My 14 year old cat has ckd and my biggest fear is that I won’t be there when she eventually passes. Since I’ve adopted her when she was 8, she hasn’t been too friendly with other people or animals besides me, so I don’t know who else would be able to give her comfort when she has to go (knowing of course, that’s not usually cat behavior when they get close to death).

And I just want to make sure she feels loved until the very end.

Finally started graduate school and seems pretty okay so far. Haven’t been able to connect much to my cohort, but a bit closer with my actual area. I’m not too down about that given I’m trying to treat this as a job than as school, and have always been shy and anxious (though not so much anymore). It’ll just be something that comes naturally over time I hope as my nerves settle down a bit and Im able to meet more people in the department and in my classes.

Trying to learn Python then leapfrog from that to do more advanced analyses with AI. Good and bad, good as it seems to give me a bit of an edge on my cohort (not to validate my worth on my status to others) but bad as I didn’t really expect to be doing this so early and no one has any real resources to learn. So it’s up to myself to figure it out.

Only since I came back from shopping today has she been more receptive to laying in my lap (apparently got into a fight with my other cat while I was out)… but she’s been enjoying her little spot on top of the freezer. I’m glad she’s comfortable in our new place, but I will miss the days where she’d cuddle in my lap until she fell asleep. 😿

I think it comes down to your level of analysis, or how you define relations. Having been living off $30-40k income for most of my life, I can definitely get the sentiment of the large differences between that and someone making $100k (even $60k), or at least someone living a working class vs middle class lifestyle. But that also goes for someone making $0-10k to $30-40k. Either way, the salience of financial insecurity hits a lot harder for someone with less existing cash.

That said, I also get the sentiment of the nil difference between working and middle class versus the ultra rich who generate huge swaths of passive income and can basically can dictate whether or not the lower classes have enough for rent. Why bother fight against each other when there’s a much larger and casual target.

In a more nuanced answer, for solidarity sake we do need to recognize our similarities to work together for a better system. But that doesn’t mean we should ignore our differences and privileges either. We should work towards achieving core necessities for all even at the cost of our own privileges (i.e. an opposite tragedy of the commons: those with some threshold excess contribute to the pond). Determining that threshold is another question, with both absolute and relative poverty thresholds with their own criticisms. And not to say that no class hierarchies will form either, technically skilled and heavily laborious jobs should be rewarded, and people will always try to skim a little off the top to get ahead of their own benefit. But in recognizing our differences, we recognize a need to monitor ourselves for the benefit of everyone.