Not fifteen minutes ago, I added another tally mark to my rather impressive "Asshole Moments" scorecard. If people traded these like baseball cards, mine would be a gem in anyone's collection. I am the MVP of sticking my foot in my mouth, and then once it's there, adding a little mustard and making a meal out of the whole leg.
Just now, in a semi-social setting where I was meeting a bunch of new people I came across someone studying to be a brain surgeon. This does not happen to me every day, in case you're wondering, and my enlightened comment was, "Dude! Wow. Well I guess if I find anyone with a brain tumor, I'll send 'em your way." As these words danced the air above my head, eliciting a mild chuckle all around, one member of the group quietly cleared his throat and said, "I actually have a brain tumor."
(Cue the iron safe falling from three stories above, creating an ever-widening shadow over me instants before I am ground deep into the sidewalk.)
I gaped at this person, waiting for the punch in the arm and the "Ha! Just kidding-- you should have seen your face!" but it never came. Instead, I mustered all my eloquence and managed, "Oh, holy crap, I am so sorry."
Other highlights from my Asshole Moments scorecard:
Working at a bookstore in Florida, I was assigned to reorganize the computer programming section. All the books in this section have maddening acronyms for names, like ASP and CCSII and C++ and MySQL and BFQR2D2, and the little subcategories and hierarchies within the section are vague, repetitive, and cryptic.
In an effort to bond with a coworker and seek a little commiseration for my task, I quipped, "God I hate these books. I mean, who would curl up on a snowy evening with this and a cup of tea? These things are about as dense and boring as computer programmers themselves." Ho, ho, ho.
Without missing a beat, my coworker replied mildly, "Well, I majored in computer programming and I loved it."
More! More!:
On one of our first dates, an old boyfriend of mine was asking about what kinds of organizations I was involved in during college.
I said, "Well, I wasn't a sorostitute, if that's what you mean."
He said, "Oh, I see. My sister was the president of her sorority."
In other news, my little cat went to the vet this week so we could investigate a suspicious lump in his stomach. I had, of course, googled cat lumps, as is my wont with anything vaguely medical and mysterious, and had immediately located all the worst case scenarios, so by the time we made it to the vet's office, it was probably a tie between the trembling cat twining himself around my neck and me for who was most nervous.
The vet and his wholesome looking female assistant (why are vet techs always girls who look like they came straight from Bible study?) wrangled Linus onto his back and promptly began poking him in the belly whil shoving a thermometer up his ass for a temperature. He stared straight at me the whole time and only meowed twice, very small meows, but still ice cold indictments.
It turns out that Linus got shivved in the gut during his tangle with Janet the Feral Welfare cat during his grand adventure out, and his shiv wound was deep enough to cause some mild herniating. Whether the lump is subcutaneous fat, intestine, or a pocket of pus (mm! had a meal yet?), is yet to be determined, but for now, I'm to shove antibiotic pills down his gullet twice a day. This is a very involved process requiring two people, specific choreography, and slices of smoked provolone cheese to ease the pain for all three parties.
Abby, the hyper-alert Australian shepherd, stands guard during the whole process looking for all the world like the kid who knows the answer if you would just call on her. Abby will take any kind of pill, injection, or whack in the teeth (just kidding), if she knows that that is her task and that she will be rewarded for completing it. Every month she bounces in circles for her heart worm pill and anti-flea treatment.
Linus is like me though-- very interested in the process leading up to treatment, but then wracked by spasms of horror whenever anything must actually intervene with his body.
And last, best, the SUN CAME OUT YESTERDAY! It was great-- I sat out in the back yard with a cup of hot tea, read a book about sociopaths, and let my body process vitamin D through exposure to ultraviolet rays. Nothing better, truly.
Showing posts with label pets. Show all posts
Showing posts with label pets. Show all posts
Friday, January 26, 2007
Thursday, January 18, 2007
Wherein I become that crazy cat lady...
Me, two nights ago:
Shuffling up and down our street at 11:00 at night in a ski jacket and fur slippers with a flashlight, catching snowflakes in the beam and periodically wailing "Meow-meow-meow!" and "Linus-man!" I did this for two hours, crying off and on and praying out loud because our cat was lost.
My husband likes to tease me that I have become a cat person, but this is not true. I have become a Linus person, and am convinced that there is no other cat in all the world as charming and sensitive and devoted as mine, which would have horrified my 25-year-old self beyond belief.
I used to work in an office where divorced women regularly shouted across the hallway to each other to check out the Cat of the Day website. For 27 years I had violent cat allergies, a cat phobia, even a recurring cat nightmare where my school lunch was inexplicably packed full of raging black cats who leapt at my face when I opened the bag. In all the years (all two of them) that I was single and living alone, working myself to death, hoarding paychecks, and eating way too much edamame, I never once felt pitiful because I could always say, "At least I don't have a cat." Cats represented the gateway into a celibate, isolated hell where every laundry room came with a shallow box of sandy feces.
So when my husband came home one night when we lived in Florida and said he had a gift for me, and then pulled a black and white kitten out of a cardboard box, I meant it when I said, "Oh, fuck no. Take it back."
But then Linus crept onto my stomach one day when I was reading, and I froze, petrified, as he buried his face in my neck, kneaded my throat with his paws, licked me with his little raspy tongue, and purred. He's done it every night since and slowly, impossibly, I've fallen in love with him.
Lately he and I have been holed up inside our heat-less house, saving so much money* as we puff out little white clouds of breath and huddle hobo-like in front of the glow of the stovetop burner to make tea.
(*$200 is a magical amount of money whose relative value is subject to great fluctuations depending on the time of day. At 5:45 a.m., it's flat worthless compared to the ability to walk like a human from bed to bathroom, instead of hunching and scuttling like some tower-dwelling bell-ringer. By 8:30 a.m., when you're nice and toasty at work, it's suddenly a princely sum, accumulating nicely into the ability to go to grad school. Cold? Ha! I laugh at you! Soon I will be using big words to obscure the point of every argument! But then from 7:00 p.m. on back into the wee hours, the dollar again takes a precipitous fall as the body slides into reptilian torpor and the marriage partner is seen, Terminator-like, as a bright blip in the infrared heat spectrum to be tracked, cornered, and immobilized in order to warm my frosty toes.)
Considering how hatefully cold it is, I will never understand what possessed Linus to dart, unseen, out the front door while my husband took the dog out to pee, but this is evidently what he did at around 5:30 p.m. We didn't realize he was missing until 9:15, so by the time I was making my debut as the neighborhood kook, he had been battling the elements for nearly four hours.
Linus has always had a curious fascination with the outside world, an itch to roam even though an aging Floridian vet took his balls and claws. This must have looked like his golden chance. What finally lured him back home to his negligent owners was an open can of tuna, which he wolfed down in about 4 seconds flat. When I finally found him and hauled him inside, he was puffed out to twice his normal size from terror and cold and he had gotten his ass quite thoroughly kicked by the feral female cat who lives under our house. Her name is Janet and she's tough and perpetually pregnant. We've seen her attack a dove in the back yard, punching it out of the air as it tried to take off, and then smacking its head repeatedly with her paw to stun it. Then she dragged it under the house and bit out its throat and probably nailed its head up along one of the baseboards with her other trophies. Anyway, she managed to scratch Linus near his eye and bite some chunks of fur out of his back, and generally get the message across that de-clawed, nutless nancy boys should stay inside where they're safe.
The whole experience rattled Linus and, I think, hurt his pride. He stayed curled up on my pillow for a whole day afterwards staring at the wall and refusing to pur or eat, thoroughly disillusioned. Apparently cat ennui has a half life of 24 hours, because by the next morning he was back at the food bowl and then purring lustily into my neck.
The viscious cold I've had ever since I went out cat hunting has been totally worth it.
Shuffling up and down our street at 11:00 at night in a ski jacket and fur slippers with a flashlight, catching snowflakes in the beam and periodically wailing "Meow-meow-meow!" and "Linus-man!" I did this for two hours, crying off and on and praying out loud because our cat was lost.
My husband likes to tease me that I have become a cat person, but this is not true. I have become a Linus person, and am convinced that there is no other cat in all the world as charming and sensitive and devoted as mine, which would have horrified my 25-year-old self beyond belief.
I used to work in an office where divorced women regularly shouted across the hallway to each other to check out the Cat of the Day website. For 27 years I had violent cat allergies, a cat phobia, even a recurring cat nightmare where my school lunch was inexplicably packed full of raging black cats who leapt at my face when I opened the bag. In all the years (all two of them) that I was single and living alone, working myself to death, hoarding paychecks, and eating way too much edamame, I never once felt pitiful because I could always say, "At least I don't have a cat." Cats represented the gateway into a celibate, isolated hell where every laundry room came with a shallow box of sandy feces.
So when my husband came home one night when we lived in Florida and said he had a gift for me, and then pulled a black and white kitten out of a cardboard box, I meant it when I said, "Oh, fuck no. Take it back."
But then Linus crept onto my stomach one day when I was reading, and I froze, petrified, as he buried his face in my neck, kneaded my throat with his paws, licked me with his little raspy tongue, and purred. He's done it every night since and slowly, impossibly, I've fallen in love with him.
Lately he and I have been holed up inside our heat-less house, saving so much money* as we puff out little white clouds of breath and huddle hobo-like in front of the glow of the stovetop burner to make tea.
(*$200 is a magical amount of money whose relative value is subject to great fluctuations depending on the time of day. At 5:45 a.m., it's flat worthless compared to the ability to walk like a human from bed to bathroom, instead of hunching and scuttling like some tower-dwelling bell-ringer. By 8:30 a.m., when you're nice and toasty at work, it's suddenly a princely sum, accumulating nicely into the ability to go to grad school. Cold? Ha! I laugh at you! Soon I will be using big words to obscure the point of every argument! But then from 7:00 p.m. on back into the wee hours, the dollar again takes a precipitous fall as the body slides into reptilian torpor and the marriage partner is seen, Terminator-like, as a bright blip in the infrared heat spectrum to be tracked, cornered, and immobilized in order to warm my frosty toes.)
Considering how hatefully cold it is, I will never understand what possessed Linus to dart, unseen, out the front door while my husband took the dog out to pee, but this is evidently what he did at around 5:30 p.m. We didn't realize he was missing until 9:15, so by the time I was making my debut as the neighborhood kook, he had been battling the elements for nearly four hours.
Linus has always had a curious fascination with the outside world, an itch to roam even though an aging Floridian vet took his balls and claws. This must have looked like his golden chance. What finally lured him back home to his negligent owners was an open can of tuna, which he wolfed down in about 4 seconds flat. When I finally found him and hauled him inside, he was puffed out to twice his normal size from terror and cold and he had gotten his ass quite thoroughly kicked by the feral female cat who lives under our house. Her name is Janet and she's tough and perpetually pregnant. We've seen her attack a dove in the back yard, punching it out of the air as it tried to take off, and then smacking its head repeatedly with her paw to stun it. Then she dragged it under the house and bit out its throat and probably nailed its head up along one of the baseboards with her other trophies. Anyway, she managed to scratch Linus near his eye and bite some chunks of fur out of his back, and generally get the message across that de-clawed, nutless nancy boys should stay inside where they're safe.
The whole experience rattled Linus and, I think, hurt his pride. He stayed curled up on my pillow for a whole day afterwards staring at the wall and refusing to pur or eat, thoroughly disillusioned. Apparently cat ennui has a half life of 24 hours, because by the next morning he was back at the food bowl and then purring lustily into my neck.
The viscious cold I've had ever since I went out cat hunting has been totally worth it.
Tuesday, October 24, 2006
Two for Abby
She's done it again: my violently anti-social Australian Shepherd has handily underscored my own personal deficits by achieving something we all once thought was impossible-- she's made a friend.
Today, while I sat moping on the front stoop, having been snubbed by the Breeders (total grim coincidence-- nothing to do with the blog and my karmic fit of conscience), Abby trotted over to the dog who lives next door, gave her a wide smile, and then slammed both front paws flat against the earth with her ass high in the air-- the play bow. What followed was the most joyful and elaborate choreography I've seen outside of a concert hall. Both dogs are mutts, but both are sleek, leggy, and built for speed. They tore tight figure eights in the grass, churning up clumps of dirt and leaves, and weaving over, under, and above each other, tumbling and diving and yipping and then both skidding to simultaneous halts to crouch briefly before leaping back into the chase. It was like watching two Russian prima ballerinas dancing a tribute to the Motherland, if Russian prima ballerinas occasionally sniffed each other's asses.
Watching her brought me some small measure of joy after a morning were I'd had flashbacks to the dismal politics of high school pecking orders. Life as a military spouse in the tiny, tiny town is apparently a much more delicate task than I had imagined. Providing further detail would be fruitless, since I myself don't understand how it all fits together. In some ways I feel like I finally understand the stress of being a CDC outbreak investigator-- you've got a town full of people vomiting blood, and then some random scraps of facts like "Farmer X has some sick pigs," "a busload of Canadian tourists came in for a convention and one had a cough," and "the city just started spraying for mosquitoes." All you really know for sure is that things are hopelessly fucked up, and now you've got a whole stack of tiny incidentals that somehow add up to the cause of it all.
Having been on the receiving end of a karmic kick to the crotch anyway, I figured why not put the Breeder post back up? After all, what is a blog for if not to document life's crotch kicks and high fives in real time for later frame-by-frame analysis.
The frame I want to focus on tonight is the one right after the blow, when the kickee's face is still in that universal "O" of shock, and before any decision has been made about further damage control or active retaliation. It's a frame I tend to get stuck in. I like to freeze the action and step outside, Matrix-like, and float all around the situation, admiring the placement of the kick, the way the kickee's back is hunched in receipt of the momentum, and then the little insignificant details-- look at the dead leaves on the sidewalk beneath them, look at their shadows, what pretty clouds...
It's as if at the moment of impact, the start of a conflict, I suddenly shatter into a thousand possible conclusions and reactions, each shooting out from a central point in a slow and graceful sunburst, kind of like the explosion of the Death Star in the uselessly souped-up version of Star Wars, Episode Four. It's a handy trick for intellectualizing emotional pain, but it also leaves the kickee standing there, vacant and pontificating, while the kicker winds up another one.
Abby's reaction would be simpler and much more honest-- bared teeth and a quick bite to the muzzle-- but I am somehow expected to employ finesse. What I'll likely resort to is my old standby, which is often misinterpreted as coolheadedness or thick skinned resilience. I'll stand back and wait. Somehow there exists at the core of my being a cheerful assumption that the first kick was a mistake. Surely you didn't realize that was my crotch you were punting! Only after kick number two will I rev up a response, and only, of course, after more analysis and some spirited coaching from my beleaguered support staff, who have been forced to review the footage as well.
Call it being a pussy, but even more than being safe, I like to be right.
Today, while I sat moping on the front stoop, having been snubbed by the Breeders (total grim coincidence-- nothing to do with the blog and my karmic fit of conscience), Abby trotted over to the dog who lives next door, gave her a wide smile, and then slammed both front paws flat against the earth with her ass high in the air-- the play bow. What followed was the most joyful and elaborate choreography I've seen outside of a concert hall. Both dogs are mutts, but both are sleek, leggy, and built for speed. They tore tight figure eights in the grass, churning up clumps of dirt and leaves, and weaving over, under, and above each other, tumbling and diving and yipping and then both skidding to simultaneous halts to crouch briefly before leaping back into the chase. It was like watching two Russian prima ballerinas dancing a tribute to the Motherland, if Russian prima ballerinas occasionally sniffed each other's asses.
Watching her brought me some small measure of joy after a morning were I'd had flashbacks to the dismal politics of high school pecking orders. Life as a military spouse in the tiny, tiny town is apparently a much more delicate task than I had imagined. Providing further detail would be fruitless, since I myself don't understand how it all fits together. In some ways I feel like I finally understand the stress of being a CDC outbreak investigator-- you've got a town full of people vomiting blood, and then some random scraps of facts like "Farmer X has some sick pigs," "a busload of Canadian tourists came in for a convention and one had a cough," and "the city just started spraying for mosquitoes." All you really know for sure is that things are hopelessly fucked up, and now you've got a whole stack of tiny incidentals that somehow add up to the cause of it all.
Having been on the receiving end of a karmic kick to the crotch anyway, I figured why not put the Breeder post back up? After all, what is a blog for if not to document life's crotch kicks and high fives in real time for later frame-by-frame analysis.
The frame I want to focus on tonight is the one right after the blow, when the kickee's face is still in that universal "O" of shock, and before any decision has been made about further damage control or active retaliation. It's a frame I tend to get stuck in. I like to freeze the action and step outside, Matrix-like, and float all around the situation, admiring the placement of the kick, the way the kickee's back is hunched in receipt of the momentum, and then the little insignificant details-- look at the dead leaves on the sidewalk beneath them, look at their shadows, what pretty clouds...
It's as if at the moment of impact, the start of a conflict, I suddenly shatter into a thousand possible conclusions and reactions, each shooting out from a central point in a slow and graceful sunburst, kind of like the explosion of the Death Star in the uselessly souped-up version of Star Wars, Episode Four. It's a handy trick for intellectualizing emotional pain, but it also leaves the kickee standing there, vacant and pontificating, while the kicker winds up another one.
Abby's reaction would be simpler and much more honest-- bared teeth and a quick bite to the muzzle-- but I am somehow expected to employ finesse. What I'll likely resort to is my old standby, which is often misinterpreted as coolheadedness or thick skinned resilience. I'll stand back and wait. Somehow there exists at the core of my being a cheerful assumption that the first kick was a mistake. Surely you didn't realize that was my crotch you were punting! Only after kick number two will I rev up a response, and only, of course, after more analysis and some spirited coaching from my beleaguered support staff, who have been forced to review the footage as well.
Call it being a pussy, but even more than being safe, I like to be right.
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