I am not a cat lover and reading this will keep me much further away from them. I try to think of people I know who own cats and see if anything about this study matches with what I have seen.
My cousin's wife L opens her home and heart to stray cats of all stripe. They have been married about seven years. She for the most part stays with her parents and her cats visiting the husband on occasion. They have decided not to have children because they don't want to raise a child in a cruel, miserable world. Not a regular couple by any standards.
Mr and Mrs D have a cat that has evicted Mrs D from bed in the master bedroom to occupy it herself. With Mr D being past eighty and Mrs D pushing seventy the cat has not done their marriage any irreparable damage. Mrs D tells me that Mr D would not miss her if she was dead and gone as long as the cat was around.
E has been on prescription strength sleep medication and anti-depressants for over ten years and admits succumbing to retail therapy every once in a while. She owns two cats who are the only family she has. E has a heart of gold and is a very loyal friend.
These are more striking cat lovers that come to mind but I know plenty of others. I wonder if the toxoplasma gondii parasite mentioned in the article spreads from one human to another - why else would there be so many cat lovers in my midst when I am not one myself. Maybe I am and just don't admit to it. Or worse my personality has altered to become more feline receptive while I was not watching. Now that's positively scary.
An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t
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