Nine Lives?

I may have to re-think the narrative that my cat is dying. Maybe she's just using up one of her nine lives.

Less than two weeks ago I was about ready to have her put down. Since then she has walked away from death's door and shown much improvement.

Katya's latest weigh-in showed that she hasn't lost any weight in the past two weeks. She's still hovering at four and a half pounds, but she's stopped her rapid decline to nothingness. That's the first time since this whole crisis began that she's maintained her weight for any period of time.

Since her abscessed tooth cleared up she's been a much more functional pet. She's eating more or less regularly and her behavior is as sweet as it's ever been. She talks. She walks. She sleeps. She eats. She cuddles. She loves.

Although she's eating, I can't get her to eat any cat food. The only things she'll eat are canned tuna, turkey lunch meat cut into small squares, and meat off of my plate, such as de-breaded chicken from a Chinese Sweet & Sour dish or sausage off a pizza. (I don't usually feed her this kind of stuff, but at this point I'll feed her anything she shows an interest in.)

The vet told me that I have one of the greatest challenges facing any pet owner: trying to feed a sick old cat when there's another cat in the house who will swoop in and eat anything I put out.

Here is what the corner of my kitchen has looked like for the past two months:

This doesn't really give the whole picture, so let me arrange it in a group portrait:

These are the different foods I've tried to throw at Katya to get her to gain weight. Included in the portrait are Whisker Lickins, 9 Lives wet, Fancy Feast wet, turkey lunch meat, Paws wet, Meow Mix Market Select,Whiskas pouches, baby food, tuna cans, and Fancy Feast dry. Once there's some resolution with Katya, I will probably donate most of this food to the pet shelter.

Despite all my efforts, she has lost weight dramatically. That is, until the last two weeks. (Hermione, meanwhile, has been ballooning up thanks to all the new food.)

We still don't know what caused the weight loss to begin with, but at least her will to live has returned.

And while I'm posting pictures of my kitchen, here's the current state of my beer bottle collection:

Wow, I can't believe how much it's grown since September.


But I had a good excuse: My cat was dying.

Maybe.

Procrastinating Consumer

Have you heard about the 270-pound man who was trampled to death a few weeks ago?

No, he wasn't working the rodeo. It wasn't cattle that trampled him.

It was shoppers. At a Wal-Mart. On Black Friday.

Two thousand of them broke through the doors of a Long Island Wal-Mart and stormed the poor security guard who was trying to keep them back. I'm trying to wrap my head around it-- trying to understand how it's possible to put your foot down on top of another human being and just keep going. To feel the squish of his body under you. It's clearly not floor you're walking on. It's a human being. Didn't they notice? And it wasn't just one individual who did this, but enough of them to stomp out a life. Do the people who killed him even know what they did?


I doubt that any of those shoppers woke up that morning thinking, "I'm gonna kill a guy today." Let's give the tramplers the benefit of the doubt. Some of them had been waiting in line all night long. They were restless. They were grumpy. Maybe the people who actually walked on him had no choice. The crowd probably moved as one, people pushing from behind, jostling from the sides. The tramplers may have been locked in position and had no choice but to walk on top of the security guard.

As Lenny on the Simpsons said, "We're going to give the word 'mob' a bad name."

I understand that some people really look forward to the day after Thanksgiving as the "busiest shopping day of the year." That it's the busiest day is actually an urban myth, but the day does have the cultural significance of a Super Bowl for consumerism. Shoppers really get into it. So much so they will trample anyone who stands between them and a few hundred bucks off a flat-screen TV.

For me, being forced to participate in Black Friday would be one of the circles of my own personal hell. I really can't understand people who get excited about this kind of thing. It's like making an event out of scrubbing your toilet. I hate shopping. I hate crowds. I hate traffic.

On occasion I do like to buy stuff, but I'm really not a very good consumer.

When it comes to buying stuff, I procrastinate. I'll consider something for months, sometimes even years, before I finally get the inspiration to actually buy it. The reason that I blog about so many of my purchases is that I don't do it very often. I thought about buying a new car, and even printed out some pages from Consumer Reports, a full year before I bought my Prius. The new vacuum I bought last January was for my new apartment, which I had moved into five months earlier. (I've had this post in my Blogger queue since then, so for the past year I've even been procrastinating about writing about procrastination.)

If I go to the store with a list of five things to buy, I might end up buying two. The other things I look at and think, "Eh, I don't really need that" or "that can wait til later." It's the opposite of the Impulse Buy. It's the Impulse No-Buy.

So it's really hard for me to imagine why people would put themselves in a position to trample a guy to death on the way to buying something. They weren't hungry and clamoring for food. They weren't being oppressed and demanding civil rights. They weren't trying to get on the last helicopter out of Hanoi. Hell, they weren't even waiting to get exclusive concert tickets.

They wanted to buy shit. The same shit you can buy any other time of the year.

Restless Charity Syndrome

This is the time of year when my college does its Combined Charities Campaign and I have to decide which charities I'll donate to over the next year.

There's a booklet that lists hundreds of eligible charities. It's funny to me all the different ways you can define "charity" by flipping through the book.

• There's the traditional sense of giving to those less fortunate than you. Organizations that fight against hunger, disease, homelessness, and child abuse, for example, are pretty straightforward. I don't think there's much controversy about donating money to help starving abused homeless children with AIDS.


• And then there are the partisan charities. Organizations that diametrically oppose each other. For example, I could contribute to gay rights organizations or Christian organizations (ahem, the Mormon Church) that fight against those rights. Planned Parenthood vs. Catholic Charities. Is it really "charity" that I'm doing if someone else is funneling just as much money into stopping my cause?


• There are charities that support jazz, dance, art centers, zoos, gardens, museums, even public radio and TV. I don't have a problem with supporting these things, but it's hard for me to call a donation to public radio "charity." For me, it's more like supporting something that I enjoy.

I usually select four or five charities and have a set amount deducted from each paycheck to go to them. I take this all very seriously and spend quite a while flipping through the booklet trying to find the best balance for my donation dollar. I don't want to give it all to one cause, or even one type of cause. So I'll usually pick one environmental cause, one civil/human rights cause, one housing cause, and one international cause.

While I was looking at my options, scanning things about AIDS, cancer, animal rights, hunger, conservation, adoption, autism, and food banks, one cause jumped out at me: restless leg syndrome.

Are you kidding me?

For all I know, it may be a serious and debilitating condition, but of all the hundreds of ways to donate my money, you want me to consider something that sounds like an affliction from a Monty Python skit?

Oh, Restless Leg Syndrome, do you have any idea what you're up against?

Stinky Cat

A quick inventory of my cat, Katya:

• Her kidneys are failing
• She's losing weight
• She has arthritis in her hips
• Her intestines are inflamed
• She's puking a lot
• She no longer eats anything but tuna, and that only in small portions
• Her weight loss is getting more and more dramatic
• She's getting pooptail.
  
• She has an abscessed tooth
• She's leaking something out of her mouth that smells like death
• She's 14 years old
• She's still the Best Cat Ever
  

In her prime she weighed over nine pounds. In March of this year she weighed in at just below seven pounds, a pound lighter than her last checkup, so the vet did some blood tests. Her kidneys were starting to fail. But this is normal in older cats and they can live a long time with substandard kidneys.

In October she had another checkup. She weighed in at just under six pounds. She'd lost another pound since March. The vet was concerned and did blood work and gave her an x-ray. It didn't provide any conclusive answers, but they did find arthritis in her hips and feared intestinal swelling. The doctor gave me some pills to help combat that.

I gave her the pills every day, which was torture for both her and me. She didn't want to swallow them, and I hated the person I had to be to get them down her. Even so, it only worked about half the time.

I put her on a weight gain regimen. I bought her half a dozen different types of cat food, then added cans of tuna and baby food. I threw every type of nutrient at her. She would eat something for a while, then decide she didn't like it. This phase was accompanied by frequent cases of puking, diarrhea and poop tail. (Hermione, my other cat, was puking because she was eating too much. She was catching all the nutrients I threw at Katya. Katya's sickness turned Hermy into a bulimic kitty.)

At her next weigh-in, Katya was down to five and a half pounds. She'd lost another half a pound in three weeks, despite my efforts to overfeed her. Because of the problems with the pills, the vet gave her a shot and told me to bring her back in a week for another weigh-in.

A week later, she'd lost another third of a pound. She was 5.15 pounds. I decided to take her with me to Indiana for Thanksgiving. I rode with my brother and his family for the three-hour car ride, holding her on my lap. At my sister's house, I put her in my niece's room, where she disappeared. I checked on her just before dinner and couldn't find her in the room. I thought my nephew and nieces had let the door open, so I initiated a panicked search of the entire upstairs. On my fifth sweep of my niece's room I noticed a hole in the fabric under the box springs. She had climbed up in there to hide.

Several hours later I coaxed her out and she ate some leftover turkey. That night she puked four times and wouldn't touch the turkey anymore. She ate a little bit of tuna, but not much.

Sometime over the next two days I noticed two things: she smelled awful and her face was misshapen. She looked like she had the mumps on one side of her face. She reminded me of Glenn Quagmire on Family Guy:
And she smelled rancid. I could only describe the smell as death, even though I don't know what that's supposed to smell like. I tried giving her some squirts of a pet spray bath that my sister had, but the bottle was old and that made it even worse. Now she reeked of alcohol, perfume, and death.

Right as we were about to leave to go home, I felt her face and noticed there was a lump on her chin. That's what made her face look weird. The smell was almost unbearable on the way home. I noticed she was leaking a yellow liquid from her mouth, and when I dabbed it with a tissue, I realized that's where the smell was coming from.

When I got home on Saturday afternoon, I went straight to the pet emergency room to have Katya's face looked at. I was bracing myself for The End. She weighed in at under five pounds. The ER vet suggested doing a biopsy of her jaw, and I agreed. But when she got a better look, the vet said it was just an abscessed tooth. That could be taken care of with antibiotics.

Now I have to give her antibiotics, which is in liquid form rather than pills. As I tried to jam her mouth open to shoot the medicine into her mouth, I wondered if the abscessed tooth was caused by me trying to pill her a few weeks ago. Did I make things worse?

Although the growth and smell are not as serious as I thought, having a sore, painful tooth is still yet another impediment to eating. And she's still wasting away with each new weigh-in. The vet had mentioned the possibility of intestinal lymphoma. If she's wasting away because she has cancer, why did I pay $100 to treat this abscessed tooth?

Because I don't want her to die looking like Quagmire and smelling like rancid pus.

----------------
In other news, I woke up this morning with a bad cold/flu. I must have caught something from my nieces. Kids are always carrying germs they pick up in school. I had to postpone a Silver League tennis match I had scheduled this afternoon. I've felt like shit all day.

When I checked Katya's face a little while ago, it seemed less misshapen than before. And I don't think she stinks as much, although it's hard to tell with my nose stuffed up.

Now if I could just get her to eat.

Memoir Juggling

I got a notice from the public library that a book I ordered was in.

So, like I do several times a day, I scribbled a note to remind myself to pick it up.

This is what I wrote:



It says: pick up Loose Girl at CPL.

After I read what I'd written, I put "Loose Girl" in quotes in case I got in an accident on the way to the library and the note was found on my body. I don't want to give the coroner the impression that I troll the public library for women.

Loose Girl is a memoir about a promiscuous teenager who was in high school about the same time I was, in the 1980's. While she was having lots of sex, and not particularly enjoying it, I was having absolutely no sex (with other people), and also not particularly enjoying it. So it's nice to see all the different ways people can not enjoy their teenage experience.

It's one of three memoirs I'm reading right now. I have one on my night table for bedtime reading, one that I read during breakfast and lunch, and one that I'm listening to during my commute. The other two are Running With Scissors, about a boy whose mother had him live with her psychiatrist's crazy family, and Failure, which recounts an entire life in terms of its failures. It's a good book to read while going through a divorce.

As you can probably guess, I love memoirs. It's not only the kind of writing I like to do myself, but I'm also really interested in people's stories. I don't much care for people, but I love their stories.

The challenge to reading three memoirs at once is that I often mix up the stories. Which one had the distant, alcoholic dad? Which one had the crazy mother who abandoned them? (Oh, wait, I think they all did.) Whose mother was the poet? Which one snacked on dog food? Which one tried to be gay but couldn't do it? Which one stole cocaine from their dad's dresser?

Mixing all of these stories up makes for one huge-ass amazing tale of dysfunction.

Get Your Shush On

Every time I have to ask someone to be quiet in the library, another piece of my soul dies.

Shushing people is the only part of my job I hate, and I do it an average of 3-4 times a day. We have a Quiet Study Area right near my desk. I know that not everyone needs a quiet area to study (especially Millenials who grew multitasking to music, TV, computers, and cell phones all at the same time), but this is the only place on campus where people who do need quiet place can find it. Unfortunately, the building has terrible (or great, depending on your perspective) acoustics and you can hear conversations from the other side of the building.

So several times a day I have to deliver "the speech:" Sound carries really well in this building, and this is a quiet study area [make sweeping hand gesture to indicate said area], so if you could try to use your inside voice that would be great. Thanks! I say this with a smile. Most people are embarrassed and apologize. They didn't realize they were being so loud. Some get pissy about it, or ignore me, and the second time I ask them to quiet down I'm not as nice. The third time I suggest they go to another building, where they don't have to worry about being quiet.

I suppose I am the right person for this job. Even when I was a student, I had no compunction about asking someone in a computer lab next to me to turn down their headphones. Why should I have to listen to their music? I was also the annoying neighbor who would ask people to turn their music down. I didn't ruin the occasional party or anything like that, but if someone played loud music every day, at all hours of the day, I wasn't shy about getting on them. I once had a neighbor in an apartment building who turned her music up in the middle of the afternoon so loud I couldn't hear my TV. When I pounded on her door, loudly so that she would hear it, and then asked her to turn it down, she asked me not to pound on her door because her baby was sleeping.

So I'm very good at asking people to be quiet, even if I don't like it. What I really hate are those rare occasions when someone brings a baby or toddler into the library. Lots of times the kid is fine. At first. But it's impossible for a child that age to spend any significant time in a library and not have a meltdown. And I cringe whenever it happens. My experience has been that parents of small children are the least understanding about the quiet zone.

One lady told me that she had to kill four hours before her ride came. So she came into the library to use the computers. With her baby. Who eventually started crying. She couldn't go outside, because it was too cold. When I suggested that maybe she go to a computer lab in a different building, she looked at me as if I had told her she should just eat her baby. We hate you breeders, so leave! I understand how hard it can be to raise a child and go to school. Child care is an unrelenting responsibility and I sympathize. This is why I always hate to approach parents with loud children. But this particular lady wasn't studying, she was on her MySpace page. Her response was, "He's just a baby, he doesn't understand." Yes, but you should.

Every year there's a new group of regulars in the library that I have to keep a tight (sound-dampening) lid on. This year it's a bunch of international students who gather at a big table. Especially when there's a lot of them, they get excited and the noise level increases. I've given them "the speech" a dozen times already, and they understand it and try to abide by it. But they forget. It's to the point now that all I have to do is walk past their table and they quiet down. Sometimes all I need to do is look over at them and they will start shushing each other.

When people are clearly just passing through or on their way out, I don't hassle them about the noise. One phenomenon I've noticed is that people always get louder when they take their leave. Saying goodbye always ratchets up the volume. They may get louder, but I know it will be gone soon and I don't stress about it.

But sometimes they linger. They'll be standing there, about to leave, having a loud conversation. They inch toward the door. And talk some more. Even louder. I consider saying something. I wait for the conversation to finish. But it doesn't finish. It keeps going. Every time the cadence of their speech appears to be wrapping up, it starts again.

Finally, I get up from my desk to approach them, and then they leave.

And it's once again quiet and calm in the library.

Order is restored to the universe.

Until the next time I have to get my shush on.

Voter #249

I yelled at John McCain in my bathroom this morning.

It's okay-- he couldn't hear me. The only ones who could hear me, my cats, just rubbed up against me in a gesture of comfort and sympathy. Or maybe they just wanted to be fed.

On the radio they played a soundbite of McCain repeating his cutesy line about Obama "already measuring the drapes in the White House."

Aside from the fact that Obama has shown no public interest in interior decorating that I know of, Obama has been very clear in his public speeches about not getting ahead of himself. He's still using language like, "If I'm elected...", not "When I'm elected..." like so many other politicians do. At one campaign event, the crowd started to get on him about it, and he replied, "I'm superstitious."

That's one thing that I love about him. Because I'm superstitious too, and it's refreshing to see a politician with the same cautious and humble sense of optimism that I live my life with.

So, Senator McCain, I can assure you he is NOT measuring the drapes, or ordering cable, or filling out change-of-address forms at the post office. He knows that the race isn't over until election day.

So, please, old man who refers to his opponent as "that one", STFU already about the drapes.

------------------

When I fed my ballot into the machine this morning, I was voter #249 in my precinct. Considering I had to stand in line for 45 minutes, that seemed awfully low. This is my third presidential election in Champaign-Urbana, and I've never had to wait more than 10 minutes before. Usually I just walk right up to the table and vote.

It made me 30 minutes late for work. I really think Election Day should be a national holiday. I know long lines and a high turnout are good for Democrats, but think of all the people who can't vote today because of work, especially in precincts where the lines are 3-4 hours long.

I'm stoically optimistic that Obama will stay away from the tape measure until the votes are counted.

Slothfest

The biggest Timicist holiday of the year goes by many names: Pluggathon, Slugfest, Couch Potatotopia, Slackerday. Not being a very devout Timicist, it's the only one of the holidays that I've consistently celebrated over the past six years.

It's a day dedicated to getting in touch with your inner sloth and not doing any work. In a perfect world every weekend would be like this, but there always seem to be chores and niggling little items that I need to accomplish before I can do fun stuff.

On Slackerday, I don't do any of it. I get out of bed and plop myself down on the couch and let myself be entertained for an entire day. It's the one day of the year when I actually clear out the Netflix DVDs sitting on my TV.

Here's what I did today:

• 9:00 am : Woke up and put on my Slacker t-shirt, the official uniform of Slugfest.
  
• 9:00 - 8:07: Since we switched from Daylight Savings to standard time at 2:00 am, I changed all the clocks in the house back to 8:00 am. Some people may consider this a chore, thus violating the spirit of Slugfest, but for me synchronizing all the clocks in the house is a fun leisure activity. Besides, it's my holiday and I get to make the rules: Synchronizing clocks is not work.
• 8:00 - 8:30: Ate breakfast and watched last Thursday's episode of The Office on TiVo.
• 8:30 - 9:00: Watched 30 Rock
• 9:00 - 10:15: Watched a Netflix DVD: The God Who Wasn't There.
• 10:15 - 12:00: Ate mid-morning snack and watched Netflix DVD, Click.
• 12:00 - 3:00: Football. Watched Bears game.
• 12:30: Ate lunch-- leftovers from Indian restaurant from night before. (Leftovers are an essential component to Slugfest. All meals should be heated up leftovers.)
• 1:30: Showered during halftime of the game. Traditionally, showers are considered work and discouraged on Pluggathon, but I was feeling pretty gross and really needed to wash the Indian food residue off my greasy face.
• 2:00 - 3:45: While watching football, I organized and cleaned out a bunch of files on my hard drive. This may be another activity that other people would consider "work" but I'm a librarian and organizing stuff is more like play for me.
• 3:45 - 5:45: Watched Netflix DVD, Capote.
  
• 6:00 - 6:30: Watched Simpsons on TiVo and ate dinner-- Another helping on Indian leftovers followed by an orgasmically good Ghirardelli (or was it Godiva?) carmel dark chocolate bar that I bought just for this occasion.
• 6:30 - 7:30: Watched the last of The Daily Show and Colbert Report from last week (TiVo.)
• 7:30 - 10:00: More NFL football. Watched the Colts game.

On paper it was a great day. I didn't do anything I didn't want to do, both the Bears and the Colts won, and I accomplished something in organizing my computer files.

Aside from the morning, where I started off the day watching TV and saw two Netflix, it wasn't much different than most Sundays. But I had kind of a crappy antisocial feeling as I went to bed. I realized that I hadn't communicated with another person all day long.

So I guess I can add HermitDay to the list of names for this holiday.

Sick Kitty

I dropped off my primary cat, Katya, at the vet and left her all day with mean evil strangers. In our eight-year relationship, this is the first time I've ever left her at the vet. She mewed in the carrier the whole way there.

I hope she will forgive me.

She's been losing weight and the vet is concerned. She's lost about 2 pounds over the last year, which is about 25% of her weight. She was having kidney problems, but the vet doesn't think that would account for such a dramatic weight loss. He thinks it's something else.

So she's getting some kitty ex-rays today.

If the ex-rays don't turn up anything, we may have to consider exploratory surgery, which would not only be expensive, but also risky in a cat her age (she's 14.) I'm not enthusiastic about that.

Since she's so furry, I hadn't noticed the weight loss. And she doesn't seem to act sick, whatever that means in a cat. But ever since I found out about this last week, I have noticed slight changes in her behavior. Is she walking more gingerly than usual, or did I imagine it? She has been more affectionate the past few months, but I thought that was because she only has one primary lapgiver now. Are sick cats more affectionate?

Because of her kidney thing, she's supposed to be drinking more water to compensate for it. But I haven't noticed an increase in the amount of water she's drinking. The vet recommended a cat fountain, because studies show that cats are more likely to drink from running water than a stagnant dish.

So this weekend I spent $50 on a zen-like contraption that runs water through a spigot and shoots it into a bowl. It's become another background noise in my apartment-- the sound of water running 24/7. I was convinced my cats would love it and imagined them running to it and licking the urine-like stream of flowing water.

Instead, Hermione, my auxiliary cat, was afraid of it at first. Katya just ignored it. It's hard to know whether they're using it or not, since the bowl is so big it's hard to see a difference in the water level, and they don't usually drink in front of an audience.

I also started buying them wet food in an effort to get Katya's weight up. The vet doesn't think her weight-loss could be accounted for by her not liking her regular food, but I'm still in denial that there's anything seriously wrong. She goes bonkers for wet food, and even if it doesn't help her gain weight, I can at least make her happy during this crisis.

DemoCrap-hics

After the 2000 presidential election Ralph Nader tried to argue that he had taken just as many votes away from George Bush as he did from Al Gore.

I thought that this was a patently absurd claim. Why would someone who likes a conservative evangelical pro-business cowboy end up going with the liberal consumer advocate from the Green Party?

Why indeed. As much as I like to pigeonhole people into nice orderly stereotypes, there will always be individuals who insist on having complicated and unpredictable reasons for supporting something.

There are gay Republicans. Feminist porn stars. Jewish holocaust deniers. Black supporters of the confederate flag. Some of these people may have more rational justification than others, but I'm learning that whatever weird contradictory demographic you can think of, there's someone out there who belongs to it.

What made me come to this conclusion was listening to a story on This American Life yesterday about a group of life-long Democrats who are campaigning for McCain in Pennsylvania. These are not moderate fair-whether Democrats, but people who appear to be passionate about Democratic ideals. They said they'd never voted Republican in their life. And it's not like they were simply being racist (like the union members in a following story who told campaigners outright, "I will never vote for a n***er for president.") One of them was black, and even set off my gaydar when I heard him talk. A gay black Democrat supporting McCain? Seriously, WTF?

And they weren't just content to vote for McCain, they were campaigning for him. Hard. One guy had taken a week off from work in New York to travel to Pennsylvania and go door to door talking up McCain. It wasn't just their support for McCain that confused me, but their fervor about it.

My only explanation is that they were disgruntled Hillary Clinton supporters who worked up such a hatred for Obama during the primaries that they're putting all their energy into getting him defeated in the general election. People interviewed said as much, saying that the Democratic party threw Hillary under the bus and they didn't trust Obama. That's all well and good, but why would you put all your energy into undermining the very issues that your candidate (Clinton) supports? There's really no rational explanation for that. Then again, people are complicated and there are always conflicting motivations that, if you could dig deep enough, there must be a logical explanation for. Even if the explanation is that they're schizophrenic.

Anyway, this got me wondering if there are any demographic groups that don't exist. The world is a big place (6+ billion people) and the sheer numbers alone make almost every combination possible. From what I've seen so far, I wouldn't be surprised if there were a lesbian libertarian Mormon Kucinich supporter out there.

Here's one that occurred to me, though: Is there anyone out there who is an enthusiastic, passionate supporter of both Obama and McCain? Someone who's undecided, not because they're lukewarm about the candidates, but because they can't decide between two such fantastic choices?

I'd like to meet that person. And write a dissertation on them.

Political Plumbing

So I watched the debate last night and had this thought: Somewhere in Ohio a poor plumber is about to be descended upon by a media circus. Perhaps they already got to him, but I'm trying to avoid any more political news this morning.

I probably should have written "poor plumber" in quotes, because as far as I could make out, Joe the Plumber is not poor. John McCain tried to use him as a poster child for Obama's tax policies, but as far as I could make out from the debate last night, Joe's family is not about to go hungry.

It's always difficult to read between the lines in these kinds of debates, but it appeared to me that McCain was knocking Obama because Joe the Plumber would have to pay more in taxes if the latter gets elected. Obama has made it abundantly clear in his three debates that the only people who are in danger of increased taxes under his plan are people who make more than $250,000 a year. So, reading between the lines, I assumed that Joe makes more than that. I think they even hinted that Joe owns his own business. McCain even alluded to this when he mocked Obama's plan with a statement like, "Sorry, Joe, you make too much money."

Is McCain really trying to garner pity from blue-collar Americans by using what is essentially a businessman who makes a quarter million dollars a year out to be a poor victim of Obama's tax policy? Nice touch that the guy's a plumber, setting up the image that he's just a working class Joe. Never mind that he's in the top 5% income bracket.

You know what I say to that? (If all of my assumptions above are correct.) Fuck Joe the Plumber. Why the hell are we arguing about his economic welfare when 1/3 of America's children don't have adequate health insurance? When the gap between the rich and the poor in the U.S. has grown steadily over the past 30 years? Let's have Joe pay his dues to the country that has given him so much economic prosperity.

Unless I'm wrong about his economic status. In which case I go on record as saying, "Oops, sorry, my bad."

Bronze League Champion!

My "championship" match in the Bronze league tonight was perhaps the greatest anti-climax in the history of Bronze league championships. I have no way of knowing whether that's true, but that's how I imagine it to be.


I beat my opponent 6-0, 6-2, in the my most lopsided match of the year. I hardly broke a sweat. This was supposed to be my toughest competition in a league where I keep squeaking out victories in tense tiebreakers (four of them in the previous five matches.)

The match was tense for the first three games, but after I won three close deuce games in a row, he kind of folded and I ran away with the first set. It turns out that positive thinking is helping me on the tennis court. I tell myself, "You're the one who wins deuce games, you're the one who wins deuce games..." and I do.

In the second set he won the first two games, but I broke his serve to make it 2-1. In the next game, on my serve, he went up 40-0 and looked like he was going to take a 3-1 lead. But bolstered by the confidence of winning nine straight league matches, I told myself, "You're going to come back and win this game, and that will break his spirit." And I did exactly that. I won five straight points, tied it up and 2-2, and after that he seemed to give up. I won the next four games pretty easily.

I was almost embarrassed by the ease of my victory. I know he didn't play very well, but I don't know how much my game affected his play. (I served really well. In fact, I got an ace in the last game, which I never do.) After a match I usually tell my opponents, "Good game" or "You really ran me around out there" or "We had some great points." But I didn't know what to say to him. I wanted to say that I was shocked that it wasn't closer, but that might have been rubbing it in.
I am a champion! I feel like announcing it to everyone I know. I want to wear a t-shirt that says, "Ask me about the Bronze league!"

It's not exactly like the birth of a child or winning a Nobel prize, but after the year I've had, it's nice to know there is one area of my life where I'm a winner.

Faith in Government & Magnet Politics

Sarah Palin recently told a crowd of supporters that she doesn't put her faith in government, she puts her faith in "you."

That's very nice of her, but I'd rather that someone seeking the job of running the government would at least believe in it.

I'm so tired of Republicans taking control of our federal government just so that they can self-fulfill the prophecy that government can't help you solve your problems. Well, of course it's not going to help if the people running the show don't even believe in it.

How would it look if I were applying for a job as a college president and I announced to the hiring committee that I didn't believe in education? I believe in you to educate yourselves! How far do you think I would get with that attitude?

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Obama Car Magnet Update

I finally received my Obama/Biden car magnet last week.

But putting it on my car was not so simple. It turns out that my Prius does not have any metal on its hind parts that a magnet will stick to. So I would have to put it on the side. But where?

Since then the magnet has traveled all over my car, starting at the back left side near the gas hole, then to the back seat door, then the driver's side door, then the front passenger side, and now I think it's on the back passenger side.

The problem is, I want to put it in a place where it does the most good. When I had it on the driver's side I realized that people could only see it when they were passing me. If this was someone who was impatient and had to wait behind me on the highway until I could get over to the right lane, they might be pissed at me for holding them up. Then they see my Obama sticker and think negative thoughts about him. "That damn Obama supporter held me up on the highway! I ain't voting for him!" It would probably also play into their stereotype of the Obama supporter as a liberal latte-drinking wuss who's too high on grass to drive fast on the highway.

So I moved the magnet over to the passenger side, where the only people who see it are drivers who I pass. They will associate Obama with a reckless fast-driving maniac. To them my political magnet shows that I have poor impulse control and I'm just swept up in the Obamamania with no regard for the rule of law. The other disadvantage of using the passenger side is that I get passed more often than I pass (owing to the fact that I geek-out about my mileage now that I have a Prius.) Which means fewer people see the magnet on that side.

What a dilemma.

Socking My Drawers

I've re-arranged my bedroom four times over the past six weeks. Mostly this just involved moving or shifting my bed, but the last time I moved the dressers around to give the space an entirely new orientation.

I have two dressers in the room. The big one is the main repository for my clothes. From the second, smaller, crappy one, I only use the top drawer. It holds my white athletic socks. Not the formal work socks or the black casual athletic socks. Just the white ones. You wouldn't think I'd need an entire drawer just for white athletic socks, but I do. Ever since the unfortunate blister incident of last January I've taken my sock situation very seriously. (According to my ex, the blister incident was a catalyst for the dissolution of my marriage, but that's another story.) I have six different kinds of white athletic socks which are worn in various combinations depending on season, level of tennis activity, and leisure needs.


The second, smaller, crappy dresser used to be reserved for some of my ex-wife's things, and when she moved out I moved my white socks into it. In the most recent moving-around it has been recruited to sit in front of the window, where the cats perch on top of it to watch "kitty TV."

Here is why I call it the "crappy" dresser. The drawers don't fit well, so when you open the top drawer too far it makes a sudden jump down as if it's going to fall. It hangs there precariously like Indiana Jones hanging off the edge of a cliff. All of the contents of the drawer slide forward which upsets the delicate arrangement of my socks. It also rubs itself in some wrong way so that sawdust and wood shavings collect when you open the drawer.

The other day I opened the drawer to get out my tennis socks for a match I had in about 20 minutes. The drawer made like it was going to fall, so I reacted instinctively with my lightning-quick hands to catch it. Only it didn't fall and my hand cracked against it. My right hand. It opened a cut between my index finger and middle finger and the area started to swell. Fuckity Fuck Fuck Fuck! That's one of my playing-tennis hands, I thought. And I only have two. Godfuckingdammit!! Twenty minutes before a match.

I washed out the cut, put some antibacterial ointment on it, patched it up with a band-aid, and hoped the swelling wouldn't affect my tennis too much. During the warm-ups I tried about three different band-aid options before I found one I liked. Then I went out and won my seventh straight match of the indoor season. I played another tiebreak and won (7-0), bringing my consecutive tiebreak winning streak to eight. (I thought of putting a counter on my website for this, but then I'm afraid I'll jinx it.) Today, two days later, the cut is healing but there's a black and blue (and yellowing) blotch between my knuckles.

So that's it for the dresser. My ex's former dresser has hurt me for the last time. It's dead to me. I plan to replace it as soon as I have some time to go furniture shopping. My other dresser is too full anyway, and it might be nice to spread out my clothes over two whole dressers.

So if anyone's looking to get rid of a competent dresser, I'm in the market for one.

Must be good with socks.

Reference Desk Deja Vu

I had a student come up to the desk a few weeks ago because he was looking for a book. I looked it up on the catalog, wrote down the call number for him, and pointed him in the right direction. I might have even walked him up to the stacks to show him where the book would be located. At any rate, he found what he was looking for. Transaction successful.

A few days later I had another request for the same book. This is not so unusual since multiple students will often be looking for the same book that their instructor recommended. I repeated the reference process. Catalog, call number, right-direction pointing. Another successful transaction.

Last week another student asked again for the same book. I took a good look at him. I recognized him as the same guy who'd asked for it before, and then I realized that it was him who had asked for it both previous times. This wasn't a case of several students looking for the same book, but of one student looking for the same book again and again. So I said, "Didn't you ask for it twice already last week?" He nodded his head.

I'm happy to pad my reference statistics, but it didn't feel very educational for me to keep looking up this guy's book for him. He told me he needed the book for his (remedial) reading class. I don't know why he doesn't just check it out instead of seeking it out in the stacks twice a week.

So I said, "Why don't I show you how to look it up, so you can do it yourself from now on? Do you remember when I visited your class and showed you how to use our catalog?" (I visited all the reading classes, so I know he completed the training.) He nodded absently. For the third time in two weeks I took him through the motions of finding the catalog and looking up a book. He stared off into the library and didn't pay attention. Finally I said to him (in a friendly voice), "I'm happy to help you find stuff, but if you're going to need this book so often you really should know how to look it up. That's why you're in college."

In the end, I just wrote down the call number on a slip of paper and said, "Keep that slip of paper and you can use that to find the book next time."

I'm reminded of the famous quote by the great statesmen, W: "Is our children learning?"

Indeed.

I Don't Sleep, Then I Rock

Here's a quick summary of my preparation and performance in my latest tennis league match:

1. I don't sleep well
2. I don't sleep well again
3. I'm exhausted
   
4. I can't nap
5. I rock. I rock I rock I rock. I rock I rock I rock. I rock I rock I rock. I rock I rock I rock. I rock I rock I rock.

I think I'm going to have to re-evaluate the image I have of myself as a choker on the tennis court. Over the past month I have been involved in five tiebreaks and I have won them all. I have fought off countless break points, set points, and match points. I am clutch. I win when it counts. Yay me.

In my latest league match I avenged the drubbing I received (6-1, 6-0) three weeks ago at the Labor Day Tournament. I'd never beaten this particular opponent, although I've come close many times.

I'd slept horribly the two nights leading up to the match and I felt exhausted. I tried to nap for an hour before the match but I only got about 20 minutes of actual sleep. I was just hoping I would have enough adrenaline to get me through two hours of intense tennis. I think the lack of sleep might have actually helped me, because I made a concentrated effort to conserve energy on the court. I had to win with strategy instead of energy.

The first set was very close. I won the first two games, then he won three, then we went back and forth. Early on I figured out a strategy that worked really well for me. Because I have a weak serve, this particular guys stands ridiculously close to the service line on my serve. It's as if he's taunting me to try to hit a hard deep serve. A few times I was able to brush him back, but occasionally it unnerved me. So while I was standing back about to return his serve, I had a brilliant thought: Why don't I do the same thing to him? I moved up really far on his second serve, and he double-faulted. I did the same thing on the next point, with the same result. I'd rattled him. The rest of the match I changed my position constantly on his serve, moving up and back randomly. This really got in his head and he didn't serve well at all.

I had the chance to win the first set at 5-4 and again at 6-5, but he battled back to tie it. So we went to a tiebreak in the first set. The old Tim might have thought, "Okay, here is where I choke." But since I'd won so many tiebreaks lately, I told myself, "You can win this. You're the guy who wins tiebreaks." I came out to a quick 4-1 lead, and then had four set points at 6-2. Then I lost two points and thought, "Uh-oh, this would be a huge choke if I lost now." But I won the next point to take the set.

In the second set he fell apart. I started playing more like Old Tim, a defensive style where I just barely get the shots back, and he kept missing everything. He was frustrated and angry and let it get to him. I won the first four games easily. (About this time I could smell victory and thoughts started popping into my head about how I would blog about this, my greatest tennis triumph so far. I know it was completely premature and I'm lucky it didn't bite me in the ass.) In the fifth game, he was serving and we had a long game that went to deuce several times. But every time he had a game point, I would battle back to tie it. I kept telling myself, "You win this game and it will completely break his spirit." And I did win it.

Up 5-0 and serving for the match, now it was my turn to choke. We had another deuce game, and I blew one match point before he won the game. Then he won the next two games and I started getting nervous. It was 5-3 and I knew he was capable of winning six games in a row against me if he got hot. I had to get over this psychological hump and end it. In the next game I went up 40-0 and I said to myself, "Okay, let's see you handle three match points." He won one point, then I hit a nice cross-court forehand that he lunged at but missed. I won, 7-6(4), 6-3.


I was very happy. I'm having a great start to my "junior year" of tennis (it's my third season.) I'm currently 3-0 and tied for first place in the Bronze league. Two years ago I was in the basement of the beginner's league. Last year I won the beginner's league to move into Bronze league, where I was solidly middle of the pack, going 4-3 and then 3-4. Now I'm in a position to think about winning the league.

I've come a long way. At this rate I'm only about 40 years away from playing at the Wimbledon.

Art and Food

A few weeks ago I bought some new posters to fill some empty spaces on my walls. I put one in a frame and hung it on my wall:


And the other one is still sitting on a chair in the corner, but I admire it every time I walk from the living room to places beyond:


These works of "stationary art" complement my pair of furry "moving art" pieces:


Which are sometimes so inaccessible that I have to crawl under the bed to admire them:


Up until a few weeks ago, this is what the corner of my kitchen counter top looked like:

This is a small sample of some of the more exotic beer bottles that I've emptied over the past few months. I know it makes my apartment look like a dorm room, but it's nice to have some tangible reminder of what I did with my summer.

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Bachelor Feed, Part Two: Return of the Crockpot

Then last week I discovered that I have two cookbooks left in my apartment. One of them happens to be a guide to "feasting with your slow cooker." I checked in my cupboards and discovered, to my amazement, that I own a slow cooker!

A "slow cooker" is apparently a lamer name for what I know as a "crockpot." A crockpot is something you throw a bunch of ingredients into and then let it cook all day and make your house smell like food. What a brilliant invention.

I decided I would try it out, so I selected a recipe (Lemon Garlic Chicken) and bought the ingredients at the grocery. I also bought measuring cups, measuring spoons, and a salt and pepper shaker-- all things that I've lived without for the past six months.



I am currently slow cooking (crockpotting?) my Lemon Garlic Chicken:

It smells as good as it looks.

Wordle

This is a word soup of my last few blog entries, compliments of Wordle. A whole lot of tennis & politics, with a dash of food thrown in.

Bachelor Feed

Last Saturday I had an inspiration: Maybe I'll cook!

So I went to the kitchen to look up some ideas in the cookbooks that live in the microwave stand. Only they weren't there. All that was left were two useless books-- one of them was a thin book on sauces, about the size of a kid's picture book. What the hell am I going to do with a book on sauces?

You see, Rebecca took all the cookbooks when she moved out. She even took the few cookbooks I owned before we got married, like the illustrated Help, My Apartment Has a Kitchen! book for beginners. I can't really complain, though. I never showed any interest in cooking when we lived together, so she probably didn't think I'd want them. At the time when she packed all the cookbooks up, I didn't argue with her. And to be fair, she left a whole lot more stuff than she took. Plus, it's been six months since she moved out and I'm just now discovering that I'm missing those books? I believe the statute of limitations for complaining about this has passed.

On a similar note, I didn't notice until this weekend that there are no salt and pepper shakers in the house. There's a large store of both salt and pepper hiding among the spices, but no shakers. How pathetic is it to have not noticed that for six months?

There was a time, before I got married, when I used to cook. Not a lot, and not often, but there have been times when I'd pick out a recipe, buy all the ingrediants at the store, come home and prepare a dinner. Despite the sense of accomplishment from doing something like that, it never really seemed worth all the work. You could get something just as good at a restaurant, and really, after buying all the ingredients, it's just as expensive as eating out.

So, if I don't cook, what have I been eating the past six months? Good question. Somehow I've survived, and even managed to lose some weight, then gain some weight, then lose it back again. I eat out a lot, have lots of leftovers from eating out, eat lots of sandwiches and frozen foods. (I've averaged at least one frozen pizza a week since the time I was 19 years old.)

But I often eat what I'll call Liberal Bachelor Feed. This includes pita chips with hummus, crackers with cheese, or blue-corn tortillas with salsa. Maybe I'll have a pickle or yogurt on the side. That's my entire dinner. It's quick, easy, and there are no dishes to clean. I can eat it easily in front of the TV, and since there's no meat involved, the cats leave me alone.

Instead of cooking last Saturday, I went to the store with the intention of finding "something new." I found a tub of guacamole, a pre-made Greek Salad from the deli, a tub of cut-up melons, and (wait for it) sushi! I'm not a big sushi eater. I've had it maybe half a dozen times in my life. I don't eat the raw fish, but things like California rolls, which have pre-cooked imitation crab meat with avocado and cucumber wrapped in seaweed and rice are pretty good. Since I was buying from a grocery store, I figured the California rolls would be the safest option. It actually wasn't bad, and I was proud of myself for eating something new.

The next day I planned to have tortilla chips dipped in guacamole, but when I tried the pre-made guacamole, it was nasty and I couldn't eat it. Instead, I had the Greek Salad and "cooked" a frozen pizza. Yum.

I Suck, Then Suck It Up

Here's a quick summary of my performance in the Champaign Park District Labor Day weekend tennis tournament today:

1. I Suck. I Suck I Suck I Suck. I Suck I Suck I Suck. I Suck I Suck I Suck. I Suck I Suck I Suck.
2. I Don't Completely Suck.
3. I Suck It Up.
4. I Hurt All Over.

The good news is my rib/back injury seems to be healed. I played a total of about four hours of singles tennis today, and the only part of my body that doesn't hurt right now is my ribs/back area.

It has been exactly two weeks since I decided to take a hiatus from tennis, load up on drugs, and let my injury heal. I played one match on Thursday evening, but other than that, I hadn't played in two weeks. So I wasn't in the greatest shape when I took the court this morning.

My first match was against a guy who I'd played many times before. I'd never beat him, but I'd won the first set against him three times. He hadn't played much this summer, and I was playing 3-5 times a week before my injury, so I thought this might be my chance to get him.

It wasn't.

The first game we played lasted about 20 minutes because we kept going to deuce. But he pulled it out, and that seemed to open the floodgates of my suckitude. I don't really understand what happened, but he rolled over me, 6-1, 6-0. We played a relatively long time, because we had lots of long points and deuce games. But in the end, the score was the most lopsided one we'd ever had, by far. It was frustrating, demoralizing, and put me in a negative stupor that made me focus on everything that's wrong with my life.

An hour later I played in the "consolation finals", since there were only four guys in our bracket. This was at noon, under an unrelenting midday sun. I came out strong to a 4-1 lead and thought, "Alright, maybe I don't suck after all." But then my opponent started to figure some things out and took the next three games. We went back and forth, but I managed to squeak out a 7-5 victory in the first set. Feeling rejuvenated after taking the first set, I won the first two games of the second set.

Then I hit a brick wall. The sun, the heat, and the match I'd played earlier had all drained my energy. The sun was brutal and there was no where I could go to get away from it. It was like a heavy leaden blanket draped all around me. I stopped running to the ball, I stopped setting up my shots properly, I couldn't do anything but take half-assed swings at the ball.

Every once in a while I would get enough of a semi-burst of energy to win a point. But I lost four straight games and couldn't see any way that I could win the match. I was down 2-4, and I didn't really care anymore. I lived only for the few seconds when we would change sides and I could get a swallow of Gatorade. I needed a respite from the murderous sun, but there was no shade on the court. I might play two good points after the change-over, but then my throat and lips would dry up and all I could think about was getting to my Gatorade bottle again.

By some miracle I managed to suck it up and win two games to tie it at 4-4 in the second set. But when he won the next game to go up 5-4, I did something I've never done before. I threw a game. To win the set, I would have had to have won three games in a row, and I knew that I didn't have it in me. I decided I would rather just go to the third set, where we only play a 10-point tiebreaker. I might have it in me to win that. So I let him win the next game, and thus the set. I don't know if throwing the game was sleazy or "gamesmanship" or what, but I was dying out there and just wanted it to end.

In the tiebreaker, we alternated the first six points, so we were tied when we switched sides 3-3. I noticed some cramping in my legs as I tried to run for shots. He won four of the next five to take a 7-4 lead, and was still leading (7-5) when we switched sides again. I was so dead on my feet at this point that even walking over to the other side of the court was torture, so I dreaded the change-overs. I wondered how long I could push myself before I would pass out from sun stroke. I tied it up at 8-8, then he had match point at 9-8. He blew it, and we had yet another change-over at 9-9. He had three match points in the game: at 9-8, 10-9, and 11-10. But everytime I fought back to tie it up. Finally, at 12-11, I had match point. I was determined not to have to go through another change-over, so I had to win the next point. I served, came into the net, and smashed an overhead away from him to win the match, 7-5, 4-6, 1-0 (13-11).

After I hit the winning point, I fell onto my back and lay on the court. It was probably an obnoxious and melodramatic act, but I couldn't help myself. I got up, shook myself off, and shook my opponent's hand. He left the court immediately, but I sat there for about ten minutes trying to get up enough energy to walk over to the shade of the pavilion next to the courts. My Gatorade bottle was empty, and I was parched.

Somehow, I made it to the pavilion, and then to the car, and then home. Every muscle in my body screamed in pain. I took some painkillers, laid on the couch, and drank liquids. The tournament director called to say he forgot to give me my medal for winning the consolation finals. (Apparently three out of the four participants in this tournament get a medal.)

Now, I hurt all over. I loaded up on drugs, but they still couldn't relieve the mind-splitting headache that came on in the evening. I suppose it feels good to have won, but I still don't know how I did it. I certainly didn't enjoy the last two sets of tennis, even if I did win.

Midday summer tournament tennis is no fun.

Tim Does Politics

I only blog about politics when I want my older brother Dan to post a comment on my blog. He's an angry anti-war liberal into social justice and evidence that the mainstream media is failing to do its job. He would never write a 1,000-word blog entry on his latest tennis accomplishments or about taking drugs with his cat.

So like a child trying to get attention from their parents by engaging in their parents' hobbies, I will try to win my big brother's love by blogging about how awesome Barack Obama is.

A week ago, on a lonely Saturday night, I was surfing the web and found that I could get an Obama/Biden car magnet if I donated $25 to the campaign. I'd already given money to Obama during the primaries, but since I drive a Prius and the general election is heating up, I thought it was my duty to announce to other drivers who I support for president. My problem was that I didn't want to put a traditional bumper sticker on my car that would be there forever, like campaign herpes. ("Dukakis/Bentson '88!")

But a car magnet would be perfect! I could put it on during the election and then take it off after the election, returning the respect and dignity to my car that it deserves. So I signed up and donated some money.

Of course, I made the mistake of giving them one of my email addresses, 'cause I thought they might actually have useful info to send me every now and then. As Bush would say, I guess I "misunderestimated" the amount of mail a major political campaign would send out. Since last Saturday I have received messages from the following people, in this order: Joe Biden, Barack Obama, Michelle Obama, Barack Obama (again), Jon Carson (National Field Director), Joe Biden (again), David Plouffe (Campaign Manager), Barack Obama (again), Joe Biden (again), Michelle Obama (again), and three messages from "Obama for America." If you're counting, that's 13 messages in a week.

I have not, however, received my car magnet yet.

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So I was watching Obama's speech the other night at the Democratic convention, and I got swept up in the excitement, along with a lot of other people. Here you have this historic candidate, with a pedigree and life experiences completely unlike any president in history of our country, after a historic primary, who represents hope and a drastic alternative to the current administration. I saw the diverse crowd and the enthusiasm in the stadium, and I thought, "How can the Republicans possibly respond to this?" What are they going to say? "Hey, we have another rich old white man running to serve the primary interests of other rich white men! It's worked the last 233 years, why not four more? Change: Let's wait a little more!" Woo-hoo!

Of course that's not what they're saying. The Republican strategy seems to be, "He's got no experience! He's just an empty shirt! Hope with no plan!" (Forget for a moment that their whole strategy is discrediting Obama instead of lifting up McCain.) We already heard a lot of these arguments during the primary, which I think is bogus. Look over the course of his life and tell me he's all flash and no substance. If any president over the past 50 years had no substance when he was elected, it was George W. Bush. He had a resume, but it was a list of failures. Obama has excelled at everything he's done. And look at his varied life experiences. It would be impossible to have done all he's done and not have learned a thing or two.

I had all of these thoughts before McCain announced his running mate. When I found out that he's selected a relatively obscure arch-conservative woman, at first I thought it was a master stroke. How can the Republicans respond to Obama's historic run? They'll use a woman as a running mate! But then I found out more about Palin, I realized this was another example of Republicans not "getting" affirmative action. No wonder they're so bad at it: They see it as selecting any minority, regardless of credentials. "Hey, you want a woman? We got a woman!!"

If you want to know more about Palin, here's an amusing video someone sent me:

Submission

I just mailed off something I wrote to This American Life, one of my favorite radio shows. David Sedaris got his start writing for them, so this is my first tentative attempt at trying to live the life of a literary rock star.

The piece I mailed off was something that I first wrote in 2000 about an experience I had in 1999. Inspired by an English teacher friend, who read something of mine and encouraged me to put my stuff out there, I dusted it off and revised it for the radio show. Then I sat on it for nine months while I dealt with other personal issues in my life.

I mailed it an hour and a half ago, but I haven't heard anything back from them yet. (Joke courtesy of my brother Dan, personal telephone call, one hour ago.) But I'm out there, ready for my first rejection letter!

Doped Up

I've spent a good portion of the past two days waiting for health care. In doctor's offices, at the pharmacy, at the vet.

But now I'm good and doped up, and the cat is stumbling around the apartment.

I hurt my ribs/back at Schreibefest two weeks ago. I blame my nine-year-old niece, who was my tubing partner and demanded to go fast, so fast that we bounced up and down on the tube about a hundred times, enough to pulverize my delicate thorax. It was fun, but afterwards I noticed my ribs hurt.

Since then I've played tennis five times, and each time my back hurts worse and my play suffers. I have no backhand, because turning my body from left to right causes excruciating pain. So after trying to heal my injury through denial, I'm taking a new track: modern medicine. The worst part of the healing process is not the pain, but the fact that I have to give up tennis for a week or two. This during the last part of my vacation, when I have so much free time, and the weather has been absolutely perfect lately. That's torture.

I made an appointment to see a doctor, and after waiting an hour and a half, got some good advice and a prescription for a muscle relaxant. I don't care about the pain, I just want to heal as quickly as possible. There's a tennis tournament over Labor Day that I really want to play in. Then I had to get a blood test (unrelated to the injury) and had to wait about an hour for that. When I swung by the pharmacy to pick up my muscle relaxant, a little after 6:30 pm, they didn't have my prescription ready. They said it would be 15-20 minutes. So I left, ran an errand, and came back 15 minutes later. Sorry, they still hadn't started on my prescription yet because there was a problem with my account (I wasn't in their system.) They had tried to page me but I wasn't there. So this time I waited in-house for them to finish, which took an additional half hour. By the time I finally got my drugs, I was starving and frustrated and just wanted to go home and take drugs.

The muscle relaxant really knocks me out, so I can't really go anywhere while I'm on it. Luckily, these are the last two days of my vacation and I have most of my errands done. So I can take two days to drug up and let my back heal. My last errand was to take my cat, Hermione, to the vet this morning:

This is what she looks like when she's alert. But lately she's been giving the vet fits during her annual checkup. She howls, spits, hisses bites, claws, and poops in her carrier. It's no fun for any of us, and so this time we decided to give her some tranquilizers before her checkup.

I was surprised how easy it was to slip the pill into her mouth and get her to swallow it. By the time I drove her in to the vet, she was grouchy but subdued. I could even see the medicine taking effect, as her eyes glazed over. We had to wait half an hour at the vet, where all she could muster was a weak growl when I tried to pet her. She woke the hell up, though, when the vet opened up her cat carrier. It was just as bad as before: screaming, cursing, lashing out, pooping. It's embarrassing. I always wonder if they blame the owner when something like this happens. Did I not raise her right? Am I a bad kittydaddy?

After I got her home, cleaned the poop out of her tail, wiped off the carrier, and put the poop-stained towels from the carrier in the washing machine, I was ready for some drugs of my own. I took my muscle relaxant and will now veg out for the next two days, watching TV and movies and playing online until I get too dizzy, which is happening as I type. Fun! (If you notice any typos in this post, it's from the drugs. Really.)

Meanwhile, Hermy is stumbling around the house like a drunken sailor. She changes her perch every three minutes, and keeps missing when she tries to jump up on things. It's hilarious.

This is her, eyes glazed over, trying to hang out at my feet. She'll sleep it off, and be ready for more mischief soon.

Happy Anniversary

Yesterday was the first anniversary of when I bought my beautiful Prius, Smuggy.


We've been through a lot in the past year: the honeymoon phase, characterized by that new car smell and 46 MPG; the long, dark, windy winter months where we were lucky to break 40 MPG; two license plate crises; spring road trips where we averaged over 50 MPG; and now the old familiar love that comes from knowing how to push all of your lover's buttons.



To celebrate our anniversary, I bought Smuggy a new set of windshield wipers yesterday. It's the car equivalent of buying your girlfriend a new necklace. Then this morning I took Smuggy to a carwash and sprung for the deluxe premium service.

Nothing's too good for my sweet ride.

Family! Family! Family!

I spent this past weekend with my family. Twenty-four of us (13 adults and 11 children) swarmed around a very large house and yard that now belongs to my sister to celebrate the 12th annual Schreiberfest.


The house that hosted this year's reunion, in Fort Wayne, IN, was designed and built by my father 30 years ago. Our family lived there for five years in the late 70's/early 80's, and then sold it when our dad got a new job in North Carolina. The house had been out of our family for 26 years until my sister bought it this spring.

So of course we had to have Schreiberfest here, in the house where all my siblings went to high school and where I lived from first to sixth grade.


The back yard is still huge, but the previous owners added a pool and my sister put a trampoline in the corner.

We hung out on the back porch,

played in the pool,

listened to nostalgic records from the 70s & 80s,

played a bean-bag tossing game called "cornhole" and then made crude jokes about our cornholes,

and took the five dogs in attendance on group walks:

We also had dinner in the formal dining room (while the kids ate in the kitchen),


sat around the family room and told family stories that we'd all heard 20 times before,

drank beer,

and made custom t-shirts for the kids:

My only priority all weekend was to challenge my oldest brother to a tennis match. We were all ready to go Friday morning, but the courts were locked and my sister couldn't remember the combination.


While they fumbled with the lock, I grumbled impatiently.


But eventually we figured out how to get in and I got to show off my color-coordinated Rafa outfit and matching tennis skillz:


I was up 5-4 in the first set, but then he put his older brother hex on me and won eight games in a row. He beat me 7-5, 6-1.

The activity that we do the most at Schreiberfest, though, is taking pictures. We take them, show them to each other, and even take pictures of us looking at pictures,


or pictures of us taking pictures


while we shape the kids into poses

or pose ourselves:


My family rocks.