Today's Happy WTF But Kind Of Sad Too

I was searching for the correct kanji for the word "sakka," which means writer/artist.( Kanji are Japanese ideograms adopted from Chinese characters.) I clicked on "images," and this was one of the first pictures to pop up:

Kitty!

This is obviously hysterical, and my first reaction was "Kitty!" My second was "Nimoy!" My third was "Nimoy with a kitty!" Pretty awesome pic, even as a kanji search result.

And then I got sad, because he died earlier this year, and I really enjoyed having him on the planet. But I'm happy I have the internet to unexpectedly remind me that we still kind of have him.

Emotional Physicality in Gail Caldwell's Let's Take the Long Way Home

Read this.

This memoir is gorgeous and heartbreaking. Some people define it as a "grief memoir," but I believe it is first and foremost a friendship memoir, as the subtitle states on the cover. That's what I think of when I think of this book.

Caldwell creates such a close emotional connection with the reader that our empathy kicks into high gear. She does this partly by describing her physical response to emotion which invites us into the immediacy, the urgency of the scene.

Near the beginning of her story, Caldwell and her dog are taking a long walk in a park--where she and Caroline Knapp often walked together with their dogs--and is suddenly overwhelmed with grief from the loss of Caroline, her closest friend: “I felt a desolation so great,” she writes, “that for a moment my knees wouldn’t work.” The attachment between her and Caroline has been ripped apart by Caroline's death, and the result is a profound, physical grief.