Overly Verbal

Dear Gmail and Microsoft,

Why do you hate me? I didn’t do anything, but you seem determined to prevent my spreading my profundity. Lately I’ve been sending e-mails that both arrive blank and are delivered to my sent mail folder entirely blank. Turns out it’s a combination of Microsoft Vista sucking really, really badly, Gmail being poorly capable of dealing with Vista’s suckiness, and my tendency to answer e-mail in one of only two ways: immediately, or never. So if I open my inbox, select a message and reply to it, the text of my reply will arrive and be stored as I intended. But if I just see a new message arrive in the little notifier thingie, open the message without opening the entire inbox, type a reply, and then hit send, my message disappears. This is unfortunate on at least two fronts, one of which is that I am far more clever when I just dash something off, and the other of which is that last night I believed that the problem was confined to only one other Gmail user, but instead it turns out that there’s only one person whose e-mail I desire to respond to at the moment, so my test of the problem was poorly designed – I tried to engage in a lively e-mail debate with a different Gmail user to see if they would get empty messages, but I did it entirely from within my inbox, and the problem never presented itself. Turns out I, as I am wont to do, leapt to a conclusion. (I should be a better person.)

In any event, you two really oughta get on the problem.

Thanks in advance for your cooperation in this matter.

Jennifer

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Dear Friends (both Silver and Golden, both Near and Far, both Whom I am Tired of Looking At and Whom I’ve Never Laid Eyes on Before),

I seriously really like you guys. You’re always making me laugh, and sending me pleasant text messages, and populating the world with kids who are going to grow up to be good and noble and true, and being like me when no one else is. You rock, and (as Sara so kindly pointed out) I probably don’t deserve you all.

I just wish one of you knew something about video editing software already.

Jen

*****

Dear Depeche Mode,

All I did was type “people are people”, and now I’ve got an entire album stuck in my head. You sure are catchy, but there are other bands.

J

*****

Dear Overly Verbal,

Today when I got it in my head that I would finally sit down and add categories for “letters” and “poetry”, I only realized after about 10 months of entries that I also needed a category for “lists”, and now I have to go back over those 10 months again, and then finish categorizing the other 16 months, and all I really have to say about that is that you are really, really lengthy, and there are so many words that I sometimes believe I can’t cope with all of them.

I still like you though. A lot.

J

Cat, in a basket, with yarn. It’s two cliches for the price of one!

I’m sort of digging this whole new camera thing, and if it means that I spend less time outside my home interacting with humanity, and more time inside interacting with my cats, well, you know, it’s probably better to embrace your destiny while you’re young, instead of growing up with some imagined future that you will never fulfill, being left bitter and disappointed. Problem is, now that Molly has asthma, the double-wide trailer thing is totally out of the question. What’s the moral equivalent of a double-wide trailer, but without all of the airway-restricting petrochemicals?

Anyone?

This time I don’t need anything translated. Instead, I need one of all y’all to tell me something about open source video editing software, so I can edit the videos that I take of Molly yawning in order to share them with the entire World Wide Web (or at least those twelve viewers of the World Wide Web who somehow happen to have nothing better to do than read my blog).

As usual, thank you in advance for your cooperation in this matter.

In other news, you know what’s awesome? The second wind. I found mine, and that was lovely for a while, but what it means now is that I’m not going to get any more sleep this evening than I have been getting, on account of I’m wide awake and rarin’ to go. (Am I at all dismayed that “insomnia” yields only three hits in the entire life of my blog? Oh, a little. There are 27 entries with the word “sleeping” in them, however, and I’m guessing that about 25 of those include the word “not” as well. I should probably try to remember to say “insomnia” instead of “not sleeping”. Then I would sound entirely more smart than I am.)

So on Sunday I watched that “last lecture” video. I felt a little bad* throughout, because the whole thing wasn’t resonating with me. (And then I felt bad because I was actually thinking, “Um, but this isn’t resonating.” Could I be more of a jackass?**) But at the very end he said something good – I can’t remember precisely what he said, but I was reminded of a three and a half hour mandatory training session I sat through last week. It was about avoiding harassment in the workplace, and since I’m a supervisor now, I got to sit through the session “for supervisors,” which seems to differ from the session for employees who are not forced to supervise someone else only insofar as it focuses slightly more on ways you can avoid being sued for harassment.

In any event, at the end we were engaged in an exercise during which we had to write on a giant piece of paper the ways in which members of our small group would like to be treated in a perfect world, where everyone was respectful of their co-workers. I don’t usually have a lot to say in small group settings, on account of the misanthropy, but since no one else was saying anything even remotely like it, I did manage to somehow interject the phrase “assume the best of intentions”. You know, like if you see someone in the elevator and they neglect to say “Good morning!” you should assume that they’re up against a deadline, or that their dog just died, or whatever – you shouldn’t assume that they don’t like you, have no manners, or are persecuting you because of your haircut.

And sure, I only have good ideas, but that really is a good idea – when you encounter someone new, you should cast aside whatever preconceptions you arrive with and instead assume that any given new person is approaching you with intentions that are noble and good and true, and that any differences you might perceive are not necessarily due to insurmountable differences in your education or background or socioeconomic status, but instead based in subtle, nearly incommunicable differences – nearly incommunicable because they can, in fact, be cleared up with just a little more communication. And it might not be easy to start the requisite communication, or pleasant even, but you have to do it, because if you don’t you might just be missing out on interacting with someone who happens to be pretty interesting but is just a little shy, or who was raised in a society where it wasn’t proper for girls to state their opinions out loud, or who only is good at speaking with other people after 2:00 p.m.

I really like the people that I work with. Each and every one of them is making a difference, and even when they get on my nerves I admire them for doing good in a world where very many people do only work. And I don’t think I suffer from too terribly many misconceptions about my personality – at work, at least, I’m convinced that most people see me as someone who is genuinely good at teaching someone to do a job to the best of his or her ability, genuinely interested in how one’s personal life influences one’s work life, and genuinely committed to making sure one has the tools and skills one needs to succeed.

But the difference between “too terribly many” and “none” is not a small one. As much as I know that most people see me as a force of good and not evil, I know that there are other people who see me as hypercritical, intolerant of mistakes, pretentious, frighteningly impatient, etc. I suppose I wouldn’t have it any other way, because you really can’t separate the parts of me that come off that way from the parts of me that don’t, unless you want to destroy both parts, which I think we can all agree would be bad.

So I guess I don’t have anything to say about that last lecture at all, except that it sucks if you die from cancer when you’re young, probably even more so if you leave young children behind. And also that it reminded me that you should really not leap to conclusions, but instead assume the best of intentions, particularly when you’re interacting with someone new. I’ve been reminded of that a lot lately, really, as recently as this very morning, and I know I’m as guilty as the next person, always making assumptions, hearing something different than what’s actually being said, letting something that happened to me before influence what is actually happening to me now.

I should be a better person.

In other news, well, there is no other news, or at least none I’m going to tell you right now, because if it was possible to die from being tired, I would be dead already. Someday soon I am going to get more than four consecutive hours of sleep, and that is going to be a good day. (My tolerance of other people is roughly correspondent with the amount of sleep I’m getting, and apparently I’m not so good at hiding that fact. So much so that on my way home someone actually rolled down their window and shouted “I’m sorry!” at me simply because of the look I gave them when they continued approaching the crosswalk I was in at a too-high speed because they were talking on their phone instead of watching for pedestrians.)

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* Or maybe I felt badly. I’m sure Goethe will let me know one way or the other.

** Sara, feel free to chime in on that matter, with examples as you see fit.

So I finally broke down and bought a new camera. It took me a while, because I had to make sure this new camera was sleek and stylish enough to suit me - I’m a little broken up about having to break up with my old camera, which, while beautiful, was just not doing the job anymore.* So I’m sure you’ll be pleased to know that future pictures of the shopping carts in my neighborhood will be much more focused. It hasn’t been my photography skills that have failed you - it was the equipment I was using. To wit:

Old camera:

New camera:

And I couldn’t resist these, because if there is something more lovely than the noses of my cats in extreme close-up, you’re going to have to tell me what it is.

In other news, oh what a pleasant weekend I have had. I’ve got a new 7-11 story to tell you later, I met a new person and before I even knew it he’d taught me a new word,** and I had a glorious nap - this whole new camera thing is just icing. I’d like to say that you can expect an actually interesting entry soon, but I wouldn’t like to lie. (It’s really taking all the energy I’ve got not to wake the cats up and make them make adorable noises so I can capture that digitally and share it with you.)

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* I think the one thing we can all agree has been missing from this blog is video of the cats, but you may now rest assured that videos (with sound!) are forthcoming.

** Micaceous - might come in handy for Scrabble, don’t you think?

Will someone please try this service and tell me whether it’s a good idea, so I don’t have to do everything myself? It sounds like a good idea, but I can’t be entirely sure.

BookSwim

Thank you in advance for your cooperation in this matter.

It’s asthma. Or at least the vet is 90 percent sure that Molly is among the 1 percent of domestic house cats that suffer from asthma. I knew she was special, I just didn’t know she was 99th percentile special. We could have increased the certainty level by subjecting her to X-rays, but even though it would be super cool to have X-rays of Molly, the vet and I agreed that we would simply treat her as if she has asthma, and if that doesn’t work we can consider X-rays later.

There’s always a bright side, though. First, asthma is not contagious, which is good, because Mouse doesn’t need any more problems than he has. Second, I am now completely justified in purchasing an exceedingly expensive vacuum cleaner, or else just moving somewhere that has hardwood floors (instead of carpet that is quietly disintegrating as I type and leeching fumes into the air that make my kitty cat wheeze). Maybe to be on the safe side I’ll do both.

So I get to give her medicine twice a day for a week, then once a day for a week, then every other day for a week, and somewhere in those three weeks we’ll see how she’s doing and whether she needs some other sort of treatment. The doctor told me that many cats with asthma show no symptoms for most of the year only to have it flare up in the summer, when it’s hot and humid, and it just so happens that Friday was a Code Red day - the air quality was so bad that humans, with human-sized lungs, shouldn’t have been breathing the air outside. So I asked whether I shouldn’t keep the house cooler, since I’ve been leaving the air conditioning set to about 75 all the time, in a probably vain hope that using it less will prevent its crapping out before I can move, and he said that it might help her if it was cooler in here, so the air conditioning shall remain set at 72. (I’m freezing, but I can put on a sweater.) And while I already use mostly products that are free of perfumes and dyes, now I’m going to switch all of my cleaning products – dishwashing detergent, bathroom cleaner, window cleaner, etc., to those without chemicals that might impede poor Molly’s breathing. (I was already knitting a reusable cotton cover for my Swiffer so I can stop using those disposable wet pads.)

The funny thing is that she doesn’t act like she’s suffering - she can’t be bothered to stop playing while she’s coughing, even. Her appetite is not diminished, she’s not acting peeved or sad, but she can’t breathe properly. She’s a brave little soul. When I received her from the shelter they told me that she was prone to respiratory infections, and I wonder if the people who kept her before I rescued her simply thought she had a cold when instead she has an autoimmune disease. She hasn’t been sick for a minute in the six and a half months she’s lived here, and they surely would have told me if she’d been sick during the six weeks she lived in the shelter, so I think it’s safe to say that she doesn’t have a chronic problem, but instead one that is triggered by something external, and once we find and eliminate that trigger, and relieve her current symptoms, all should be right again. She’s not particularly keen on the medicine I have to give her, and Mouse hit her once earlier in the week when she was coughing, probably because she was making so much noise. And he was being an ass yesterday and hissing at her, probably because she smelled like the vet still, and he pretty much hates the vet, including the smell. Otherwise, though, I think she’s going to be just fine, even if she does have an incurable disease.

So my hair stylist, who I also visited yesterday, told me all about her asthma, which was treated with injections and eventually disappeared. Apparently she wasn’t allowed pillows, or blankets, couldn’t eat certain foods, for a while was not even allowed to go to school because she was so ill. And she went on and on about the carpet – carpet is bad, bad, bad for asthmatics. And if carpet is bad, then I imagine other upholstery-type things are bad too, and I think Molly would probably feel better if I bought a leather chair for the bedroom to replace the hideous upholstered monstrosity that is in there now, which is actually older than the carpet is, if such a thing can be imagined. (The question is, would she look better on a sage green leather chair, a white leather chair, or a black leather chair?)

Other than replacing some cleaning products, leaving the air conditioning on all day long, and buying a new chair, though, I feel like there’s not a lot I can do, and that makes me sad. All I want for the cats is that they’re happy and comfortable, and I feel horrible because I can’t just instantly make Molly all better. Granted, I would feel worse if she was actually acting ill, and the coughing has almost entirely subsided after only 24 hours of medication. We’re supposed to see improvement within 48 hours, so I’m glad that she seems somewhat better already. (But since she’s on steroids, I’m also a little concerned about what they call “roid rage”. I would assume that because she’s been reasonably mild-mannered the whole time I’ve known her she’s not likely to suddenly show a more violent side, but I was also assuming that because she’d been reasonably healthy the whole time I’ve known her she wouldn’t suddenly start having a hard time breathing – we all know what happens when one assumes.)

In any event, the situation develops, and I’ll try to find other things to write about, but for the time being, if my blog really’s boring, you’ll just have to bear with us. Because other than Molly’s asthma, the only other new thing is my haircut, which is simply adorable, and I’m pretty sure we don’t want me to start going on and on about my hair again. (Right?)

How is it possible that someone who often fishes had never heard the expression “fish or cut bait” until I, who never fish, don’t even care to eat fish were I to catch any (except maybe tuna), used the expression in passing? I’m like an expression idiot-savant or something.

Remember a while back when I said there was an epic entry on the way concerning my dissatisfaction with the medical establishment at large? That entry grows larger by the minute, on account of I keep getting paperwork in the mail about my recent medical insurance claims, but why can’t I find time to actually write it?

(Here’s the short version: my ophthalmologist owes me $65; I owe my dermatologist $106.55, but she thinks I owe her $136.55; my medical insurance owes me some as yet to be determined part of the $30 that I paid to my dentist for a procedure that was not dentally necessary, but was instead medically necessary. It’s practically a wash, but only if I fill out eleventy-hundred forms and then sit patiently waiting for the machine to spit checks at me. It’s not about the money at this point – now I’m just engaging with the establishment on principle. I keep wondering how people who don’t read English manage their health insurance forms, when I can scarcely figure them out and I consider myself among the most intelligent and capable people currently in existence.) (Oh yeah – and I think I’m cancelling my dentist appointment for next week, because of all the things I can imagine to spend $374 on, a crown is not even on the list.)

How many times am I going to have to call the police to report people selling foodstuffs in my parking lot without a proper solicitor’s license? Earlier this week, when the ice cream truck that bears no company name or phone number happened to be in my parking lot selling ice cream (among other things?) at precisely the same time I happened to be in the parking lot with my ever-so-patient sometimes companion,* I remarked upon the lack of recourse one would have if one were to purchase ice cream from said truck and feed it to a small child who then fell ill. Across the street were some police officers, so my ever-so-patient sometimes companion waited while I discussed the matter with the police officers. Turns out that they think that most of the people driving unmarked white panel trucks or vans and selling things to eat in my parking lot likely don’t have proper solicitor’s licenses, and that if I were to send the police an e-mail containing the license plate numbers of these vendors, they would investigate the matter. I guess that answers the question, then: I don’t have to call the police – I can just submit reports online.

Why is Molly coughing? Does she have consumption? (We’ll find out tomorrow, when we go to the vet. Speaking of which, the other day I bought the little guys some new cat treats, and the package reads, “For your pet’s health, see your veterinarian regularly.” So I also wonder, can I just look at pictures of him online, or do we have to visit face-to-face? And where does my vet hang out after work anyway?)

How long will it be until I no longer have that Chumbawumba song stuck in my head?

Am I really going to actually go to Baltimore tomorrow to see Mike Doughty for free at this fancy Artscape thing, or is it going to be too hot? (Speaking of which, did I really go see The Alarm, The Fixx, and The English Beat last week, like actually attend a concert, and then not tell you anything about it, even though I rather drunkenly persisted in writing several incredibly amusing and insightful observations in my notebook, partially just so I could quietly mock the apparent music reporter who was writing the setlist in his notebook, but mostly so I would remember things for the eventual blog entry? I did.)

I think that about taps out my capacity for wonder at the moment. So be it.
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* Read “newest ex-boyfriend”. It’s not like it’s a long story, it’s just sort of boring.

So a week’s gone by, and while I might in fact have things to write about (no, really, I do), I don’t feel like it right now.

In fact, I sort of feel like Mouse:

Kindly leave us alone. We’re sitting in our boxes, and it’s nice and clean in here, plus it smells good, because I just made cookies. (I’d share, but that would require your coming over, and that seems unlikely. More for me!)

So yesterday my bathtub was draining really, really slowly, and when I attempted to unclog it by plunging, that wasn’t successful, because it is really hard to plug up that little overflow hole so that air can’t get in and out. So today I bought some Drano, even though I would rather have not had to do so, because I really need my bathtub to drain. That just stopped it up altogether, although I have no idea why. So for awhile I simply sat and looked at my bathtub filled with filthy water that now had toxic chemicals in it, thinking about what day I could take off work to have a plumber come.

Then it dawned on me – why not just plug the tub, which already has a plug that happens to fit perfectly, and just use the plunger on the overflow hole? Sure, it was a little awkward, plunging sideways, but it worked after very little effort on my part, and now my tub drains as quickly as a tub should drain, and I didn’t have to interact with any plumbers. I just don’t understand why a) none of the instructions on the Internet about how to unclog your bathtub suggest that and b) why I didn’t think of it earlier.

You may be asking why I don’t wonder why c) no man I know has ever suggested that to me before. That’s simple. First off, the men I know are always asking me to fix things for them, and not the other way around – “Hey Jen, my toilet won’t stop running” or “Hey Jen, I can’t upload pictures to my blog”. (Once I had a tire blowout when my brother was in the car with me: “Hey Jen, can you just go ahead and change that tire? I don’t want to get these pants dirty.”) Sometimes I count on the men I know to do things that I am incapable of doing because I have extremely low upper body strength, but mostly I just expect to be able to be able to do things myself. In fact, I’m pretty sure that many of the readers of my blog (whom I believe to be almost exclusively men) probably don’t know what the first part of that second paragraph even means, so I drew you a picture:

You’re welcome.

(Now all of a sudden the song stuck in my head is “Hallelujah”. (I think because of the bathing on the roof.) Previously this weekend it was “This Corrosion”, which is quite a long song indeed.)