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Today’s story in our Pets Make Us Human contest comes from lui pac.

I first saw Foktillus two years ago while doing research in the mountains of Kiamba, Sarangani Province. Fok’s former master was a three year-old boy who loved to cuddle him and choke him to invite out his claws. Fok was around two months old at the time. Fok had scars, was so thin and I thought he was not well cared for. When he moved around he would get kicked by the children and he’d just reply with a gentle meow. I did not find that adorable. So I thought I had to rescue the cat.

I find beauty in the deep blackness of his furs. I am a fan of black and I thought a black cat would be a perfect pair for my black terrier-spitz doggy-dog. My colleagues were not amused at the color of the cat. The hell I care. I don’t believe in superstition and I love to disprove them anyway. The next day I befriended the parents of the boy and convinced them that the cat would live a better life with me in Marbel. I guess they understood. That same day I went home with my three colleagues with the black cat lap-hopping inside the car. Fok is now my study-mate, writing buddy, and the best friend of my black doggy Maximus.

Foktillus gets a gift pack from Purina, PAWS, and the Homeless, Not Worthless campaign for stray cats and dogs. His human will get the prize notification by email. To join our Pets Make Us Human contest, email your pet adoption story and a photo of your cat or dog to saffron.safin@gmail.com.

In his introduction to the anthology Fantastic Tales (Random House, 1997), Italo Calvino cites Tzvetan Todorov to explain the difference between the Fantastic and the Marvelous. Todorov “holds that what distinguishes ‘fantastic’ narrative is precisely our perplexity in the face of an incredible fact, our indecision in choosing between a rational, realistic explanation and an acceptance of the supernatural…the incredible event the fantastic story tells must always allow for a rational explanation, unless it happens to be a hallucination or a dream (a fail-safe device that sanctions just about anything).

“On the other hand, the ‘marvelous,’ according to Todorov, is different from the fantastic in that it presupposes our acceptance of the implausible and the inexplicable, as in fables or the Thousand and One Nights.”

Here’s a classic of the fantastic, the marvelous, the weird: The Manuscript Found In Saragossa by Jan Potocki.

Today’s story in our Pets Make Us Human contest was sent in by Jeje.

Eight years ago I was finishing my college thesis so I bunked with my groupmates in their townhouse in Las Pinas. We worked till the wee hours of the morning on weekends. I remember it was 3 am and I was making coffee for everyone when all of a sudden my friends came rushing into the kitchen, shutting down windows and closing the doors.

This was all explained to me by my friend while she was lining the window sills with cloves of garlic. The next day, we found a puppy by the doorstep who indeed had a black face. He was awfully quiet and preferred watching us. I’m not sure if he had an owner but he stayed with us often and we fed him regularly. We named him Poochie. When it was time to go back to Manila, I was afraid to leave him roaming around the village since there were always cars around. I brought him home with me and we have been together for 8 years. He means the world to my family and has paved the way for us to keep adopting stray dogs. We now have five beautiful, adopted strays.

Poochie gets a gift pack from the Purina-PAWS Homeless, Not Worthless campaign.

Revolutionary Road, adapted from the novel by Richard Yates, is a finely-crafted movie about people who know what they don’t want but don’t know what they want. By my count, that’s 8 out of 10 people on earth. In this case the protagonists are beautiful 30-year-old blond Americans from the 1950s, so they feel more pressure than most to achieve their dreams. If they knew what they were. For a while they think they can find the answer in Paris, but that doesn’t work out, and it doesn’t occur to them to move to Manhattan, which is a train ride away. So they are left with their nice house in Connecticut, their lawn, their healthy children, and his promotion and substantial pay raise at a computer company. Oh the horror.

But what do I know about suburban angst? We’re so much more cheerful out here in the Third World, and we live next to landfills. When well-fed, educated people who can afford orthodontists whine about the hopeless emptiness of their lives, I tell them to move to the depressed neighborhoods in the Philippines, where people have tangible reasons to be depressed.

Revolutionary Road is directed by Sam Mendes, whose previous films include the universally-acclaimed American Beauty. Never understood why people were so ga-ga about that movie. We’ve seen Blue Velvet and Twin Peaks; American Beauty has nothing to say to us. Leonardo DiCaprio stars as Christopher De Leon and Kate Winslet as Vilma Santos and Nora Aunor—take that, Meryl. Two minutes into the movie Leo and Kate are already fighting and I tune out because whenever I hear adults squabbling I automatically withdraw and watch them from a great emotional distance. But enough about my childhood. Anyway I had this urge to watch Ishmael Bernal’s Relasyon and Broken Marriage again. I mentioned this to Ernie, who recalls laughing out loud at Broken Marriage’s sarcastic upbeat ending with the matching beautiful sunset.

My favorite character in Revolutionary Road is the real estate lady’s son played by Michael Shannon. He’s out on a pass from an insane asylum, he’s undergone electroshock therapy, and he can see exactly what’s going on. There’s a fact of life: the ones who see too much are conveniently labeled crazy.

Ready for her close-up: one of the vintage movie posters to be auctioned off by Christie’s. I love a movie narrated by a corpse floating face-down in a swimming pool. I read somewhere that three decades before Sunset Blvd, Scott Fitzgerald considered having The Great Gatsby narrated by a corpse.

Our first dog adoption story arrived yesterday from Faye Ferrer. We would prefer that you and your pet be together at least six months by the time you write us, but we’ll make an exception for our first canine entry.

My son and I just came from watching Watchmen from Gateway. As we were walking towards P. Tuazon we saw a tiny figure with glowing eyes on the side of SM near the motorcycle parking lot. It was a small dog (which looked more like a big rat) sitting, wagging his tail and looking at us intently. We knew at once that this was an abandoned dog: he was very skinny and tied to a post with a nylon cord. The mall security one guard told me that the dog had been there since that morning (we saw him at around 11pm). I left my name and number with the guard in case someone reclaims him. We brought him home even though the cats (five of them) were all hissing and ready to pounce on the poor thing. The following day my sister took the dog home and now he is friends with her other dog. The vet says he is probably less than 3 months old. He’s now two weeks with my sister and her daughters and their dog Kid – Shing has found a home. Right now Shing is undergoing de-worming and anti-mange medication. Shing and Kid get along very well.

Shing gets a gift pack from Purina and the Homeless, Not Worthless campaign.

Photo: Kim Jong-Il as a puppet in Team America

In late 1993, when North Korea was gearing up to withdraw from the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, fears of an imminent war broke out across the Korean Peninsula. The eyes of the world were firmly fixed on the region. Not a day passed without some international coverage of the North Korean nuclear crisis.

A short while later, Kim Jong Il was named the commander in chief of the Korean People’s Army.

I Was Kim Jong-Il’s Teacher—Then He Had My Family Killed. By Kim Hyun Sik. Inside the World of Kim Jong Il, a photo essay in Foreign Policy.