco, has been nicknamed Jazz because she's so mellow.

If you remember how BabyCat summered in the wicker basket, she has now found a new spot to hide in which is a little stranger. She jumps to the top of the kitchen cabinets and stares down at us:

She is always paranoid, twitchy and unsettled. The kids call her "Rehab" because she acts like someone who once had an addiction. When I asked to what, they all looked at me with that, "She-doesn't-know-anything-look" and said, "To meth."

Of course.

Then there's Sarah who will cuddle up to you, purr and nap for a few minutes. Without warning, she will hiss and scratch and run off as if you have just poured acid on her. She hisses as she runs. Here is a typical expression of Sarah's:

I think she's bipolar, but the kids call her "D Wing" -- I think every high school has a wing for kids who have broken through the not fitting in category. That's where poor Sarah would be if she were a teen...

Jade, the senior cat, the alpha cat, keeps the other cats in line. Once, when someone forgot to shut the sliding glass door to the deck, we found all five cats outside with Jade up on the railing keeping watch. The dark side of Jade is the reason BabyCat has to sleep in baskets and on top of high kitchen cabinets: Jade has rage issues. She takes most of them out on BabyCat who is half her size. This is Jade:

In fairness, Jade's sister died very young of heart failure. They had been just like the two kittens are now, so everyone gives Jade a lot of room. She's not particularly cuddly or accessible, but she is a favorite of the teens.

What did they nickname Jade?

Kurt Cobain.

10 comments:

Nora MacFarlane said...: D-Wing! LOL!!! Our cats keep us in stitches too -at least a laugh a day.; Monday, 14 December, 2009
Bish Denham said...: LOL! D-Wing sounds like she shouldda been named Skitzy or something like that. And that Jade...what a b****. :); Tuesday, 15 December, 2009
Anne Spollen said...: I know Nora, cats are really funny. We keep watching them "scale" the Christmas tree and getting stuck.

Jade is really awful sometimes; I looked at her on the blog and she's even starting to look a little mean.

I think she's preparing to lead an army of cats against dogs,though. She's pretty tough.; Tuesday, 15 December, 2009
Mary Witzl said...: Sarah looks like a hard case all right. My cousin in Kentucky had a cat like her. She'd be perfectly fine one minute, the next a spitting, snarling fury. To this day, the kids remember her as their gold standard of cat weirdness.

Those kittens make me want to cry. They look like OUR kitten -- who's just run off and disappeared. We're all brokenhearted.; Wednesday, 16 December, 2009
Bish Denham said...: Forgive me Anne, I've tagged you!; Thursday, 17 December, 2009
Anne Spollen said...: Oh no, Mary! I hope s/he comes back. That's heartbreaking.

Tagged again -- I'll go over and see what you've done me in for, Bish.; Thursday, 17 December, 2009
Stewart Sternberg (half of L.P. Styles) said...: It's good to be surrounded by teens, and I agree that their language has an irrepressible flavor. As for your cats, it's reminiscent of life here with four dogs and feline. I love having several animals, being part of a pack...what is it they call a cat grouping? A pride? I don't remember.; Saturday, 19 December, 2009
Anne Spollen said...: A pride sounds exactly like what a cat would call herself and her cohorts. I don't know if that's correct in the National Geographic sense, but I like it, so I'm sticking with it.

Four dogs! I bow to you, sir.; Saturday, 19 December, 2009
K.C. Shaw said...: Seeing animals interact is as fascinating as seeing teens interact, so I'm not surprised the two groups mix well. I'm down to one cat now, but I think he's decided he's a person. He's certainly spoiled.; Saturday, 19 December, 2009
Anne Spollen said...: I think cats were put on this earth to spoil.

And it IS fun to watch the human teens interact with the cats (who walk around a level or two above us humans)

Sometimes I feel like an anthropologist in my own living room...; Sunday, 20 December, 2009

Books

Light Beneath Ferns

"I have this strange sense that my silence is preparing me for something I can't name . ."

Elizah Rayne is nothing like other fourteen-year-old girls. More interested in bird bones than people, she wraps herself in silence. Trying to escape the shadow of her gambler father, Elizah and her mother move into an old house that borders a cemetery. All her mother wants is for them to have "normal" lives. But that becomes impossible for Elizah when she finds a human jawbone by the river and meets Nathaniel, a strangely hypnotic boy who draws Elizah into his dreamlike and mysterious world.

Only by forgetting everything she knows can Elizah understand the truth about Nathaniel—and discover an unimaginable secret.

Teen made trailer for Light Beneath Ferns.

Order Light Beneath Ferns here.

Foreword Magazine's Review of Light Beneath Ferns

Excerpt from THE SHAPE OF WATER

CHAPTER ONE
I discovered windows one afternoon and after that, nothing was ever the same. They had always been there, of course, glass panes shimmering in the color of rain, but that spring for the first time, I was able to open the windows in my room. For years, the locks had been painted stuck, and during the winter, heat from the radiator beneath my windows finally steamed off enough paint off the metal wings of the locks could be twirled open. Knowing that I could open the windows attracted me to them, and I began sitting under the windows, staring through the glass at the sky. From that position, on a chair in my room, the sky did not seem real; it seemed a place I was making up, so I watched it.
The white wood of the window panes acted as frames so the sky came to me slowly, and the huge openness of its space did not touch me. All the window glass in our old house had wavers and bubbles inside it, so at times the clouds moved like water, melting and blurring until they passed outside of the warp. After a few afternoons of sitting, the heavens seemed too quiet to keep watching so I began watching a small patch of woods next to our yard that housed little more than trees and a scatter of bony, mean-looking rabbits.
I started gazing at the sky and the woods in March when the branches were still wet and it was then, with nothing outside my window but trees and rain, that I noticed a shine inside darkness, I noticed colors glimmering within the darkness of the wood. I watched birds come and go, I watched rain nipple down from buds to the grass. The water dripping from branch edges and leaves created optical tricks; I could see that as I watched leaves melt.
Then one day I ventured into the space outside. I did not think about doing this much beforehand. I simply opened the window and dropped to the ground below, uncertain as to why this should be such a more satisfying exit than simply using the door; my father worked until seven o’clock and I could do whatever I wanted until then. But I liked the solid sound my legs made when I landed. Leaving via a five foot drop seemed so much more a decision than just using a door. The sense of escape made my heart pound, though all I escaped was the soundless spread of moss-colored light inside my house and the silence.
I had come to know silence well during those months after my mother died. When you sit in silence long enough, you learn that silence has a motion. It glides over you without shape or form, but with weight, exactly like water. Its color is silver. And silence has a sound you hear only after hours of wading inside it. The sound is soft, flute notes rising up like the words of glass speaking. There comes a point when you must shatter the silence, when you must shatter the blindness of its words, the blindness of its light. I did this by going into the yard. Once I stood there, in the grass next to the trees I had been watching, I found silence outside as well. But I was happier outside than I had been in the house, so I stayed for a bit. I stood beneath my bedroom window for a few minutes, looking up at the branches and the crooked pieces of sky colliding between the branches. I believed I could identify the scent of the sky as I stood there, a blue menthol fragrance similar to the scent of seawater that sprayed into my face when I first dove into the ocean. That initial scent smelled much more subtle than the ocean’s heavy, fishy aroma, a whiff of salt and mint that warned a more powerful scent would enter my nose just as I approached the water on a dive. It was the scent I dreamed in. And it was the scent of that spring sky as I stood in my yard.

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