Cecilia Tan's web journal, entries from 1999


December 17, 1999

OK, summary of my holiday season, done as a Beat poem: Thanksgiving, duck fat, too much coffee, waddle, shopping frenzy, gift wrap disaster, my tree is only ten inches tall. Mah jongg Chanukah, movie plex mission, soon we'll drive to New Jersey, my parents now have email.

The urge to whine about it not being baseball season is strong, but I think I'll say something about Y2K instead. Somehow, as the actual date gets closer, the feeling that a horrible disaster will befall us or that the world will end gets less and less. It just doesn't seem realistic, somehow... I mean, we've got PLANS, f'g'dsake, for January and February and March. What would it take to keep Spring Training--for example--from starting? World War? C'mon, even WWII didn't shut down the major leagues. Oh, yeah, I heard about that town that tested their phone system and knocked out the entire thing. I guess it's not that I don't think some major upheavals could take place, mostly that I'm just not WORRIED about them anymore.

But I'm still staying home on New Year's Eve, just in case.

P. S. Oh yeah, here's a picture of Joe, for the curious.


November 7, 1999
Wow, another October went by when I didn't have time to update my web page. A look back at previous years seems to indicate this happens every year. Oops.

At least all the traveling this year wasn't business. Took a bona fide vacation to Disney World.

I don't think I can say enough about Disney World, about how far above and beyond any other kind of vacation experience a Disney vacation gets. We took the backstage tour of the Magic Kingdom (called the "Keys to the Kingdon" tour) and it was truly fascinating how much work and detail goes into scripting and easing every single park-goer's experience. I had great fun, though everyone cam ehome exhausted and with colds.

But let's talk about Derek Jeter, please.

I'm going through an interesting renaissance of my erotic life, lately, which has everything to do with a bunch of good friends helping me to get over a very old heartbreak, and nothing (directly) to do with Derek Jeter. It has a lot to do with Joe, too, but there's really not enough room here to detail the story behind Joe. Ask me when you see me and I'll go on at length, though. Meanwhile, though, I'm having vivid erotic fantasies pretty much every day about Jeter, who is the shortstop for the New York Yankees. It's the first time I've fantasized about the same person daily (especially a famous person) since I was a teenager, I think. Of course, the psychological motivation underlying it may be the fact that really I'm missing Joe, who is in North Carolina for a few weeks, and it's somehow easier and less frustrating to fantastize about an unattainable dream than to feel the real tangible lack of Joe's being here. Or maybe I'm reading too much into it all.

Regardless, I'm pretty happy with the state of my sexual psyche right now. Time to go write some smut.


September 2, 1999

I am happy to report that, yes, you CAN go home again. I took a vacation in New Jersey last month, to see my family and to do some things that I hadn't done since I was a teenager, like go to the Jersey Shore and see a baseball game in Yankee Stadium.

I was half-convincing myself on the drive down to the shore that everything was going to be different, and I shouldn't expect it to be the way it used to be when my brother and I were kids. Maybe corporate developers had moved in and built up the place into a homogenized tourist destination. Maybe environmental decline had made the beach unihabitable or killed the crabs in the bay. But no. I am happy to report there is NO STARBUCKS on the boardwalk! Even last summer's broadcast of the "MTV Beachhouse" let Seaside Heights, New Jersey essentially unchanged. People are still wearing the same clothes, same hair, and listening to the same music as they did in 1983.

OK, a few little things were different. Like the tattoo and ear piercing shops were now tattoo and BODY piercing shops. But Skee Ball is still 10 cents (25 cents for triple points), the pizza is still ultra-thin and cheesy, and there's still a Kohr's Frozen Custard stand about every twenty five yards. Redeeming tokens for prizes and tchotchke in the arcades is still strangely satisfying.

And how about Yankee Stadium? They've still got the same guy (Eddie Layton) playing the organ, and the same guy doing the announcing! Yankee Stadium was the first three-tier ballpark and is still the classic Temple of Baseball it was when I was a kid. There are subtle changes--they do more with the Diamondvision than I remember--or maybe I always ignored the ads as a kid. And the Beer Man now sells all kinds of beer. There were guys walking around with Bass Ale and Fosters Lager and all kinds of other stuff -- I told the guy next to me if he saw someone go by with a crate of Sapporo, I'd take one.

But the hot dogs... ahhh, the hot dogs. I had one at Sunday's game (versus Seattle -- RIcky Ledee hit an inside-the-park home run, and Ken Griffey, Jr. was held 0 for 5!) and it was possibly the best-tasting hot dog I've ever eaten in my life. I wasn't really expecting a semi-religious experience from a hot dog, but, there it is.


August 2, 1999

So the obsession with baseball continues. I even bought a New York Yankess cap off a vendor on the street outside Fenway Park (only FIVE BUCKS!) and have been wearing it around the house to break it in. Going to a few games when visiting the Big Apple and the Hotel Mom later this month. Planning to hit the Jersey Shore, too. Took corwin to a water park for his birthday (he'd never been) and gee, what is it about splashing around in water that instantly reduces any of us to ten years old?

corwin thinks it's all part of a second childhood thing we seem to be on right now. I don't think this is exactly a new thing, viz. the toys of the past few Christmases... but there does seem to be a concentration of evidence this year. By far the biggest piece of proof we have of this is our planned trip to DisneyWorld for the fall, which has us whistling a happy tune and clicking our heels several times a day. I remember, as a child, weeks before going on the obligatory suburban family of four pilgrimage to DisneyWorld, praying to God (this was back when I was getting ready for my First Communion) to please not let me die before I got to see DisneyWorld. OK, so maybe the anticipation isn't quite *that* fervent this time around, but it's no exaggeration to say we are TOTALLY STOKED.

But anyway, the second childhood thing, is it just us? I don't think so. There seems to be a generational thing going on, that as Gen-X becomes firmly thirty-something, we crave the stuff of our youth. Pop culture has been recycling this stuff for quite a while now--witness the popularity of the Schoolhouse Rock video compilations which have been out for years, or the current rash of remakes and adaptations both in Hollywood (the Brady Bunch may have started it all, but there's no end in sight...) and in Top 40 (are there any R&B hits of the 70s and 80s that haven't been remade into rap songs or dance remixes?) OK, as a post-modernist, I like recycling, re-using things in startling or subversive ways. But well, most of this recycling isn't actually innovative or subversive--it's just the "dumb f*cks in Hollywood" (to quote Harlan Ellison) blindly chasing a buck with whatever formula might work.

The thing is, the infantilization of Generation X started back when we were called "slackers"--and the boomer generation called us lazy, immature, etc... (Aside: surely I must have at some point already ranted on this page about how the Gen X work ethic definitely exists, it's just not always recognizable to the boomers as such. See the TIME Magazine article on the high rate of Gen-X enterpreneurship from last year...) The "ok then, well, why should I grow up" mentality is pervasive, even among Gen-X CEO's and corporate managers who are responsible for millions of dollars of revenue generation in the economy, who have progeny of their own, etc. People who boomers would otherwise consider "mature" will still get sucked into an all-night session of an Internet interactive role playing game (the high tech equivalent of staying up all night reading a book with a flashligh under the covers.) We kind of revel in it--stumbling in late to our time shift jobs (or working from home)--and kind of wondering if this so-called "growing up" is even necessary.

All of which makes me wonder if the previous generations actually went through exactly the same things, just with different cultural hallmarks and symptoms. (What was that old thing about middle-aged guys buying the sportscars they always had wished for when they were 18?) We've already got our souped up SUVs with built in GPS, electronic maps, CD jukebox and cappuccino holders. But the older we get, the more we crave Lucky Charms, Captain Crunch, and Gillgan's Island reruns...

We'll know we're grown up when we return from DisneyWorld to our staggering VISA bills.


July 14, 1999

So, over July 4th weekend I had this urge to sit in the hot sun, eat a hot dog, and yell at people. That is, no, I didn't want to go disrupt a lot of barbecues, I wanted to go to a baseball game. As it turned out, I went to a lot of barbecues instead, and two out of three ain't bad, but well, I've been thinking about baseball a lot lately, and about sports in general, and also about space exploration. I'll try to explain the connection, and it has something to do with human nature and the human condition...

I spent this Saturday afternoon watching the U.S. women's soccer team fight China to a standstill in the women's World Cup, and then finally win in a penalty kick shootout. I watched this sporting event in a hotel bar (I was at a science fiction convention) and by coincidence happened to be in the same hotel where New England's men's pro soccer team, the Revolution, stay. So the crowd was about half clueless but excited sf fans ("is our goal on the right or the left?"), and half ultra-clued in pro soccer players and their staff. We all cheered equally loud, and one of the guys next to me remarked that they were amazed to see non-soccer people getting so into it. That even four or five years ago they couldn't have imagined watching people in a hotel lobby jump out of their seats and scream for a penalty kick. I was pretty amazed too, at how excited I was myself.

I find my interest in sports kicking in now after a many year hiatus. As a kid, the only sport I liked was baseball, and the only sports I liked watching on tv were baseball and ski racing. From about age 10 through 16 I was a huge New York Yankees fan--I remember the summer Thurman Munson died while I was at 4-H Camp, and my parents were afraid to break the news to me when I got home. (As it turned out, I had already found out because one kid got a sprained ankle or something, and while at the emergency room, he and a camp counselor heard the news.) This was the era of the Year of the Comeback, of Billy Martin and Reggie Jackson, of Dave Righetti's 1978 Fourth of July No-Hitter. No wonder I get a hankering for baseball on July 4th. I was AT that game, with my whole family. I remember already thinking it was one of the best days of my life when Chuck Mangione played the national anthem (I really liked Chuck then too) and guys with smoke shooting out of their shoes flew down into the stadium on parachutes. But then to be witness to history? And for them to beat the Boston Red Sox to boot? Unbelievable. Plus then we went to see the fireworks, and had dinner in Chinatown. A lot of excitement for an eleven year old.

But then came college in New England, and now I live in Red Sox country, and so I hadn't watched baseball for a long time. Then about two years ago I watched a post-season game on TV--was it the Cleveland Indians versus the Baltimore Orioles?--and I rediscovered the drama of baseball, and also that the current way baseball is televised seems more exciting than it used to be.

(I promise I'm getting to the part about space travel and the human condition soon.)

Then came the Mark McGwire/Sammy Sosa home run race, and other snags on the cultural gestalt from the world of baseball, and I guess I'm as susceptible to various kinds of popular fevers as other Americans. Soccer is cool, man. Don't it just point up how crappy Olympic coverage has been in the past decade? They try to manufacture drama but all they end up doing is mucking up the coverage and boring us with a lot of documentary footage of hometowns and such, and killing any suspense by featuring only the winners. What they really ought to be doing is letting raw athleticism and the real drama of competition shine by showing events in their entirety, (and not just those where the US is favored).

Another ping in the cultural gestalt I fell under the spell of was the John Glenn space shuttle mission. I'd been hearing a lot of gripes lately that the American public didn't really care about space missions, that it didn't really captivate people's imaginations, that space launches were boring. But that's just it--space launches aren't boring any more than baseball is boring. For a lot of people Mark McGwire made baseball un-boring. For a lot of people John Glenn made a shuttle mission un-boring.

People get captivated by drama, and by heroes, and that was what the Glenn mission had, what he home run race of 98 had, and what the US women's soccer team definitely had, in spades. My interest in sports is an interest in drama, in a different form of story, where unlike in a Hollywood movie, anything can happen.



June 9, 1999

I'm finding myself a little bit at a loss for what to say this month. Because the obvious thing I should talk about is Star Wars, but you're probably as sick of that topic as I am...

OK, let's talk about me instead. (Surprise, surprise.) Lately I've noticed that my powers of visualization and fantasization seem to be failing. Yes, this is as bad as it sounds, and I don't know what the heck to do about it. To describe it briefly--I used to think about a character, say, and in my mind they'd be a three-dimensional, walking, talking, arguing thing, like a movie reel spooling in my head, outside my conscious control. But I recently came to realize that this doesn't happen anymore. No, I sort of see characters like snapshots now, I can't seem to animate them anymore. This is bad for a writer like me. I keep writing, pure craft and artifice get me through short stories and other short pieces... but to have what it takes to carry through a novel, I need to get my power back.

This of course leads me to wonder why it went away. I have a sneaking suspicion that one of the reasons is because... I grew up. I don't think like a kid anymore. I own a house and I vote. My head's full of tax deductions and appointments.

I noticed this especially when--OK, here's the bit about Star Wars--I caught myself thinking that I would have really gotten sucked into the movie if I had been about ten years old (the age I was when I saw the original). In my mind I have a snap shot of the young Obi-Wan... but I can't make it move or speak. I can't play with it/him. This is frustrating.

Then, there's the fact I had my heart broken a few years ago. I seem to have gotten over it pretty well, though it took time. But only just now am I realizing that my power to fall in love with a character was damaged at the same time.

How to get it back? How to return to the daydream state of my youth? I'm not sure. Just thinking about it, realizing it, may help. Beyond that, I'm not sure. Set aside some time to do nothing but dream, maybe. But in my busy life, maybe that wish is itself a dream.


May 6, 1999

Okay, I don't usually editorialize much here--I try to keep it personal and brief. But after three weeks of news about LIttleton, Colorado, I find myself thinking a lot about my own high school experience, and trying to explain my own actions of that era can be as baffling as trying to answer the unanswerable question of "what were they thinking?"

Did you know I almost joined the army? When I was seventeen I was finishing up a distinguished high school career as a popular geek. Yeah, I found it pretty weird too that by the time I was getting ready to graduate I was by some measure "popular." I was never in the "in" crowd--I got straight A's, played the sousaphone in the marching band, ran cross country track, edited the literary magazine. I rebelled against the fashionable cliques by wearing a pirate costume to school. In other words: I was a weirdo.

You know what else? I always carried a knife. It was completely against school rules. But in my purse with my Rubik's Cube (I'm not kidding) and hairbrush was always at least one knife, sometimes more than one. Why did I carry that knife? Was it just teen rebellion? Was it "cool"? Was it part of my ongoing role-playing fantasies? Was I a little bit paranoid? Yes, yes, yes, and yes. I grew up with the background paranoia that death could come down on us at any second--in the form of a nuclear bomb. But living in the cold war era when "it" was the Bomb and not AIDS (not yet) I also felt like the sword hanging by a hair over my head could be other things, too. Like random gunmen appearing out of nowhere and shooting people. I would never sit with my back to the door in any room or restaurant, shit like that.

Ironically, in recent years, as the cold war has dissipated, my paranoia has lessened, too. But boy did I feel a stab of ice in my chest when I read about the kids at Columbine High, the school choir at practice hiding in the office, the teacher bleeding to death. I couldn't picture any high school library but my own, any math classroom but the ones I used to sit in.

But I was going to tell you why I thought I might join the army. A lot of reasons. Money for college? I knew I was going to go somewhere expensive, Ivy League, and my parents were moaning about it. An unintended side-effect of my visit to the recruiter was that my parents never, ever complained about the cost of my education again (at least, not in front of me). That hadn't been my intent, but the money was definitely a motivating factor. How about learning how to shoot? At the time I figured joining the army was one sure way to learn more about guns and self-defense. I'd never heard of a class on gun use or gun safety--heck, at that time I hadn't even heard of the NRA. (And if you ask me, if the NRA wants to win the public relations war, they could do it by embracing gun control and safety and pushing an agenda of gun education to the general public... but they can't because really they're mostly just a bunch of gun nuts and not actually effective politicians when it comes to keeping arms in the hands of Americans.) So, anyway, the army was the one place I could think of to get a gun education. I'd never even held a gun in my hands. There was also a desire in me to challenge myself in a masculine milieu, which the armed forces certainly was, women in uniform or no, and in a physical milieu as well. I wanted to know if I was made of the right stuff. I wanted to know if I could survive boot camp. (A good friend had joined the air force two years before, and had been hospitalized during basic training with broken knees after he fainted during a forced run with full pack...) I was pretty sure by that point that I was up to any intellectual challenge that could present itself, but what about physically? I had run cross country track, which was the only boy's sport they let girls do, for four years and had never been good at it. But I kept at it. Why? That was a question I asked myself every September when I would contemplate quitting the team. Why did I keep doing it? Because I wasn't a quitter, and I was trying to prove something to myself, by continuing to do something I sucked at and which was hard. It wasn't until my very last race that it dawned on me that how good you feel about what you're doing doesn't necessarily correspond to how well you're actually doing. In fact, with running, it's the opposite. The worse you feel, the harder you're running. It took me four years to learn that, and having finally learned it, I wanted to push myself. I wondered if I could go into another underdog situation and beat it this time. And let's not underestimate my then sublimated and not-well-understood yearning for discipline in my life, and wanting to have allegiance to something larger than myself, and wanting to work in concert in a disciplined group of people toward a common goal. (You can laugh but that's at least one of the things I got out of marching band, aside from all the fun...) All pretty compelling reasons to try at least the Army Reserve, wouldn't you say?

After the visit to the recruiter and taking the military aptitude test, though, I weighed other things as well. How about my anti-authoritarian streak? Is that impossible to reconcile with the desire for discipline? Two contradictory impulses, that's right, mutually exclusive. But I had both. It bothers me to see people in the wake of the Columbine shootings wailing that they can't understand how various contradictory psychological impulses seemed to coexist in the shooters. But, duh, that's the way people are, adults as well as seventeen-year-olds. I mean, can you believe I almost joined the army? There are more reasons why the army was not a good idea for me. How about my loathing of the Reagan government and my opposition to the military actions Reagan had ordered? I would fight for my country, but not for the current administration. That would not wash. And how about the feeling I had that most other army personnel were probably as dumb as posts? I get frustrated with morons easily--what kind of team player would I be? (Another reason I preferred track as a sport--no real teamwork involved...)

I figured out before it was too late that the army was not for me. The recruiter took several years to give up on me though (after seeing my test scores he nearly drooled.). He was a nice guy, a career sergeant, who called to tell me happy birthday and ask if I was thinking about the Reserves for a few years after that.

I'm thirty two years old now, and seventeen is far away. I've found my desire for physical challenge and discipline satisfied by over a decade of study of the martial arts. I've stopped worrying so much about gender issues and masculinity--maybe I've proved to myself what I wanted to prove all those years ago, or maybe some things just don't matter so much anymore. I'll sit with my back to a doorway, too.

But you know, I still want to learn to shoot. I live in a state where handguns are a serious no-no. But still. But still.


April 9, 1999
I turned thirty two years old yesterday. And what did I do? I wrote a story about death. I don't think the two are related, but who's to say? It's Spring, it's Easter, it's the time of rebirth. It's time for me to remake myself into the person I will be in my thirties. But who is that? What is she (or he) like? I feel like since my twenties ended I've been coasting, letting the environment shape me by erosion, entropy. What new modes of thought will I delve into? What new skills will I learn? What new obsessions will grab me? It's time for the next era of Cecilia, and I'm looking forward to it.
March 9, 1999
Work work work. What else is there to talk about this month? Argh. Overworked and underpaid, stressed, seems perpetual at this point. But I don't have anything new to say about that, so instead let's talk about the cats again.

Miraculously, after I complained on this very web page a few months ago about how the two of them (Tai Gau and Varenka) were completely failing to get along, I suddenly started finding them sleeping on the same bed in the afternoons. Not cuddled up, mind you, not touching at all, but within one inch of each other on the bedspread in the guest bedroom, every afternoon. This past week we had some cat-loving houseguests who have done wonders to boost cat-happiness and self-esteem--and we've actually witnessed the two of them rubbing noses from time to time.

So maybe I should pick another thing to bitch about here that will be chagrined by the Universe as a result and therefore improve. I've often used writing as a magic spell of sorts, to conjure up what I want (hey, it worked with corwin, even...) and maybe this is another manifestation of it.

I once complained here about my RSI ("tennis" elbow, or, more accurately, mouse elbow) and received a flood of advice and good wishes. Well, as of the end of December I was ready to pronounce my RSI cured. In the beginning of February I suffered a relapse, or so I thought. But now, it seems, it's not tennis elbow at all, but a neuralgia (phantom pain in the nerve) caused by the shingles I suffered in October. So maybe the spell worked for the tennis elbow, too.

Let the next thing that bugs me, and that goes away, be the ten pounds or so that I have put on over the past eight months. Yeah, ten. For someone as small as me, it's a lot. You know how big a five pound sack of sugar is? I've got two of those riding on my thighs and hips right now. I wouldn't really care except for a few things: 1) more weight is bad for the weak knees, 2) I don't seem to be leveling off and could gain even more, 3) my pants don't fit. #3 is the most day to day annoying, especially in the winter, when I want warm, thick pants! Ah well. Summer will be here soon, and with any luck I will jetison some of the things that cause stress in my life, re-center myself physically, heal more of my nagging injuries, and redefine my body size and shape to what I want. I feel like every time my weight goes up it is just a symptom of how out of control of my own life I really am, despite appearances. Now to try to reverse that.


February 7, 1999

Gee, I guess Ground Hog Day came and went without me noticing. It's been a mild winter here and seems sort of weird that Spring is fast approaching. This far, of my goal for the new year (which was work less, earn more) I'm accomplishing half of it. I'm earning more. But I'm having to work more to do it. And it's still not enough. Ah well. I've griped about that enough, though, so instead I want to say something about television.

Television, for me, is an indulgence, kind of like chocolate. We don't have cable (or even normal reception) in our house because I know that I would go on tv binges that would result in much strife and lost productivity. It's so seductive and it feels so good... it seems stimulating, yet it's narcotizing. You'd think that someone suffering from information overload as I am would hate the tv. But that's just it, I really like it too much.

When I do watch tv, it's usually in a hotel on business, or at my parents' house in New Jersey, or sometimes at a neighbor's house here. I don't mean when we sometimes watch a season's worth of X-Files on videotape, I mean when I watch tv in real time, not pre-recorded. I love to channel surf, and see how many things I can watch simultaneously. Nature show, baseball game, movie, and music videos. Or, I like to look for the weirdest, hardest to believe thing there is. I have an intense anthropological interest in what tv can show us about how weird human beings can be. Lately, of course, there's been a real catering to that urge, with every network doing "World's Scariest Wedding Videos" and "When Appliances Attack" and such. But even better than those, I think, are programs that inadvertently point up just how weird/sad/out-of-whack the human race is. The whole existence of tv shopping channels isn't that weird, but have you actually listened to the patter the hosts come up with on the, like, All Knives & Swords Hour? Wow. (I can't even try to recreate it...)

Change of channel here: I forgot to rant about how bad the coverage of the last couple Olympics were. There's this idea in the big networks that the Olympics are this big, dramatic event, that people will stay glued to, and thus watch lots of ads. OK, not a bad idea. But what the networks have lost sight of, it that it's the sporting competition itself that is what creates the drama and what rivets people, not the endless pre-produced human interest segments they pack each hour with. Yawn! First of all, it kills the suspense, since they always show a pre-produced segment about the winner, and they always show it prior to the finish of the race/game/whatever, so that when the athlete does win, you supposedly feel like you know them better and can have that nice warm glow when the "one you liked" wins. Nuh uh. You're supposed to fall in love with athletes because of the way they play, of how they triumph on the field/ice/track, overcome the odds, captivate through their mastery of the game and their prowess at their sport. I don't want to see a bunch of heartwarming scenes of some racer's house in Podunk, and then only see highlights of the race. I want to see the whole race! Otherwise, what you have is more like news reporting of the Olympics, infotainment, rather than the broadcast of a sporting event.

What I'd like to see the IOC do, is rather than sell the whole Olympics as one single-network coverage package, they should be able to sell each event a la carte. OK, say ABC wins the bid to be the official broadcaster here in the US. They then choose what events they will cover. Everything else should be up for grabs from ESPN, NBC, whoever. Last I looked, there were over 50 million people in the USA practicing tae kwon do. Don't you think some of those people (like, um, maybe all of them...) might be interested in seeing the full contact tae kwon do matches from the Olympics? Don't you think that's probably worth some sponsorship money from Macho, and Adidas, and Gatorade, and whoever else? Instead, people with satellite dishes have to pick up the Korean tv coverage of it.

This may not solve the urge to over-produce the coverage of the games, but I think it would give more people a chance to see more sports. And it would make each network less pressured to condense each event into a summary, rather than showing events in their entirety. It would allow viewers to get caught up in the drama of the sport itself, not the Up Close segments.

Of course, if they ever do that, I'm going to be hosed. Because then I'll have to get cable. And there'll be no going back.


January 4, 1999 At a New Year's party this past weekend someone asked me what my plans for 1999 were. My answer: "Earn more, work less." They said: "Good plan!" Now, we don't know how we're going to manage this, but... that's the plan. What's implied in the above is what I really want to do is write more, and do less other work, but that may not work out. Well, 1999, here it is. Let's do it.

I was going to say some more stuff about the New Year and all, but what I really want to talk about is my pets. I have two cats that don't get along and this worries me. The female, Varenka, is about four to five years old and was a traumatized stray who used to be afraid of everyone. Now she's mostly only afraid of male strangers in the house, but she comes around fairly quickly. We inherited her from a relative who had rescued her. The male, Tai Gau, we got as a four month old kitten from the Animal Rescue League about six months after we got Varenka. Tai Gau is extremely friendly and outgoing with people, but now that he outweighs Renki by a pound (he will be two years old in March), he beats up on her a lot.

I always assumed they'd have a period of adjustment where they fought and then they'd eventually reach detente or maybe get to like one another. (Every other pair of non-related cats I've had have grown to be friends.) But they still fight daily, to the point where fur flies and Renki hisses so much she loses her meow because her throat's sore. If I spend too much time with one cat, the other one gets jealous. I try to play with both of them, but it's hard. I'm not sure what to do to restore family peace, or if it is even possible. It's clear they'd each be happier to be the "only" cat, but I don't want to give one away. What to do, what to do?


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