LuckyLu of the Frontier

“De Mi Careta” by Palov & Mishkin

I adopted my cat LuckyLu from an animal shelter last March. Despite being one of the prettiest and fluffiest cats my friends have ever laid eyes on, with flowing gray and white locks of silky cat hair, I must say that Lu is no mainstream cat. One can tell from her dodgy approaches to social interaction and her affinity for unnecessary leaping that there is something more beyond those gleaming, crystal eyes and plumed tail. There are 3 reasons why the cat is out of the box:

1) Escape from the box
If I had to make a comparison, LuckyLu resists going into her carry-box with the urgency of a criminal trying to escape the grasp of a policeman about to put him in jail. To my dismay, I must use these authoritative measures to pack up and transport LuckyLu to her cat-babysitter Sophie’s house when I go out of town.
When I adopted her, the SPCA gave me a used pink box. If only they knew LuckyLu’s powerful abilities they would have given me a newer model.

On the train ride to her first vet appointment, she scratched, jerked, and rushed the door with force in attempts to escape this temporary cell. With its faulty door lock, it was only minutes before LuckyLu was able to break out of the box. I desperately looked around the crowded train for help as I struggled to shove her head back into the box, yet I mostly got looks of surprise and a certain old man who was laughing at me as he watched the chaos over the folds of his newspaper. After wrestling with the cat and my own personal embarrassment for what felt like the longest train ride of my life, I finally managed to get LuckyLu back into the box and innovatively used a hair-tie to secure the door until we got there. Disaster (somewhat) avoided.


Still too broke to buy a sturdier carry-box for Lu, the SPCA gave me a cardboard box to bring her home in. This box only lasted one trip until I found myself carrying a raging LuckyLu, frantically scratching a hole in one of the cardboard walls, trying to escape. Like prison break, I saw a furry white paw jut out of the side of the box, followed by her head tearing through the cardboard like the Hulk through a brick wall. Ditching the piece of shit box, I lurched forward to grab LuckyLu off the cold, dirty street. Once I picked her up, she relaxed in my arms and let me carry her against my chest four blocks home.

2) The Chamber of Secrets
Sometimes LuckyLu used to disappear for hours at a time. This made no sense, really, because she is a housecat, forever trapped indoors. Where oh where in this small apartment could she be?
Of course, LuckyLu, so opposed to being confined, had found an outlet for her thrill-seeking nature. Her need for mystery and adventure brought her to the Chamber of Secrets of my apartment, or, the internal labyrinth of pipes which connects the bathroom to my roommate’s closet. With a keen nose for excitement, LuckyLu discovered this passageway before we knew it existed. One morning, she appeared in my puzzled roommate’s closet and declared, “I know no boundaries, for I am LuckyLu.”

3) Subversive hair-do
LuckyLu has a dread. Since it’s always been her choice to do what she wants with her hair, and she grooms it all day, I figure that this is a purposeful addition to her appearance. Sometimes it makes me wonder—what is next? Colored fur? A tattoo of the Meow Mix logo on her lower back? However rebellious my little LuckyLu’s new look is, I’ve come to the conclusion that a little experimentation can’t do much harm, and that there are much worse things that she could be getting her whiskers into. I’ll have to keep an eye on that lower back though.

Movin’ right along.

One of the main obstacles while talking to my friends about postmodernism is that no one ever has a precise enough definition for it and we all end up talking about different things. Finally, I feel as though I’ve found a fitting description:

“…one fundamental feature of all the postmodernisms: namely, the effacement in them of the older (essentially high-modernist) frontier between high culture and so-called mass or commercial culture, and the emergence of new kinds of texts infused with the forms, categories and contents of that very Culture Industry so passionately denounced by all the ideologues of the Modern…

The postmodernisms have in fact been fascinated precisely by this whole ‘degraded’ landscape of schlock and kitsch, of TV series and Readers’ Digest culture, of advertising and motels, of the late show and the grade-B Hollywood film, of so-called paraliterature with its airport paperback categories of gothic and romance, the popular biography, the murder mystery and science-fiction or fantasy novel; materials they no longer simply ‘quote’, but incorporate into their very substance.”

Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism by Fredric Jameson