Overly Verbal

So I’m on vacation. Being on vacation is pretty cool, even if you do have an unreasonably long list of things you mean to do – you see, it’s not really a vacation at all, but rather a “staycation”, a “holistay”, if you will.* In any event, I’m not going anywhere, so I’ve got to cross some things off of my to-do list.

Granted, some of the things on my list are as simple as baking cookies, talking to Molly about why it is not cool at all to wake me up at 1:30 in the morning (while sitting on the floor near the bed meowing around the potholder in your mouth),** and, well, consolidating all of my to-do lists.

Other things on my list(s), like finding a suitable place to live, are proceeding apace. I think I’ve solved the problem, although I’m not taking any actual action for the next ten days – sure, that might change the solution, but the one I’ve settled on requires a bit more research. I’m testing commuting times, trying to figure out whether to live in less space or more space than I inhabit now, and learning more about the people who might be my new neighbors. Sometimes I’m learning more about them by talking to them,*** other times I’m learning more about them by reading statistics on the Internet.

For example, in the city in which I now live, there is one registered sex offender for every 243 people (but only 7 of them live in my ZIP code, and none in my complex, although it seems that 2 of them work in the shopping center closest to here, and have no known home address. Curious.). In the city which I believe I am moving to, there are no registered sex offenders. And the people in my new city are reportedly slightly less well-educated than the people in my current city, but those are averages – I’m pretty sure there’s a greater concentration of people without bachelor’s degrees in my neighborhood than there is in other neighborhoods in my city, even if we include that one guy.

The first set of figures I encountered seemed altogether too dramatic to be true. Yes, there’s crime where I live now, but there really can’t be that little crime in the city I intend to move to, can there? So I checked another site, and another, and it is true that some cities around here have crime occurring not only at lower rates than near my current home, but also at significantly lower rates than the national average. And this particular city also has a Wegmans, and I am not at all opposed to Wegmans, not even one little bit. Remember how excited I was when they opened a Harris Teeter near the last place I lived? (Yes, I also remember when the Harris Teeter went bad. Hard to forget, actually. (Harder still if you publish a story about it on the Internet.))****

So there’s that. I’m looking forward to moving, hoping I can pull off my current plan, and actively attempting to rid my home of everything superfluous in it.

In other news, in a couple of weeks I’m going to a party. In, um, Texas. So I need to pair an adorable dress with a pair of adorable boots, and the only boots I own that are suitable for wearing in Texas (i.e., with a “cowgirl heel”) are short and brown, but the adorable dress I want to wear is knee-length and black, so I can’t decide whether to get a new dress that would look adorable with my Texas-appropriate boots, or whether to get a new pair of tall, black, Texas-appropriate boots that would look adorable with the dress I like so much. Why does modern life have to be so complicated and trying? Why?

More tomorrow, I’m sure, since I’m going to the dentist and all.
_____
* Both of those “words” annoy me beyond all measure, but you can’t have everything.

** First, she’s not supposed to jump on the kitchen counter, even if it is covered in attractive things like rubber gloves and cotton potholders. She knows this. Second, I am experiencing quite enough waking up in the middle of the night due to noise right now without her contributing. Third, a cat makes a specific sound when it is meowing proudly about something it is holding in its jaw, and when I hear that sound these days I immediately think, “Great, another dead or dying mouse! Just what I need.” (Much as you can’t un-ring a bell, you can’t un-rattle my nerves just by showing that you are victoriously carrying a potholder around with you rather than a rodent.)

*** Okay, really only one of them (and you’ll learn more about him later, I’m sure), but the others I’ve encountered have seemed perfectly pleasant as well.

**** Tuesdays and nested parentheses go together like, well, two things that go together really well, don’t they?

So say I’ve had an experience that was unpleasant. And say I write you an e-mail telling you about it, in case you’d care to do something about it. There are a couple of ways to respond to that e-mail, both of which I have experienced in the last several days.

a) Simply ignore my e-mail, and when I phone you to see whether you received it and inquire as to whether further action might need to be taken, be an ass.

b) Write me an e-mail back, detailing a more unpleasant experience that recently happened to someone else, including the words “beaten”, “robbed”, and “bleeding”.

Just for the record, neither of those responses actually make me feel better. In order to make me feel better, it is necessary to be funny about my unpleasant experience (e.g., a third possible response: “Sorry about trying to break in like that. I just wanted to see you.”).

Humor is a defense mechanism with which I am perhaps too familiar, but I still like it. In fact, I like it more than I like denial as a defense mechanism, insofar as laughing can be cathartic.

I am quite literally on the verge of putting everything except Molly, Mouse, some clothes, and my laptop (and some cat treats) into storage, and insisting that I be put up on someone’s couch until such time as I can find a place to live that is not a hazard to both my health and well-being. I’m probably not going to actually do that – I like my privacy, and Mouse is in one of his peeing on things phases, which makes him less than a desirable roommate. (He’s something like 82 in human years – give him a break.)

All I can say for sure is that I am taking all of next week off of work, so that I can try to figure out how to fix this situation before it gets worse.

Wish me luck.

Or send money.

Or beer. Beer would be fine.

I don’t know much, but I can tell you this: when you wake up to the sounds of someone trying to get into your house through your bathroom window just before 3:45 a.m., the number of police officers you have to let in and out, coupled with the number of lights you have to turn on, added to your need to stop and spell-check the e-mail you write to your landlord about it (because you know that your facility with language is diminished when you are tired), makes it very difficult indeed to easily fall back to sleep when you’re finished.

It was probably just a drunk guy who got locked out of his apartment and was trying to get back in, but who was so drunk that he mistook my bathroom window for his own. Happens to the best of us, I’m sure. No one could get into my house through a window if they wanted to, without breaking one, at least, and I don’t think anyone really wants to get in here anyway.

So the guy leading the meditation this Sunday* talked for a while about the “impermanence of sound”, and so now I’m thinking about that, and about the fact that if I had been sleeping more deeply, I might not have heard any sounds at all, and instead slept right through the time when someone was attempting to get in through my bathroom window. I can’t decide right now whether that’s a good thing or a bad one. (Maybe the important lesson is that things can be good, bad, or neither good nor bad. Perhaps this whole episode is neutral.)

The other thing that I can tell you for sure is that there is no one online to chat with at 4:30 a.m. I mean, there are, likely, but not people I know and want to chat with. Even the people on the West Coast are asleep.

There are all sorts of other things I could tell you now, not having written here since Tuesday, but further blog entries may just have to wait until I have found a new place to live. I had intended to make some progress on that front this weekend, but instead spent my weekend doing other, more pleasurable things, things which I shall not recount here except to say that I had McDonald’s for breakfast on Sunday, and having breakfast at McDonald’s always makes me glad, particularly if I have a companion (even a begrudging one).

_____
*Yes, I went again. It’s like a thing I do now. Get over it.

Dear Blog,

You know that I have sort of an unnatural affection for you, right? You’re so good at certain things, like giving me a place to dump the contents of my brain, providing a tiny little comments section where people I know (and am still getting to know) can say clever things about everything and nothing at all all at once, generating an archive of my life* so that I can go back and say, “Sorry, Turbo, you’re wrong – see, I wrote about it on my blog!”, and making me feel like it’s not really necessary to send carefully crafted e-mail individually to each of my friends.

Other things you sort of suck at, though. Like not making me feel guilty because I could be spending each and every minute I spend writing here instead writing something publishable, not documenting every time I have a really good idea that I just can’t muster enough energy to bring to fruition, and not recording for posterity all of the relationships I have attempted to foster but instead have failed miserably at fostering. Maybe you could work on those things.

Anyway, I am rather fond of you, and a while back I had this crazy idea that I should post pictures of things I am rather fond of, in order to generate an aura of positivity. But I think you and I both know that “auras of positivity” are not something we’re good at generating, so you could just go ahead and forget that I ever had the 20 days of pictures of things I love idea, if you don’t mind. That would be keen.

Tell you what - I’ll go ahead and properly categorize all of your old entries, if you go ahead and delete those that make me sound like anything less than a cool, calm, collected young lady.

Thank you in advance for your cooperation in this matter,

Jennifer
_____
* No, just those parts of my life that I publish for the entire World Wide Web to read, but close enough.

So Molly and I went to the vet again today, when our favorite doctor was there. He listened to her right lung, said it sounded fine. Then he listened to her left lung, and said it sounded a little wheezy, although not nearly as bad as last time she had visited him. Last time she had visited him she was coughing. This time she had not yet started coughing, because I was paying very close attention to her, and took her to the vet as soon as we could be assured of seeing our favorite doctor. So we get to take medicine again, twice a day for four days, once a day for three days, and once every other day for three to five days. Molly is not all that fond of taking medicine, but this episode solidifies (and, well, validates) my decision to move out of my home, where the air conditioning is not reliable.

It will likely come as no great surprise that I left the air conditioning turned off for three days last week while I was at work, because it was dripping, the dripping was getting worse by the minute, and I was fearful that I would come home to find one or both cats pinned under a 2 foot by 2.75 foot piece of wood that had fallen from the ceiling because it was saturated with water. And I mentioned before that Molly’s asthma is triggered by heat and humidity, and while the high temperature inside my house those three days was not too terribly high, it was high enough to trigger mild breathing problems. At least she wasn’t killed by a falling piece of plywood.

And I think her current suffering was slightly lessened by my behavior: I stayed home from work on the 2nd of September so I could leave the air conditioning running and monitor the dripping, and stayed home for an entire weekend day on the 12th so that I could leave the air conditioning running and monitor the (second coming of the) dripping. I still don’t feel good about it, though, because her current suffering could have been avoided altogether.

Lest anyone get the wrong idea, she doesn’t actually seem to be suffering at all. She may be just the tiniest bit more sluggish than usual, but she still plays like a kitten. She’s a trooper.

In any event, I’m going to buy a stethoscope now, so I can listen to Molly’s labored breathing and learn what it sounds like. Whenever I try to listen to her breathing without a stethoscope, just by laying my head against her torso, she starts purring, because she likes to be close to me. The stethoscope just might trigger purring too, if I’m using it instead of a strange man in a cold, sterile office that one has to be carried to in a box, but I think I’ll give it a try anyway. Frankly, I was a little worried that I was being paranoid, imagining her troubled breathing sounds in my head because I knew the air conditioning was broken, and would put Molly through the trauma of going to the vet (and pay $44.95) for nothing. But I knew the right thing to do was take her in, even if it was all in my imagination, and I’m glad I did. (And I’m also glad that I have prednisone left over from last time she had an asthma attack, because that makes this episode less expensive.) I’m not just glad that I did because I was right (and because I so enjoy being validated), but also because she reacted quite positively to the medicine last time. Buying a stethoscope will not prevent me from taking her to the vet when I think she’s having trouble breathing – if buying a stethoscope was a guaranteed cure for anxiety, I would have bought one a long time ago. But it will give me more information about what the lungs of an asthmatic cat sound like, and since I’ve got an asthmatic cat, I should know how her insides work, what they sound like when they’re going bad, etc. Simple common sense.

Also, the doctor confirmed my suspicion that Advantage Multi is not a good medicine to give to an asthmatic cat who lives with a geriatric cat,* and said it was perfectly reasonable for me to not have applied it to Molly. And they wouldn’t refund my money because the medicine had been removed from its packaging, so I donated it to them. Never mind that they removed it from its packaging in order to give it to me in a pill bottle instead of in the box it came in – I told the woman that I think it’s more appropriate to just stick a prescription label on the box, and she agreed and told me she would pass my concern along. So a letter to the corporate offices is underway, and while I never expect my $18 to be returned to me, I do expect my issues to be addressed.

Speaking of which, even though I am not a bully, I can act like a bully sometimes. I don’t do it often, but when someone accuses you of being a bully, your first reaction might be to show them what bullying actually is, by being a complete ass. And I could have avoided acting on my first reaction, but I did not. It wasn’t a mature thing I did, nor am I particularly proud of myself (it was sort of funny, though, as long as you’re on my side of the argument). I should be a better person, but sometimes when people call me names I just can’t help myself. I react in kind, even though the appropriate thing to do is turn the other cheek.

Ah well. There’s always next time.

And while I could post a picture of something I love tonight, or at least make a bulleted list, I’m not going to, because I have to somehow lure Molly out from under the couch and then squirt one cc of foul-smelling liquid down her throat, so that she can breathe again. A girl’s gotta have her priorities, and the health of my cats is among the foremost of mine. (Pardon me if I’m being ridiculous.)
_____
* Validated again? I’m on a roll!

So here’s something I thought would never happen: I was innocently sitting and eating dinner with someone* this evening, regaling him with tales of my miserably complicated existence, when he said, “You should come meditate with me this evening.” And so I asked him a ton of questions, assured him that I would suck at meditating worse than anyone has ever sucked at meditating before, and then I said, “Okay.” And so I sat in a room for an hour, with a whole bunch of other people, meditating. I won’t say it wasn’t weird. It was weird. But at least a third of it was actually effective, and I totally put thoughts out of my mind without judging the thoughts themselves or the fact that I was actively freeing my mind of thoughts, and I’m pretty sure I’m going to go again next weekend, and . . .

I’ll wait while you pick yourself up after just having fallen out of your chair.

. . . there were only four or five points during which I had to stop myself laughing out loud, and I think people who have never even met me must be aware that I am not the sort of person who can sit still for an entire hour, let alone refrain from talking at the very same time that I am sitting still. But I did it, and it was interesting (and did I say weird?), and now I shall read a book or two about meditation, and maybe then I will be more relaxed, and not such a raging bitch.

I also had a morning that turned out about how I expected it to be, but was still sort of unexpected. You know how sometimes you meet a person who’s allergic to cats and think, “Well, thank goodness he’s allergic to cats. That’s a good excuse for never talking to him again!”, and other times you meet a person who’s allergic to cats and think, “Oh, that’s too bad, but it is entirely too much effort to make sure that my home is as free of cat hair as possible so that he can avoid sneezing and having red, itchy eyes while he’s at my place”? And you know how sometimes, but only sometimes, you meet a person who is allergic to cats and think, “Well, maybe I ought to just buy an air filter. I mean, I could use one anyway, right? I can’t afford one, because I have to move and all, but maybe I can use my flexible spending account to pay for it.** Also, there is likely not an air filter manufactured today that can adequately combat the amount of cat hair and dander in my home, but that’s neither here nor there”? No? Maybe that’s just me.

Sorry there’s no picture of the unexpected. Whose stupid idea was this 20 days of pictures of things I love anyway? I think I’m like 3 and 7 now, and am therefore officially losing.

Somehow I feel like a winner though – even though my life is a little complicated right now, and I have several things I’ve just got to figure out, and quick (like which bank I’m going to rob to be able to afford to have two guys with a truck come move all of my personal belongings to a new home) (after I have found a new home, I mean), sometimes I just have to step back and say, “Jen, you know, your life is pretty keen. You have friends who are super-great, an unnatural knack for pulling yourself up out of holes you get yourself into, and, well, almost an entire box of wine. Quit your bitching for a minute and appreciate it.”

And so I am. And that is all.
____
* Who needs a codename.

** Or could, if I hadn’t already spent all of the money in my flexible spending account for this year. Will someone kindly remind me to increase the amount of money I put away before taxes to pay for medical costs that come out of my pocket? I never do realize how expensive my life actually is, and next year I’ll need a crown. (Next year? I need one right this very minute, but I’m waiting until January, so I don’t have to pay taxes on its cost. Sometimes I’m a cheapskate.) (A miser?) (A person who puts off things that really need to be done because they just don’t feel like paying for them right now? I don’t know, I guess a lot of people are like that. But I am saving up for the crown as we speak, started saving the minute I learned it needed to be purchased – I’m not sure how many people are like that, but I know for a fact that some people are not.)

“You’re an intelligent woman, Jennifer, and you like to validate your intelligence by bullying people.”

True, or not true?

Last night while I was sleeping, my blog went a little haywire. An old entry was randomly posted twice, with two different timestamps, and a draft got posted instead of the final version. So I fixed it, but if you read my blog last night, I apologize for any confusion.

And yesterday, someone asked me if I could diagnose why their Blackberry-type thing was moving all of the calendar entries forward an hour. I could not.

I know I like to find patterns – that’s just how my brain works – and maybe this isn’t a sign that there’s a wrinkle in the space/time continuum. But maybe it is.

In other news, I had the pleasure of waking up at 4:22 this morning, to the beautiful sound of dripping coming from the air conditioning. So whatever plans I had for this weekend are going out the window, so I can search for a new apartment. There are so many things I would rather be doing . . .

See how she can’t even look at you? She doesn’t believe in persecution.

She deserves better than this.

I can’t be bothered to take a picture right now, because Molly is sleeping (I think she’s having trouble breathing again, so I’ll need to find out in the morning whether our favorite doctor is on staff this weekend), and Mouse is, well, also sleeping, and posting a picture of a sleeping cat just doesn’t seem right today anyway. And I’ve still got the second creepy picture on hold, but that isn’t right today either. In fact, I’m in the mood for words, so you get a bulleted list instead of a picture. I’ll paint a picture with words, as they say.

Things I Love

• I have had several epic online chats with people that I like very much this week, and while I do not love that I do not have as many people immediately near to me that I like very much as I would like, I do love the fact that we can chat online, and learn new things about each other (or just catch up) and that everyone is quite funny.
• I also love that I have enough free time to have epic online chats with people that I like very much.
• (I also love the short little chats when everyone’s too busy for epic chatting, but really just wants to mention something right that very minute.)
• And when someone types, “I was just thinking that!” in response to something that I have typed.
• Possessing the ability to type really, really fast
• Even though I sometimes have crazy days there, I really do love my job. And I love that I was able to temp long enough at my current job to ensure that it was a good fit for me, and that the company I work for does good things, and that (most of) the people I work with are funny, and able to handle adversity, and motivated, and smart.
  (God, this list is going to take forever. Let’s be pithy, eh?)
• Appetite for Destruction, particularly Mr. Brownstone
• Domino’s Pizza
• Knowing right from wrong
• Pulling myself up by my own bootstraps
• Wine
• Not being a moron
• Responsibility, and that I am responsible
• Possiblities. (Yesterday someone reminded me of the Louisa May Alcott quote, “Far away there in the sunshine are my highest aspirations. I may not reach them, but I can look up and see them, believe in their beauty, and try to follow where they lead.” I tell you, there sure is a lot of stuff in my brain. Why do I even have that quote in there? (Granted, last night I couldn’t remember the end, had to look it up, but still.))
• Lists of things I love
• Movies. Actually, I don’t really like movies at all, but there are a couple of movies I’m excited about seeing – the new Woody Allen, which I have somehow not dragged anyone to yet; a 2003 film of A Separate Peace, which I did not know existed until yesterday; and the new version of Johnny Got His Gun, coming out sometime this year.

That’s all I think I have time for now, because I want to go watch a movie. And I might not even have time tomorrow to take a picture of something I love, if I actually focus on doing the things that need doing, like finding a new apartment. I think I’ve found a building I’m interested in, and it’s within a mile of my work, and I want to take a walk through the neighborhood, to see if it’s as sketchy as I think it might be, so I may just wake up really early, do all my errands, and then go to work, on a Saturday. It’s quiet in there on Saturdays, and no one’s around to bug me, and I have some catching up to do. But people who go to work on Saturdays are losers, and I don’t want to be a loser. (Whoever just thought, “Um, Jen, it’s a little too late for that”? You don’t have to tell me – I already know.)

On that note . . .