I’m determined to have a good year this year, even if I have to bite and scratch and fight for it. Last year was a bad year, and actually, the year before that was actually pretty bad too. For whatever reason I’ve just been feeling kind of lost… and I am really sick of that feeling. I don’t want to spend any more time feeling like that.

I’m not even going to make a bunch of resolutions this year. Last year I made some and two weeks later I couldn’t even remember what they were. So this year I’m only going to concentrate on one thing: I’m going to stay in constant motion and I’m going to concentrate on learning as much as I can. Me and Bunny are going to try to grow this website as much as we can. I only have a little while here on Earth and I’m not exactly a kitten any more, I think it’s time for me to start fulfilling my obligations. Here I go.

~ pinky

Bunny just posted our first episode on our website. I had a chance to sit down and do a very short interview with my friend Dr. Hui, who was nice enough to drive all the way out here from LA (I think it’s about a two or three-hour drive). Besides doing the interview, we gave Dr. Hui a nice tour around the immediate vicinity (the old trailer park, the huge electrical power line towers, the semi-abandoned junk yards) and we also showed him our plans for the university we’re hoping to build one day (I think he was impressed). We really enjoyed his visit.

Even though it’s just one episode on our website so far, at least now I feel like we’re slowly moving forward. It’s a start. We have three more episodes in-progress, I hope to have them all done and posted on our website very soon.

~ pinky

I was browsing the internet last night when I came across a photo that really shocked me. It was a photograph of an Iraqi man who had been shot in the head by a U.S. army sniper. His head was basically gone, his face was flattened out and floppy like an empty rubber mask. There was blood everywhere, trailing away from his head via a small foamy river. He had no head any more, but he did have blue pants and clean tennis shoes. It’s hard to believe that someone’s life can end so quickly, and with so much violence.

This morning I woke up with a huge knot in my stomach. I’m sure it was that awful photograph and for most of the morning I kept wishing I hadn’t ever seen it. Then I started wondering to myself, “How many Iraqi people have died during this war?” I went online and found a website called iraqbodycount.org. The current estimate is somewhere around 30,000 civilians killed by military intervention in Iraq. This is a number that exceeds my comprehension.

There’s been a lot of argument here in the U.S. about whether it’s right or wrong to show photos of dead people, be they U.S. soldiers or Iraqi civilians, in our newspapers or on the evening news. But if my not-very-close encounter with just one dead Iraqi man left me so sad and angry, I can only imagine what would happen if people were confronted with many, many more images of this kind of violence and suffering. I don’t want to see photos of mutilated children, but I’m sure there are thousands. They must exist - but where are they? I still don’t understand why all the news reports of bombings, kidnappings, executions, errant missles and whatnot don’t seem to affect me on the same visceral level that that one photo did. Maybe if you want to stop war, you have to show pictures.

~ pinky

Today is “Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day” here in the U.S. Which is also to say that the other 364 days of the year are “Not Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day”. In their place may I suggest “Malcolm X Day” (May 19), “Sitting Bull Day” (how about June 25?), “Anne Sullivan Day” (April 14), and about 361 others.

~ pinky

I’m still being haunted by that awful photograph (Jan. 14 entry), and the insane war that produced it. You know, one of the places that photograph led me to was to think about the disparity of numbers of the dead. 30,000 Iraqi civilian dead, 2,000 U.S. soldiers dead. I don’t mean to trivialize death and suffering by going on and on about numbers, but I can’t help but wonder - is this kind of disparity between the number of dead soldiers versus the number of dead civilians ‘typical’ in times of war, or is this war in particular some kind of highly unusual exception?

I did some quickie ‘research’ (I use the term very loosely, sorry) and learned that during wars, it’s not unusual for many more civilians to die than soldiers. Once such example being World War II: about 25 million soldiers died, compared to over 62 million civilians deaths. The Korean War was similar in this respect: about 750,000 dead soldiers (North Korean, South Korean, Chinese, U.S., U.N., Soviet) versus between 1.25 to 1.55 million civilian deaths (both sides). I don’t have exact figures because I don’t think anyone really knows exactly how many people die during wars…

Another thing I didn’t realize is how many war-time deaths are caused by starvation, disease, exposure, drought, ‘friendly fire’, atrocities, and so on. For example, during the American Civil War, twice as many soldiers died from non-combat related reasons than were killed in ‘action’.

When someone says the word “war”, I immediately think of “death”. The thing is, though, that the iconic image of ‘war-time death’ that immediately comes to mind is of a soldier (invariably a male soldier) being shot, bombed, bayonet-ed, grenade-ed, or otherwise killed by… well, another male soldier.

Obviously I have an overly simplistic, one-dimensional concept of how wars actually destroy lives - children, women, the elderly, soldiers… cats… And I’m willing to bet I’m not the only one who thinks like this. So I’m curious - what would be a good way to teach people about war and what it really is?

~ pinky

Tonight Bunny, Kim, Mimi & I went to a friend Pat’s memorial service. To be honest we didn’t know her very well, mostly we just saw her around sometimes behind the Greek restaurant’s dumpsters, but she was always very kind to us the few times we did get to talk. She was also very well respected around here, known for being very compassionate and also very knowledgeable about various scientific methodologies. She was also quite stunning to look at - I’ve never seen another white rabbit around these parts, perhaps she was an escapee, nobody knows. But she was run over by a truck last Tuesday, I’m sure she was killed instantly and didn’t suffer at all.

I don’t think there ever was a human being born who decided not to drive a car or truck because of the risk to small, crossing animals.

~ pinky

Bunny, Mimi, and I watched the Olympics™ tonight on television, it was the final night of the ladies figure skating competition. I have to admit, I’m a bit confused by the whole idea. To me, figure skating looks like some kind of art-form, maybe similar to dancing, theater, or maybe even painting. It’s weird to me to make that into a competitive sport, with winners and losers. I said “Why does this have to be competitive? Why not just have all these girls perform, and we can enjoy all of their performances without having to say ‘you were the best, you were second best, and so on’…?” Then they both looked at me like I was from the moon and said “Nobody would watch…”

Really?

Why are human beings so hard-wired for competition? Is it simply a handy motivational mechanism useful for promoting excellence and forward-movement? Or is it something more primal, perhaps a deeply-embedded animal instinct that long ago allowed certain cavemen the ability to survive by clubbing their smaller, weaker, less competitively-inclined cavemen buddies to death during long winters and other times of food scarcity?

Not being the competitive type myself, I won’t pretend to know the answer to this. Bunny recommends that I just interview some ice skaters to find out what they think about this. Personally I find it hard to believe that any ice skater would have anything at all in common with a club-wielding caveman.

~ pinky

[ note from Bunny: Tanya Harding? In your face Pinky. ]

Hi everybody.
It’s a good thing March has 31 days in it, otherwise I would have had no entries this month. We finally finished our first video episode yesterday, and while we’re quite happy to get number one out of the way, making that episode was also a pretty stressful process. I suspect we’re going to run into quite a bit of problems for a while, being that I’m not going to be able to fix many of the problems we encountered any time soon. First off, we found out right away that I’m not a good performer. Talking with your friends is sure a lot different from talking with a microphone and camera in front of you and having that little red recording light flashing. I’m learning all kinds of things I didn’t really want to know about myself: I tend to slur a lot of words together. I tend to trail off at the ends of sentences. I mispronounce a lot of words. When I’m reading my script, it really sounds like I’m reading from a script. And it’s almost as if the harder I try, the worse everything gets. Plus, I really don’t like the sound of my voice… I think I need voice lessons, acting lessons, and a whole bunch of other lessons I’ve never even heard of yet. I’m sure it’s just going to take a lot of practicing on my part to get better, and it’s actually really nerve-wracking to think that there’s people out there listening as I’m floundering around in front of a microphone. My ego’s all slumped over and tired from the mean ass-kicking it received this week.

But Bunny, Mimi, Kim, and I, we’ve been talking about it a lot these past few weeks, and we keep on coming to the same conclusion - it’s important to keep working. We’ll keep trying to improve as we go along, but for the time being, we just feel like we have to be stubborn and single-minded and force our way forward. We read the newspapers every day and sometimes we just feel so overwhelmed, almost like there’s nothing we can do to make anything better. We probably won’t know for a while if anybody will find The Pinky Show useful in some way or not, but one thing we’ve definitely found out for ourselves already, is that in order to make The Pinky Show, we have to talk a lot things out. And all this talking and discussion is helping us to kind of sort out our thoughts and think through some of the things that’s been pressing down on us. An other option would be for us to lie around and spend all our time complaining and whining about stuff - I’m pretty sure that kind of behavior accomplishes absolutely nothing. Cats don’t live a long time you know, we’re here in this world for a little while and then we’re gone. We don’t have much time to waste.

~pinky

One of the things I like to do to relax is to browse the internet. I guess you could say it’s kind of like a hobby (I’ve heard people call watching television their hobby - that’s also pretty bad). I don’t really like to do physical activities like exercising (yeah, I know), and there’s not too many things to do around here that anyone could call ‘amusements’, so reading, talking with friends, looking for stuff to eat (and then eating it), and browsing the internet are what I like to do best. Which brings me to the subject of today’s entry - annoying bumper stickers. Here’s one of the stupidest ones I found tonight:

Not really sure what to say about it other than this bumper sticker makes no logical sense to me at all (if anyone out there can educate me as to how U.S. soldiers have saved us from speaking Arabic, Vietnamese, Korean, Spanish, Russian, or [insert evil/inferior foreign language here], please feel free to e-mail me a mini-history lesson). Okay, here’s another:

Aren’t human beings also made of meat…?

Yesterday Bunny and I were arguing about something (not bumper stickers) and she implied that I’m a humorless slug (by calling me a “humorless slug”). I may be a slug (see exercise thing, above), but I don’t think I’m actually totally humorless. But I’ve noticed that whenever I don’t laugh at something somebody else thinks is funny (no matter how offensive or stupid that thing may be), suddenly I’m ‘humorless’. Like now.

~ pinky

One of the things we’ve been asked most about regarding the Vietnam War episode we just published is where we got our information from. I can understand the question because, to be blunt, quite a few things in our episode contradicts information about the Vietnam War found in many mainstream texts.

First let me preface my response by saying that there is a tremendous amount of information about the Vietnam War ‘out there’ and wading through even a small percentage of it was pretty daunting. But we expected that. What we were not particularly prepared for is how much of the so-called ‘factual’ information we encountered from one source would be directly contradicted by other ‘factual’ information from other sources. Before making this episode both Bunny and I assumed, naively, that a fact can generally be depended on to provide an objective representation of some aspect of reality that basically everybody can agree upon (isn’t that pretty much the definition of the word?). We basically assumed that debate and criticism is really reserved more for matters of opinion, not facts. Well, we’ve had to take a step back and rethink all of this, because so many of the ‘facts’ Bunny and I encountered in our reserach of the Vietnam War turned out to be, upon closer examination, simply untrue.

So the question is, what happens when historians write histories based on un-factual facts? And how do you try to piece together a coherent, honest retelling of how something as complicated as a war happened, based on research that includes those un-factual histories? Hmm… big problem.

In the end, we did have to decide which ‘facts’ to go with. And how did we do that? Well, in most cases, digging more deeply into each one usually revealed what (apparently, probably) really happened. But we also found out that sometimes it’s very difficult to determine what really happened because the reporting of information is always so intertwined with the reporters’ interests. There’s really no such thing as completely unbiased, objective historical narratives.

In the case of our Vietnam War episode, an important test to figure out what was ‘true’ or ‘false’ was NOT to see how many people lined up on one side as opposed to the other (majority rules style, a la Wikipedia), but to go to primary documents and see what they had to say. It also mattered if we could find information that weakened a certain party’s position, being presented by that party itself. And finally, of course, it mattered to us that any piece of information embody a high degree of explanatory power - some information, however much we would have liked to believe it, simply did not make much sense when placed next to other sets of (verifiable) information. So, for example, the Pentagon Papers were very useful in this regard, since there was so much self-incriminating information included therein, which really did help to explain why and how the ruling elite in the U.S. did what they did.

The episode is relatively short (only 40 minutes) but still has quite a bit of information in it that is repudiated by practically every high school textbook (U.S. history, American Studies, etc.) I’ve seen. Which makes me wonder, how are these people acquiring information for their texts? I’ve always been the skeptical type, but needless to say my paranoia (not my usual paranoia, but my research-related paranoia) has been boosted to new heights in the past several months. Pretty scary.

By the way, one of our friends, a high school history teacher in Los Angeles, lent us a history textbook he bought while on a trip to Vietnam. It’s translated into English and tells the story of Vietnamese history (including the American War) from ‘the Vietnamese perspective’ - it’s a fascinating read but sorry to say in many instances it’s just as flashy, ‘factual’, and utterly inaccurate as our own American textbooks, albeit from the opposite direction. We did find a lot of interesting perspectives in that book, but like everything else we had to double- and triple-check any ‘facts’ containted therein before putting any of it in our episode.

I think our next episode will be about something less fraught with ideological (and emotional) struggle - perhaps something like My Favorite Ice Cream Flavors.

So continues our education as we make our little show.

~ pinky

I read various newspapers every day. I also read books everyday. I put them both in my head and let them fight it out.

In contrast to the (apparently) currently popular idea that war/invasion/occupation are all effective ways of spreading democracy, today’s book-quote:

“What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?”
- Mahatma Gandhi, Non-Violence in Peace and War.

We still like Gandhi, right?

~ pinky

I was reading a report in the British medical journal The Lancet about human rights abuses in Haiti. It stated, among other things, that 8,000 people were murdered and 35,000 girls and women raped or sexually assaulted in the Port-au-Prince area during the period immediately following President Aristide’s removal from power in February 2004. The crimes were committed mostly by the police, UN peacekeepers, anti-Lavalas (Aristede’s political party) groups, and other associates of the U.S.-backed interim government. Assassination and rape were basically being used as instruments of social control and punishment for political affiliation, and all of this has been going on for the past couple of years right off the coast of Florida. The report was published in the journal’s September 2, 2006 issue, so it’s been in circulation for several days now. I’ve been watching the front pages of lots of major U.S. newspapers and news websites and so far I haven’t seen any references to it appear anywhere.

An obvious question: Why not? It can’t be that the numbers aren’t shocking enough, or the crimes not heinous enough (i.e., death squads gang raping children - isn’t this generally considered news?). And it can’t be that Haiti’s too far away for us to care - I’m looking at my globe right now and I can cover Florida, Haiti and Cuba with my paw all at the same time (and I have really small paws). I can only assume that its absence must be for ‘other reasons’ - I shudder to imagine.

So what is in the news at the moment?

• the recent quadruple-murder/dismemberment in Maine;
• The Crocodile Hunter guy’s death-by-stringray;
• Andre Agassi’s retirement from “tennis” (a.k.a. giant ping-pong);
• Pluto’s demotion from planetary status to glorified asteroid;
• etc., etc., etc.

It’s not that I don’t think any of the above stories are worthy of inclusion in a newspaper, because, yeah, I actually did read all of those stories too. *cough* [Bunny’s note: Pinky reads People magazine.] But I’ll bet you $20 [Bunny: she doesn’t have $20.] that if you did a poll of a million newspaper readers, most of them would (maybe reluctantly) agree that these stories really don’t have the same degree of social relevance as the Haiti story. Which kind of raises a potentially interesting question: Why do we gravitate towards reading stories that we know aren’t, in the greater scheme of things, important? (here I’m only referring to those instances in which newspaper editors don’t deliberately exclude important stories from appearing in their papers in the first place…)

Hmm. I’m kind of wondering why we read the news. I mean, some of us are almost addicted to it, like it’s an absolutely essential ritual we have to do every day, right? But do we read the news as a ‘first step’ towards actually going out there and changing the world? Or do we read the news as a more passive form of entertainment and self-gratification? (I’m guessing more often the latter) And if it’s more of the latter, I wonder if these kinds of choices imply something’s gone wrong with our sense of values. It’s hard not to wonder how and why we became the way we are. Sorry, no real answers yet, just questions. As always, for those of you out there who have all the answers, please feel free to e-mail them to me here.

Oh, by the way, we’re making some pretty good progress on our next episode. Hopefully it’ll be done sometime next week (it’s fairly short, we’re calling it a ‘donut & coffee’ episode). On a side note, this one will be the first in which Bunny and I actually have music in the background. So far the ‘music’ (gotta put that in quotes) we made is very, very bad - tortuous really - but we just want to try out not having just empty space behind the narration.

~ pinky

I just read some articles about the SMART-1 research satellite at the European Space Agency’s website. It’s been orbiting the moon for the past three years or so, carefully mapping the moon’s surface, testing its solar powered thruster, and other scientific-y stuff like that. Anyway, the mission came to an end four days ago, on September 3rd, when the satellite was deliberately crashed into the surface of the moon.Is that for real? Doesn’t that suck for the moon? I mean, I don’t know if you’ve ever looked at close-up photographs of the moon’s surface, but it’s real pretty up there. And now there’s about 630 pounds of space garbage littering the surface of the moon that wasn’t there before. How long’s it going to be just sitting there, looking all messy, before someone goes there to tidy up?

I get pretty annoyed whenever I see someone toss a cigarette out a car window, like the Earth is their own personal trash can. To me this is just a bigger, more moon-oriented example of the same idea. According to the European Space Agency, “SMART-1 ended its journey in the Lake of Excellence region, in the point situated at 34.4° South latitude and 46.2° West longitude.” Okay guys - apparently you know exactly where you crashed it - now go clean it up!

~ pinky

[Bunny’s note: That’s moon vandalism.]

Those terrible airplane attacks happened on today’s date, exactly five years ago. I just saw a newspaper poll that concluded that for Americans, “September 11 ranks as the most pivotal event in history”.

The poll did not need to explicitly state that September 11 refers to the destruction of the World Trade Center, Pentagon, and United Airlines Flight 93 - everybody knows; it is assumed. But a quickie review of world history shows that September 11 has been a violent day many times over. Just a few examples:

September 11, 1297: The Battle of Stirling Bridge between Scottish and English forces. Over 5,000 people killed.September 11, 1649: Oliver Cromwell’s forces (English) massacre the Irish at Drogheda. Approximately 3,000 people killed.

September 11, 1683: The Battle of Vienna begins between the armies of the Ottoman Empire and various Central European kingdoms. Around 20,000 people killed.

September 11, 1709: The Battle of Malplaquet (France versus England/Netherlands/Austria). About 40,000 dead or wounded.

September 11, 1944: The RAF (British Air Force) firebombs Darmstadt, Germany. About 12,000 people killed.

September 11, 1973: A U.S.-supported coup deposes democratically elected President Salvadore Allende of Chile. From 1973-1990, military dictator Augusto Pinochet would murder, torture, and ‘disappear’ the Chilean people by the tens of thousands.

September 11, 1982: Palestinian refugees in the Sabra and Shatila camps (Lebanon) are abandoned by international forces assigned to protect them, allowing Phalangist militia to enter the camps and massacre Palestinian refugees while Israeli forces seal the camps’ perimeter. No one knows exactly how many civilians were killed - estimates range from 700 to 3,500 people killed.

Those who perished on those airplanes, or at the World Trade Center, or at the Pentagon, will be remembered today. These other victims of violence, for the most part, will not be mentioned or even remembered. If we believe that all life is precious, then how can this not be wrong?

~ pinky

I received quite a few e-mails in response to yesterday’s (September 11) diary entry. Most of them went kind of like ‘hey pinky i didn’t know there were so many other things that happened on other 9-11s’, stuff like that. This one interested me the most though:

Dear Idiot,
I mourn on September 11 because as an American I feel we all need to remember those who lost their lives to the terrorists. I’m not going to feel bad for people killed in a battle 700 years ago in England. We are talking about New York, Washington D.C. and Pennsylvania in 2001. Different time, different place - get it? You have no right to tell me, or anybody else, how to mourn. Fuck you very much.J. Stroud
Syracuse, New York

He raises an interesting point (not the fuck you part, the part before that) and I thought that responding would be a good way for me to explain a bit more regarding my reasoning and intentions. Here it is:

Dear J. Stroud,
I think you missed my point. I wasn’t telling you how to mourn. Of course everyone may remember some deaths while selectively omitting others. For example, my friend Pat was killed by a truck this past January 31. If I want to light a candle for Pat this coming January 31, without having to light candles for all other bunnies run over by trucks on every January 31 since the beginning of time (and believe me, that would be a lot of candles) of course I’d be totally entitled to do that. But a personal memorial service for a single bunny is not the same as a national day of remembrance wherein an entire nation reflects upon a violent, traumatic, history-changing event. One is personal (me & Pat), the other involves the transformation and re-writing of an entire nation’s identity - isn’t that a big difference? What I’m saying is that for certain things I tend to be more interested in what nations end up doing, rather than individuals, especially when armies, bombs, and thousands of civilian deaths later become involved.The official response of the U.S. government to the September 11, 2001 attacks was to answer with more violence. So apparently killing is a justifiable response to killing, which of course is not a new idea. That’s why I placed September 11 (v. 2001) alongside the other September 11s (versions 1297, 1649, 1683, 1709, 1944, 1973, and 1982) - it was my way of pointing out that throughout history, many human beings have rejected life and peace in favor of death and war. I know there are always more than a few people out there who believe that life and peace are good, but the fact is that horrible things like these still happen. I’m trying to understand how and why.

Remembering September 11, 2001 as yet another example in a long line of human beings’ failure to overcome their violent tendencies helps me to keep my eyes fixed on one of my long term goals: I want human beings to be more conscious of the suffering they create through their selfish thoughts and violent actions. You don’t have to like it, I’m going to keep on working towards that anyway.

~ pinky

I just heard back from Mr. Stroud in Syracuse. His e-mail:

Idiots,
So what were we supposed to do? Just let them kill our families as we sit around and do nothing? Do you even know anybody who died at ground zero? Go tell their children how you plan to do nothing to bring those terrorists to justice. I’m so sick of all your whining about peace and consider this conversation over. J. Stroud

You know, I read Mr. Stroud’s e-mail several times, and the most striking thing for me is how he apparently sees retaliating with violence as the only ‘real’ or ‘legitimate’ response to violence - struggling towards peace, or understanding, or healing looks a lot like ’sitting around doing nothing’ to him. To be blunt, I think his inability to even imagine an alternative to violence is actually a large part of the problem. Of course he’s not the only one - we (all of us on planet Earth) wouldn’t be in such a mess if we’d put as much effort into fighting all forms of violence instead of tolerating or supporting it.

~ pinky

[ Bunny’s note: That last sentence doesn’t make sense. ]

[ Pinky: Yes it does. For example, when I see you lying in the sun all day doing nothing, that represents a conscious choice. ]

[ Bunny: Okay but that’s still a bad way of trying to say what I think you mean. ]

I don’t know what kind of music Frank Zappa composed or played. Maybe there are some radio stations around here that play his music but it wouldn’t matter because I don’t own a radio. Our computer can play CDs though, so I’m trying to obtain a Frank Zappa CD from somewhere. But in the meantime, I like Frank Zappa because he’s funny and gives good (I think) parenting advice:

The first thing you have to do if you want to raise nice kids, is you have to talk to them like they are people instead of talking to them like they’re property.

Seems like a good idea, but also seems like a principle not too many adults believe in.

Oh. I wonder if there’s Frank Zappa videos on YouTube? I better go look.

~ pinky

[ after-note: There are! Really enjoyed the Willy The Pimp video… ]

[ note from Bunny: Is it just me or did the fish part at the end make anybody else hungry? ]

Q: Why didn’t the skeleton cross the road?
A: Because it was too chicken! lol!

Posted by Kim

…..comments…..

[ Bunny: That doesn’t make any sense. Not funny. ]

[ Mimi: Actually the punchline is supposed to be “Because he didn’t have any guts”… *rolling eyes* ]

[ Bunny: Still not funny… ]

[ Pinky: Stop posting stuff in my diary… ]

Tomorrow is Christmas, isn’t it? “Merry Christmas” to everybody out there! I mean, only to all of you who like to hear that, and for those of you who are offended by Christmas wishes, my apologies for even bringing it up. I’m actually not Christian, whatever that means. Actually, since I don’t really know much about religion, maybe I should use my delete key to erase all this and keep myself out of trouble.

Actually it’s easy to get confused about Christmas. Bunny and I hopped a truck to Las Vegas last week to check out the mall action - you should see the crazy activity at the shopping malls out there. It was intense, kind of like a frenzy. People were stressed out and spending tons of money. It reminded me of when I used to think Christmas was a holiday invented by retailers (I only found out about the Jesus-God connection like, maybe two years ago). I like the idea of giving gifts, and I like the idea of receiving gifts maybe even more. The thing is though, we don’t have lots of money and what little money we do have goes directly to buy food, water, electricity, maintaining equipment, and so on. You know, the necessities. So we certainly don’t have any money to spend on presents.

Which raises a logical question: If you want to show somebody that you appreicate them (during Christmas, during whenever), what’s an appropriate way to do this other than buying them a present? Because judging from what we saw at the malls, there’s probably no real alternative to buying stuff right?

Please e-mail me any ideas you might have. Because tomorrow is Christmas (it snuck up on me) and I don’t have any presents for anybody, and I don’t want them to think that I don’t care about them.

~ pinky

How embarrassing. I got presents from Bunny, Mimi & Kim and I didn’t have presents for them. They didn’t seem upset that I didn’t have anything for them and I honestly don’t think they are but I still felt kind of bad about it.

Mimi & Kim gave me one of my favorite things in the whole world - food. Well, not actual food, but they gave me a coupon for a free Burger King cow sandwich and small order french fries. They said they found it on the ground near highway 127. Bunny made my present herself - I can most accurately describe it as a cross-stitched doll of me (photo below). As you can see I tacked it to the computer monitor with double-stick tape, it’s really neat. It looks like pixel art except it’s all stitched by hand (paw) in thread.

Any suggestions for how to have a money-less Christmas?

~ pinky