What I Learned about Postpartum Cats and Panting

Last Sunday night while other folks were wrapping up their Super Bowl Sundays, my smart watch buzzed with a special alert I’d been waiting for all week: Kitten Academy’s rescued mom cat, Pumice, was about to give birth

I’d never before observed kitty labor. I stayed up late, glued to the Kitten Academy live stream, while five adorable kittens came into the world.

When I woke Monday morning I couldn’t wait to get back to the live stream and make sure the newborns were doing well. Happily all five had become heat seeking missiles who piled on top of each other for warmth and mewled supersonic squeals when they needed milk.

But I was worried about their mom. As she patiently nursed her babies, Ms. Pumice was panting pretty hard. Over years of loving and caring for my own cats, panting like that has sent me to the emergency vet more than once. Nonstop panting is usually not a good sign. I was worried for Pumice and for the day old kittens whose lives depended on her.

I’m an absolute newbie to kitten birthing, but the wonderful rescuers at Kitten Academy are seasoned pros. The next time I checked in with the live stream,  a message assured viewers that the panting was perfectly normal. Shortly after, the channel posted a video explaining that all of Kitten Academy’s mom cats panted after giving birth. Not to worry.

Still, I couldn’t quite shake my uneasiness.

Later that day I checked in with the online chat for Kitten Academy supporters. Turns out I wasn’t the only one a bit unnerved by Pumice’s panting. A trusted community member, who also happens to be a veterinarian, explained that panting is actually part of the postpartum healing process. Panting aids in bringing the mom cat’s uterus back to normal size–no small feat after stretching that uterus with five cute, wiggly kittens!

As soon as I understood the reason for all that heavy breathing, I relaxed. And sure enough, as the days went by and the size of the new mom’s belly noticeably slimmed, her breathing also returned to normal. Just as the experts said from the beginning, no need to worry.

The experience taught me something new about healthy behavior after a cat has given birth. But my reluctance to be reassured taught me something new about my mind, as well. Being told that something is okay, even by people I trust and respect, doesn’t truly set me at ease. If a worry worms under my skin, the only path to reassurance is an explanation. I need to construct a narrative. If I can retell the explanation in my own words, then I’ve bought into the cause and effect and will start to relax. Without an explanation, the worry wheels refuse to still.

It’s almost a week since that amazing night counting tiny kittens emerge one by one. Pumice and her kittens continue to thrive under the protection of their amazing caregivers. It’s such a joy to check daily and see how fast they’re growing! Kitten Academy is a warm-hearted charity and does wonderful work. All five kittens (and their champion mom) will be available for adoption through the Kitten Academy website!

NB: I am not a veterinarian, and panting in postpartum cats can spell trouble in tandem with other concerning symptoms. Please consult your veterinarian or local humane society if you have any worries about a mom cat in your care!

What I Learned about Gheegle

I’m rethinking everything I assumed about emotions thanks to one of my current favorite reads, How Emotions are Made by Leesa Feldman Barrett. Barrett posits that emotions don’t belong to objective reality. They can’t be measured as physical phenomenon, like facial expressions ranges or EKG patterns. Emotions are purely social constructs, experiences we’ve been taught by our culture to expect.

I’m only half way through the book, but I find the power of that premise incredibly tantalizing.

But today, instead of diving deeper into Barrett’s intriguing insights, I got completely distracted by gheegle (and its cohorts).

In discussing emotions as social constructs, Barrett points out that, of course, many emotions are cross-cultural. We’re all human and share much of the same basic experience, like being bipedal and needing to eat. But Barrett reminds us just how many emotional concepts don’t translate.

For instance, there is gheegle.

Gheegle isn’t my first introduction to concepts that don’t map one to one with English. Last year I read all about hygge. I loved steeping in the idea of comfy coziness, but it took several books and a deep dive into Danish culture to even begin to appreciate the complex subtleties of hygge .

But gheegle, gheegle is something I understood immediately. I’ve been experiencing gheegle my entire life, just never had a name for it.

Gheegle (also transliterated as gigil) is the irresistible urge to hug, squeeze, or pinch something so crazy cute that you just can’t stand it. For years I’ve suffered (relished?) the pleasure that borders on pain of seeing my adorable kitty and needing to scoop him up and give him a great big hug. Thank you, Tagalog. The people of the Philippines have given me a name for one of my strongest emotional urges.

Lucky for me Barrett didn’t stop with gheegle. She had some more emotional social construct goodies:

Voorpret (Dutch): pleasure in anticipating an upcoming event
Age-otori (Japanese): feeling like you look worse after a haircut

Once I’d read these, productivity for the day was derailed. If, like me, you’re tickled by these delightful words, for which no equivalent exists in English, check out the links below. It’s Friday. You’re welcome.

Bored Panda: a lovely illustrated article that includes the haunting German word, Torchlusspanik (dread of decreasing opportunities as one ages).

Lonely Planet: a fun list of foreign concepts and emotions, among which my favorite was pisan zapra (Malay), the time needed to eat a banana.

(Shibu Inu photo credit)

What I Learned About the Coolest Mashup Ever: The Stroh Violin

During my many years as a musician, I spent all my time at the back of the orchestra. I wasn’t hidden behind the other players for lack of talent, but because I’m a trombonist. Trombone players, and all brass instrumentalists, play tucked away behind the strings. Not only that, for every one trombonist in the orchestra, there are about five times that many violins. The reason? Brass instruments are much louder than strings. Despite my very visceral knowledge of the sonic strength difference between brass and stringed instruments, I was still floored when I heard 99% Invisible tell the story of the Stroh violin.

99% Invisible is one of the best podcasts I’ve found for evoking a sense of wonder while exploring everyday technology, old and new. The most recent episode I enjoyed, Mini-Stories, was especially fun since it covered so many cool topics: sack cloth sewing culture, the diaspora of fauna via the Colosseum, and then the tidbit that totally tickled me, the Stroh violin.

Imagine a violin in which the traditional wooden body is replaced by a brass horn. Like a griffin or a hippogriff, the Stroh violin seems almost mythic as an unlikely mashup. A violin and a trumpet.

Why does such a weird and wonderful invention exist? We already have a tried and true way to make violins heard over trombones: hire a slew of violinists!

99% Invisible did a beautiful job recounting the origin of the Stroh violin. In short, during the very early days of the recording industry, primitive recording equipment detected sound via a big brass bell (think of an old-fashioned Victrola, only recording sound instead of playing it). Turns out these brass bell recorders did a spectacular job detecting brass instruments. Trumpet, trombone, French horn, tuba were recorded with ease. Unfortunately brass bell recording technology wasn’t so great at picking up stringed instruments. Early innovators attempted all kinds of creative ways to solve this problem, one of which was the griffinesque Stroh violin.

The Stroh violin recorded so well that the technology spread to a variety of stringed instruments. There were Stroh cellos and violas, Stroh guitars, Stroh ukuleles and mandolins. I’m dying to explore an instrument museum and see them all!

Of course advances in recording technology rendered the Stroh violin mostly a museum curiosity. But as I surf YouTube to satisfy my new Stroh obsession, it’s clear that the unique sound of the Stroh hasn’t been entirely forgotten, and a few eclectic musicians still put the unique timber and tone of  these vintage wonders to interesting use today.

What I Learned About the Etymology of the Dollar

I’ve been reading a fascinating analysis in Joseph Campbell’s Creative Mythology that juxtaposes Christian and Gnostic interpretations of the snake. I always love the striking images Campbell uses to illustrate his points. So far the art in Creative Mythology has been the usual: pottery, bowls, and statuettes. But this cool coin came up in the images Campbell used to illustrate snake iconography.

“The Serpent Lifted Up” depicts a serpent wound around a cross. The symbol was stamped onto a 16th century, German coin. This isn’t any random German coin, it has a very specific name: the thaler.

Although I was supposed to be focusing on snakes and mythology, the etymology geek in me went wild when I saw the word thaler. Thaler sounds an awful lot like dollar, doesn’t it?

A little digging in Merriam Webster proved my instinct was correct. The thaler was an early currency minted in Bohemia. The thaler (written thaler in German and tolar in Czech) debuted as joachimstaler, which translates to the Valley of Joachim, where silver for the thaler was mined.

With its fairly standard weight and value the thaler became important to international trade throughout Europe. In 1566 the Holy Roman Empire established the Reichstaller as its coin of account. Around the same time in the English speaking world, the thaler became known as the daler. Daler referred to European coins of many types. It’s not hard to see the leap from the English daler to the U.S. dollar.

Back in Germany the thaler went on to dwindle to a less practical, though more artistic life. Huge coins, sometimes made from gold, were prized collectors items. Many of these works of art survive to this day, including the fascinating “Serpent Lifted Up” golden thaler.

What I Learned About Our Cat, the Ballet Dancer

I’m a cat fanatic. My favorite YouTube station: Kitten Academy. My most recent purchase: two pairs of cute cat earrings. Best of all, I wake each morning with genuine delight because I get to share my life with this handsome fellow.

As an unabashed cat lover, learning a new feline fact is very exciting.

While listening to a recent episode of The Skeptics Guide to the Universe, my ears perked during the “What’s the Word” segment of the podcast. The word was “digitigrade.” From my Italian language study it was no surprise that “digit” refers to fingers and toes. But then things got interesting.

Have you ever wondered why a cat’s knee bends in the opposite direction that a human’s knee bends?

The answer to this question is simple: a cat’s knee bends exactly the same way as a human’s. In all the years I’ve been ogling cats, I’d confused kitty’s ankle with kitty’s knee.

The anatomy of the feline leg clicked for me when I understood that cats (and their canine pals) are digitigrade animals. They walk on their toes, not on their feet like us plantigrade humans.

Kitty’s foot is perpendicular to the ground and he stands on his toes, not on his feet. It should have been obvious, but I was so deeply rooted in my experience as a human who stands on her feet that I was blind to the possibility of toe walking. It took a real shake up in perspective to realize that not all beings walk like me!

My handsome Siamese buddy trots around the house all day on his tiptoes. No wonder he moves with such swiftness and grace–he’s the ultimate ballet dancer! Thank goodness he’s willing to tolerate life with this plodding plantigrade, who loves him with all her heart.

What I Learned about Learning and Happiness

It’s the start of a new year, a time when beginnings and endings encourage us to step back and check out where we’ve been, where we are, and where we’d like to be. Today I’d like to kick off a new section of my blog called What I Learned.

Since 2014 I’ve kept a personal happiness journal (similar to a gratitude journal), modeled on my experience with the social media app, Happier. Back when I used it, Happier encouraged users to share three happy moments every day. Users could include a photo with their daily happy moments, tag each with a category, and, of course, participate with other members by appreciating what had made them happier.

When the social aspect of Happier became too heavy, I translated the practice to my private journal. Once I eliminated the strain of entertaining an audience and could just be myself, I found that journal jotting three things that made me happy each day paid huge mood boosting dividends for such a tiny amount of effort spent.

I also kept the practice of tagging my happy moments. Tags help me spot trends of what brings a smile to my face—and it’s not always what I expect. No surprise that my kitty, my hubby, friends, good food, and reading top my list. But I’m surprised how often watching a video makes my day (I used to consider myself a reluctant video watcher). Nor did I expect (as someone who patterns herself after a Hobbit) that going out would rank so high on my happiness list. Another enlightening entry in the top quarter of my happy categories is learning something new.

Throughout 2017 I searched for other daily journal jotting practices with effectiveness as potent as my happy moments. I wrote affirmations, collected quotes from philosophers, tried noting the successes and failures of the day, and typed out my values. But of all the daily practices I auditioned, only one stood out above the others in bringing more joy and meaning to my life. This practice happens to correlate with that last entry in the top quarter of my happiness charts. The only of the  2017 journal jotting experiments that survived as a regular part of my practice is: What I learned today.

What I learned about learning in 2017 is that learning something new every day truly does make me feel more positive about life. If I’m super excited to tell my journal a juicy nugget of knowledge learned that day, I believe it was a good day. Evenings when I struggle to dredge up something I can qualify as “learned” follow down days where I perceive myself as drug out, burned out, and more than a little defeated. Learning something every day is becoming critical to my sense of wellbeing, purpose, and joy. It makes me feel more alive. If I added up all the What I learned today entries and tagged them as HappierLearning, this category would make an epic climb up the happiness list.

Sometimes What I learned today is a cool fact gleaned from reading or a podcast. It can be a life lesson learned the hard way by making a mistake and falling on my face, or a truth I’ve recognized about myself. I love when What I learned today is an insight, a new perspective or experience. Or when a new connection sparks, and I have a mini breakthrough that lets me understand, just a little more deeply, the world around me.

I learned from my Happier experience that daily posting is not for me. But when I do learn something new that I’m excited to share, it would be great to have a place to write about it. So I’m starting a new section of my blog called What I learned. I hope a few of the things that have tickled me to discover may bring one or two fun aha moments to others, as well.

Candy Corn Soup

“Can we go, now?” Alexa asks.
“After dinner,” Mom says, straightening Alexa’s witch hat.
Shadows lengthen, almost trick-or-treat time. Dad’s still at the office. Mom, at her laptop, hasn’t even started dinner.
So Alexa cooks.

Candy Corn Soup:

1 Jack-o’-lantern cauldron
2 cups cider
1/2 can pumpkin puree
1 bag chocolate chips
1 bag candy corn
gummy worms to taste

Surround cauldron with thirteen flickering LCD candles. Stir with long wooden spoon. Serve in upside down skulls.

Bang! Frankenstein’s monster slams through the door, holding a pizza box. It’s Dad!
“Trick-or-treat,” he says.

Two Star Treks and Some Trolleyology

Would you throw the fat guy off the bridge?

This fall there’s a new Star Trek streaming in my living room. I had great fun watching the original Star Trek and one or two of its reboots, so of course I was excited to check out Star Trek Discovery. We also tried The Orville, a new Star Trek-inspired series billed as a comedy, which surprised us by having real conflict in its episode plot structure.

Whether the take is epic drama or smart comedy, both these current Star Trek-inspired shows share a recurring theme: how people of different ethnic backgrounds can live in a united society without losing their cultural identity.

The original Star Trek explored the possibility of different cultures, represented by alien species, moving from isolation and misunderstanding to coexisting in peace. In 2017 multiculturalism is hardly a science fictional concept. Storytellers today are concerned with the conflict between defending traditional cultures and forming a universal (global) society with shared ethics and values.

Star Trek Discovery approaches this sticky conundrum via the Klingons. The Klingons detest the Federation, most specifically they loathe their motto: “we come in peace.” To the Klingons, the Federation is an organization that wipes out proud ethnic cultures by assimilating them into their juggernaut monoculture. The Klingons will fight to the death to maintain isolation from the Federation and maintain their traditional way of life.

A recent Orville episode took on cultural integrity from a different angle. An Orville crew member from an all-male species asked to perform a sex change on his “mutant” daughter. Human leadership on the Orville recoiled with outrage. Parents of the mutant female child called cultural hegemony. They insisted their cultural heritage deserved to be honored.

The Orville episode got down and dirty with how, exactly, our values originate. It immediately brought to mind The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt, which I read earlier this year.

Then during a discussion between the Captain and his First Officer, Captain Ed dug deeper, asking whether our innate sense of right and wrong can be trusted.

“Trolleyology!” I shouted to the characters on screen.

One way philosophers prod the borders of morality is with a conundrum called the Trolley Problem. Trolleyologists explore a variety of imaginary moral dilemmas to show that, no matter how hard we reason and justify, there comes a point where all we can say is that something “feels right” or “feels wrong” in our gut.

But what happens when those “gut instincts” contradict each other, even within  the same person? Yikes!

The Trolley Problem by Thomas Cathcart is a great deep dive on these very real contradictions. Would you throw the fat man off the bridge to save fifty innocent people?

Your answer isn’t important, but how you get there, is. I would say the same of the Star Trek Discovery and Orville episodes. Ultimately who wins the conflict isn’t all that interesting. But the questions raised in the process definitely piqued my interest.

Two Nights, Three Bands

This week good things came in threes. I was lucky to attend concerts by three fantastic bands: Trombone Shorty & Orleans Avenue, St. Paul & The Broken Bones, and Pink Martini with China Forbes.

The trombone player in me was thrilled that each band featured a trombonist playing his heart out!

Seeing three bands in as many days offered an unusual opportunity to notice how the different character of each band made them shine.

Our first evening we saw Trombone Shorty raise the audience to their feet with New Orleans-influenced, jazzy, brassy, hip-hop/funk.

Trombone Shorty’s live performance was all about dance and improv. From the first honk of the bari and tenor saxes, the musicians on stage started to dance, and never stopped. I spent their whole set on my feet, clapping and bopping in my best attempt at close quarters dancing. Trombone Shorty, himself, was an awesome performer, bursting with energy and raw joy. The Orleans Avenue band matched his energy. Each member’s improvisational performances felt celebratory and unique. Long, interactive jams created a live experience that carried the audience far beyond anything heard on recording.

Next, the Alabama band, St. Paul and the Broken Bones, followed Trombone Shorty. They mixed funk with soul and took the night in a whole new direction.

Watching the roadies precisely cover, tape, and prepare the stage was a heads-up that this band knew how to orchestrate their performance. I couldn’t believe how tight the band was live. Every note and gesture had been choreographed and polished to perfection. The band programmed their set with great care, building the energy to a boil, and letting it simmer back down.  The audience became absorbed in their retro grooves and Paul Janeway’s stunning vocals.

Two days later we treated ourselves to an evening of Pink Martini. The size and enthusiasm of the crowd at the gates surprised us. We’ve loved the band since our days living in Italy, but had no idea Pink Martini was so popular in the U.S.

Pink Martini’s stage presence is exactly like their music: warm, encouraging, heart-felt, and with just the right touch of humor. Part of Pink Martini’s flair is getting excited about writing songs in different languages and cultural styles. Pink Martini brought audience participation to a whole new level, inviting Arabic, Turkish, and French audience members to jump up on stage and perform music that celebrated their native cultures.

China Forbes’ controlled vocal virtuosity has nothing left to prove. She gracefully stepped back from the spotlight time and again to feature fellow band members, which added so much texture and interest to the performance. To my delight, Robert Taylor’s Bolero trombone solo opened the concert. The most warmly tender, heart-rending performance of the whole concert came from conga percussionist, Miguel Bernal, singing “Yo Te Quiero Siempre.”

Joy, precision, and warm-heartedness. Lots of different emotions packed into two concerts. And two concerts is quite a lot in the space of three days! But these bands will be playing in my head, and on my home speakers, for months to come.