Sometimes, I miss my old apartment. It’s Saturday night — cold, winter. The sun is long gone from the sky by now. I’m planning a relaxing evening with some hot cocoa, laundry, and movies. Saturdays being my only day off, and the only night this week I’m not working or at a happy hour, I plan to spend it bunkered down. Heat up, movies on.
It’s night like this I miss my old two-bedroom apartment, with the somewhat spacious kitchen. Now I’ve got a studio — yes, it has a walk-in closet, but it’s still a studio. My futon is in my living room, or, perhaps, my living room is in my bedroom. It seems like a luxury that I had an apartment with one room alone for my bed. Craziness!
However, I’ve noticed I tend to keep this apartment very clean and organized. Perhaps not “very”, but “mostly.” There’s a tube of balm next to my TV, my vacuum cleaner isn’t put away. My coat is draped over a chair, and there’s an empty bottle of beer on a bookshelf that I really should throw away. Aside from this detail work, my apartment is clean: you can see the carpet, most surfaces are free of dust. The kitchen counters sparkle, the trash is not (yet) overflowing.
Small spaces tend to force one, even as generally busy (and therefore messy) as I, to keep things clean. I hope this habit continues if I ever move to a bigger space!
There’s this great film from the late 90s — it’s vastly under appreciated — that has, to my eternal regret, and the eternal shame of Universal, never been released on widescreen DVD. It’s called Fierce Creatures and it’s by the same people who did Fish Called Wanda — same cast, writers, yada-yada.
It’s been many, many years since I saw it last, and if my dusty old memory works correctly, Kevin Kline — who plays two roles — plays a character who is tasked to rehabilitate a zoo his dad (also, Kline!) has bought. There’s a scene where Kline clambers into a panda exhibit, much to the horror of the zoo staff. Turns out it’s an animatronic panda, and Kline, if memory serves, humps the thing much to the staff’s horror and/or amusement.
The point being, that while pandas look cute and cuddly, you should remember that they’re panda bears. And while Wikipedia stresses that panda attacks on humans usually occur as a result of said panda being annoyed by said human, they’re not exactly your everyday house cat, right?
A college student in southern China was bitten by a panda after he broke into the bear’s enclosure hoping to get a hug, state media and a park employee said Saturday.
[T]he student was bitten on the arms and legs. Two foreign visitors who saw the attack ran to get help from workers at a nearby refreshment stand, who notified park officials, the employee said.
“Yang Yang was so cute and I just wanted to cuddle him. I didn’t expect he would attack,” the 20-year-old student, surnamed Liu, said in a local hospital, according to the official Xinhua News Agency.
Stupid stupid stupid.
I mean, I joke about jumping into the Big Cat enclosure at the National Zoo here in DC and rubbing the tigers’ stomachs, but, um, I’m joking. Because while I adore cats, and while I love to see the movements of my own in such larger forms, I know that Big Cats are nothing, in behavior, like my own pets. Plus, there’s the whole scale of things: when my cats bite or claw, they rarely break my skin. Those tigers? Oh, I’d be dead in one swipe!
I did just crack up in laughter at the article’s end (emphasis mine, and mine alone!):
Last year, a panda at the Beijing Zoo attacked a teenager, ripping chunks out of his legs, when he jumped a barrier while the bear was being fed.
The same panda was in the news in 2006 when he bit a drunk tourist who broke into his enclosure and tried to hug him while he was asleep. The tourist retaliated by biting the bear in the back.
