The Origin of the Term 'Cat's Cradle', or: My Overly-Eventful Night

This is my second night of making up a bed in the hallway while Wax is on the night shift. The purpose is to prevent Perry from peeing inside, and in that respect it's working. It's just that...

...First I woke up to an unpleasant stabby sensation to find the Crazy lying on my boob. I shoved her off and went back to sleep. Then I woke up to an unpleasant stabby sensation again... and shoved her off again. And rolled over.

Then I was awakened by a loud crash from the kitchen that just kept going on for like five or ten seconds.

"HEY!" I yelled. Sometimes the cats will actually stop running around or fighting if you do this. It didn't stop. I yelled again. Silence! I relaxed. Too soon.

The clattering noise came back a minute later, fainter but persistent. I finally got up and stumbled down the hall into the kitchen...

...only to walk into a tripwire at chest-height.

A TRIP-WIRE? Half-asleep, I thought I was maybe dreaming (am I in a movie?) or imagining it (maybe it's just a spiderweb?).

But then I turned on the light.

The entire kitchen was a cat's cradle. There was the thread crossing the doorway at chest height zigzagging all over the centre of the room and repeatedly around both the chairs standing there. It led to the spool sitting innocently in place on top of the sewing machine.

I took a bleary step or two closer to the sewing machine and reached out to pluck the spool of thread off, nearly tripping on two more trip-wires as I did so, and started winding it back on the spool to the accompaniment of more ominous rattling noises as the entangled chairs jerked against the floor. So I kept winding for way longer than I am used to it taking to rewind a spool of thread. The tangle gradually dissolved and so did the chest-high trip-wire, but, to my surprise, that was nowhere near the end.

I followed the thread down the hall. It wrapped around the bookcase somehow and took me straight into the livingroom, where I discovered that it was wrapped around my armchair. A good tug freed it, but then

the teacups and saucers were jiggling. The thread actually went around my chair and then individually around and under the individual pieces of stoneware on the occasional table! I finally found the end and hid the spool.

I stomped/stumbled back to my bed, nearly tripping over the dog, who tries to glue himself to my ankles when he's anxious, growling, "Fuck. Stupid crazy cats," and flopped down into the bed, hard.

My pillow exploded.

Or rather, the Crazy exploded out of my pillow and shot past me into the room.

Then I went back to sleep.

... that was my night.

sneakers of the day

Gola "Chart" in an unusual colour combination and a sleek, lightweight and pretty body sculpt.

incest shipping, the privileging of romantic-sexual love, and culture-centrism

I've had a hard time putting my finger on why some particular meta that I see from various incest-shipping communities perturbs me when I am, in fact, an incest shipper myself in some fandoms, both RPS and not. I mean, obviously the problem isn't the incest, then; so what, I thought, is it?

But as of now, I can put my finger on it!

It's a particular culture-centrism in a particular argument that I sometimes see. The argument basically attempts to deduce logically the incestuous(/sexual) quality of a relationship as a direct consequence of its intensity, or scope, or, y'know, bigness. Of course, there is a subtle difference between the bigness as a foundation for speculation - which is generally the biggest motivator for incest fic I think - and the argument that the bigness itself is inherently and also canonically implicative of incest/sexualisation. So that argument - the difference between "profound love... let's speculate on making it sexual" and "profound love is always inherently sexual" - is always in the background, in any incest shipping situation.

The problem is that that basic premise, "The sibling love relationship is the most profound love and most profound relationship in these siblings' lives" does not inherently imply incest. Or at least, that's certainly taking for granted a proposition that is at best highly debatable. Romanticising brotherly love, or to put it another way, making sibling love really BIG, as big as sexualised romantic love conventionally is, is just the starting point. It doesn't have to be, "Any time you love someone THIS much or more it automatically is sexual/is not brotherly anymore". It can also be, "Brotherly love CAN BE just as big as sexual love."

The reason I call this automatic sexualisation of love based on its, er, bigness culture-centric is that I view that presumption as arising from a deeply embedded, sometimes unexamined moral norm of modern Western culture: the privileging of sexual and romantic life partnership, or the nuclear family unit, over other forms of love and family.

Life-partnership is privileged in modern Western society and culture: the "highest", most celebrated, most romanticised, most rewarded, most socially protected form of love, and defined exclusively as 1) sexual, 2) romantic, and 3) monogamous. Sexual-romantic-monogamous life partnership (hereafter SRM LP - if there's an existing term I don't know it) is so fundamental to our society and culture that it can be difficult to see it as a construction. In this culture the so-called "nuclear family" (SRM LP + children) has been called a "building block of society", and the prevalence of the SRM LP model is easy to see in the extremely low acceptance of asexuality, bisexuality, and polysexuality/polygamy compared with homosexuality, or the transfer of the nuclear family model, sometimes called "heteronormative" in this context, to contemporary constructions of gay romance.

This is culture-centric because in many other cultures, the nuclear family is not the most important form of family, and/or SRM LP is not the privileged or most important form of love.