ribble's Progress #1: Cat

This is the year I'm getting more work, a new apartment, and a cat. Here's how that's going:

NUMBER ONE (1)

CAT

I decided I wanted a grownup cat because 1) it's really easy for kittens to get adopted without me, and 2) I don't want to be responsible for the socialization of any living thing at this point in my life.

bff! and I checked out a cat at a place she knew about on the Lower East Side, Social Tees. bff! had met this cat (who does not yet have a name) when the cat had just had kittens. When bff! went back later, both kittens had been adopted, but the cat hadn't. This made bff! sad, so this was the first cat I met.


She was small, black and reaaaaly friendly. Long story short, she was in heat. I will check back in a week to make sure she is not this friendly all the time, but this will probably be my cat. Please do not adopt her before I do.

I feel a little guilty because Speedrail and Liz came up with some great ideas for what and what not to name this cat, but I've decided to name her "Kino."

The family that originally found her had been calling her "Cleo," and I liked the idea of keeping the cat's name the same because we are both grownups and we each had a life before we happened upon each other. Unfortunately, everyone I talked to hated the name Cleo. Still, I wanted something that at least sounded the same, so that's where I started.

"Kino" is a film term. Kino Flo is a company that developed an innovative new lighting system, fluorescent bulbs that didn't flicker, which we call Kinos. Kinos are light as a feather, versatile and easy to work with, and they don't get hot or require any time to turn on or off.


Kinos gave cinemotographers an entirely new weapon in their lighting arsenals and are arguably the most radical innovation in film lighting since the film camera was perfected in the 1920s.

Kino, which is Russian for "film," also suggests Dziga Vertov's Kino-Pravda film series of the 1920s. Specifically, it suggests Man With The Movie Camera, that film series' representative masterpiece. Kino-Pravda films use an energetic and engaging documentary style that uses a lot of camera tricks and innovative techniques to represent the world better than simply seeing it for yourself.

So in general, Kino represents freedom, being light (in terms of weight), progress, and a certain flexibility and playfulness, all of which is significant with this particular cat and what she represents to me. It's short, it's easy to spell over the phone, and it's quite a privilege to be able to name a black cat after a source of light.

I assumed all of this was perfectly obvious, almost cliche, but based on the number of times I've needed to explain the name "Kino" so far, and the number of things I needed to look up on Wikipedia to get this explanation even laughably accurate, I guess it's about as obscure as you can hope for this sort of name.

bff! and I are going litter shopping tomorrow afternoon.