Kevin the Cat

This weekend I bought a copy of Elle UK. For one, my style icon MK Olsen was on the cover, but mainly because I lack self control in the magazine isle. (I entered Borders to buy a book and left with three magazines...and a book). While reading it, I forgot it was printed in the UK until every once in a while I came across funny terms and phrases like "high factor sunscreen, for a fair or Celtic complexion." or "bits" in place of just about any word or "quiff" instead of "coif". Suddenly everything I read was in a dead pan dryly witty British accent, and thus normal sentences became hilarious. America loves it, because we're narcissists who love our own culture and looking at Britain is like looking at a classier, wittier, vespa driving, castle dotted, more grammatically correct romanticized version of ourselves. British culture is like ours but it's not. It's foreign and yet familiar. It's like those "what's wrong with this picture" games. The pictures are exactly the same but in one donald duck has on a red sailor suit.

This is similar to the ongoing turf war between my cat Diana and her arch nemesis, Kevin. Diana and Kevin look nearly identical in that they are both completely black, except that Kevin ugly and Diana is cute. They hate each other so much that when Diana even thinks she sees him, she wails like a wounded yeti. For the longest time I thought she was just crazy for making these noises at her own reflection in the sliding glass door, until one day I was looking into her reflection and suddenly my eyes focused and it was her ugly twin Kevin! I screamed. It was like a horror movie camera trick where the reflection in the mirror suddenly turns from the naive heroine into Dracula, or Freddy Krueger or Chucky. Somehow it seems this is what happens when we encounter Britishness, for a minute we only see our reflection, but when our eyes focus in, we find it's actually Kevin the cat lurking behind the glass.