Adoption

About two weeks ago I had one of those days on which I could do was hug Fred and mourn the loss of Sarah last year, and Chloe the year before. The grief was so raw and recent that it came as something of a shock to realize that it had been a good six months since Sarah died in my arms.

The day seemed to have been a turning point of sorts. Before it, I wouldn’t in any way consider talk of adopting another cat. I wouldn’t hear of it, in fact. After that day, though, the prospect didn’t seem quite as painful. Since Sarah’s been gone, Fred—total sweetheart though she is—had been acting rather weird, as if she felt she had to make up double the kitty neurosis of her absent older companion. She started doing this weird thing in the mornings in which she’d jump on the mattress at six a.m., poke at me and whuff, then jump down—a couple of dozen times. She started walking around the house and talking to herself in that where is everybody? yowl, though she’d know full well I was sitting on the sofa. She became obsessive over a couple of lengths of extra-chunky yarn that she would carry around the house with her in her mouth, yowling all the while. She couldn’t even sleep at night unless the yarn was draped over Craig and I in decorative shapes of her own making.

So we figured it was time to look for a buddy for her.

We dipped our toes in the water kind of tentatively, by visiting an adoption event at a pet store in Port Chester. We’d decided going in that we preferred a female cat under a year old, but perhaps a little older than tiny kitten-age. The one cat who fit those criteria was an orange-and-white calico named Skittles, who was eight months old, tiny, and very sweet; she had an inquisitive way of looking around at all the other animals and people as we both held her purring, narrow frame in our arms. She’d been rescued from a high-kill pound in Kentucky and brought out here to a foster home. I melted a little more at the prospect of getting a cat like that into our household.

But it was the day before Easter, and we both were going to be out of the house for most of the next day, and it didn’t seem right to adopt the first cat we saw and then just leave it. So we looked elsewhere, the rest of the week.

We went to an animal shelter in Norwalk a couple of days later. It was a giant complex where they wouldn’t even talk to us until we’d filled out one of those long questionnaires I’ve seen at other shelters that are full of well-meaning—but ultimately invasive—questions. Questions of a sort like, How much would you be willing to spend on your adopted pet in the case of a medical emergency? or May we visit your home to screen it prior to adoption? that make me want to scrawl down profanity-laden responses like my checking account is none of your goddamned business and oh hell no. They subjected us to a lengthy interview in a room full of teddybear cats so full of good will and trust and love that they would’ve curled up on Mussolini’s lap with no qualms, no doubt to see how we interacted with them, and then asked what I thought were a series of really insensitive questions about how our previous cats died.

I get that they’re trying to match their pets with people who aren’t going to abandon them and who will give them a good home, but damn. If my cat was 22 and died of old age, why do I have to go into detail about her last few minutes? Back off already.

Finally, grudgingly, they took us to see some of their adoptable cats. But they did it in the way our real estate agent showed us houses, a dozen years back. We said we wanted to a two-story three-bedroom house in Royal Oak, and he’d take us to a two-bedroom ranch in Southfield. We’d repeat what we wanted, and he’d show us a one-bedroom condo in Ferndale. We’d asked to see friendly young female cats under a year old, and the cats we saw were all mostly ten, male, and were so feral they’d run behind the cat furniture and hiss and hide whenever we entered the room.

We tried our vet, since that had worked when we’d gotten, but they didn’t have anything. Then last Friday, we drove to Long Island to visit the North Shore Animal Shelter, which was supposed to be huge. It was. It’s an entire complex with a vet school, a shelter, a cat domicile, and a pet supplies store. And the place was packed with dogs of all sorts—but only maybe twenty cats, all of them older, and all of them marked ‘Best as only cat’ on their cages.

There was one cat there whom we liked, a young tom named Lenny. Lenny was beautiful—he was a soft red color. In his cage, he was sweet and friendly and narrowed his eyes at us in an inviting way. Lenny had been dyed pink, either by pranksters or by his previous owners. The dye couldn’t be washed out, so Lenny looked a little bit like a punk from the nineteen-eighties at various angle, when suddenly he’d have the hue of a luridly-glazed doughnut. We liked Lenny a lot . . . until we got him out of his cage. At that point he was all screw you, SUCKAHS! and started running for the exits, and then started biting and clawing anyone who’d attempt to restrain him. When I put him back into his cage, he got a death grip on my right hand with all four paws and his piranha jaws. It took a good five minutes to detach him, and once they had, my hand looked like I’d thrust it into a running lawn mower.

So that was discouraging.

Then Saturday we went back to the pet store where we’d been the week before, since they were supposed to have another adoption event. Kentucky Skittles was still there. So we adopted her. Full circle, in a way.

We renamed Skittles as Ruby, and she’s a sweetheart. She stepped out of her carrier and investigated the house with a hungry curiosity. She proved right out of the box to be an excellent fetcher, tirelessly chasing after toys and scraps of paper, picking them up with her teeth, and then dropping them at our feet. She cuddles and purrs, and loves to look out of the windows. She’s taken over the top of the grand piano, across which she likes to sprawl like Michelle Pfeiffer in The Fabulous Baker Boys. What more could you want in a cat?

Fred was not happy at first about the new addition to the family. She spent most of Saturday atop a dresser, balefully glaring at Ruby and growling the feline equivalent of Don’t come near me, Kentucky trailer trash. Things changed the next morning when Fred observed Ruby playing a good long game of Fetch with me. By last night, they were playing with each other like old buddies, and this morning they were eating side by side peaceably.

It’ll work out just fine.

Welcome, New Instagram Users!

iPhone owners have been using the popular photo-sharing app, Instagram, for over a year and a half. Last week, Instagram opened its doors for the first time to users on the Android platform.


It was nice to see a bunch of my friends—both those with Android smartphones and some laggards with iPhones who finally downloaded the app because of all the publicity—join the free service and begin posting. Personally, I don’t give a fig about platform wars. They’re boring, and shrill, and pointless. Anyone who takes and share fun photos is always welcome in my playground.


I’ve been an Instagram fan for a year. When I first downloaded the app, though, I didn’t get the point. “I can already share photos on Facebook,” I thought to myself. Or, “I could join Flickr if I wanted to do that.” True enough—and it may be that those services or something else might be more attractive to you. But I became an Instagram addict when I realized the following simple facts.





1. Instagram is not about the filters.


Whenever the popular press or technology writers attempt to describe the service to people who’ve never heard of it before, they talk about Instagram’s photo filters—some various effects and frames that can give your photos different looks. They range from sepia tones to black and white, from overexposed to dark and murky. The use (and abuse) of these various filters generates a lot of derision from holier-than-thou types who like to sneer about how real photographers don’t have to doctor their shots with hipster Instagram filters, and from websites who assume that the filters are all there is to the app, and recommend alternative software to users who want to apply effects to their photos.


There are plenty of other apps and software that will do a hell of a lot better with effects than Instagram. I edit my photos with effects, but out of the hundreds of photos I’ve posted there, I’ve used Instagram’s filters maybe twice. Very few people I know use them at all.


And that’s because Instagram is not about filters. Use them if they amuse you, but know that the service’s real strength is in the social aspect. That is, the sharing of photos, and finding others with similar interests—even if it’s just for a fleeting moment.


Immediacy is one of Instagram’s strengths. Last winter, Craig went into the city one afternoon and was bewildered when he started seeing people dressed up as Santa all around him. Thronging Grand Central Terminal. In the subways. On the streets. We figured out quickly enough that it had to do something with the annual SantaCon event—but I got to enjoy it remotely, at home, by looking at photos tagged with #santa or #santacon hashtags. There were hundreds of photos from various people in various states of bewilderment not only in New York, but in the major metropolitan centers around the world, snapping and posting photos of Santas.


Sure, I might’ve seen that on Facebook. (Though I didn’t.) I might’ve seen it on Flickr eventually. When you’ve got hundreds of people armed with cell phones with good cameras posting photos as it happens, though, Instagram becomes a fun and powerful place.


But you might not realize that until you glom onto the fact that. . . .


2. Instagram is infinitely more enjoyable with hashtags and geotagging.


Hashtags—that is, affixing a classifying word with a # symbol—are what make Instagram go ‘round. It’s possible to post your lovely photo of the Empire State Building onto your photo stream and have your handful of friends admire it, but no one else is going to find it without a few hashtags. If you added #empirestatebuilding in the comment, people who are looking for shots of that iconic building are suddenly going to see it. If you go whole hog and throw in some New York City tags as well—#manhattan #nyc #newyork #ny—you’re widening your audience even more.


There are people who are going to want to look at #architecture shots. If you caught the skyscraper against a particularly awesome cloud formation, there are bunches of Instagrammers who love #cloud or #sky or #cloudporn shots. There are even specialized tags like #lookup (nothing but shots of people pointing their cameras upward, for some often-surprising perspectives) and #buildinglover (for people who love taking or looking at photographs of buildings). They’re fun to explore. I’ve spent hours looking at #rustporn.


When I’m browsing photos, I often enjoy looking at other people’s shots of places and things I’ve experienced. I enjoy looking at shots of my alma mater with the #williamandmary tag, for example, and I like to moon over shots with the #detroit and #royaloak tags. Detroit has a particularly good set of Instagram aficionados who post shots under the #igersdetroit tag—your locality might, too, and they might even sponsor particularly fun events in which they’ll all get together for a photo walk, or similar social/photography events.


If you want to look at cheesecake, investigate tags like #beard or #muscle or #swimsuit or #tattoo. If you like animals, look at #cat or #dog or #pet or #penguin. Yes, there are over 22,000 photographs of penguins.


If you’ve got geotagging capabilities on your phone, use them. I find nothing more exciting than tagging a shot with the location that I took it, and then seeing what other photographs people have taken at the exact same location. If you’ve never been impressed by the infinite variety of the human imagination, you might be after you attempt that exercise.


I’m not one of those people who can take a daily shirtless shot of himself in the mirror, post it, and rely on a hundred people to hit the ‘like’ button. I tag stuff religiously. As appropriate, I tag the photo content, information about the location, special interest group tags, and I tag the apps I’ve used to edit my shots. I’ve made all kinds of new friends that way, and as I’ve learned how to write hashtags, the number of likes I’ve gotten on individual shots has climbed.


Which is all well and good, but keep in mind that. . . .


3. You cannot win Instagram.


It’s not a game. It’s not a popularity contest. It’s gratifying to get likes on your photos. It really is. It’s very gratifying to get a lot of likes on your photos. It is not going to change your life for the better, though, to get so obsessive that all you think about is getting people to click the little heart by your snapshots.


The goal should not be for you to get 20 likes per photo, or 50, or 100, or 1000. Your goal should not be to accumulate a thousand friends. Having a photo make the popular page is fun, but it’s not your goal, either.


You should be enjoying Instagram as a way to share your photos, and to look at what other people are doing with their cameras. You can see all kinds of amazing things you’d never see in your ordinary life, through your Instagram friends. That’s the reward. The likes and the rest are icing on a rather substantial cake.


4. As in real life, it's better to have too few Instagram friends rather than the wrong kind of Instagram friends.


It’s always gratifying when a stranger begins following you on Instagram. That warm, fuzzy feeling of someone enjoying your shots enough to want to seem them every time you post them—priceless.


There are, however, people on the service who are ignoring my third guideline. They think they can win at Instagram, and the plan to do so by friending anyone and everyone. You can tell who these people are pretty easily. They haven’t liked a single one of your photos, even though they’ve added you to their friends list. Typically they have only a handful of photos on their profiles, and they’re following thousands and thousands of people—or else their follower-to-following ratio is highly skewed, as in they have only 33 followers, but they’re following 15,000 people.


Often these folk are fifteen-year-old schoolgirls from Sweden. Or fourteen-year-old Japanese schoolgirls. They are often narcissists who post photos of nothing but themselves.


These people may follow you, but they are never going to look at your photos or give them likes. They’re known as ‘ghost followers.’ They attempt to up their own following—and thus the number of likes they get—by befriending anyone.


They are a waste of your time, and you don’t want them as friends. Get them off your followers list immediately by blocking them, and then unblocking them. That way, if they genuinely want to see your photos, they’ll find their way back.


Instagram uses an algorithm in its assessment for the most popular photos that’s highly-guarded and very mysterious, but the number of followers one has plays into the calculation. If you have hundreds of ghost followers, it’s going to stymie your photo’s chance ever of making the popular page. Plus, I just genuinely get grumpy at ghost followers.


If you want to use a service to get rid of them for you, use a search engine to find IGExorcist or another similar site. They’ll automate the purge of followers who never interact with you.


Generally I find the Twitter paradigm applicable to Instagram. On Twitter, if someone follows me, I will follow them back if I know them personally, or if I find them interesting. If someone follows me on Twitter who’s spammy, or boring, or just plain irrelevant to my interests, I feel no compulsion to follow them. On Twitter, I don’t get my nose out of joint if I’m following someone famous or popular and they don’t follow me.


My advice on Instagram is to follow who you like, and don’t stress out if they don’t follow you back.


However, and maybe even most importantly. . . .


5. Instagram is most enjoyable when one explores and takes chances with strangers.


If you like someone’s photograph, hit the heart button and like it. People love it when others like their photos. If you really like it, tell them so with a quick comment! Then check out the rest of their photo stream to see if you enjoy their other shots. If so, follow them, and keep following them as long as you’re enjoying the ride.


Day-to-day shots of people’s lunches, feet, and rumpled bedclothes don’t mean much in themselves, but the stories that people tell about their lives with a timeline of photographs can be incredible. I follow the feeds of talented photographers grappling with recovery issues, of men and women whose work takes them to exotic corners of the world, of parents grappling with the severe disabilities of their children. I follow some people whose shots are so quirky and odd that I can tell what type of sense of humor they have, right off, without having ever spoken to them.


I follow an aspiring film actor in Spain, and an established television actor in Los Angeles. I follow a blues guitarist in Georgia, and an introspective bodybuilder in Greece. I follow someone who crafts exquisite photos of the countryside of Norway, and other stylists who take nothing but macro shots of flowers that transcend the mundane. I follow people I’ve never met who live in my home town. I follow people whose sole aim in life seems to be taking pretty shots of their pretty selves in front of the mirror, day after day.There’s room in my life for all of that.


But the most unique thing about the service is that in the year I’ve used it, I’ve never once encountered rudeness. I’m sure it’s out there—I’m sure there are prickly people who insult others, or trolls looking to generate response with shock and profanity. They likely won’t last long. Because in my personal experience, no matter what comment I’ve made or whose photo I’ve liked, or however different from me someone is when I interact with them, I’ve only gotten kindness, thanks, and positive vibes.


In an internet culture that seems to thrive on snark and irony and negativity, that’s what makes Instagram different for me, and that’s why I keep going back.