Over the past twelve weeks, we have gone from “one of the cats that lives under the house just came in and had two kittens at us” to “there are two young cats wandering around the house who will hopefully be enjoying a meeting with the neighbor who is interested in adopting them”. We watched them grow from tiny little nuggets who couldn’t do anything but squirm sightlessly towards their mother’s nipple and peep loudly when they needed to have some help eliminating waste, to a couple of sleek mini-panthers. (Both of them are pretty much entirely black; one has white toes on his left rear paw just like mom.)

And lately I have been thinking about how amazing this is. A collection of chemicals can ingest other collections of chemicals, break them down, and build them into a new collection of chemicals that can run around on its own. Even if you look at this on a purely physical, anti-mystical level that’s pretty goddamn amazing. Even when you feel like you’re drowning in kittens because you have to pass through the room they’re in to do anything because you live in a shotgun house, which is a series of rooms linked directly to one another with no hallway (except for the little one around the bathroom).

A cat came into my home and made some kittens and it’s kind of amazing.

Also I am very glad I am never gonna have kids because, damn. This has been stressful enough.

Shower thoughts. And dishwashing thoughts.

Awrite, so one of the right-wing objections to the idea of “basic income” (“everyone gets enough money to live on”) is that nobody has to work for it. And that there are a lot of jobs that need doing that nobody would do for fun.

I have a suggestion for getting around this. Everyone who gets the Basic has to spend one day out of the week working… in one of those jobs. Four days a month gets you enough money to not need to take any other job, if you live a modest life. With “enough” determined by regular examination of how much it costs to live where you live and not have your living situation be a deep cause of unhappiness.

How these jobs are determined could vary. Ideally every citizen has some voice in what jobs are allowable for this. Some jobs are for the state. Some are for private industry – businesses could come to the Basic Job Bureau and apply have people come work for them. But there is a price for the businesses that do that; if you take advantage of the free-to-you low-level employee provided by Basic, then you have to do the one day of Basic Work as well. Whether or not you want to. With your pay shared out to all your employees instead of going into your pocket.

There are probably many objections to this, starting with “yeah good luck getting the rich assholes who’ve never worked a day in their life to agree to it”. There would also be exceptions to the “everyone” parts of these. My hope would be for there to be more exceptions made for people just running on Basic than people with multiple employees.

Bureaucracy would include things like “keeping track of what people end up doing well and taking pride in, and who is an early bird or a night owl” and “making sure everyone gets whatever training is needed for this week’s Basic Job” – I could see you ending up with a monthly rotation of gigs rather than something new every week, for instance. Maybe sometimes your Basic Job is working alongside someone doing the same thing for the first time, and training them. And also “making sure that no Basic Job requires risk to life and limb”.

Anyway, I am sure other people have had thoughts like this. But I had them today while cleaning myself and the dishes and felt like sharing to see what kind of reactions I get.

Well. I’d been dreading this for a while and it finally happened tonight.

There is a pizza place nearby. Theo’s. They make pretty good pizza. Their serving process is a little goofy: you make your order at the counter, then they give you a stand with a laminated picture of a celebrity or a cartoon character on it, for you to put at your table so they know where to bring the pizza when it’s done. Harmless enough, right?

Not when one of them is Ren and Stimpy, and you worked at Spumco.

They were totally chill about it, thankfully. Swapped with Glenn Danzig. Who may have his own litany of terrible associations but I just know of him as a musician who exists.

I put it out of my mind and spent the time waiting for the pizza to come out with Kim Stanley Robinson’s new book, “The Ministry For The Future”, instead of with my memories of working under John. It was a good pizza, too.

Well, it’s official, I’m now one of those people who isn’t upgrading her machine any more. I used to always be running the latest OS within about a month (to make room for bugs like “iTunes deleted my entire library omfg”) but I’m still on Mojave and here’s Apple releasing Big Sur to the public. I never bothered upgrading to Catalina because “finding replacements for a couple 32-bit apps I like having around” doesn’t sound like a thing I wanna do. Nor did “see how well the new Music app implements the particular corners of iTunes I am used to using, and if it constantly tries to get me to subscribe to Apple’s streaming service like the stupid iOS music app”.

I will do it in a couple of years when I get a new computer, I guess.

I feel like this is a marker of getting old.