I think I'll get a cat. How to go about it? I bet a few of my legion of readers are catowners and could advise me. My coworker J.E. is a serial catowner and has simply relied on strays to show up at his doorstep. I haven't seen any unowned cats hanging around my place, but perhaps that's because my neighbor's cats have staked out the territory. On the other hand, I'm hesitant to spend money on one only to find out that it's temperamentally unfriendly.

In other news, I applied for that teaching job in Japan that J.E. used to hold. He thinks I have a couple of things going for me. First, the company seems to like hiring by word of mouth, which is how he got the job himself, and he agreed to write me a letter of introduction to the director. Second, he said the director's homely unmarried daughters have a lot of say in the hiring process and like to keep a "stable" of young single men around.