But Call Me Betsy

Another cat has appeared, less than two weeks since we had to put Gretel to sleep. Amanda and Kim found him chasing a butterfly in an alcove while they were on a smoke break. They captured him and put him in my office where he immediately went to sleep under my chair. I don't know what to think. He's very cute and he's affectionate and sweet, but Henri hasn't been a single cat for very long and I think he prefers not having to compete for my attention. Plus I don't know if the two cats would get along. Plus Gretel just died. Plus the extra litter and food. Plus who wants to become attached to another animal that's going to eventually make you sad again? He does look a little like Henri only he has much more white. I didn't name him (though I thought of some names. Does he look like a Linus?Flufferheadbudgetbuttonhooknose? Twinkletoes? Pinky Tuscadaro?). Last night, Shawn and I were interrupted from contemplating the animal by the sound of sirens. Went out...

I dreamt last night that I decided on a whim to have my nose pierced (I think because in the dream, I was having a slumber party at my parent's house in Florida and wanted to impress my guests). The piercing I choose was a gigantic barbell--like maybe a ten pound barbell. It didn't look too good and I could hardly hold my head up. Then George Michaels showed up, but it was GM in his Wham phase, before he came out of the closet, so he wasn't yet gay (dream logic). I finally had to take the piercing out and then my nose was disfigured. It wasn't the best slumber party ever.

Best quote from our trip to the li'l town of Jim Thorpe this weekend. For those of you sports illiterates out there, Jim Thorpe was a real live all-American , all-around wonderful athlete of some century or another. He never actually lived in the town named after him, but they have tons of photos of him everywhere so it's almost like h e did. Look here at this photograph of Jim Thorpe. He played football, baseball, track, field, lacrosse, badminton, and Monopoly all with aplomb, good manners, and skill. The town of Jim Thorpe also has a prison where some accused Irish slaves coal miner Molly MacGuire's were hung for fighting back against their enslavement. The tour guide, a cute sixteen year old blond girl who kept rocking back on her sneakered heels, explained in unwavering monotone how the prisoners were led into the dungeons for solitary confinement, left there for what was supposed to be thirty days but was often sixty, given nothing to sleep on, and having their waste...

During the EEG on Wed., I wanted to ask the technicican how she dealt with paranoid schizophrenics who needed the test. I mean, one of the big qualities of that disorder is believing others can read your mind. I'm guessing that when you're hooked up to 26 electrodes in your head and they tell you they'll be reading your brain waves, you might flip out a little. I know I did and I barely have a disorder (as yet unclassified). I was thinking, Don't think about sex. Don't think about sex. It'll show up in your brain waves. The worst part of the test was when I had to purposefully hyperventilate for four minutes. You breathe in and out very rapidly--doesn't sound like it would be super strenuous, but your head fills up like a balloon and your lips and mouth go dry and it's unpleasant. The technician asked me a series of questions as though I were a concussion victim: 1. Do you know where you are? 2. Who is the president of the United States? 3. If I have a q...

We keep trying to make Henri into Gretel, but it's not working. Every morning after the alarm clock goes off at 7:15, Henri comes in and does his own alarm noises--meowing and meowing and jumping on the bed. Shawn was meowing back at him to make him meow more and it sort of worked, but I knew what he was doing--he was trying to get Henri to act like Gretel who would go on answering endlessly. Seriously, I once tried to see how many times in a row I could make her meow and I gave up after about fifty. And as much as we try to make Henri be her, he is not. He is, in fact, antithetical to Gretel. He hides under the bed all day. He stays there even after I'm home. You'd think maybe he could come out and hang around, but he doesn't. He's most active after hours and in the morning. He still scurries away from Shawn. If we have guests, it's like he doesn't exist. We have to show them pictures of Henri and say, "This is our other (now only) cat. He is real. You...

Okay, I'm over Gretel now. Yes, we had seventeen years, eight months, and four days together, yes, I've known her since the day she was born in my closet in my first college apt. on Atherton Street, yes, she's met every single guy I ever seriously dated, yes, she was with me through each move I made as an adult--from Tallahassee back to Dunedin to three apartments in Chicago and two apartments in State College, and three places in Philadelphia, and yes, she slept next to me nearly every night for all of those years, and yes, she was very often the first living creature I saw when I woke up, and yes, she would amble into the room to greet me whenever I walked through the door, but come on. Enough is enough. Actually, being sad comes and goes. I'm fine, I'm fine, I'm fine, and then I am absolutely, desolately not fine at all. But I can look at her picture without crying and I picked one of her claws off the sofa without losing it (though did not throw it away), an...

January 13, 1989 to August 17, 2006

Remember the three words above. You will be asked to repeat them at the end of this post. These are the words the doctor gave me at the beginning of the visit to check memory loss. I went to seem him yesterday to figure out what we can do to improve my memory and all that epilespy stuff. The doctor reminded me very much of that strange lawyer guy on Ally McBeal--the curly haired, awkward one who always had a problem with his nose whistling? You know who I mean! Anyway, mild-mannered and nerdy, but very nice. He asked me about the seizures and a few other questions about my life and work and then told me that he thinks I was misdiagnosed. He said it in a kind of dramatic fashion with lots of pauses. "Well....from what I'm hearing...I think you may gotten the wrong diagnosis...I think...it might...be..." pause pause pause "A brain tumor!" No, he didn't say that, but I was wondering, is this good or bad news? He thinks...it might be...complex partial seizures i...

Pretty much every day in Fishtown, I come across another gray dead pigeon that has been smashed completely so s/he looks as though run over by a steam roller. They are everywhere. Sunday, we spotted one that wasn't dead, though it appeared a little suspect. It was sitting on its belly too far into the street. It may not have had legs. Shawn was very distressed. I suggested we rescue the pigeon and build it little fake legs out of matchsticks and then the pigeon could compete in the Aviary Special Olympics and win at the last second and then we would run over it with a Mac truck. Rode my bike to work and back yesterday and nearly hit a couple of them myself. They seem bent on destruction. Speaking of which: This is Gretel in her natural habitat, the shower. She has taken to licking the condensation off the curtain. She has a serious thing for H2O and will stick her head in a glass for a full ten minutes to get as much of it as she can. She will also harass you when you are washing y...

I must, must, must write about my weekend and Tara and Jimmy's wedding and Zena's visit and how the woman at Macy's measured Shawn's crotch, but no time now so instead, you get photos. To your left, you will find Luke and Liz. See how fast Liz knits? Her hands are literally unable to be captured without being blurry, much like a hummingbird in flight. She is knitting a row for a baby blanket I'm making for my friends Julie and Danny, who are soon to have a li'l baby boy named Bump (see next). That is Julie in the Hawaiian print, plus me, plus Danny. The way it's posed, it sort of looks like Danny is wearing red nail polish, but he really isn't. The final photo is our wild animal, Gretel. Ever since we moved and she has been allowed back outside, she has been plotting her escape. She even went so far as to drop a few pounds in order to squeeze underneath the fence into the next yard. Here, you see how we naively thought that leaving a space that's 1 i...

What happens if you wait too long to post about your whole entire weekend is that you get suddenly very tired at the thought of trying to recall and describe everything and you may never ever get around to writing about it and your friends (who would appear in the stories b/c they were part of the weekend) become cranky and non communicative. So let's see if I can do highlights. First, you should be aware that Liz and Luke came to visit and that our other friend Padhraig was also in town. So it was State College people galore! Friday: Arrival day! Liz and Luke arrive via Chinatown bus after dark. Shawn is at happy hour (in Shawn time happy hour on Friday lasts from 5 pm-midnight) and though we expect to possibly see him before we leave for dinner, he is MIA. We go to Johnny Brenda's and run into Padhraig and Carrie. It's loud and we're shouting at each other. Carrie's friend Mary sits at the other end of the table with her blond hair all over the place. I keep askin...

I haven't played Sims II since I went to visit Liz in Park Slope, but she and Luke are coming to Philly this weekend so I played for a little while last night remembering again how enjoyable it's not. In the way I play the game, everything is about keeping them happy and fulfilling their goals. I have one family that's maxed out in life goals, but I can't just relax; I have to continue to pursue their dreams. This is because I am a control freak in many ways and don't ever like to see anyone be unhappy if I can do something about it (Florence Nightingale syndrome with a sarcastic side). Conversely, Luke creates pudgy characters with bad afros (Corey Crouton, for one) and let's his life unspool into chaos and flies. He will actually let a Sim pee himself. This suggests to me that he has a little less anxiety than I do and that he's not so worried about order in his life. Liz plays in similar way--she likes to watch them do their own thing (in my opinion, this...

I'm worried about Gretel. She is a skelecat. I can feel her breastbone, her ribs, her bony, bumpy spine. I don't know if it's the heat or her age (17) or the anxiety of being this close to escape because she's now allowed outside or if she's not eating or what. I recently started feeding her wet food as her teeth might be hurting her with the dry crunchy dead horse cat food. I feel a little sick with anxiety at the thought of something happening to her, but I know she'll die. It's the not knowing when that's hard. Jess once said that she wished she could just put her dog Lucy to sleep right then, just so she'd know when she was going to die. It's the unknown quality of grief that scares me. Like, maybe I'll be fine or somewhat sad, but then recover in a week or so. Or maybe I'll be devastated since she was my first pet ever and since I got her in college and so when she goes, it's this metaphorical death of that college self too and ...

That's the new Snickers campaign appearing on 75% of the billboards and 55% of the cab tops in Philadelphia. It's meant to cleverly place "Snickers" back in the minds of Americans by using the familiar brown and white packaging with word associations like "Peanutopolis" and "Snackadilicious." What it does for me is to make me "Carmelgolyhate" Snickers. Everyone in my dept. is up in arms because it's so flipping hot on the third floor due to global warming and the record temperatures for today. We're all considering going home at noon because it's too unbearable to work (actually, it's not that bad, but who wouldn't want a half day)? I blame George Bush for the abundant crop of blood-thirsty mosquitos that feast on my arms at legs in my back yard, for the sweat tickling down my back, for the fact that my cat has lost 10 pounds in the heat and lays flat as a pancake to be as close to the floor as possible, for the unco...