Cat ears

I'm so glad I've never had to clean cats' ears regularly before, and I can't wait for this to be over. Their ears aren't even infected! They HATE having ear drops put in. They HATE having the ear massaged, and they REALLY hate having the ears wiped with cotton. This basically has to happen in the bathroom, because the cat is guaranteed to shake their head violently. It's very hard to get comfortable on the bathroom floor while immobilizing a reluctant cat!

The gunk can prevent the topical medication from working, so you have to try to get as much of it out as possible. That meant like five applications of ear drops the other day, the first time Snookums got his ear medicated, and by the end he actually stopped accepting the freeze-dried duck treats I was giving him after each application. His poor little ear turned red and irritated, too.

Yesterday I gave him the second application of the medication. I didn't clean Tristana's ears because she escaped in all the fuss, and hers aren't as bad, but this morning I see they're actually both quite dirty again so she's maybe just gonna have to have them cleaned every few days for the foreseeable future. Auuugh.

I always enjoy a university AU, but

I feel fandom in general is really missing out on the potential hilarity of a Unitarian Universalist congregation AU. Not surprisingly, of course, because most people don't know what that's like, but every time I ponder the funny potential of the university AU, I inevitably think about the similar, but often weirder, potential of the UU AU.

Of course this is a broad range of possibility, but in fandom-specific terms, a group of teenagers somewhat reluctantly ending up all employed in child-wrangling, like in Stranger Things, actually happened to me when I was a teenager. I'm pretty sure that all the members of our congregation's "Teen Group" were employed in childcare during the services at one point, because we all wanted the money and there's always a shortage of UU adults who are willing to miss the service.

(At the time I found this tough to understand, because the 'services' are basically lectures on various political and historical topics, and our minister trainee was a pretentious, twee dipshit without much charisma or skill at public speaking. In retrospect, though, I realize they were looking forward to the coffee and conversation hour and the chance to talk freely with adults who shared their values, since the congregation was a progressive enclave full of non-southerners, pagans, atheists, queers, Christian refugees, and social justice warriors who were mostly in the toxic white supremacist Christian nationalist deep south due to the university.)

There were all kinds of enemies for us UU kids and teens, both within the congregation and without. Having to choose lying about religion, refusing to discuss it, or endless debates (sometimes bullying) from fundamentalist classmates was common experience to all the kids in the congregation. There was even a super fucked-up witch hunt in my childhood in which the congregation's most popular volunteer religious education teacher and head of the social justice committee, my mom's close friend, was driven out of the congregation permanently by a brigade of officious ladies who had all previously been on my personal shitlist for being what I then referred to as "fake nice" (I think I was about 10-11 at the time). His original offense was using the word "stupid" when rough-housing with a horde of kids, unknowingly hurting one's feelings, but his alleged crime was that holding a gradeschool kid upside down by their feet while they giggle was evidence of not knowing how gentle you have to be with children. His real crime was being a childless man and good with children, because it was their heavy implications on this subject that did most of the work. (They all stayed and experienced zero consequences, two of the leaders giving public non-apology apologies to the congregation and not to their victim, may they all suffer from ingrown toenails and chronic headaches. They also continued to be obnoxious to any kid they ever interacted with basically.)

There's plenty of meat for fandoms that don't focus on teenagers, though. There was a spiritual? Discussion? group that I'm pretty sure had a controversy and split in two over the question of whether they would use the term "praying" or not for moments of silence, with a big debate over whether it's still praying if what you're really talking to is the (possibly divine) little voice within. There were mighty battles over committees, with at least two people who apparently lived just to join them and make sure nothing ever got done at the meetings. There were desperate efforts to get someone to agree to be the president of the board every year, because moderating the main board meeting means it's their job to get people to get to the point using only Robert's Rules of Order and if they fail nobody gets to go home and everybody else gets to blame them for their sleep deprivation. There was a desperate search for a permanent minister to hire that lasted over a decade. There was a feud between the committee chair of the hospitality committee and the paid events coordinator that resulted in the yearly fundraising dinner almost not happening. There was a years-long battle fought by my parents and the other half-jewish couple to get them to stop calling the Thanksgiving event a "Thanksgiving Seder" and instead provide accurate information about other cultures' harvest and Thanksgiving holidays, with many, many offensive statements from extremely culturally Christian white people who thought there was no reason for jews to be offended. (We did win!) And there was a huge kerfuffle when the trainee minister tried to ban our ex minister, who had been a member for decades and had many close friendships in the congregation, not only from attending, but from having social interactions with anyone. About half the congregation were ready to quit over it.