I haven’t forgotten all about this neglected journal again, really. I just went away for an extended weekend visit with my family. And a couple of days before the visit, my step-grandfather died. I thought I might write about that, but I still haven’t sorted out what to feel about it. Not in any conflicted way that might be interesting to write about. Just a general feeling of “Huh. I barely knew the man, certainly didn’t have any relationship with him, and he went without much pain and at home the way he wanted to. Doesn’t seem like there’s much to mourn here. But I think maybe I’m supposed to be sad. But I’m not.” And that’s about all there is to say about it, really. Sometime in the next few weeks there’ll be a memorial service in California that I’ll attend if I can get the time off work, and maybe I’ll write more about him then.

In the meanwhile, I headed off to New Jersey for some family time, since my little sister just had a birthday a couple of weeks ago. It was mostly a fun trip. I have a pretty good relationship with my family, as long as my stepfather and I don’t talk politics, so it was good to see them again. I got to do lots of relaxing and reading and visiting with my childhood cat, Sunny, who I miss very much. And of course lots of excellent food paid for by my parents, which is at least half the point of visiting them. I introduced my sister to some good movies, survived driving with her the day after she got her driver’s license, and gave her her birthday present, which she loved even more than I could have hoped.

On Saturday the whole family went into New York to see Gypsy, but I caught an earlier train and got to spend time with Shawn and Julie, which is always fun. Even if it leaves me very sad about being so far away from New York. I don’t think I could ever live there, but I do miss being close enough to make frequent day trips. Anyway, we talked and ate insanely delicious brunch and laughed a lot and then went shopping and spent way too much time convincing ourselves not to buy DVDs. And then I met up with my family for Gypsy, which started off a bit wobbly but wound up being a great experience. Except for the woman in front of me who kept singing along with Bernadette Peters. Which you just don’t do. Fortunately, my stepfather is in possession of a Glare of Death that outshines even my mother’s or my own, so she shut up quickly.

I did spend far too much of the trip fretting about being away from Pixel, who still has a cat-cold, and trying to avoid discussing gay rights issues with my stepfather since I was really disappointed in some of his views that I learned about this weekend, and I haven’t quite adjusted to the fact that my room is now my dad’s office and I’m staying in the guest room, but otherwise it was a nice little break. Although now that I’m back I’m sort of in people-overload mode and wanting to hibernate for a few days to recover. I did get a bunch of reading done, which is always a good thing. But now I am trying to catch up on the four million things the TiVo recorded while I was away, so last night I didn’t read at all, and I just couch-potatoed instead. Bad Stacey. Tonight I will read. I may even get to pick up Pamie’s book if I go to Borders tonight, which is exciting but also all weird. I can’t imagine reading about the Tiny Wooden Hand on an actual printed page. And such is the fascinating update on my life. But tonight or tomorrow, I have an Indian food date. And garlic nan makes everything better.

Every once in a great long while, for no particular reason that I have ever been able to identify, I am suddenly seized with a great longing to completely rearrange my apartment. And this is apparently one of those weekends. I am saved from some of my furniture-moving impulse because a lot of my apartment layout is dictated by things that either are beyond my control or would require more effort to change than I consider worthwhile, like rewiring the bedroom or running extra cable into the bedroom or something. So mostly I am stuck moving bookshelves around, and occasionally my dresser or coffee table. But that seems to be quite enough to occupy me this weekend.

Yesterday I hauled up some old bookcases that were abandoned in the basement by the last tenant, cleaned them off and de-cobwebbed them, and moved them into the front entryway. Which necessitated moving the little chest of drawers I had there into the living room, and the similarly-sized set of shelves that had been there into the kitchen to hold some of my appliances, and then while I was at it I decided to move a big bookshelf across the living room to hold my tapes and DVDs, and now my arms hurt from all that furniture-moving. And perhaps from the four million books I loaded and unloaded from the shelves.

The cats are thoroughly annoyed with me for moving things without consulting them, but my mother would be very proud of me. In fact, if I manage to uncover the surfaces of my desk and coffee table, I may have to take pictures just to prove to her that I do occasionally attempt to live in something other than squalor. (Which is a really fun word to say. Squalor!) Of course, the down side to all of this is that although my apartment may be squalorrific on a regular basis, I know where everything is. And now I’ve gone and moved things, and doubtless I will get completely confused and be utterly unable to find anything, every again.

Plus, now there’s a bare spot in the living room which is clearly calling out for more bookshelves. I envision an Ikea trip in my future, since I am still at the Ikea-Billy-bookshelves stage of adult furniture ownership, and have not yet progressed to the really-nice-bookshelf stage. I dream of big sturdy wooden floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, with one of those rolling ladders to reach the top shelves, but ’tis not to be. Unless I get a sugar daddy. But I’d need a really specialized sugar daddy, who would understand that the way to my heart is not through jewels and expensive clothing and fancy dinners, but rather through bookshelves, film festival passes, and a maid who would be in charge of cleaning out litter boxes for me.

And now I’ve gone and written a journal entry about spring-cleaning and cat litter. Oh, the glamour of my life. Other, mildly more exciting things have happened. We had a very small barbecue last night with excellent food and pretty good company, and I’ve seen some good movies, and I’m having fun re-reading Neverwhere in preparation for the DVD release of the BBC miniseries adaptation. But really, I’m mostly excited about the belated spring cleaning. And about getting to sleep in today since the clinic was closed for the holiday. And about the loaf of bread I’m about to bake. I guess some days it’s just all about being happy about the little things.

Today I am helping to run the saddest little experiment in the history of psychology. (Or at least, in the history of my two years working in this lab.) We’re planning to make some changes to our computerized learning tutor, and we bandied about some possibilities for those changes in our last lab meeting. So we decided to get a handful of students to user-test for us and see if the changes would be helpful.

Except that we don’t have time to reprogram our current tutor, so this experiment consists of pieces of paper with mockups of what the screen would theoretically look like. And then instead of clicking things with the mouse, the students have to poke the pictures of radio buttons with a pen. And then since we don’t have an actual computer to record what they do, I have to stand there and write down ‘Participant chose third option’ after he pokes the piece of paper with a pen. It’s actually quite funny, but also very, very sad. And after all that, the first participant we ran didn’t even notice the changes! There would be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth and rending of clothes, except that I am a lazy git who can’t be bothered to expend the energy.

I think instead of all that tiring gnashing and rending and wailing, I should go in search of food. I woke up this morning with visions of Indian food dancing in my head, and I can’t really afford to eat out any more this month but I may have to do it anyway, because the persistent need for masala has not gone away all day.

(But before I go, I must quickly point out that I think I have just had a brilliant moneymaking idea. As I was writing this I was chatting online with Len, and in the process I think I found an untapped niche market. I think that nicotine patches, and birth control patches and any other sort of patches that may exist that I can’t think of right now, need to come in lots of cool patterns and shapes like band-aids. Because I think if birth control patches came in Spongebob patterns, I would totally consider switching forms of birth control for the sheer joy of having a Spongebob patch plastered to my hip all the time. And I realize I’m kind of a freak in many respects, but surely someone else would share my joy.)

Much to my surprise (and chagrin, since I will now have to stop having snide thoughts whenever yet another person sends me a “Hey! You should sign up for Friendster! It’s so cool!” email), Friendster actually seems to have served a positive purpose in my life. Yesterday I decided to check in and respond to a couple of messages people had left for me, and in the process I discovered an old friend I’d thought lost forever. Which is terribly exciting for me since there are so few people who I really click with and like and have fun with, and Corrin was always one of those few people.

Of course, it’s been four years now, and people change a lot in four years, so it’s entirely possible we’ll find ourselves without much to say to each other now. But even if that turns out to be the case, I’m just glad to know she’s happy and doing well. And in the best case scenario, I’ll have an old friend back in my life, which is a Very Good Thing. I don’t seem to be very good at keeping friends for more than a few years, so the few I do still feel close to, I really treasure even if I don’t see them very often.

Although when I was discussing the short-lived nature of my friendships with Len last night, it occurred to me that perhaps I’m a bit hard on myself. Most of my childhood and high school friendships were formed by virtue of being stuck in the same small town and the same small school with people, and having fairly few friendship options to begin with. We didn’t really have that much in common except taking the same classes and finding everyone else pretty annoying, and in a couple of cases some shared drama-club geekery, or crushes on the same guy. Perhaps not the best basis for long-lasting adult friendships. So I guess it’s really only been since I got to college six years ago that I had access to a wider range of people from whom to pick and choose friends based on something other than proximity and desperation, and of those friends I think I’m doing okay. I’ve got a small handful I keep in regular contact with and love dearly, and a few more I keep in touch with sporadically and am very fond of even if we’ve more or less gone our separate ways. So maybe I shouldn’t yell at myself too much for not having a bunch of life-long friends, and just work on the whole “cultivating adult friendships” thing.

Then again, given that last night’s activities involved hanging out with Joel and eating melted chocolate doughnut glaze scooped off the bottom of a Tim Horton’s box, complaining about the grossness factor, continuing to eat it anyway, and then flinging the box up a flight of stairs to remove it from our presence, perhaps I should not be trumpeting how mature and adult my current choices of friendships and pastimes are. But I’m sure there was scintillating and intelligent adult conversation going on somewhere amid the sugar overdosing. Or perhaps not.

The protestors were chatty today. It was really a lovely bright sunny morning, and perhaps that put them in a good mood. At any rate, apart from one fellow who kept bellowing “GOD SEES YOUR WICKEDNESS!” at me, they were quite friendly and said good morning and asked how we were and such things, and then got about their business pacing and praying and handing out pamphlets while we got about our business escorting the patietns.

And then one of the protestors happened to walk past just as I was having a conversation with a couple of the other escorts about the movie Dogma. Sweet little old lady type, kind of like what I imagine a grandmother might be like if a grandmother weren’t an insane alcholic weirdo like mine. One of the quiet ones who just paces and prays quietly, but doesn’t harass the patients, so I don’t mind her. She walked several steps past us and then turned around and hurried over to ask excitedly, “Hey, I have terrible hearing, but were you talking about that Kevin Smith movie?” I think we were all a little surprised because it’s kind of rare that we have conversations with the protestors that go beyond “Good morning,” “Have a good day,” and “Sir, you’re not allowed to block the sidewalk like that.” But we confirmed that we were talking about Dogma, and she got very excited and started telling us how much she loved that movie, and how genius it was, and how the real prophets probably were just like Jay and Silent Bob. And then she wandered off again and that was the end of the conversation.

It was just a wee bit odd. It rarely occurs to me that the Christian protestors might think the prophets were foul-mouthed slacker potheads. These are the moments when I can’t tell whether they’re purposely fucking with my head, or whether life’s just teaching me a lesson about making assumptions about strangers.

I can’t have the cat. I want the cat, but I can’t have him. I just have to remember that.

He’s very sweet. He’s all the same color, a lovely smoky gray, and his fur is very soft. He’s skinny, but I can’t tell whether he’s skinny because he doesn’t have a home and is living on what he catches, or whether he’s skinny because he’s just reached adult size and is still growing into his grownup body.

If he doesn’t belong to someone now, he probably did at some point in time, because he’s skittish but warms up to people very quickly. The first couple of times I saw him he stared at me and then ran away, and then he let me pet his head before he ran away, and now we’re good friends. Yesterday I sat down on the front steps and he came and sat in my lap and sniffed my clothes and then stretched up and licked my nose. After I went inside he settled down on the steps, and when I came out later he was still there and came running up to pat at my legs. But he’s not mine. He probably belongs to someone. And even if he didn’t, I have three cats. And Len has a cat. And when we get around to moving in together I know he thinks four cats will be enough. (And the rational part of my head knows he’s right. But I am a crazy cat lady in training, and this cat is so sweet! And we’re friends! I could take good care of him and feed him regularly and he wouldn’t have to be skittish or overly skinny!)

Besides, I don’t think Pixel likes him. He hangs out under my bedroom window sometimes in the mornings, and if I’ve left the window open during the night I sometimes wake up to find her perched on the windowsill hissing down at him. So I can’t have him. This entry is mostly just to remind myself that he can’t be my kitty even if I love him.

Also because if I don’t write a crazy cat-lady entry today I am going to wind up writing about my ongoing struggle to read Shogun, and how I’m going to cry if I find one more sentence waxing rhapsodic about the enormous girth of the main character’s penis. If I wanted historical fiction porn, I’d be re-reading Clan of the Cave Bear. And besides, on general principle it weirds me out when my mother recommends books to me and they turn out to be all about sex. I’m choosing to believe that at some point in the next 800 pages this book will stop being about Captain Blackthorne’s gigantic cock and start being about all of the other interesting things there are to say about Japan.

I’m not hopeful, though. I’d rather hang out with the cat. Who is going to need a name if he’s going to keep hanging out with me, because I can’t just keep calling him The Cat. Greymalkin is the obvious choice, but so overused. But perhaps I should stick with the general Macbeth theme. Looking down the cast of characters… Duncan, perhaps? Macduff? The Third Murderer? The pun involved in naming a pet “Fleance” would make me cry if he ever actually did get fleas. I really should not be spending time thinking about what to name a cat I absolutely am not allowed to have. Why do I have no willpower where cute fuzzy creatures are concerned?

This is the part of the journal where everyone gets to tell me what to do. As one of the more entertaining side effects of this most recent trip to visit my parents, I am suddenly in possession of a Playstation 2. My little sister and I were hanging out and chatting about geek culture, and somehow we got onto the subject of DDR. Which, to make a long story short for those who don’t know, is a dance video game that’s been very popular in geeky circles for a few years now, though I’m not sure whether it’s been mainstreamed yet. I suppose it must have been at least somewhat, for my sister to have become aware of it in our little suburban New Jersey hometown.

Apparently my mother was quite taken by the notion and decided it sounded like a more fun way to get exercise than most of the typical forms of exercise, so she went running to her computer and by the next day she’d ordered a DDR setup. So now she and my sister are playing DDR and apparently having a lot of fun (though I don’t know whether it’s actually working as a form of weight-loss), and they decided I needed it too. So Mom got back on the internet, and suddenly I am in possession of a Playstation and DDR.

I started learning to play last night, which I suspect would have been very funny for anyone in my living room watching. Have I mentioned that I lack all sense of rhythm, grace, or coordination? And that this game sort of requires you to have at least a vague sense of rhythm, and ideally some coordination too? On the way to his food bowl, Dimitri walked over the pad you dance on that records your steps, and I think he scored higher than I did. I am duly shamed. But anyway, that’s fun so far, and I’ll probably be occupied with that for a while. But then I’m going to need new games. And it’s been so long since I had an actual game system apart from my PC that I don’t even know what’s out there anymore.

So, this is your chance. Tell me what exciting games I’ve missed in the last decade or so that I should be playing. I’m open to any suggestion, though I’m biased toward adventure/puzzle games and against racing or first-person-shooter games.

In other news, for anyone who doesn’t read the comments here, the cat I wrote about yestserday shall henceforth be called Spot. I heard Spot meowing under my window this morning, but it was far too early to get up, and I also don’t want him to get used to the notion that I’ll go outside and play with him at any hour of the day or night. So I just went back to sleep, and when I left the house for work a few hours later he was gone. Hopefully this afternoon he’ll come back and I can tell him that he has a new name.

I feel as if I should update, but there’s not much to say. Over the weekend I got to meet up with Jeanne, which was as much fun as I had hoped and then some. Plus, I always like an excuse to go to the Church Brew Works. What’s not to love about a restaurant that was once a church, and now has big shiny beer brewing equipment on the altar? There hasn’t been much going on since then, though.

I’ve mostly been geeking out on Final Fantasy, because I’m one of those people who gets a new game and doesn’t do much besides eat, sleep, and grudgingly go to work until I’ve finished my game. Sometimes I can be saved from total immersion in a game by spending time with Len, or if I have other things to go out and do. But Len’s really busy doing a recording project, and I lack the funds to go to movies or eat out or do anything at all until I get paid next week, so it’s pretty much just me and the Playstation hanging out in my apartment, until bedtime when it’s me and a book. The good news is, Dimitri and I have worked out a cozy little arrangement where I sit on the couch, he sits on my lap, and I rest the game controller on his back while I play, so he’s loving the extra cuddle time.

There’ve also been some really great thunderstorms over the last few days, and I live for summer thunderstorms, so this pleases me immensely. Except that the power keeps flickering (and last night it was out for hours), and my appliances are all very unhappy. I’ve just given up resetting any of their clocks until the power stays on for a whole 24 hours straight without a flicker, so it’s now midnight all the time in my apartment according to my assorted electronic devices.

My other main activity over the last few days has been attempting to help both my mother and sister deal with the trauma of sending her off to pre-college. Her first few days seem to have been really rough, and I got lots of phone calls and emails from both of them. But she’s started her Egyptology class and made a friend, so things seem to be going much better now, and I think they’re both going to calm down and stop panicking at me. Which is good, because I certainly don’t mind the emails and phone calls, but I had no idea what I could say that would be useful. I adjusted to life away from home pretty quickly, but I’ve always been more of an independent loner type than my sister. I suspect it’s a function of being an only child for many years, and the only child of a working single mom at that.

And then yesterday I had a nice front-steps-sitting, chin-scratching, belly-rubbing session with Spot, The Cat Who Is Not And Never Shall Be Mine, out on the front steps. I’ve been worried about him with all these thunderstorms, but he showed up right after that one passed, and he was only a little damp. So he must have a dry place to curl up and wait out the storms. And that’s really all that’s going on in my life. Except that I very vaguely recall my dream from last night, and it was as if I were living in some weird mix of Final Fantasy and Harry Potter, which leads me to believe that my subconscious thinks it’s living in the pop culture of 1999 or thereabouts. I’d be tempted to tell it to join me in the new millennium, but maybe it will be happier staying there. At least it will never know what Hollywood did to The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.

For some reason, this has been the weekend of people and situations popping up from the distant past and reasserting themselves in my mind. These have all been people I have missed and was thrilled to hear from, and/or situations that were never quite resolved and that I would be happy to see put to rest once and for all, so it’s not a bad thing. Just peculiar, the way these things happen all at once.

I’m not a believer in astrology, but occasionally when things happen like last week where a lot of my friends had deaths or serious injuries in the family, and this weekend when several unrelated bits of my past converged on me at once, do make me wonder briefly whether to give a bit more credence to such things. But only briefly, because I am a skeptic and disinclined to believe most things that I haven’t seen with my own eyes. Or that just feel deeply right on a gut level, even if they can’t be verified. Anyway, hopefully terrible things will soon stop happening to my friends’ loved ones, and if anyone else from my past resurfaces they will be people I’ll be happy to hear from.

In other news, I finished up my video game and now have my life back, which is nice. I was supposed to go a Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble concert last night but stayed home with an upset stomach, which is too bad because I’m told it was a very good concert. But apparently they’re also running a series of films relating to music all summer, so this afternoon we went and saw two of them. Satie and Suzanne, a story told mostly in dance about the composer Erik Satie and the lost love of his life, had some stunning individual scenes and images, but as a whole didn’t really hang together for me. I think, sadly, that I just don’t really get dance. I don’t dislike watching dance performances. If nothing else, the human body is just an amazing thing and I like watching dancers move. But the performances I’ve seen rarely engage me or evoke any real emotion other than that detached appreciation for the human body. Perhaps I should try seeking out some other forms of dance, since most of my exposure has been to ballet, and see if there’s something out there that would speak to me more.

Ravel’s Brain was about the composer Ravel and how he struggled with being unable to write music when he developed a degenerative neurological disorder that left him able to hear music, but not write it down or communicate it to someone else. Mostly I really liked this one, partly because my inner psychology major always likes studying neurological disorders. (And seeing lots of cool pictures of the brain. Mmmm, brain. Such an amazing structure, and beautiful in a weird squishy way.) But there was this whole thing with weird interludes with a singing neurosurgeon, that kept breaking the mood. I think I actually wouldn’t have minded the singing neurosurgeon if each of his appearances hadn’t caused the woman sitting behind me to cackle wildly and very, very loudly. And occasionally proclaim loudly “What the hell was that?” or “Gross!”

But overall the movies were entertaining and thought-provoking, and it was lovely to be in an air conditioned building for a few hours, so it was a good afternoon. Except that apparently all that refraining from smacking the person behind me was completely exhausting, since I came home and passed out for an hour and a half. Quite unusual for me, since I almost never take naps. They just make me grouchy. But we ordered Indian food when I woke up, which always makes me less grouchy, so it all worked out well enough. All of which is not terribly exciting, but it’s been a quiet weekend.

I very rarely feel the lack of close offline female friends in my life, but every so often I do. I just wrote Eliza this crazy long rambly email that was all headlong rushing from subject to subject and silly babbling about cats and TV shows intermingled with serious stuff about heartbreak, and it was fun. It felt like afternoons when Della and I, or longer ago, Rachana and I, would sit around and talk about everything and nothing and jump wildly from subject to subject, and it was delightful and silly and fun in a way that my male friendships aren’t. Though they are delightful and often fun in other ways.

Right now I want to take off from work early and meet up with a good girlfriend and get iced mochas and walk to the park and sprawl out on the grass and chitchat about nothing particular and everything under the sun. But I just don’t have any of those friends locally anymore. I don’t usually think about that because it’s such a small percentage of women I’ve known that I’ve been able to form those friendships with that I often forget they’re possible at all, but right now I am thinking about it and I’m sad. I have people I can call and people I can email for those conversations, but it’s not the same. There’s only one real contender for that sort of friendship in my life just now, and she comes attached with a boyfriend who kind of drives me crazy if I see him more than once every month or two, so I’m not seeing her much lately. Sadness.

Oh, well. Not much going on around here. Most of the people in my lab are going away tonight for a conference and will be gone all the way through next week, and I have a few things that urgently have to get done before they get back. But I think if I do those things properly they’ll be pretty quick, and then I’ll have a fair amount of downtime, which is nice. I anticipate finally getting a few decent nights’ sleep in the near future. Unless Spot keeps meowing under my window, which he is doing more lately. Last night I gave him a collar and attached a “Is this cat yours? Please call me at [my phone number]” note to it. Hopefully he belongs to someone and they will see the note and call me and then I will know he’s not a stray and I can set my mind at ease. If not, I don’t know what I’m going to do.

I desperately want to take him in, but maybe I should try to find him a home with someone else. I’ve got a bunch of friends moving around in the next few months, maybe one of them will want a cat for their new abodes. If nothing else, I will get him a vet checkup and vaccinations once I know for sure he doesn’t have people to belong to. Then play it by ear, I guess.

I am fooling no one when I talk about finding him another home. Obviously I want him to live with me where I can love him and cuddle him and fatten him up. Why do I even pretend otherwise? I am alternately really good at pretending things don’t mean as much to me as they do, or really terrible at it, and I have never been able to figure out which things it is that I’m good at covering up. Obviously not the cat-related ones.

And see, here I am rambling all over the place again. It’s one of those days when I am very chatty but can’t seem to stick to a topic, so I’m just chattering at anyone who will hold still for ten seconds. One of the good things about a journal is that it can’t run away when i’m feeling inanely chatty. However, I have just checked my email and Eliza has written back while I was jabbering. Hurrah! More silly girl talk! I must go respond. And then force myself to either do some damn work, or get the hell out of the office, because for some reason being in here is causing me to totally spaz out today.

I really think that I somehow missed class the day they were going over Delayed Grafitication 101 in high school. I am so terrible at waiting for things or events that I want now This is partly about Spot. I am still very anxious, waiting to either get a call about him, or at least to have him come back and visit me so I can see if he’s still wearing the collar and note.

But today’s utter lack of patience is non-cat-related for a change. Today I was searching around for a treat for myself to celebrate my raise. Nothing big enough that it would eat up my whole raise, just a little something that I’d been wanting and could afford now. And it occurred to me: Caller ID! I loathe talking on the phone and there are really only three people from whom I would usually like to accept phone calls, but because I never know who’s calling I always wind up talking to people I don’t really feel like talking to. Plus: Telemarketers. About which no more really needs to be said. And Kate Michelman from NARAL. God knows I’m a big fan of reproductive freedom, and I support NARAL with my money and, when I can, with my time. But I am getting really tired of Kate Michelman’s stupid pre-recorded phone calls and it’s starting to make me hate her organization.

So I pulled up my phone company’s web site and did a bunch of clicking and typing, and voila, I have caller ID. And yet, I cannot yet use it because I don’t have a caller ID box, and the one I ordered won’t arrive for days and days. I want to cut myself off further from the human race right now, and I can’t. It’s very sad. And underlines my total lack of anything resembling patience. I should really work on that, but I have no idea how.