To those of you expecting my continuation of the Edmodo story: Please be patient for a little bit longer. I’m collecting experiences from educators the world over and will publish those soon. In the meantime, I wanted to write about something which has been on my mind for the past 5 days.
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Some of you might already know that our beloved cat Ninja (who’s been a part of our family for the past 4 years) ran away Monday morning. I’ve been guilt-ridden since, because I didn’t lock the apartment door that day (I was distracted doing some math for this) and he managed to open the door and sprint down the stairs (I didn’t realize this until 5 hrs later). We’ve only been living in this building for 2 months and hardly know any of the neighbors (and in return they don’t know us or Ninja). As soon as he got to the first floor, some of the neighbors were leaving their apartment and their door was open. He must have freaked out and gone in, making a mess in the process, overturning a Christmas tree and scaring 3 underage kids to tears. The mom, worried for her kids’ safety, opened the balcony door, from which he jumped onto a snow-covered roof of an adjacent low rise bank. All traces of Ninja are lost since.
Of course, we only found this out 2 days later.
Now, I don’t want to put blame on anyone other than myself (it was me that left the door unlocked after all) but had this mom known that Ninja was in fact a neighbor’s cat, would she still have opened the balcony door and enabled his runaway leap? I don’t know. But if she did know it, it would make it easier for me to classify her as an animal hater. Now, it’s not that easy. I feel as if I’m (yet again) at fault for spending more hours connecting to people online than I do trying to understand the offline world around me and those who inhabit it.
My boyfriend and I have spent the last 5 days and nights roaming around the neighborhood with flashlights, cat snacks and toys. This country has practically no animal shelters, so it’s not like we can go somewhere and look at lost pets. We were about a day late in putting up missing cat posters (that’s how we finally found out about Ninja’s escape). And in these past 4 days I’ve done more offline neighborhood socializing that I would have done in an uneventful year.
Among other things, I now know that the hairdresser in my building has a dog that is scared to death of pyrotechnics and has to be loaded with tranquilizers every New Year’s Eve. I am now aware of the fact that there is a vet living on the 1st floor. I found out that the girl working in the office next to the bank is afraid of cats. The girl in the kid clothing store helps her mom with her shifts when her mom doesn’t feel well. The neighbors across from me don’t open their door when you ring the bell even when they’re home. The people on the 4th floor take long afternoon naps during which time their teenage kids do their entire PR (including dealing with garage keys). The girl on the second floor loves cats and has been throwing pieces of ham out her window (!) just in case, since she heard that Ninja ran away. I also found out that the woman that feeds the strays every night has 7 indoor cats and that the older man taking care of the young kittens in building next to ours buys salami every day and cuts it into the tiniest pieces to feed them. He also names the kittens and has no children.
Everyone has been very helpful in our (still fruitless) search but all these conversations we’ve had along the way have been some sort of an offline Twitteresque experience. It kind of reminds me of a rather old but still interesting post by Clive Thompson about how Twitter creates a Social Sixth Sense. I sort of feel like I’ve developed a neighborhood sixth sense in the past 5 days of Ninja-search.
Now if only we could do this more often and without needing tragedies and crises to do so.
Do you ever feel like your online ‘social networking’ is taking up more time than your offline one? Do you suck at one and excel at the other? Or are you good at both? How do you manage?
PS. This would be the 6th night Ninja will be out in the freezing cold. Time to grab my flashlight.
Photo Credit: dawn_perry
