I’m a dog person, raised in a family of dog people. “Cats are crabgrass in the lawn of life,” my mom would say, quoting Peanuts. My sister had a cat at one point, and I had to learn to be nice and supportive about it.
I don’t actually hate cats. They’re just to be avoided at all costs. Alex and I are a big-time allergy household, which means that their dander is a tremendous inconvenience, practically and socially. That’s not their fault; it’s not ours either. But the other day, I caught myself cooing over the cat next door. So I’d like to formally admit my truth: While every single dog is a good dog, there are also a few good cats.
Here they are.
We looked at a lot of apartments when we were moving to D.C., and the process went full circle: The very first rental we toured is next door to the place where we ended up. I know nothing about the occupants of that apartment, other than that they have a very cute cat. It’s an uncommonly small cat, I think, with a permanently kitten-ish look. The cat likes to sit in the window—just above human eye level—and gaze with great focus and intensity at the people on the sidewalk. Being equally nosy, I gaze back, despite the small security camera perched on the windowsill. I feel that I understand this cat, and maybe it understands me, too.
When I was a kid, I really loved Miyazaki’s movies about children with jobs—so, Spirited Away and Kiki’s Delivery Service. I, too, wanted the sense of purpose and independence that came with work. (Spirited Away is less about independence and more about child labor, but I didn’t totally get that as a ten-year-old.) Because I was also a girl into witchcraft, I loved Kiki’s familiar, Jiji, a spunky talking cat with a cute little nose. I think that Jiji would get along famously with the cat next door, who I imagine to be an intelligent and sardonic little stinker.
I’m obsessed with a cat-shaped pillow that lives on the couch in Alex’s dad’s home office. Alex’s great-great Aunt Erna sewed it. This pillow is like a three-dimensional sketch of two cats; its hand-painted look and tawny coloring reminds me a bit of an Egon Schiele portrait on brown paper. Although I never want to live with a live cat—indeed, cannot!—this is a cat with whom I would gladly cohabitate.
In the summer when you were a teenager, you’d climb out your bedroom window.
It went like this: Someone, almost always a boy, would come to the window, tap, tap, tap. You’d sit up from the bed, where you waited fully clothed under your blue-and-green floral Laura Ashley bedspread, and arrange the pillows into a five-foot-six lump that vaguely resembled a sleeping person—you—her body and face covered by blankets.
Using your arms, which were strong from gymnastics, you’d boost yourself up to the windowsill, bringing one foot, then the other, to meet it. A few feet below, an air-conditioning box awaited you. You’d slide down to it, butt against windowsill, and from the metal box it was a quick jump to the grass, glossy and wet from the sprinkler, followed by a jog of 100 or so feet to the curb. You prayed your gossipy, religious neighbors wouldn’t see you as you hustled yourself to the idling car.
The minutes, sometimes hours, you spent waiting for the arrival of whichever boy you momentarily liked, your heart pinballing around in your ribcage, were exhilarating, terrifying. You felt like you might vomit, but the adrenaline rush you got from defying your mother and her overly strict rules (you lived in an Evangelical town and were not Evangelical; she was raising you alone and proving a point) was so bracing that the fear was worth it. You didn’t yet know the dark paths your rebellious ways would take you down, and you wouldn’t for years. Right then, in gray, staid, boring, fundamentalist suburban Illinois, where the judgment of your neighbors, teachers, and friends rumbled like a looming thunderstorm, you just loved feeling wild and free.
You shared a room with your sister, who was only 13 months younger than you were, and from her you demanded stillness, silence, unstinting loyalty. She was as anxious as you were that your mom would wake up and catch you mid-flight. You lived in a tiny ranch house, your bedroom just down the hallway from your mother’s—so close that you could hear her dry little cough, the telltale sign that she was stirring from the oceanic depths of sleep. If she merely cleared her throat, your heart would belly-flop. This was in the days before cellphones, so you couldn’t text or call to abort the mission. Once you committed, you were going with the boy who was coming to fetch you, or you were getting caught. You never did, though.
In this way, you hung out with boys late into the night—in the dark, cramped backseat of somebody’s car, in motel rooms rented with fake IDs, in the dank basements of homes where parents were gone and no one thought to ask where.
In this way you find yourself, at 2AM on a muggy early-August night, sitting on a wooden bench that faces a tiny manmade lake in a public park near your home, with a boy named Tony, who is three years older than you are, 18 to your 15, and known for sleeping with his girlfriends. You are a virgin; sex is still scary to you, mysterious. You don’t remember now what he said to you that night, only that one moment you are virtual strangers biding time with each other so that your friends, who are a newly formed couple, can make out in a copse of nearby trees, their leaves silvery in the late-summer moonlight, and the next moment his hand is touching your wrist in a way that leaves your entire body coursing with electricity. His mouth is on yours. His tongue meets yours. His hands move up your shirt, over your thin cotton bra, under it. You have spent many nights in public parks, leaning against a cold metal jungle gym as some nervous boy small-talked his way to a chaste, dry-lipped kiss. This is different. Tony is in control, confident, steering the situation with unnerving swagger like he does the red sports car he drives at top speed into the parking lot each day at school.
What happened, your friend, who is staying overnight at your house, asks, once you’ve safely reentered your bedroom and dismembered the fake pillow-bodies you created (one for her on the floor). You don’t know. You tell her you’re not sure. You honestly can’t say. You were just sitting on a bench, listening to cicadas buzz and fumbling for words, and then some primal part of you that you didn’t know existed was awakened. You only see Tony once more that summer. You watch a movie on the VCR in his parents’ basement; his hands roam further still. At school that fall, when those August nights feel like unreal interludes existing outside of space and time, he’ll tell everyone you let him touch you.
In the midst of a big week for parasocial relationships, Katherine Churchill draws a fascinating parallel between stan culture and medieval saint worship.
Last summer at the Eras tour in Stockholm, when Taylor Swift first emerged on the stage of Avicii Arena in her sequined bodysuit, the woman next to me in the standing section burst into tears. She had traveled all the way to Sweden from Canada to see the concert, and to finally behold her idol after such a long journey overwhelmed her. While the crowd roared around us, I was struck how her emotional outpouring was so reminiscent of the medieval pilgrims I’d studied as a medieval scholar, who traveled to distant lands to worship their favorite saints.
You see, since time immemorial, people have been screaming, crying, and throwing up over their faves. Today we swoon over anime characters, Lady Gaga, our K-pop bias, etc. But many of the hallmarks of fandom—effusive emotion, cults of celebrity, fan fiction, and the proliferation of merch—have synergies with popular Western European literary and religious culture during the period between roughly 800 and 1500. In truth, fandom is as medieval as jousting on feast days and parading around in tights.
If you’re a fan, you probably understand what it’s like to feel overwhelming passion for distant or fictional subjects. That’s something that would have felt familiar to medieval people, too. They famously went gaga for religious figures like Jesus, the Virgin Mary, and other saints in Western Europe, which is my area of research expertise. Pious medieval people would express their love for these icons by literally screaming and crying about their love and devotion. As the scholar Anna Wilson has argued, what scholars call affective piety—a medieval mode of religiosity that involved intense and at times inappropriate emotional responses—resembles modern fans’ outbursts about beloved celebrities, genres, or works.
Take the example Wilson draws on, that of the medieval English autobiographer Margery Kempe. Kempe dictated a book about her life in the fifteenth century, which is how we know that she was a huge Jesus stan. When she thought about Jesus, Kempe “myt not kepe hirself fro krying and roryng” (was not able to keep herself from crying and roaring) in a way that “was so lowde and so wondyrful that it made the pepyl astoynd” (was so loud and so wonderful that it made the people astounded). To many modern audiences, the effusive religious devotion Kempe describes may seem alarming. But fans, I think, will recognize her outbursts as relatable—a way to express profound love, like barking at K-pop concerts.
Saints, especially, were adored in the medieval period. The historian Aviad Kleinberg describes them as akin to modern celebrities, in that they were “admired by large enthusiastic crowds,” even though their fans knew “very little about their ‘real’ persons.” I spoke with Maggie Solberg, associate professor of English literature at Bowdoin College and the author of the book Virgin Whore, a study of the biggest saint of all, the outrageously popular Virgin Mary. Towns built statues of Mary in public spaces, and medieval people, Solberg told me, would leave their jewels and clothing to the statues in their wills. Much as we now keep track of celebrities on Deuxmoi, medieval people read and told stories about folks who had visions of Mary and experienced her miracles. Solberg sees both Marian devotion and pop-star fandom as forms of goddess worship. “Beyoncé to me is the most Virgin Mary-like one, where everyone acknowledges, like, she is truly flawless.” Medieval people talked about Mary, Solberg said, in a similar way, describing her as “immaculate.” The sense, according to Solberg, is that “she is perfect, but I’m not jealous and I’m not mad, I just love it.”
A reminder that corporate rebranding catastrophes are nothing new—just ask Pepsi.
TRAVEL
On China
A glimpse from Jasmine Sun’s extensive meditation on China’s economic ascent, noting that even tourism becomes optimized in a culture where you can “007 your hobbies as well as your job.”
After missing the train (we didn’t qiang tickets fast enough), we asked our Didi driver en route to Shanghai whether he ever considered living there instead. “Shenghuo jiezou tai kuai,” he replied. It’s a common reply you hear from people outside of big cities. The pace of life is too fast.
Youth unemployment rates in China now hover around 20%, though the true numbers are unclear. At lunch, my 24-year-old cousin told me about his college classmate who just got rejected from a job as a low-level airport worker. In this economy, he was not even qualified to push luggage carts around. But my cousin’s own accounting job is not bad. He gets weekends off, and can do overtime from home.
My longtime understanding was that Chinese people do not believe in mental illness. So I was surprised to see a big mental health installation in the middle of a mall. On baby-blue signage, passersby were encouraged to journal feelings of burnout on sticky notes to drop into a plastic box. Therapy-speak slogans prompted visitors to “release toxic negative energy” and “don’t be too hard on yourself”; if feeling angry, you could try releasing it via physical exercise and creative expression. Just like recovering techies in San Francisco, burned-out Beijingers have also started creating “third places” and hosting “life-story salons,” writes Chang Che. Aha, I thought. This is a sign of a rich country: China is summiting Maslow’s hierarchy.
However, even leisure devolves into competition. I hear that the Shanghai marathon lottery is impossibly selective, and a popular new museum exhibit showcasing Egyptian sarcophagi just opened a 12am-to-6am time slot after all the others filled up. In a piece for Asterisk Magazine, Chinese Doomscroll writer Molly Huang describes the trend of “Special Forces Tourism” (特种兵旅游): “maximizing your vacation time to do the absolute most, packing as many as a dozen destinations into one day. A sample itinerary looks like this: You take the overnight train into Beijing. Arriving Saturday morning, you visit Tiananmen Square, the Forbidden Palace, the National Museum, Mao Zedong’s Memorial, the famous Wangfujing shopping area, and a dozen more locations all in one day, quickly taking a photo at each to prove you were there.” Turns out you can 007 your hobbies as well as your job.
In a fascinating conversation on Concurrent, a Chinese investor sums up youth anxiety as follows: “In China, everyone believes the state will ultimately succeed, but no one knows whether they’ll be the victor or the price paid for victory.”
Stacey Dooley: The TV presenter and Strictly Come Dancing winner has started a Substack for her Dance Floor Debrief podcast, discussing “all things Strictly.”
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Awe teenage years but it was different you see with me, often wish it were as hot as all that as sexy as the gossiping neighbors would have it be. But, no back seats or hotel rooms for me, it was off to a street race, a concert, party by the river or the Lake; sometimes just cruising around my friends and me in whatever parent left car and key;)
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=m_MaJDK3VNE&pp=ygUeaGVyZGluZyBjYXRzIGNvd2JveSBjb21tZXJjaWFs
Fabulous ad about herding cats.
Awe teenage years but it was different you see with me, often wish it were as hot as all that as sexy as the gossiping neighbors would have it be. But, no back seats or hotel rooms for me, it was off to a street race, a concert, party by the river or the Lake; sometimes just cruising around my friends and me in whatever parent left car and key;)