Thoughts on Thursday

Purrageous Mom again. I am not sure where to begin. When I wrote yesterday's post I was hurt and I was angry. This blog was always somewhere that I could go and just have fun. Innocent fun with peole who shared my love for fuzzy, four-footed children. Then reality intruded and something was pointed out to me that while probably meant as helpful, was approached utterly the wrong way....

I had thought about just leaving and not coming back because it left such an incredibly bad taste in my mouth. As the Meowers from Missouri said, my safe harbor was invaded and that was hard to deal with. Knowing that I had done something that could be misconstrued as being antisemitic was painful - no I do not think muffinmidi was implying that I am or was being antisemitic but when I googled "Fagin as a racial slur" up popped this blog. I had this image in my head of some neo-Nazi skinhead looking up their hateful sites and finding this blog. That made me feel physically ill. I choose not to make any decisions about this blog while angry or hurt. The question of changing the kitten's name bothered me all day too. I had an image of me calling him to come to me and screaming out a racial slur. Yeah, that made me cry even harder. Needless to say yesterday was horrible.

Then today, I went shopping. The kitten needed more kitten food (he eats like a pig!) and I was wandering the cat aisle. I was looking at all of the cat toys and saw this giant fish cat bed and thought "Oh, Diamond has one like that!" and I saw a lizard like toy and thought of Daisy and then the idea "I wonder if Mu Shue and company needs anything here" and I realized how much the cat blogs had become a part of my life. You guys had purred and purrayed for Fagin to live and how wrong it would be of me to let one comment take that support base from me.

All of this over the name of a kitten who is not even 8 weeks old and who does not weigh even 5 pounds yet!! I want to thank everyone who cared enough to come by and visit and leave their love and encouragement- some even more than once. PB&J - the poem is wonderful and made me cry when I read it. And all of you anonymous posters - what you guys said mattered and meant a lot. I feel like I "know" the steady cat bloggers but seeing these perfect strangers who posted for maybe the first and only time stop lurking just to tell me how much they love the boys and me meant a heck of a lot. I have more emails than I ever imagined and I will get around to answering them all, I promise!

So yes, the Black Furrball will sail again. I am not saying we will immediately begin posting again, but we will not delete the blog. We have also decided not to change Fagin's name. Heck, even me calling their pirate ship the Black Furball (A play on the Black Pearl) could be considered racist as a pirate ship being referred to as black could be seen as neagtive towards black people (remember the whole Scar issue with the Lion King). I've also decided not to enable comment moderation at this time. I reserve the right to change that, but for now, let's hope that this blog will help to serve as a reclaiming of the name Fagin for something other than prejudice. I always hate it when I hear the phrase "the n-word" because I believe that gives the real word way too much power. Maybe this blog will take some of that prejudice power away from "Fagin" too.

Again, thank you to everyone. I never ever anticipated over 80 comments would be left and all of them but one would be positive. You guys are wonderful and I am grateful to have such good furrends!! Thank you from the bottom of my heart.