JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

Cats and swords, be still my heart. All the great TV series—The Wire, Breaking Bad, Buffy The Vampire Slayer—bow before your master, Neko Samurai!

Who is the genius who thought up this series? When will it be on Netflix? And what band is singing that bonkers “I’m So Great” song in the trailer?

Saffy is T’Chorva. Summon the Dora Milaje!

Drogon is T’Charot. Bring me my armored rhinoceros!

Jacob is T’Chenes. Vibranium claws!

Obviously we love Black Panther and will watch it over and over again. Gripping, joyful, political. The world needs this movie.

I knew there was a reason I bought this kerchief.

Dammit I leave for ten days in Japan for the World Domination Project, and the minute I return to Manila my phone is seismic with reports of an alleged cat massacre in BGC. Before I can celebrate the mass recruitment to our cause, I have to find out what the hell happened to the cats. When I get the details, when we figure out who is responsible, they’re going to wish their parents had been neutered.

Post your suggestions on how to deal with the cat killers.

Update: Saffy has recovered fully and is eating twice as much as she used to.

Saffy in her carrier

I’ve just read this inspiring investigative report on the Online Cat-Industrial Complex, and I’m thinking of starting a new career as a feline interpreter. Having lived with cats for 19 years, I have figured out what their facial expressions, sounds, tail positions, ear angles, kneading, poop placement and other nonverbal cues mean.
(more…)

According to my friend Rebecca, there is a large colony of cats living on the hillside around Sacre Coeur, and she sees some of them on the street every morning when the neighborhood cat lady feeds them. I didn’t see any of the hill cats. Whenever I missed my feline overlords at home, I had to climb the long stairway to the cafe with the resident cat extortionist, Me.
(more…)

Illustration by Anne Tamondong

Yesterday I organized my journals, meaning I collected them from wherever they were scattered and put them in a trunk and in a big plastic box (there’s a lot of them). I found my journal from mid-2015, a leather notebook I got from Papers and Tschai, a handmade studio in Cebu.

In it was an account of my cat Mat’s last day. Since he had fallen ill a week earlier, he had been very weak and sleeping in the kitchen. On his last day, I was awakened at 6:30 in the morning by something fluffy landing on my feet. It was Mat, who had used his last burst of strength to walk to my room. I knew then that he didn’t have long, so I stayed with him all day and tried to make him comfortable. At 8:08pm, he breathed his last.

There was no place to bury him, so I asked my friend Tina if I could bury Mat the following morning in her garden. Then I wrapped Mat in one of my old T-shirts and put him in a box. The janitor wrapped him up some more and we put the box in the lobby where the guard could watch it overnight.

I went to bed at midnight, exhausted. At 2:45am I dreamed that someone was pounding furiously on the door. I woke up, but there was no knocking. In the morning I noticed that the welcome mat had been moved.

I like to think that Mat was trying to get back in the house, or maybe the angel of death had come to collect my firstborn male cat. (I’m sure it wasn’t a Pet Sematary scenario because Koosi and the neighbors’ dogs are all buried around here, and none of them came back.) Mat was a sweetie. The next day we couldn’t get a taxi to take us to Tina’s place (pre-Uber) so Juan lent me his car and driver. So Mat arrived in an SUV (according to witnesses, he leapt out of one and ran to my building) and left in an SUV. He was a sosyal cat.