Year in Review

The first bird of 2006 was a downy woodpecker.

Things went downhill from there. And uphill a little here the last two months of the year.

I am shredding 2006 and burning it in a coffee can in the backyard. Hopefully the first bird of 2007 will be a phoenix.

Surprise! I'm a Boy!

Actually I kick male ass on the spatial problems - 19 out of 20 for the "angles" quiz, whereas the average score for men is 15.1 and for women 13.3.

Overall, the results seem to be based on "Gurls are too stoopid to do engineering." There's not a great deal of disparity between the average male and female scores on many of the "feminine" traits, like verbal ability and decoding emotion from pictures of people's eyes. But if you can picture how an object will look turned in space, you must be a guy.

I've got a cold. I'm having a hot toddy and going to bed. Check out Feministe for more.

I Have Returned

From the land of squishy white bread, eggs fried in Crisco, and venison burger floating in oily-sheened Velveeta. I tried to stick to the shrimp and chicken and selected the leanest portions of ham I could find, but I overdid it on the baked beans and the cookies, and I lay in bed at night listening to my tummy squeal and burble like a pet guinea pig.

Detox time. Green tea, brown rice, and steamed vegetables for a week.

Yule

“It’s the first day of winter,” my coworker moaned, dragging herself around like Chopin’s funeral dirge. “Such a long way to go ‘til spring.”

Interesting, how disconnected we moderns are, flooded with fluorescent light and weather porn over every forecast of snow, that many of us don’t know that this is the day the light begins to return. I point out to my coworker that the days start to get longer after the solstice as the sun swings north in the sky. She seems to find some relief in that, or maybe the peppermint Edy’s ice cream had the comforting effect.

On the way home, I stop at the market to check out the wreaths and garlands. Balsam, pine, and fir, I love them all, but cannot justify spending money on their organically-grown, fresh-cut, trucked-in-from-the-Upper-Peninsula prices. I breathe deeply of my favorite scents and buy some beef medallions instead.

At home, cold rain blows into my eyes as I clip a bough of holly to bring inside to deck my hall. The cat pokes her head out of the door as soon as I open it. The smell of my two-foot Fraser fir Christmas tree hangs faintly in the air. I set the holly on the cabinet and spoon out some special food for Sylvie. I watch her eat her treat with the swelling in the heart that an Italian grandmother must feel when she serves her signature bolognese.

The little steaks are delicious broiled with cracked pepper and minced garlic and with a side of asparagus tips, washed down with a brown ale of the “winter warmer” variety.

I wish I had someone here to share it with. I make my own meaning for my life, but it’s damned hard to do it alone all the time.

I open the small, mailable gifts from my far-flung friends. Soft gray cashmere socks with a blue snowflake pattern. Some incredibly good-smelling Finnish sauna soap. Bars of dark chocolate, fancy paper clips twisted into the shapes of birds, a disposable fountain pen. A card from Ozzie Paul in Sydney, who writes, “Spare a thought for those of us having to bear the long summer days.” I plug in the lights and arrange the gifts at the base of the tree around the beautiful sandhill crane book from D. & B.

The gifts are nice. I wish some of the friends would let me feed them more often.

Earlier Farm Boy told me solstice celebrations are “just as silly and mythological as the rest.” I told him I rather preferred some of the pagan holidays. He asked why. I responded that solstice is an actual, observable phenomenon, something to let us humans mark the passage of time. “Until the earth’s poles move again,” he said.

I suppose I need the silly and the mythological. I don’t have the fortitude to not believe in anything.

I light a couple of spruce-scented candles. I stare out between the slats of the blinds for a while, watching the rain come down harder, wondering if I chose this loneliness or if it somehow happened when I wasn’t looking.

Quote of the Day

Once you can accept the universe as matter expanding into nothing that is something, wearing stripes with plaid comes easy.

– Albert Einstein

The Shape of Love

Feedback on the New Blogger?

What do you think of the labels? Are they workin' for ya? I'm trying not to be obsessive about yet another thing to organize. It's really enough that I have to turn all the labels on the canned goods outward and keep the dollar bills in my wallet facing the same way and in order (with the ones folded in the middle). The labels seem too big and white to me; perhaps I'll try to smallify or unwhiten them in the template.

The Ann Arbor School Board Has Never Been to Cincinnati

This is the first thing I thought of when I heard they named the new high school Skyline.

Final Project

Almost finished.

Flawless Logic

From a box of Domino® sugar:



Therefore, sugar is an important part of any balanced diet.

And the recipe for pecan sticky buns is approved by the American Diabetes Association, right?

Baking Day

After three years, I believe I have perfected the "molasses crinkle" aka the "pain-in-the-ass cookie," so called because of the unreasonably sticky dough.

• Use all butter instead of butter and shortening.


• Add 1/4 cup more flour than recipe calls for.


• Spray everything with Pam.


• Bake for 2 minutes less than recipe calls for.

On This Day, I Quote George Gordon, Lord Byron

Through life's road, so dim and dirty,
I have dragg'd to three and thirty.
What have these years left to me?
Nothing - except, thirty-three.

And a cat who's chewed out half her fur, a dad who sings to me on my voice mail, and a toaster oven with a timer that only sometimes works.

Miscellaneous

Excellent comment threads at Feministing and Feministe on the intersection of stature and gender. (Thanks Kevin.)

I hadn’t shopped at Target for a long time, so I was somewhat surprised by the expanded grocery section. “Well, I do need cheese,” I thought, but it still felt strange to walk out of Target with socks, soap, and a bag of shredded mozzarella.

Still no birds at the feeder. P. has commissioned her husband to create a special work on his Native American flute to ask the spirits for birds. They’re really all I want for Christmas.

Anniversary

Ten years ago this month, I left graduate studies at the Ohio State University and moved to my first solo apartment. You might think my next move would have been to find a job. It wasn’t. The next thing I did was to get a cat. “For every house is incomplete without him and a blessing is lacking in the spirit,” wrote Christopher Smart, when he considered his cat, Jeoffrey.

The cat was free, and she almost wasn’t mine. When I called the ad in the paper, the woman told me someone else had beat me to her. A few hours later, she called back to say the other person hadn’t shown up. Soon I was standing in the living room of a ranch style house in the western suburbs of Columbus, where I was introduced to Sylvia.

She slipped down the stairs, a gray shadow in the corner of my eye, while the family explained that the teenaged daughter simply didn’t want the cat anymore. Plus a large dog had joined the household. The mother brusquely gathered up cans of cat food, a dish, and a plastic cargo crate. All of it was mine. Free. Just take the cat. I was there for less than five minutes. They crammed her in the carrier and suddenly I was standing on the step holding the crate, a little stunned by the lack of ceremony. No good-bye pat, no rite of handing off. Animals have never been disposable to me, and I have never let one go without a farewell of some sort. "Well, their loss. Come on, kitty," I thought-beamed to the soft, frightened creature at my side as we stepped into the cold dark together.

I didn’t even feel her silky chinchilla fur until we were home. Home was the upper apartment in a dilapidated house a few streets north of campus. It had a kitchenette and two rooms outfitted with yard-sale grade furniture. Raccoons lived in the attic and a broken window was never satisfactorily repaired. The downstairs neighbors had noisy sex on Sunday afternoons and Thursday nights after E.R. Hey, E.R. used to be good.

Gas was around $1.15 a gallon. I think my rent was $280 a month. But I digress.



Sylvie’s never been much of a lap-sitter, but she was visibly uncertain and shy at first. She warmed up to Dmitry, who had a way with cats, even if he wasn’t patient enough to help me practice my Russian phonetics. “Your kitty is пушинка” - a bit of fluff - he would say, giving her tail a gentle tug.

He wouldn’t recognize her now, with her beautiful silver fur gone from her belly and back legs. For the past five months she’s been chewing her own hair off. The vet has been unable to treat successfully the allergy or compulsion that causes her to do this. I’m not completely at a loss yet. One of my writers’ group members suggested Dr. Pitcairn’s natural diet, which helped her dog with skin problems.

The hair loss is not the worst health issue she’s ever faced. In 2001 I noticed her lapping the water bowl bone-dry on a daily basis. She was diagnosed with diabetes and prescribed insulin injections. She fought the shots every day. She slashed at me. She hissed at me. She skulked around, hid under the bed, fired furious, baleful glances at me. I cried on the phone to the vet that I couldn’t do it - that Sylvie hated me too much - and the vet assured me that I was not a bad kitty mom if the injections weren’t a viable option.

But they were the only option. After I stopped trying to administer the shots, Sylvie got sick and skinny to the point where her hindquarters quivered with the exertion of merely walking. Finally she let me start to give the injections. Even after five years, this trust does not extend to other people. If anyone else approaches her with a syringe, they will shortly need the tube of Neosporin. The only person foolhardy enough to make an attempt was my friend K. from the wildlife rehab clinic, and she had to go after my cat with padded welding gloves on and with the net used to restrain coyotes. A wild bird of prey is easier to handle than my pissed off cat.

She pretty much hates anyone who comes in when I’m not home, even if it’s someone she’s met before and seems to like. She will smack the hand that feeds her. I tell friends coming over to take care of her while I’m away to throw the food down and go.

She especially dislikes women with higher-pitched voices. After the coyote-net incident, she would rush at K. like an enraged bull elephant. She ripped open a three-inch gash on the foot of a little girl for following her into the other room. When my girly-voiced friend J. came over, I had to shut the cat in the bedroom. She seems to like men better, but she’s not a good judge of character and totally, completely adores the cads.

She is attracted to black pants as if they’re made of catnip. She hogs the body pillow at night. She demands canned food immediately upon my return to the apartment, no matter how brief my absence. She chews on the Christmas tree.

She leaves all the yarn and beads alone. She forgives me for yelling and for running the vacuum and for coming home late, even when I smell like other cats. She keeps me company while I work. She likes quality chair time, when she can press her forehead against my leg and purr like a diesel engine. She gives me kitty-kisses.

In the past ten years, we have moved four times. I have had seven different jobs. My brother and two good friends have died. My heart’s been broken a hundred times. Life has shattered, shifted, come back together with jagged Crazy Glue edges. Sylvie is always there, rasping tears off my face with her warm tongue, head-butting me to get out of bed, greeting me at the door.

For all these gifts and more, my furry purry one, Fancy Feast all month, and the feather toy every night.

But They Didn't Ask About "Pop" or "Chipped Ham"

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