Maya

Surrounded.

The stuff pushes in, new stuff; Christmas stuff and clutter. I have a tendency to be overwhelmed even by too many groceries after a trip to the store, the consumerism of Christmas always freaks me out a little. I don’t know how to catalogue things, except books. I have just gotten done giving things away, things with emotional weight; I never keep such things. They stay new and perfect if they are full up with expectations that never realized fruition, or a disappointment that hangs over my heart. It’s so much easier to gift wrap my emotional bounty and give it away in parcels,

But there is always the incoming. The influx.

I don’t pretend to be well, but tomorrow and the next are also parcelled into organization bits. This year I will synthesize a little bit more of the love offered. I’m frowning over a sum, bent over the computer. The stuff has a presence of its own, looming and omnipresent as rock formations in my mind.

What she does, the kitten, is she leaps into the middle of everything that seems so serious and so much. She’s a little girl cat, and she’s one of *those* girls, you know: The kind that prove boys aren’t _quite_ the most lovable things on Earth. She’s all round tumminess and slightly slanted green eyes, and she can take the distance from the couch to the arm chair in one leap, no sweat. She lands in the pile of my terrible stuff, and I’m laughing, suddenly, because there’s a ribbon caught on her whisker, and she’s a rakish pirate cat. I push it all aside, very matter of factly, and retrieve my wayward cat.

Strange magic, Maya. You turn my sink and soar into a comical flounder. I want to write, to respond to people far enough away that I can get close to them. And of course push away those who have gotten too close, find some way to word my regard and still carefully post my ‘Keep Out’ borders, but you won’t stay on the floor, will you?

She jumps into my lap with the stubborn, single-mindedness of a girl cat. Gracie was the same way, but Gracie didn’t leave four tiny holes in the skin of my thigh, rousing me to holler from the pain of her stubborn climb.

You’d laugh too, to see her looking wild and alarmed, rushing away from the shout, to hide behind a pile of ‘Shall i keep them?’ books. She knocks things down. She doesn’t listen. She hops into my lap over and over while I’m sitting at the keyboard, thinking I will write the twisted etchings of my mind down.

She licks my chin.

I have to take my hands off the keyboard, and wrap them around this little, purring body. She doesn’t understand anything. She doesn’t know I’m a failure, that I make some sort of living off of introspection, that I hate myself, and the holiday, and love my family and hate their presence and hate  hate hate the STUFF; she’s a fool.

And she’s real. And soft. And alive.

And I’m in love. w/Maya.

Children take us away from ourselves but fill us with a passion of uncertainty and regret and twisted, awkward love.

Maybe I needed a kitten.

Maybe I wanted one.

Who could have known? I stop here, because she is purring insistent, and maybe I’m bleeding a bit, but that’s okay.’

Wiry, real-live things can do that to you, sometimes.

A few words on Vegetarian Dog Food

Sometimes, I think I’m pretty funny. Others don’t necessarily share that opinion, alas. Case in point, I used to write articles for an online site who paid very poorly. Since the pay was so ridiculous, and the format so open, I didn’t always take the proposed topics very seriously. Due to their new nazi profit sharing tactics, it has become somewhat worthwhile to revise the articles that were not particularly well received so that my portfolio makes a little money without me doing anything.

Before I erased it for all time, I wanted to share what I feel is a very helpful article on How to make Vegetarian Dog Food. (I may also share my valuable insights in a later post on ‘How to Date Your Older Home’… very interesting information, that. Stay tuned.)

How to Make Vegetarian Dog Food

1) When you set out to make vegetarian dog food, it is important to start with a vegetarian dog. If budget allows, several vegetarian dogs are ideal, in case your cooking makes one or two of the dogs fatally ill. If you can’t afford several vegetarian dogs, one vegetarian dog and a few vegetarian guinea pigs will probably work just fine.

People sometimes ask “How do I know if my dog is a vegetarian?” That’s a fairly dumb question: A vegetarian dog will not eat meat. Be careful when you get your vegetarian dog that you don’t accidentally get a vegan, because feeding a vegan is a pain in the tookus.

2) K, you have your vegetarian dog(s), now you need your ingredients. You might be thinking that vegetarian dog food consists primarily of vegetables, but vegetables are only one component. Grains, beans, cookies, these are all fair game when you go shopping. There are two main rules to follow when buying ingredients for vegetarian dog-food. First: The ingredients must be vegetarian, which means no meat. Secondly: Your ingredients should not be poisonous to your dog. Outside of those parameters, you might as well try anything. You’re the chef, the entrepreneur, the culinary mastermind. And hey, if you can find some vegetarian dog food while you’re shopping for ingredients, that will save you a lot of work.

Here’s an incomplete list of ingredients to avoid because they might be dog poison.

chocolate
onion powder
citrus fruit
rat poison
Preparation H
rhubarb
raisins
draino
acne medication

3) So you have your vegetarian dog(s), you have your non-poisonous vegetarian ingredients- now it’s time to make the food. Depending upon your ingredients, you will likely have to chop, puree, and boil stuff together. Make sure there are no large chunks of any ingredient that your vegetarian dog or guinea pig might choke on. Write down the ingredients in each concoction so you won’t forget. Avoid seasoning with a tremendous amount of ketchup or salt, as large quantities of these are unhealthful to canines. Navigate by smell. A hungry dog isn’t all that finicky, so if you’re not gagging they might go for it.

4) Let your dog perform the taste test. You might be really curious, but ideally you won’t be the one eating your vegetarian dog-food, the dog will.

5) Monitor your dog for digestive upheaval for 48 hours- kind of like a quarantine. If he lives, document the taste-test winner. Put it in your recipe box. Congratulations! You’re a canine Betty Crocker!

A Happiness List (in no particular order)

Robin and Anhinga both tagged me for the happiness meme, wherein you list 6 things that bring you happiness. This is somewhat of an expansion on that concept. I’m not going to tag anyone specifically, as this meme has been around most everywhere, but it’s as good a day as any to paste up a happiness. The very act of thinking about these things gave me a glow.

1. A camera with fresh batteries

2. brioche with home-made jam

3. sea creatures! Dolphins, cuttlefish, rays, seaweed, fish, salmon, blowfish, swordfish, kelp forests, itty critters

4. The perfect color green sweater

5. Irish fellas

6. Italian fellas

7. Latino heartthrobs

8. Appealing mutts

9. laughter

10. Music!

11. Dancing!

12. Yellowstone

13.  Yosemite

14. Mountains and towers of books

15. Crunchy stuff: Nuts. Frozen blueberries. Ice. Cereals.

16. Chocolate. (good chocolate)

17. Conversation. (good conversation)

18. The part where you’re excited about a movie you’re going to see, and sometimes the part when you’re watching a movie and realize you really, really like it.

19. Nature in all its iterations, and the opportunity to experience those.

20. sand on bare toes

21. A good game of cards.

22. History, and the option to embrace or ignore it.

23. French

24. clean sheets

25. orchids, and their astounding variety

26. colors, and their astounding variety

27. words

28. Trees. Leaves. Crunching leaves. Crunching leaves and the perfect color green sweater.

29. Chai tea

30. Good dreams

31. being held

Baby Dragons

Here is the picture I didn’t use for today’s header, cus I couldn’t quite figure how to make it fit:

 

Anyway, I’m pleased with what I’ve got, though that one there mightily appealed to me cus of the mischievous expression of the dragon, and the lovely, stalwart tilt of the hapless ship about to be pounded.

So like, I am a dragon.

Seriously, just respect my hoard, and we’ll be cool and stuff.

No, it’s a Chinese Zodiac thing. I just made it under the fence… if the New Year had started a little earlier in 1977, I would have been a snake.

Ssss.

What, you don’t buy into those things, you say?

Well, I wouldn’t either if I’d been born a rat or a pig or a boar, but having the Chinese calendar all ‘I dub thee, dragon’ gives the situation a polish of legitimacy (for me).

Dragons are pistols, I guess. You cross a dragon with an Aquarius, and you get some really good and really bad traits, amplified. The hybrid I’m most likely to fight to the death with would be a Tiger-Leo (< also hump to death) or a Snake-Scorpion, my zodiac worst enemy.  I will largely ignore Rat-Geminis, and Horse- Cancers… though I get along with half the horoscope of monkeys and dogs.

 

Nothing is mentioned here, there or anywhere about Aquarian-Dragons and Aries-Sheep, but I’m here to tell you it’s good… very good. Or maybe star-signs really have fuck-all to do with inter-personal outcomes.

What do you think? What’s your sign? Do you have a fatal-love sign? Are you pretty sure you’re going to get offed by a Gemini? Do you put any store by these things at all?

Curious. 

*find your Chinese Zodiac sign

 

 

Fewmet means dragon-dropping by the way. Just thought you’d like to know that.

She sings

Sitting down to read a bit this morning, I hear my daughter start to hum. She is taking her bath. I keep an ear on things, because lately she’s taken to kidnapping one of the household pets for ‘company’ in the bathroom, and I hafta listen to make sure the grumbling of today’s victim stays on an aggrieved and inconvenienced pitch, instead of elevating to the yowl or yelp of terrified distress, because that means either a) Sierra’s actually tried to induce one of them into the bathtub/shower or b) he/she is having one of my girly supplies applied to its fuzzified person.

All was pretty peaceful this morning. Gracie-the-cat was today’s chosen victim (I’m astounded she doesn’t spazz when she gets carried into the bathroom). There was just the occasional, plaintive mewl of a pet whose been emotionally orphaned from any hope of rescue. I was trying to compose a reply to an e-mail, when suddenly the tune she was humming pushed through my preoccupation, and I froze for a second, listening.

It was the lullaby. The lullaby in the music box of my old, battered bear when I was a child; an old tune that still lingers in certain memories, but one that is in little circulation in real life, overtaken now by ‘rock-a-bye baby’ (that horrifying little Grimm’s fairytale) or more contemporarily, by Elmo ‘n’ crew.

This was the tune I made up words to, to sing to her when she was very small. I haven’t heard it since.

When I was a child, battered bear was not my favorite. I didn’t pass him down, for he was retired to a high shelf before Sierra was born. Not that he was a bad bear, mind you, he was just old-aged, even when I got him: A venerable fellow, the musician of my plush nightly-comfort crew. When a night particularly called for more than Kwalt tucked under my chin, and Blankie laid across my pillow, when a night was a real humdinger of strange nightmarishness, then battered bear would be wound up, and the tinkling sound of that familiar tune… old, authentic, with some pauses where the music box lagged, …that song would play.

And later, I sang it to her.

And now… does she remember that? Does she remember being held and rocked and sung to? I cross the hall. Stop. Listen. I can almost feel Gracie’s energy on the other side of the door, tensed for escape from her steaming purgatory.

Mark another mystery down to this endless wondering thing which is parenthood. If I open the door now, all she’s going to think about is the unforgivable release of Gracie. The song, if it is a real memory, something she can access in her head, will turn off in favor of complaints and accusation. If it is a remnant though, a sound her heart knows but her brain can’t manufacture, it will be gone like a dream when I open the door.

So I sit down right there in the hall, my back propped against the doorframe. I listen, marvelling at the strange shapes that life takes. A little white paw pokes out beneath the bathroom door, and I touch it so it curls upward like it’s trying to take hold of something, something that might not be there.

You and me both, Gracie.

You and me both.

zeufli

Naw, I donno what it means. It just seemed like the word to fit the picture. So I’m going to draft my own definition.

zeufli- n. a pattern or knot of color or energy that draws the eye’s focus toward a central point.

Shall we do another?

Well, if you’re certain.

Two cats are currently breaking my ’stay off the bed’ policy. They look angelic and purrrfect while breaking the rules, and not like the little furbags of fleas and pestilence I just know they are. Maybe I should give up the fight to maintain a cat-free zone, but consider this: Would you walk around in a cat litter-box and then climb into bed?

No? Me either. I don’t mind soiling my coverlets with my monkey-ickiness. I am a great ape, and my monkey-ickiness must, of necessity, go where I go. But this is a whole other species of ick. This is feline ick comingling with my monkey soil.

 Maybe I better not think about  it too much.

 Yesterday I started reading  ’Animal, Vegetable, Miracle; A  Year of Food Life’ by Barbara  Kingsolver. Yesterday a boy  made me cry. Yesterday a boy  also made me laugh.

 I think my rebel kitties ought    to go take their cuteness and feline ickiness to a boy’s coverlet, and leave me in peace to brood on the symbolic relationship between subsidized soybeans and love affairs.

asdlfkjkdas;fjs

..

gesundheit.

Insidious Pussies

What if the creator of the original web-log really did mean for bloggers to post adorable cat pictures?

We’ve all experienced the aberration that is I CAN HAS CHEEZBURGER. We’ve all tread too close for comfort near the murky depths of the cat blogging underground. Most of us have seen tell-tale signs of cat-blogging even in our nearest and dearest… the innocent great-aunt who forwards all those cutesy little e-mails. The seemingly solid head of household tiptoeing down to his basement in the dark hours of the night, his wife sneaking up behind him to discover his porn fetishes only to see… a tiny Abyssinian??? …driving a motorcyle??? “This is what you’ve been doing all these hours?”

Cat-blogging is indicative of something sinister; I think we’re all pretty clear on that. It’s hard not to give in, not to laugh, not to take a little peek at what’s making that retarded WordPress site so damn popular. Cat-bloggers are kind of like pod-people: They don’t even realize they are infecting other people with their brain-washing.

Now. Look down. Is your pinkie crooked?

There’s still a strong, vocal faction of the population who believe robots will ultimately rule the Earth. I am a representative of that sensible demographic, but the pervasive, insidious trend of cat-blogging does bear consideration.

The furballs are taking over.

Before you shrug me off, remember that Egyptians did worship the little bastards. They even went to the trouble of mummifying their mangy little kitty corpses. Were they on to something? How did a small, fuzzy creature who has to lick its own ass, how did such a thing come to dominate the information superhighway? It bears examining, folks.

Whatever the first bloggers meant blogging to be used for, I think all the tech-geeks, the news-vultures, the literaries and the esoteric elitists, I think we all have to band together and resist that siren Siamese call. “Miaou.”

Repeat these words to yourself each time you sit down to the computer. Make them your mantra; make them your battle-cry:

“I will not forward cutesy kitty e-mails. I will not post squashed face whisker-gits on my site, just for a hit-spike. I will not go gently into that dark night. The internet is for PORN not PETS. I will NOT become a CATBLOGGER!”

Good, good, thats the spirit. Now, here’s a little Rorschach test to make sure you aren’t too far gone already. What do you see in the ink-spot? Go ahead, you can tell me.

____________________________

Update: Validation!

(This post was re-erected from the archives. I posted it first 1 year, 1 month, 1 week ago. Boy, time flies.)

I guess I could moo.

Muse Erato! Come on down… ! You’re the next contestant on ‘WTF should I write?’

I am feeling contented on this late Tuesday morning, which is creepy in and of itself, for Tuesday is the black sheep of the week, the sly, rebellious, unpredictable day. The weekly waif sporting sparkles or talons, sometimes both simultaneously.

But I am contented today; serene, peaceful, practically bovine in nature. No storms of passion, no great, soaring ambitions to shake up the pleasant routine of a Tuesday afternoon. I’m devoid of any rant-spurring grievance, or political fervor.

I have gone bucolic.

I have gone barnyard.

The only reasonable communication at this point would be some mellow lowing, but I don’t wish to attract any lonely Scotsmen who might be lurking in the area. I’m a simple girl, with simple needs: A plot of meadow, some buttercups, maybe a poem; the Wordsworth kind… one of those meandering, gentle doozies that drive you crazy if you have something better to do:

“A HUMMING BEE–a little tinkling rill–

A pair of falcons wheeling on the wing…”

sigh

It is frustrating, I’ll admit, to take to a cow’s disposition so readily. I’d like to imagine my former life as something very exciting, literature provoking: A bandit, a runaway inn-keeper’s daughter, maybe a pirate. If I lived in the animal kingdom I was surely a fearsome wolf or a jaguar, rowr.

Not a strapping Guernsey named Clover Bell! Damn.

My contributions to the literary world may only have amounted to… well, calcium.

Still, don’t turn your nose up at fortified bones. Would Dickinson have written such pretty poems with a hunchback? Imagine Hemingway with osteoporosis: No big game hunting safaris for him. And Jane Austen could hardly have turned that divining nose up at high society without decent bone structure.

I guess I best not devalue my origins, but holy fuck a pirate would have been cool.

Like, moo.

Tidbits sans Panda Porn

Julian was the one who found this, but… woah. Remember the Wolf Point Meteor thing that several of us did a couple weeks ago? Yeah. Well, early this morning a fireball soared across the Oregon sky and made a sonic boom felt for miles around where they estimate the impact may have been.

I’ve discussed the fact that the local weather seems to reflect my mood sometimes; the worst storm of the winter coinciding with the worst turmoil of my stormy soul. That kinda thing can’t help but give you a a complex after awhile. It’s an amused, indulgent complex. A “Yeah, I know my mood doesn’t control the weather, but gee, I feel a little like God.” kind of thing.

So you can imagine what this news is doing for my complex. I… I conjured a meteor! Holy bamboo rattan, batman. What should I do with these new powers? Gonna try and go for good as opposed to evil. I could, you know, use this new evidence of my omnipotence to be a badass, and score free cheetos and stuff, but I think I’ll try to remain a benign and cheerful minor deity. You’re all safe. Someone inferred that I was ignorant last night and I didn’t even smite them, so you know I’m not gonna mess with my weebles, except maybe a few inexplicable goat sightings. Who can resist a few enigmatic goat pranks to pass the time?

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

As long as we’re talkin’ about the cosmos, in case you didn’t hear, a full lunar eclipse is taking place tonight at 8:43 pm EST. That’s 5:43 pm here in Oregon, when it isn’t quite dark yet. The eclipse will last about 3 hours and twenty some minutes. I know it’s February, and freakin’ cold in most areas of North America, but this is a pretty early eclipse and your last chance to see one until December of 2010, so give it a look. Might be fun.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

I haven’t been visiting blogs very much this week. I apologize. Sometimes I feel like sticking to my little corner of cyberspace, writing my thoughts down, and not much like venturing out. That’s defining it imperfectly, but sometimes I kinda feel like gathering in, and other times I’m directed out. I guess. I haven’t been feeling very gregarious in real life, either. Maybe a reaction to the non-stop company of my birthday week/weekend.

Anyway, I’m not meaning to be snooty and certainly don’t expect you to read me when I’m not reading you. Just having a down time at the moment.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

I’ve been going about the last couple weeks feeling a little like someone has died. No one I know has died, but I still feel that kind of emptiness. It’s hard to say just what prompts such feelings, but it’s like a low-level reaction to accumulative loss. I am feeling the absence keenly of people who have gone out of my life. Particularly the last big love, but other loves and friends before that.

It shouldn’t bother me this way. I compare my feelings to the gaping yawn of other people, who lost loved ones yesterday or lost their husband, their child, their best friend.. and it seems like a self-indulgent thing. But then, I donno; letting go, moving on, it’s always something I’ve had trouble with. It feels a little callous to me, the expectation that healthy humans do this swiftly. It’s also always felt a little impossible.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Finally, an excerpt from a book I’m reading that struck me as particularly relevant today:

It is an important and popular fact that things are not always what they seem. For instance, on the planet Earth, man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much- the wheel, New York, wars and so on- while all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man- for precisely the same reason.

Curiously enough, the dolphins had long known of the impending destruction of the planet Earth, and had made many attempts to alert mankind to the danger; but most of their communications were misinterpreted as amusing attempts to punch footballs or whistle for tidbits, so they eventually gave up and left the Earth by their own means shortly before the Vogons arrived.

The last ever dolphin message was misinterpreted as a surprisingly sophisticated attempt to do a double backward somersault through a hoop while whistling the “Star-Spangled Banner,” but in fact the message was this: So long and thanks for all the fish.

In fact there was only one species on the planet more intelligent than dolphins, and they spent a lot of their time in behavioral research laboratories running round inside wheels and conducting frighteningly elegant and subtle experiments on man. The fact that once again man completely misinterpreted the relationship was entirely according to these creatures’ plans.

-Douglas Adams
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

Missing, as I did, my Italian

One day I was surfing blogs.

I don’t know why I do this. I have more than enough to read on my list, and I love my list and don’t need to go looking elsewhere for more list to read. But it’s a compulsion a bit like someone who lost a sibling long ago and thinks… ‘Maybe today I will find him.’

In my search, I saw a blog that was written in Italian. I was missing someone who was teaching me words in Italian. The funny part: The person teaching me was not fluent, and his Italian was grammatically scandalous; but I never let on that I knew it was mostly googled and probably worse than mine, because I loved the sound of him saying the words.

(this is quite the tangential blog post, isn’t it?)

At any rate, the blog I found was in real Italian, and looked to me like Greek or Martian would look. From a sense of sentimentality, or perhaps an appreciation of the artistic layout of the page, I went to babel fish and translated it to read.

What came up was an amalgam of Italian and English that was actually rather beautiful. The words, the half-meanings hinted at a bigger picture. Understanding only part, I had to draw my ideas from the puzzle pieces I could see.

There was a poetry to it.

And so I share… this is varasca, and an entry I found kind of magical between the spaces. I believe it’s about a pet turtle, but also much more.

l’entomologa January 28, 2008

pèa, the turtle d’acqua, has a passion, not particularly shared neither tantomeno approved of from the rest of the family, for l’entomologia. in its Aquarius raises in fact one colony of little animals from company of the species Drosophila Melanogaster: worse than one dumb than beagle!

we do not know well if it holds to them for pure and simple company (that it consists phrenetic in the volteggiarle over to the head, that is under to the lamp merendina), if holds to them in order to spy on of l’interessante riproduttivo cycle or if it is a its way in order to bring annoyance to us and to perhaps communicate a its dissatisfaction to us.

fact is that its amichetti do not give ’sto great annoyance then; here, they even force to think next to the philosophies orients them, to the reincarnation, the fugacità of the life, the tenacity of the life. in particular when one of we decides of appaudire vigorous in their aerial space, or during the supper, between one forchettata and l’altra, it supports the polpastrello on a dot that moves on the table, and then tatuato on the polpastrello. and one does not move more.

for a po’ it even leaves to lose, but then regularly, passed a sure period, pèa it recommences: I do not know like, but lathes to house and are here, she and its crobatic patrol from apartment, to redesign nell’aria – of new – the outline of a life.