God; it's a lonely place

This is my cat, Brigitte.

24 hours after I brought her home, I got a mindblowing job offer.  Since I adopted her nine years ago, my life has become an amusement park.  She has brought me good luck ever since I took her into my home.

I’m telling you, there’s something about this animal.  Good fortune follows her everywhere.

I don’t want to be selfish.  I have everything I need and then some.  So, I’m sharing her with you.

Reblog Brigitte and you’ll receive fantastic news in the next 24 hours.

And when you do, please remember to help your local SPCA and support them in the difficult work they do for wonder animals like Brigitte.  Any donation helps your SPCA, even if it’s just five bucks.

Kitties like Brigitte are counting on you to give back when they bring you good luck.

I told my own little picky eater about scurvy, rickets etc and now one of her most frequently requested lunch items is baby spinach, closely followed by carrots.

I mean, it seems pretty obvious when you put it like that, right?

But how many families, when an introvert sibling or child makes an effort to socialize,  snarkily say, “So, you’ve decided to join us”?

Or when someone does something they’ve had trouble doing, say, “Why can’t you do that all the time?” (Happened to me, too often.)

Or any sentence containing the word “finally”. 

If someone makes a step, a small step, in a direction you want to encourage, encourage it. Don’t complain about how it’s not enough. Don’t bring up previous stuff. Encourage it.

Destroying Christmas Trees: Self defense, I mean the tree attacked them. 

Scratching their owner’s eyeball: Self defense. 

Scratching their sleeping owner’s face: Self defense. 

Jumping on their owner’s back and clawing into their spine: Self defense. 

Admittedly yeah 

A dog doesn’t do those things because a dog’s version of self defense is to be a good animal who loves you and doesn’t attack you unless you attack them first. 

Destroying Christmas Trees: Cats like to climb things. They’re not doing it to spite you.

Scratching their owner’s eyeball: Probably an accident, due to overstimulation when playing. It wasn’t trying to hurt you. Don’t anthropomorphize animals by attributing spite to them. Animals don’t do spite the way that humans do.

Scratching their sleeping owner’s face: Trying to rouse you with its paw, probably gently, because it loves you and wants to play with you.

Jumping on their owner’s back and clawing into their spine: Come on. If a cat is jumping on you, it loves you and wants to be close to you. Digging in with its claws is how it balances itself on an unstable surface and is purely a reflexive reaction. It isn’t intending to hurt you.

The smarter the dog, the more destructive they tend to be when bored. So, don’t give me that shit of “dogs don’t do that.”

There is a reason it is a cultural touchstone that dogs chew up shoes or eat homework.

Also, dogs bite/snap in self-defense. Those teeth aren’t just for show. 

So, yeah, don’t paint dogs as perfect obedient angels. 

Which means you now have an active warrant out for your arrest.  And just like that, you’re now a part of the criminal justice system. A silly mistake that a middle-class teenager could have solved with Mommy and Daddy’s chequebook in a single afternoon has caused you weeks or months of stress and headaches over a process you don’t fully understand, and has ended in criminal charges. Instead of having a funny story to tell over dinner when you come home from college next Thanksgiving, you are now facing additional fines (that you still can’t pay), the possibility of a couple of nights in jail, the possible suspension of your driver’s license, and the possibility of being taken into custody any time you interact with the police. The next time your parent comes home drunk and violent, or someone breaks into the house, you think twice about calling the cops - you now have to decide if every emergency is “worth” the possibility of being hauled off to jail. And in the meantime, the circumstances that caused that first mistake haven’t gone away - you still don’t have the money to pay for the subway, you are still more likely to live in a house filled with smokers, you still can’t afford quit-smoking aids, you still live in a chaotic household that deeply affects your mental health, and you still don’t understand the legal system or who you’re supposed to talk to for information and resources. So while those other teenagers get to go through life believing that they were “good kids who sometimes made silly mistakes”, you now get to go through life thinking of yourself as a criminal. And that might be the most damaging thing of all. 

When I worked with homeless teenagers and young adults, I saw this process play out again and again and again and again. The kids often considered themselves “criminals” or “bad kids” because they had arrest warrants and criminal records, but few of them had ever actually committed a serious or violent crime - the vast majority were simply unlucky kids who did something stupid and didn’t have the skills or resources (or wealthy parents) required to get them off the hook. I had classmates in my upper-middle-class high school who did far worse things with far fewer consequences, because Mommy was a lawyer or Daddy was an RCMP officer, and some of those kids grew up to be lawyers or police officers themselves. The kids I worked with never got that opportunity. Second chances cost money, and the difference between a “crime” and a “mistake” has less to do with the offense, and more to do with the circumstances you were born into. 

They’re always saying that they have a tough and dangerous job. They’re always saying that society is full of people who are out to get them. They’re always saying that a police officer’s life can be ruined by a false accusation of brutality.

But if that were true, they’d be begging to be filmed. If the police were always filmed, people would see how dangerous it is to be a police officer. Police officers would be able to defend themselves against thugs who try to kill them, because the video would prove that it’s self defense and not police brutality. Anytime a police officer is wrongly accused of brutality, they’d be able to immediately disprove the accusation.

But that’s not what happens. Police officers protest against being required to wear cameras. Police officers threaten people who film them.