At 8:10 AM today, Havana Brown and I were just out of the garage. It was a funny-feeling morning and my eyes were still burning and dry. Seconds later I had not yet driven past the main entrance of home when I saw Tsuki-san! 

I stopped in the middle of the street, oblivious to the possibility that a neighbor’s car or a school bus just might make an appearance at that moment, and just stared at the cat. A million thoughts raced through my head; maybe dad thought it was Tsuki-san who was dead in the street yesterday — I will definitely give him the bath I put off last week — Will throw away the cat food he doesn’t like — Must fix him — I shouldn’t have cried so much yesterday after all — Ha Ha. 

I opened the door and got halfway out of the car, and called on to him… Tsuki… Tsuki. He just looked at me. Then I looked at his tail and for a split second I saw my ecstasy physically dissolve in front of my eyes. It wasn’t Tsuki after all, it was a cat that looked exactly like him but had a shorter tail. 

I think if the dead do come back, we would all love them very much more than before. But that would also make us the butt of the joke.

Today Tsuki-san, my cat, died. He was only two years old. Someone ran him over with their car.

Tsuki-san is Japanese for Mr.Moon. My brother rescued Tsuki-san from the dumpster when he was a few days old, back in April 2005. Tsuki was so tiny and so cold when I got him, his umbilical cord had not fallen out yet and his eyes were still shut.

I fed him and I took care of him. I would often wake up in the night to change his warm water bottles. And I remember how happy I was when he opened his little eyes for the first time. Of course then I had to make sure they didn’t get clogged and a daily routine of dabbing them with moist and warm cotton pads was followed for some time.

Tsuki-san used to sleep next to me during my many siestas. Most of the time it was he who did the sleeping because I would stay up for fear I might move or turn and annoy him. He looked so peaceful when he was asleep. I will miss that.

He was very playful and had an abnormally long tail which was his favorite toy. He never really appreciated catnip or his black necklace/collar, much less the bell on it. He also liked playing with paper balls, and he never bit a child pulling him from the tail. His character was very distinct from all my previous cats; I loved him the most.

Tsuki liked to climb into my humungous closet and to play with the bags on the closet floor and with whatever items of clothing he could find dangling. There was this one time when he fell asleep inside the closet and was locked in until the following morning. I don’t think he tried to get into my closet after that.

When he got bigger and taller (he was a very tall cat), I could no longer give him baths on my own. He particularly detested the bathroom for this reason and he could tell that he was going to be wetted, shampooed, and rubbed whenever my brother and I gave him that “look.” He would then avoid us, but we would get him anyway.

I think Tsuki-san was probably the dirtiest cat I ever had. He really could not care less about his personal hygiene unless it was mating season (and I make no guesses in this field). He was specifically filthy in the winter and I would not clean him for fear he might catch a cold.

Around September 2006, Tsuki got himself a girlfriend. This was a smaller female cat who followed him everywhere he went and even shared his food. I had doubts about the nature of their relationship but I later discovered it was entirely platonic – Tsuki may have been a bad boy, but he was no pedophile.

My bonding with Tsuki-san was the highlight of any day during the past two years. I miss him terribly and I am deeply saddened by his premature death. I am not sure if there is a cat paradise somewhere in the heavens, but I know Tsuki would probably not want to go there. He would want to spend eternity sleeping on my red couch or stealing food from mom’s pots. That’s my boy.

Tsuki-san is now remembered vividly in the following posts:

Chicken skin

And now we feast

Lazy cat who has no keys

Untitled

Cute little monstress

Oddly enough

Feline related entry: Fall from Grace

Feline related entry: Viva Tsuki-san

Requiescant in pace, beloved friend.

Drastic times call for drastic measures.

Important note: This is not my car and I do not know whose car is it.

- I -

Lately I’ve been wanting to be simple.
I don’t know why but I know I like to experiment.
This is not a poem. It’s also not a song.

- II -

Now I have to go to class and I don’t feel like it.
The professor is an idiot.
He reminds me of the naked king.
So pumped up and yet so worthless.

- III -

Not so long ago I posted in a forum.
I posted my opinions in God and people.
The moderator deleted the post.
He/she/it asked me not to talk about religion.
There was a rule, not to discuss religion.
I wasn’t discussing religion. God is not religion.

- IV -

Yesterday a classmate told me something.
She told me I had strange opinions.
I asked her what she meant by that.
She said she feels I am mysterious and exotic.
It was because I showed the girls my hair.
I told them they “don’t want to know what I believe in.”
What marvels? What strange opinions?
Playful hair maybe. Yeah.

- V -

Once I wondered if I would turn into an orange.
It’s an old post, you can dig it up.
Now I wonder if I am, at all.
Thinking is overrated, passion is underrated.
And too much literature spoils the mind.
Also cigarettes and perfume.

From Act I of Waiting for Godot by Beckett; read and think of what the lines mean. Remember, we are not told who Godot is and why the two main characters Estragon and Vladimir are waiting for it/him/her:

Pozzo: You took me for Godot.
Estragon: Oh no, sir, not for an instant, sir.
Pozzo: Who is he?
Vladimir: Oh, he’s a . . . he’s a kind of acquaintence.
Estragon: Nothing of the kind, we hardly know him.
Vladimir: True. . . we don’t know him very well… but all the same
Estragon: Personally I wouldn’t even know him if I saw him.

I found the play quite revealing and deep. Evidently, people have different opinions on what it means and who the characters represent. It certainly helps to give it an existentialist reading; perhaps Godot is God, perhaps he will never show up, perhaps we humans so need to believe in a supernatural power that we create it, imagine it, and then wait for it to intervene in our lives while it simply cannot be bothered.

There is a lot of talk lately about a governmental intention to raise the tuition fees in public universities in Jordan. But while officials in the Ministry of Higher Education dismiss the rumours, many in Jordan have learned through experience that if a rumour is officially dismissed, it will soon turn into reality.

Interestingly, a more controversial measure was taken very recently to provide financial support to public universities in the country. A one JD tax was forced on anyone who had a landline or a cell phone (paid once a year). That means/meant the following:
1- The grand majority of Jordanians currently pay a tax to support public higher education.

2- A large number of these taxpayers do not have access to this public higher education, and they admit their sons and daughters to private universities or to no universities at all. This means they are forced to pay to teach other people’s sons and daughters when they should not.

3- Most of these taxpayers are forced to pay the same tax two or three times, or more. If a person has a landline and a cell phone, he or she will pay the tax twice. His or her sons and daughters who have cell phones will also pay the same tax regardless of their age.

4- Cell phone owners in Jordan already pay 16% sales tax and an “additional” 4.5% tax, which totals 20.5%.* Now it is safe to add this infamous one JD tax to the total cost.

5- This would certainly generate more money for public universities. Public universities already received revenue up to 20-25 million JD from the ambiguous “additional fees” that students had to pay at the start of each semester in 2006.* The revenue generated by the one JD tax, however, is no more than four million JD.** This means that a ridiculous amount of 400,000 JD will go to each of the ten public universities we have.

6- The Ministry of Finance took the trouble to dig as far back as 1985 to find a law to shave money off Jordanians. The law is called: قانون الرسوم الإضافية للجامعات الأردنية رقم (4) لسنة 1985 (Additional Fees Law no.4 for Jordanian Universities, 1985). Not only that, the Ministry took the time to “interpret” the word “phone” in the law and to finally deduce that it is a word generic enough to include cell phones along with landlines.

7- If the Ministry of Higher Education eventually decides that the old-new law does not help it generate enough money to fill the monetary cracks in public universities (and it doesn’t), it just might raise tuition fees.

8- The Ministry of Higher Education finds it easier to collaborate with the Ministry of Finance to impose taxes or to act on its own and raise tuition fees, all instant quick-money solutions, instead of designing long-term revenue-generating projects and plans. If nothing else, this indicates poor planning and poor supervision over the financial assets of public universities in Jordan.

To return to the main topic of this post, even back in July 2006 there was talk about raising tuition fees for public universities. The rumours were dismissed and the Ministry said there will be no changes over the fees in 2006. Well, now we’re in 2007, I wonder if any surprises await us this year.

An important question is this: How much more can the Jordanian citizen pay to get some education? And, even more importantly, is the quality of education provided in public universities in Jordan really worth all this money the citizens are forced to invest?

* Al Rai newspaper
** Al Ghad newspaper

The concerto Duo Degani-Rucli was a pleasure to attend last week. The Italian Embassy did a better job this time organizing the event than it did last time, back in November I believe, for the conerto Quartetto di Cremona. Practice does make perfect. I was particularly satisfied that a program of the concert was handed out to everyone, an obvious step forward to mend a past error.

I had the pleasure of meeting the ambassador and his wife, Dr.Emanuele Manzitti, Prof. Maria Laura Iasci and even a reader of my blog — all during the break! My Italian was not astounding, I must confess, but I still managed to hold reasonable conversation. I really enjoyed the concert and loved the music; it is so refreshing to listen to music so refined from time to time.

I’m uploading the pictures that were not totally shaken and ruined, for your eyes only:

Yes. It is the Era of Movie Reviews here at Tololy’s Box. Popcorn and coke for the critic, per favore.

I came upon the good fortune of having a sister who knew someone who had a pirated copy of 300, the movie about the Greco-Persian war. So I watched the movie with my sister two nights ago and, to make this review even more worthy of your attention, I watched 300 again last night because again I was lucky enough to have a brother who got another pirated copy of the same film.

Theatrics and difficult English aside, the movie was horrible. It lacked edge, it lacked proper build-up, and the dialogue was sickeningly cheesy. This was no epic movie (I know it is based on a graphic novel, yada yada), this was a joke.

The highlight of 300 was, however, the Persian god-king Xerxes. What an exotic, statuesque figure! What marvels he had in his private chambers on the battlefield! This moment of admiration gone, the movie did feature way too many sculptured abdomens. The irony here is that the six-packs did not make it any more interesting.

My rating of 300 is that it is a “bleh movie.” For additional enjoyment, click here to watch a montage of the “Gayest. Movie. Ever.”

This past week I got the chance to watch Hannibal Rising, a prequel to the legendary movie cycle on Dr.Hannibal Lecter. This will be a brief review, and I will cut to the chase.

I had previously expressed my excitement that a new movie on Lecter was out. The movie’s plot, however, was a bit far-fetched. Like the critic I cited said, it “doesn’t hesitate to avail itself of whatever historical boogeyman it needs to advance the plot, whether it’s Klaus Barbie’s exportation of French children to Auschwitz or the loss of one’s entire family in Hiroshima.” Hannibal Rising contained enough violence, sadism, and sheer evil to sustain a person a lifetime. I must confess the movie was, in my estimation, the darkest and most graphic story of Lecter.

Hannibal Rising was basically about the metamorphosis of Hannibal from a normal boy into the cannibalistic serial killer we have all known him to be. Good movie if you are interested in the shaping of this violent, yet sophisticated, mind.