This is Bella, the latest addition to our household. Bella is about five months old. We adopted her from the local SPCA. Her name was Stevie at the shelter, but there wasn’t any way that was going to stick.
One of the things that I’d forgotten about having a kitten was that it means stopping your knitting every minute or so and saying “No!” It also means making sure that neither your working yarn nor any yarn ends are trailing across your leg; if they are, prepare yourself for the delivery of a tiny set of claws right through your pants and into your skin.
I’ve set aside a sacrificial skein for when Bella gets too obsessed with my knitting and won’t take no for an answer. I haven’t had to use it yet because, like most kittens, Bella has an attention span of about three nanoseconds. Just tossing a penny on the floor works wonders. And this afternoon Bella was quite happy going to sleep in my lap without trying to help me out with my current project.
Bella isn’t our first cat——Maxine predates her by almost eleven years——so you’d think I’d be used to the cat/yarn negotiations. But as you can see from the picture below, these days Maxine just can’t be bothered with anything that doesn’t involve being asleep.
The Invasion of the Body Snatchers came out in 1953, just as the Cold War was gaining serious momentum and Senator Joseph McCarthy was getting warmed up. Its invasion of alien spores that turn humans into emotionless automatons was one short remove from what the Soviets supposedly had in mind for the entire world. The 1978 update (starring Donald Sutherland and Leonard Nimoy!) worked with the same paranoia while also playing on fears of nuclear war-induced mutation. Both take an anxiety that was created by humans and turn it into an external threat, drawing a clear line between victims and aggressors. Almost any pre-1980 alien invasion movie can be read this way (before the aliens started healing us with glowing fingers and eating Reese’s Pieces).
Japan——introduced Americans to their anxiety of pervasive technology, that it may be a conduit to forces beyond our control. Pulse (the Japanese version) brought that anxiety full circle, uniting deep suspicions of the internet, cellular phones and televisions with the terror of nuclear war. The creepy shadows left by the movie’s victims echo the prints left on buildings and streets by the victims of the bombs we dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In both of these movies (and their J-horror bretheren) innocent people doing innocent things find themselves at the mercy of the beyond. Like all good horror movies, they take the fears and anxieties that we create ourselves and turn them into monsters beyond our control, and beyond our responsibility.
leaving, nor is it the act of knitting that sweater. It’s the unspoken expectations——the hope that the reaction of the person for whom you’re knitting that sweater will match up to the time, energy and love that you put into it——that will haunt your relationship. I’m not saying that the reaction won’t match; just that it’s the honesty about the expectations that keeps the ghosts away.
