1.

It’s good that I’m writing so much this week, even though the reasons are crappy. I don’t think I mentioned I was supposed to be at FogCon again last weekend, and I’m super bummed I had to cancel due to not being able to walk or stand. SMALL DETAILS. I did a metric asston of writing after I got back last year and I didn’t even care that I had just started a new role at work and that it was super stressful. Then I think work kind of ate me for a while and I did no writing except around xmas. I tried to substitute running for writing last fall, but it was boring and then I got sick for a month in October. Writing begets writing, too. When I am writing offline, I am blogging more.

Can I say as an aside I feel like I almost never run into anyone who has, like, a three-day or even a week-long cold anymore? It seems like it’s always this epic that lasts for a six weeks wherein three different things are contracted? I know that happens to me and all of my friends.

Maybe the point is this is like one of those time travel tropes where you can go back and give the girl the tampon/ray gun/std in time, but the writing will still happen somehow. You cannot stop it. That sounds good. All I am doing right now is sleeping (exhausted) and peeing, like a baby.

2.

I think of my dogs as coworkers, perhaps in part because I do actually take them to work most days. There are always there, reliable, acting sane (for dogs). They would lay down in front of an avalanche of waffles for me and their little jaws would not stop moving until they went into a carb coma. Edith would probably poot herself to death since she doesn’t seem to handle wheat well.

And yet I think there is this part of me who still likes cats better. They speak to me more with their fickleness and irrational hatreds. I know that dogs have become our mirrors, and I hear a lot of people say that they are more like people, but I think cats are more human. Tiny walnut brains. Confusion. Taking out against something for obscure reasons. Loving other people, things, or cats for even more obscure reasons. Dogs, at least ones who aren’t severely damaged or bred to only love people who are 5’3″ falconry buffs who smell of sage, have public hearts. Cats have secret, unpredictable hearts.

Goethe’s heart feels she should make sweet love to every device I try to interact with.

This is my take on cats: some cats like no one. That’s unfortunate. Some cats like everyone okay, or even a lot, but don’t seem to have a special person. Some cats are lucky, and they love multiple people, which is good, because sometimes people go away or are separated. I have acquired used cats and they have taken a liking to me. I hope they are not pining too hard over lost loves.

Goethe likes me best. I am her person. I realized recently that everyone else I live with finds her slightly hateful, because she is, to them. She is pretty much always nice to me. When I bailed her out of the pound in November the volunteers in the back cheerfully went back to retrieve her and then one returned a few minutes later, empty-handed and frowning, sporting some new claw marks on her forearm.

“Could you…come back and get her?”

“WOW!” Gertie said, when she saw me. She always yells at me with this little pinhead squeak. She swirled around her cell and came forward when I reached for her. “MEW! MEW! MEW!” She sank her claws into my shoulder as she hugged me and banged her head on my face. “Where have you been?” she asked, drooling and purring.

“Oh, good,” the volunteer said, relieved.

“Has she been a jerk?” I asked.

“Well…I’m just surprised to see you holding her. No one else has been able to touch her.”

“I’m her person,” I explained, which was the first time I realized it was true. “And I’m sorry about your arms.”

Sometimes I pet her and sometimes she pets herself on my finger or knuckle. And sometimes we have a lazy standoff where I press my finger to her face and she does nothing. She is no Nietzsche but she’ll do.

My coworker. Note the sliver of my sad red feverish face in the background. SMEXY.

3.

As a small catty P.S., I will say that something interesting happened when I was out of town last month. I boarded the cats, even though my sister was house sitting, because between her coming and going and the contractors, I did not want a cat to disappear and have that be my sister’s problem.

Last time I boarded Mere and Goethe together in their “large” room, which was a nice cube not quite wide enough to hold a bed…maybe like a large closet. It has a window and many levels. This was not available for our recent trip, so I went with two separate cages in a room with a few other cats. There was the option of Mere and Goethe being let out a couple of times a day together to look out the windows and stretch their legs.

Something that always made me sad about their mother-daughter dynamic is that Mere would always beat Goethe’s ass, and Matilida’s, before we lost her. When we got them back from boarding I expected a huge explosion of fighting as they settled down again, but it didn’t come. A day after we got home, I discovered that Mere was grooming Goethe, which was a thing she had not done since Goethe was a tiny kitten.

I thought of this just now when Goethe came to visit me in bed this morning and bang her face on my Kindle, and I discovered the back of her neck was all wet. Thanks, Mom.