A Caturday Post

Since life is basically what happens to you between two sessions of browsing cat pictures on the Internet,  I thought I'd enrich the online treasure trove and share some shots of the freshest addition to our cat clan (read:the entities ruling our household with an iron paw).

Flex came into the word as a Felix, but in the Finnish tradition of studying the youngling and providing it with a befitting name, it was decided that Flex is far more descriptive of his rather dynamic personality. The kind of catsonality which lands on your laptop out of the blue, unstopabbly types out a shortish communique to his underlings and bellows his soul out to let you know he's there. A natural born tyrant, therefore.

He's nevertheless strangely well behaved in front of the camera, but after all tyrants do love to have their pictures taken- so instead of Kim Jong Un looking at things, this is Flex not looking at anything in particular because he's already deciphered the meaning of life- all cats have, but they keep mum about it. 

While he was was doing his best impression of a Vogue spread or, alternatively offering himself as the ideal prop for next year's IKEA catalogue, his mother, Lizzie was watching on with that doubtful look of 'I've made this thing and I'm afraid I can't take it back'.  Though she's probably pretty smug about him deep down, since, of all her offspring, he's the first to share her splendid black and white coat. 

Arad/50 mm

I might claim that my project of shooting one day in Arad strictly with the 50 mm lens was a great artistic endeavour of which I thought long and hard and which was aimed at revealing something in particular about the town I’ll always fondly call home.  The truth is, I was lazy. Lazy to take the other lenses to me, lazy to change them according to my subject, just lazy in general because we set out on a very fine autumn day, which the weather gods had proclaimed to be the last but one very fine day of the year in general.

The next step was convincing myself that this is actually great, and will give disparate yet oft photographed subjects a kind of coherence which, as a rule,  lacks from both my person and what I might overblownly call my ouevre. Though I’ve recently read that nothing makes us more human than our capacity to firmly hold contradicting beliefs. Therefore I will claim that I both meant and did not mean this whole thing, and it both makes some sense- or none at all. 

Spring is for the Irresponsible

It’s an odd feeling that whenever I am at home in Arad, I also unavoidably feel like a tourist too: since I have not spent considerable stretches of non-holiday time here for a decade or so, I do not have a data plan on my phone, so I keep hunting wi-fi connections. Needless to say, it’s a silly thing, one of those symptoms of how our society has totally alienated us from others, and ourselves as well.

As I was waiting in a car parked next to a bus stop the other day, I noticed how everyone was either fingering their phones, or talking to someone- on the phone naturally. They usually spent a careful time staring at the screen, looking like they’re working hard at figuring out whom to call, and why. Just as I was about to become comfortably judgmental, it dawned on me how the most pleasant part of my day had been taking in the sun in the Pensioner’s Park- and discovering that there’s a free wi-fi connection.

It was kind of hard to decide whether it had been the sun to make me happy- or the wi-fi. I would say a combination of both, and, for my defense, I could also add that under normal circumstances, I would have settled for a book, but I happened not to have one with me. So as I was merrily browsing the Internet, I bumped upon an article about how February had been the hottest month on record, compared to expected averages.

And that made perfect sense, judging by the number of trees in untimely bloom I had just photographed. Generally, the whole of February had been on fast forward flower-wise: there used to be a time for snowdrops, and then a time of hyacinths and daffodils, and then a time for tulips. This year everything came in fits and starts, and all at once.

So I should have- panicked? Made plans to eat less meat, fly less, shower less, use less poisonous sounding household products? Maybe. But I was just happy for the sunshine, the wi-fi, the pink blooms. Spring is an irresponsible time. Or perhaps I am irresponsible full stop. Is being born in spring an excuse? I hope so.