I suppose it’s kind of dorky, but I really like voting. Even when it’s an off-election year, even when there’s not much on the ballot that I’m excited about, I just like the act of voting. I like that moment when the curtain closes around you and it’s just you and the democratic process, you and your one vote which might not make a difference, but just possibly might. It reminds me of when I was little and would go with my mother to vote in the elementary school gym. Her shoes would click and squeak on the wooden floor which was usually freshly polished for the occasion, instead of its usual dullness worn down by day after day of third-grade dodgeball games. She’d hold me up to the buttons and levers and show me which to push, and while my knowledge of civic responsibility was not terribly sophisiticated at that age, I knew I was helping to do something grown-up and important.

This isn’t one of those election years when I’ll be waiting up, watching the news, biting my nails as the polls close. It’s not one of those years when there’s a particular race I care about that much. But it was still fun to go and vote, and I’m glad I did my part.

It’s gray and rainy and just a little chilly. Quite the perfect weather to be curled up on the sofa with a blanket, a good book, a mug of hot chocolate, and a couple of cats. Instead, I am at work dealing with multiple broken computers even though dealing with broken computers is not at all part of my job description. This is less than optimal.

On the plus side, Len has promised that tonight there will be the pasta thing with roasted peppers and turkey sausage and cream sauce that I love, and possibly tiramisu as well. So if I survive the last hour or so at work, the evening shows promise. I may even be able to work it so that first I can go home on my own and get in bit of reading-and-cuddling-with-the-cats time, before heading over to his place for tasty food. Which would be optimal indeed.

Earlier today I mentioned “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in conversation and was suddenly afflicted with a great desire to go re-read all my T.S. Eliot poetry, which also seems like an excellent thing to do on a rainy afternoon. Except that then I might have to go out and buy more, because for some reason I still do not own a copy of The Waste Land. And having just forked over $200 to my veterinarian on Saturday for checkups and vaccinations, I really cannot afford to go on a poetry spree before my next paycheck. Besides, I think what I really want to read is the specific poetry books I had as an adolescent, that I used to read on rainy afternoons curled up on my bed in my parents’ house right under the window.

My mother had several poetry books but I never actually saw her read them, so one day I rescued them from their downstairs bookshelf and took them upstairs, never to return them. There was an Eliot collection, the complete works of Carl Sandburg, a copy of Anne Sexton’s Transformations, and a couple of anthologies. One was a “Best-Loved American Poetry” collection that I kind of hated but no longer remember why, and the other was a collection of poetry from the New Yorker. It was the New Yorker collection that I used to take out and read most often on rainy days, but it had nothing to do with the poetry inside, most of which was only passingly interesting to me. What I used to peruse regularly were several clippings tucked inside the book. A couple were cartoons and another handful were poems, carefully clipped from magazines and tucked away inside the poetry book. And then presumably forgotten, since I was the only one who ever read those books. The clippings were clearly fairly old, yellowing and pressed flat by the weight of the book where they’d been folded. My mother must have tucked them in that book years earlier, maybe when she was still married to my father, maybe before I was born.

I read that handful of poems over and over, trying to understand what they’d meant to her then. I was sure they were clues to the parts of her I didn’t understand, messages set adrift for me to discover yeras later, although I’m not sure now what I thought they’d tell me. I don’t even remember now what the poems were about, except that one was about a lost love. For no good reason I decided that she must have clipped that one when I was a baby, that it must have reminded her of my father. I read that one first every time, and when I was done I always took care to fold it along the same crease she had folded it, to preserve the one bit of evidence I had to convince myself that surely they had loved each other once. 

I never did figure out what the poems meant to her, why she chose those ones to keep, who she was thinking of when she trimmed the edges neatly and tucked them away. These days it seems too late to ask. But I still wish that book were one of the ones I had taken with me from their house. I’d really like to go home and read it tonight. But I suppose if I can’t have nostalgia this evening, tiramisu makes a good substitute.

(Except that I wrote this and then forgot to make it public until just now, and in the intervening time the tiramisu plan has been pushed back until later in the week. Curses! I will have to go home and drown my sorrows in dark chocolate Hershey’s Kisses instead, because they are my new food of the gods.)

(Quick note to anyone not on the notify list: Hi. I’m back. Hopefully on a regular basis. At some point soon I will do a catch-up type entry, but really there’s nothing new going on in my life unless spectacularly bad hair counts, so you’re not missing anything. Moving along:)

I don’t know if it’s a full moon or if everyone went a little crazy with the nice weather yesterday and then the deluge of rain today or what, but the crazies were out in full force at the clinic today. We had combative boyfriends, theological debates about whether Catholicism will eventually destroy all Protestants, screaming matches from opposite sides of a busy intersection complete with police intervention, the guy who squirts holy water on the sidewalk going a little crazy and deciding to throw holy water directly onto the escorts, and just to add some amusement to the proceedings, some kind of Harley-Davidson convention taking place a few blocks away so that we had giant burly men in tattoos and leather wandering up and down the street and occasionally getting in the middle of the theological debates. And all of this before 9 a.m.

I have decided that the one essential for surviving life as an abortion clinic volunteer escort isn’t actually discretion, self-restraint, passion about reproductive rights, or even the ability to be awake and cheerful at 7 a.m. It’s a sense of humor. It definitely takes one to cope with some of our regular protestors, particularly the fellow in the tricornered hat who insists on cornering all of the other protestors into theological debates and then stomping off in a huff because he considers them all heretics. (I won’t even get into what he thinks of the escorts, patients, and clinic employees.) Even the regular crazies shy away from Tricornered Hat Guy. He’s the uber-crazy.

Fortunately, the rain drove him away pretty early today. Less fortunately, I had to stand out in that rain all morning, and now even though I have changed into dry clothes I still feel cold and wet and sniffly. Maybe it was the extra drenching of holy water that did it. Either way, although I had vague intentions of either heading down to the AIDS Walk finish line to cheer on my friends, or going to the Science Center with Len and his little brother who’s visiting for the week, I am sleepy and cold and afraid of the crazies running loose today, and I think I’m just going to stay in this afternoon.

Several Netflix movies arrived today, including the most recent Almodovar film that I didn’t get to see in the theaters, so I think it would be an excellent afternoon to curl up on the sofa with a cuddly blanket, a mug of hot chocolate, and a stack of movies.

In other random bits of news, the unthinkable has happened and I have actually agree to set foot in Las Vegas next year, something I swore I would never do. Only for this particular group of people I’ll be meeting up with would I do this. So, although I fully intend to sit back and let other people deal with the actual planning of hotels and activities and stuff, I’m also curious as to what there might be in Vegas that would be fun for me to do. Reader-type people, if any of you have any good suggestions for things to do in Vegas (maybe things that don’t involve gigantic numbers of people, glitter, and Elvises, if such things exist in Vegas?), leave some comments and tell me all about them.

One of the many good things about very old friends is that they’re there when you need them, even if that just means “when you’re at your desk and bored and thinking about writing a journal entry but you’re too distracted by  to think of a subject.” So, Shauna has asked me interview questions, and I shall dutifully answer them, and voila, instant journal entry! Shauna’s questions:

1. What made you feel compelled to volunteer at an abortion clinic, and how has the work molded your perception?

This could be several journal entries on its own, and I think it will be someday soon when I’ve been doing it a little longer and have a better-informed perspective. But the short version is that while I’d thought about volunteering for several years, a conjunction of two things prompted me to actually do it.

a) I was starting to feel that my personal life was stagnating a bit, and upon reflection I decided that I the one thing really missing was the loss of a feminist community in my life since I graduated and stopped working at the campus women’s center.

b) Perhaps a bit more surprising, the war with Iraq. Most of the people I know were getting very polarized and politically active, and I was torn and couldn’t come down on either side firmly enough to get active about it. But I didn’t like feeling indecisive and helpless either, so I decided to get active about something that I did feel strongly about and could do something about locally. I don’t think I’ve been doing it long enough yet for it to have made any major changes in my perceptions. The only real change I’m seeing so far is in myself, that I’m much happier in general and feeling better about myself now that I’m doing something I really believe in again.

2. What do you like about the adult you’ve become?

Man. I’m still dealing with the concept that I might actually be an adult! But okay, I guess I am an adult. And I like that I’ve become pretty independent, that after being very sheltered as a child and spending most of my college years in a frighteningly codependent relationship, I finally feel like I’m my own person and have my own interests and opinions, and that while I like having a significant other to share things with I in no way feel that I need anyone else to complete me. And I like that I’ve mostly learned to handle depression so that even though it’s a part of me, it doesn’t control me. And I like that after a few years of thinking I had to be all cool and mature, I’ve finally recaptured the joy of being silly and childlike in some ways as an adult.

3. Describe your most memorable moment (or at least one of them).

This is the one that stumped me. I rarely think of discrete moments in my life. I tend to think in the big picture and have a hard time separating any one moment out from everything that caused it and happened because of it. I think I’ll have to skip this one.

4. Do you have a theme song? If so, what is it?

Hm. Not one that I could answer instantly with “Oh yeah, this is my song.” I do tend to think of Jonatha Brooke’s Annie as the song I would sing to younger versions of myself if I could. But I’m not sure what a theme song for me now would be.

5. How about a half-year recap, while you?re at it? Inquiring minds want to know, what HAVE you been up to?

See above re: stagnating. Really, not much that’s new. I’m still working in the psychology lab, which is definitely not a career thing but suits me well enough for now. I took the general GREs and did quite well, and am semi-studying for the psychology GREs, but I’m not really convinced that grad school is for me at all so that’s not something I’m pursuing terribly hard right now. The search for what the hell I should do with my life continues. I’m still living in my swank-yet-full-of-cat-hair apartment, because Len and I both got totally bogged down in other things over the winter and stopped house hunting. Hopefully we’ll start that up again soon, but his requirements are so specific that I’d be surprised if he actually bought a house anytime soon. We’re still together and I’m still in possession of my three cats.

There are only really two big new things going on in my life right now. One is working at the clinic, about which I’ve already written a bit and will write more soon. The other is that my little brother will be a member of this fall’s freshman class at my university. This probably also deserves an entry of its own, and I’ll write one soon. But the short version is that I’m thrilled he’s going to be here, worried that he won’t have the slightest desire to get to know me when he’s got a whole new college life to settle into, worry that he will want to get to know me and I won’t know what to say to him, and a whole lot of weirdness about my father and stepmother being a regular presence in my town from now on. They’ve been sending me all these emails asking for advice on what he’ll need to bring, and making plans to have dinner with me when they’re here for his orientation and stuff, and I’m thoroughly freaked out.

To add to the hilarity, my little sister is in the middle of her college hunt, and although she’s deeply in love with another school as her first choice, my university is currently her second choice. And she doesn’t want anything to do with my brother. So there’s a good chance I could wind up with two siblings in my hometown, neither of whom want anything to do with each other. Which is a recipe for disaster, or a sitcom, or both. But I’m trying not to get too worked up about that until it becomes a real issue.

Also, I have discovered that I should have been listening to Elizabeth all these years and watching Sports Night reruns despite the word “sports” in the title, because I am suddenly madly in love with it and desperate to get all the reruns on tape. But that’s rather less important news; it just happens to be my current obsession.

Attention: If you are my little sister, go away now and don’t come back until after your birthday. (Also, email me and let me know you’re reading this, not because you will learn anything new and shocking about me, but because if I knew you were reading I would be able to have fun sneaking in our in-jokes and knowing they’d make you laugh even though no one else would understand. Like, say, logs!)

If you are anyone but my sister, feel free to stick around. Although the main thing I have to say is that I am the best big sister in the world, because I found the perfect birthday present for her. I am not a very good gift-buyer most of the time, so it pleases me when I have flashes of brilliance. (Though they do not always pan out. Much as Len appreciated the thought behind receiving a half-dozen potted baby pepper plants from me a couple of birthdays ago, they were promptly neglected and died.)

My sister lives for tech crew and getting new carpentry tools. Her new screw gun was the highlight of her Christmas gifts. And she is deeply obsessed with the color green and always wears silver-and-green jewelry. So clearly the thing to do was to buy her a silver bracelet with a green carpenter’s level embedded in it. A little weird for some people I suppose, but I’m sure she’ll love it. I’m so excited that I’m going to bring it to New Jersey with me at the end of the month so I can give it to her in person a week late rather than mailing it to arrive by her birthday.

Which reminds me that in less than three weeks I will be in New York seeing Gypsy, and I am far, far too excited. As a diehard musical theatre geek, it is a deep sorrow to me that I have never gotten to see Bernadette Peters live in anything, so I am overjoyed about this. And clearly if she is still having throat problems and missing performances by then, I will have to fling myself over the balcony in despair. Or at least whine a lot, and then make myself feel better by trying to get rush tickets for Nine. I don’t know what has gotten into me, actually wanting to see something involving Antonio Banderas, but I really liked what little I got to see during the Tony Awards.

All of this is reminding me that the one thing I really miss about living in New Jersey, apart from the ocean, is being close to one of the major theater centers of the world. Pittsburgh tries very hard, and our Civic Light Opera puts on some decent shows, and we do get the occasional touring company — but it’s just not the same. Not at all. Though I haven’t seen many plays at the smaller theaters around town, so it may be that there’s some great stuff that I just don’t know about. I think that’s something I should work on this summer. I already have tickets for several CLO shows, so next I have to find out what’s going on in the non-musical world. And now I have probably totally lost everyone who reads this except for Melissa and Elizabeth, so I’ll stop musical-geeking. At least temporarily. I make no promises about my weekend in NJ/NY. Geeking about Bernadette might well ensue.

I suppose on some level I am usually aware that I am a bundle of contradictions (and hell, aren’t we all?), but it tends to amuse me greatly when I have those moments where I become consciously aware of some of those contradictions. I came over here to write an entry about the gradual lifting of my annual spring depression and now I’m starting to feel like a human being again, and I started typing a couple of sentences while cheerfully humming along with my MP3 player because one of the joys of my own office is that I can hum if I want to and I don’t have to worry about bothering anyone. And then I paused to actually think about what I was so cheerfully humming and bobbing my head to, and I cracked up when I realized that it’s the most depressing song ever. (And yet so cheery sounding! I love this song and Pete for introducing me to it ages ago, but when you stop to think about it, it probably shouldn’t be considered a cheerfulness-inducing song.)

But anyway, aside from the fact that I am newly re-obsessed with a song whose chorus is “I hope you die, I hope we both die,” I have been feeling awfully good for the last week or two, after several months of depression even worse than my usual spring depression. At first I was trying not to think about it much at all, because even when I am majorly depressed I still have the occasional good day, and if I get too invested in the notion that I’m finally getting better, then it’s just that much more of a let-down when I crash again. But then the good day stretched into a few good days, and then it was a good week. So I started cautiously sneaking up on the notion of being happy. Not so much thinking about it to any great extent, just sort of noting ‘Hey! I feel all perky and stuff.’

Last week I went to a barbecue at Len’s house and actually had a good time hanging out with people instead of hiding in the studio as I am wont to do. Of course, even when I’m in my best moods my socialization needs are still very minimal, but I think I’ve made the shift from “Oh god, if I have to interact with another human being I am going to scream and then curl up and die” to “I think I feel like just chilling out with at my place tonight, but I haven’t seen that friend in a while, so maybe over the weekend I’ll give her a call and we can watch the new Buffy DVDs or something.” And I’m sleeping reasonably well again (except for the whole getting-up-at-six-on-Saturdays-to-volunteer thing which I still haven’t adjusted to.) So although it’s a little too early to say for sure, I am cautiously declaring myself out of the woods and ready to rejoin the world of the living. At least until mid-July, when although I will no longer be depressed, I will be once again unable to leave my apartment because it will simply be too hot and humid to move from the comfy chair in front of the window fan. But in the intervening few weeks I intend to enjoy having my life back.

Of course, the actual having of a life may have to wait until next week. On Saturday I have clinic duty plus tickets to the CLO to see Miss Saigon, and more importantly, I must have an obsessive marathon of my new Buffy DVDs for the rest of the weekend. And maybe work a trip to see Finding Nemo into that somewhere. Although after I wrote that it occurred to me that all that stuff is having a life. Except maybe the obsessive Buffy thing. And even then, I’m hoping to lure Merewyn and Emily and their respective significant others over for part of the marathon, so I think that counts as having a life. I seem to have started having one again in spite of my best efforts to the contrary.

I’m off to sleep in a few minutes, and my mind is all over the place tonight, so just a few completely disconnected free-form thoughts before I sleep.

1) After three attempts that were thwarted by various occurrences, I finally managed to see Finding Nemo tonight. I now have much love for it, as I do for every Pixar film or short I’ve ever seen except, for some reason, Toy Story. I think the movie made me revert to about six years old, because I spent the entire ride home in the car wiggling gleefully and rambling about what kind of fish I would be if I could be a fish. I wonder if this is the sort of behavior I’m supposed to have grown out of by now. Also, why do people not turn their cell phones off at movie theaters? The people in the row in front of me had wiggly talkative kids, and the ones behind me were adults with cell phones, and the cell phone people kept taking calls and then bitching about the kids. Which was annoying as hell, because unless you’re at a midnight showing, I think when you go to a kids’ movie you have to expect to see kids. And it’s much more obnoxious to listen to a grown man chatting on his cell phone than to a kid enjoying and engaging with the movie.

2) I am sleeping all the time the last few days. I keep waking up, starting to get ready for work, and then deciding I need two more hours of sleep. And then coming home from work and napping. And then going to bed early. I haven’t been doing anything particularly exhausting, so I don’t understand this at all. Perhaps I am going into hibernation, at the wrong time of year and in the wrong climate and species.

3) Why did I not know that the movie that Dave McKean and Neil Gaiman are working on came out of the idea of creating a Labyrinth sequel? Even though it wound up not being directly tied to Labyrinth, that makes me far too happy. I enjoy it when my disparate pop culture obsessions come together.

4) I have managed to burn myself three times in the last two days in the kitchen. I almost never burn myself, so I don’t know how I’ve managed to mess up the same arm three times in two days, but I think maybe I should just stay out of the kitchen for a while. My stove is in collusion with my cookie sheet and they both want me dead, or at least minus my left arm.

5) I want ice cream. Fortunately, there is ice cream in my freezer, which makes this an excellent time to stop blathering at my journal and start getting some ice cream instead. And then sleep, in the hope that I can actually get up and stay awake at my normal time tomorrow, something I have failed to do for the past two days.

For someone who hardly ever bothers to remember the anniversaries of good things in my life, I am far too prone to dwelling on anniversaries of bad things and getting all morose about them. This is probably something I should work on, but I’m not quite sure how. I can certainly make an effort not to dwell, and I’m working on that, but unfortunately it’s not as if I can just will myself not to remember the anniversaries in the first place. I suppose it’s just one of the many ways I could use some improvement, that I’ll continue to work on and hopefully train myself out of someday. Though that’s not much comfort when I’m smack in the middle of the doldrums. (And here, as always when I use that word, I must stop and hum a chorus of “Don’t Say There’s Nothing To Do in the Doldrums” from the 1970s movie version of The Phantom Tollbooth, which not nearly enough people have seen.)

But continuing my effort to claw my way out of said doldrums, I must note that I had a really lovely Sunday despite the tiny black raincloud hovering over my head the day before. I slept in shockingly late, and then made breakfast for Len and myself, very yummy banana pancakes with turkey sausage and some very strawberries. A minor disaster was barely averted when Dimitri became determined to get maple syrup all over himself in an effort to get to some leftover bits of sausage.

Sticky-fur crisis averted, we went to the aviary and finally saw the baby penguin, Stanley, who is definitely not a baby anymore, but who is still very cute. (And mean and grumpy and generally disliking of people, which makes him all the more endearing to me since I enjoy people and animals who share my curmudgeonly nature.) I got to sit and chat with my favorite blue macaw, Benito, who is a total attention whore and very entertaining. (We also noted with much relief that the poor macaw who had been burdened with the groan-inducing name of “General Macaw-thur” has apparently had his name shortened to “Mac.”) And then of course there were all the other aviary birds, who were all interesting and beautiful, but we did rush through a bit because it was kind of crowded. Still, lots of fun.

We went to Mad Mex for lunch, and then what we had intended as a very quick errand became an all-out houseware-shopping extravaganza, encompassing both Bed, Bath & Beyond and Ikea. Many shiny kitchen items were acquired, and there was an impromptu purchase of an entertainment center, and a cheese guillotine, and it was all very entertaining. Both for me and for the Bed, Bath & Beyond employee who was laughing at me and my excessive glee upon discovering the cheese guillotine-y thing. Then the evening was taken up with my continuing effort to watch all the old Sports Night episodes. I’ve almost seen them all now, except for a small handful. I think I’m overloading on witty repartee, but there are certainly worse things to overload on.

All in all, a good antidote to the Black Raincloud of Over-Dwelling On Past Events. Of course, right now I’m under the Gray Raincloud of Fear Of Stuff I Have To Do At Work Tomorrow. I’m mostly perfectly happy to be helping to organize this big psychology conference for next year, but with my intense hatred of talking to strangers on the phone, I am rather fearing all the calls I have to make tomorrow. But once I get that big scary thing out of the way, the next few days should be smooth sailing, and then I get to visit my family and be spoiled rotten for a few days and see Gypsy and hang out with a bunch of people I know and love in New York, and one or two I’m looking forward to finally meeting, so I’m quite looking forward to the next week or so. As long as I survive all this phone-calling crap first. I simply do not understand people who still conduct their business by phone and fax. Why doesn’t the rest of the world understand that it’s supposed to be conducting all its business by email for my convenience?

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.

I know, I have been a bad journal writer. I’ve been awfully busy this week moving Spot into my bedroom and quarantining him, and trying to placate the other cats for being barred from the bedroom, and trying to help him not freak out about being indoors, and sleeping on the sofa in the living room, and other such general cat-related craziness. But he’s so cute! (Although on closer inspection, I am beginning to have a sneaking suspicion that he might be a she rather than a neutered he. My other cats don’t really want me getting close enough to their bums to do a proper comparison. I think I may have to wait for the vet to tell me.)

Anyway, things are starting to settle down, and if the vet gives him a clean bill of health tomorrow I’ll be able to un-quarantine him and then everyone can go everywhere in the apartment and I’ll get to sleep in my bed again. Of course, a whole other type of craziness will probably ensue when the cats meet without a pane of glass between them, but I’ll deal with that when it happens. And I have a couple of people who are possibly interested in giving him a home, so that’s good. None of them can take him for at least a few more weeks, which is not really a problem because I am already loving him dearly and the longer he can stay with me, the happier I will be. But that’s pretty much all I’ve been doing the last few days.

On the plus side, my wonderful mother sent me a gift today out of the blue, and one part of it was the new Neil Gaiman children’s book, and the other was The Poets’ Grimm, an anthology of late-twentieth-century poetry inspired by Brothers Grimm fairy tales, both of which are right up my ally. I have passed a lovely afternoon reading them, with Spot curled up near my feet. But now I am agonizing over whether to shelve the book with the poetry books or fairy tale books. (Or, whether to reorganize entirely so those two sections are next to each other, and then the book can be the dividing point.) Oh, the dilemmas of my overly compulsive book organization…

I knew that craziness was coming up with the big giant experiment we run twice a year, but at one point this morning I realized I could actually feel the weight of complete work-freakout-mode settling onto my shoulders. The problem is that I have a different sense of how soon something should be done than everyone else seems to.

It’s a five-day-long experiment, and I’m the one who’s actually there running and dealing with crises if things go wrong. And I think that before the experiment actually starts, we should have everything ready to go for all five days, so if any crises come up we can devote our time to them and not be worried about whether we’ll have the materials ready to run the experiment at all the next day. Everyone else seems to think that as long as we’re one day ahead of the game we’re fine, so we can just think about the day one stuff and ignore the other four. I work with a lot of very intelligent, driven people, but most of the time we all work in our separate areas and our differing styles don’t cause friction. This experiment drives me crazy every time we run it, though, and makes me want to yell at everyone around me.

I really need a job where I just never have to interact with other human beings, ever. Or I need to return to copy editing, where my only interactions involve grammar snark, which makes me happy. If only there were a copy editing job in town that wanted to pay me at least what I make now, and doesn’t care that my only qualifications are three years at the campus newspaper and 24 years of living in a grammar-freak family.

All of this is not helped by the fact that I thought my estranged father’s impending visit was next Tuesday, but I’ve recently been informed that actually they decided to drive in early and spend several days in town, so he’ll be here the day after tomorrow. Fortunately I can use the “I’m really busy and won’t have time for more than a dinner or something” excuse free of guilt, because it’s actually true. Plus, once Monday rolls around they’ll be busy getting my little brother settled into his new dorm room and doing other freshman orientation things, so they won’t have much time either.

Thank god the Toronto film festival begins almost right after the Experiment From Hell ends, so I can get the hell out of town for a week-plus and relax, see some good movies, spend time with some good friends, and just generally unwind. Because I am already way too tightly wound, and the real craziness hasn’t even started yet. All of which is a long-winded way of saying that I hope to squeeze in a journal entry here and there over the rest of the month, but it’ll be the exception rather than the rule.

I had such good intentions of writing tonight, since I was reminded that I missed my five-year journal-versary in July. And no, those entries aren’t currently available. They will be at some point, but with the format they’re in it’s a slow process uploading them. And besides, when I re-read those entries I am reminded that I was quite the idiot in many different ways at that point, so I tend not to read too many at once lest I be tempted to invent a time machine just so I can go back and yell at myself. But at some point those older entries will be online.

Meanwhile, it’s just kind of nice to remember that they were there, because I vaguely recall how new and interesting the whole thing seemed then, before everyone and their mother was doing it. (Not that I was on the vanguard of the online journalling scene or anything, I missed that by a good two years — but at that point it was just everyone doing it. The mothers hadn’t caught on yet.) And besides, I am the queen of picking up new hobbies or intending to pick up new hobbies and then forgetting all about them instantly. So it’s kind of amazing to me that I’ve kept anything going for five years, even if there have been chunks of several months at a time where I was on hiatus. Anyway, that’s what I wanted to write about, except that I was going to be eloquent or funny or at least put up my first couple of entries to both mock and appreciate them. But I am dead tired and it’s four thousand degrees in my apartment, plus I’m totally frustrated at a work situation and I know that I shouldn’t write about it publicly since it involves an undergraduate experiment participant and I suspect that I’ve got some sort of ethical obligation not to write about it in any detail.

So instead I’m mostly just popping up to say hi, and marvel briefly at the five year thing, and note once again that my writing is going to be pretty sporadic until mid-September, so if you’re not on the notify list you might want to be rather than checking back here regularly to find nothing here. Also to note that the coolest thing happened today. I was walking across campus on my way home from work, and I ran into my brother. Just walking around campus, on his way to a freshman orientation thing. Because he’s here for good. And I can just bump into him anytime, after only seeing him once since his very early toddlerhood. My baby brother! It made me very mushy and happy and I walked the rest of the way grinning from ear to ear, because it was just so neat, that that could happen. I’m really glad he’s here.

I realize that everyone who knows me already knows that I am a great big musical theatre geek, but sometimes I startle myself with my display of geekery. Like right now, where I’m at work and have my MP3 list on random shuffle. I have a few songs from the show Tick Tick Boom on this list (and yes, I know there are supposed to be some ellipses in that title, but I don’t know where.) So anyway, on comes Sunday, and I start giggling madly at my desk. This song cracks me up every time, not because it is particularly funny or a good song in and of itself, but because the tune and most of the lyrics are a play on the title song of Sunday in the Park With George, my favorite show ever. And so this is not just musical theatre geekery, but multiple levels of geekery because I’m cracking up over intertextual references between shows.

I am such a complete and total dork, it is no wonder that no one is answering my emails today. Although I know it’s working because my mother and Len are answering my emails, and yesterday Eliza got my email about Ellen Emerson White’s books. Reading this journal entry of hers I was utterly horrified to realize that a book I remember fondly from my adolescence was actually the third in a trilogy and I’d never read the first two. Curse you, crappy public library where I grew up that had a tiny YA section and couldn’t be bothered to stock the beginnings of trilogies! Clearly I must now hunt down the first two books and read them right away, and then reread the third for good measure.

Except that I also need to get started on Dreaming in Cuban because since I harassed Laura into maybe joining a book club, the least I can do is read the damn book so I can discuss it with her. And I am trying to simultaneously read Mrs. Dalloway and The Hours, which is a terrible idea all by itself because clearly I should read one first and then the other, if only I knew which order would be best. And I also need to do four thousand tons of work and then go to Canada, where I will not have time to read my own books because I will be mooching from Blake and Amy’s fabulous library instead, in between watching 20 movies in 9 days. Why are there so many good books to read, and so little time in which to do it? I need to be independently wealthy so I can just read all day. Which would probably drive me crazy in practice, but it’s a nice daydream.

Why, yes, this is a totally scattered and pointless journal entry, and it’s never going to go into the good writing hall of fame. Perhaps the “run-on sentences with crazy over-use of commas” hall of fame. But it’s amazing that I’m finding two seconds this week to write anything at all, so this will just have to do. Besides, if I weren’t rambling about this stuff I would be whining about my job, which would be annoying and also unfair because 98% of the time I love my job. Just not at this time of year. So instead, musical and book geekery. At least it’s not about the cats for a change! (Although they all continue to be insanely cute, if overly needy because I am at work all day and night this week and not spending enough time with them.)

Oh, man. Every time I sign on to Movable Type to update this journal, my poor book log stares at me pitifully and whines, “What about me? Why don’t you ever update me? I am withering and dying a slow death!” It’s really terrible. It’s not as if it should be a chore — I love reading other people’s book logs, and I really like the idea of having one of my own so I can look back at the end of the year and see what I read and what I should read more of, yet I’m terrible at keeping it up. I suck. But I finally updated it, so now I can temporarily breathe a sigh of relief and for a few days I won’t feel guilty whenever I think about updating the journal and not the book log.

Otherwise, it’s been an eventful day for two reasons. First, to get the obligatory Spot Update out of the way, I took him to the vet this afternoon and he has an almost-clean bill of health. He might have worms, so they gave him a dose of de-worming stuff and I need to give him another one in two weeks. But other than that he tested negative for feline leukemia and AIDS, and all vital signs checked out healthy and strong. He got some vaccinations and the vet confirmed my guess that he’s a neutered male, and that he’s between 1 and 2 years old. Now all that remains is to get him used to the other cats, and to see if I can find him a permanent home. I’ve got some prospects for a home although none that would be ready to take him in for several more weeks, and the cats all spent a few hours together this afternoon without bloodshed or even hissing, so I think that’s going to go well. The next couple of days will still be a cat-sequestering logistical nightmare to be sure that they maintain separate litter boxes, but then everything will be much simpler after that.

The other main event of the day was a much more intense clinic escorting day than usual, since today our clinic was the lucky target of the Operation Save America gang’s “Face the Truth” tour. Which, to be fair, although very crowded and really bad about obeying the laws about blocking the crosswalk and the clinic entrance, was actually relatively good about not following the patients and talking to them, just standing near the curb holding up signs and praying. But there were four or five times as many protestors as usual since they were coming in from around the state and nearby states to converge on our clinic, so even though they were being fairly low-key, it was still kind of crowded and crazy and overly intense. And while they were pretty good about not harassing the patients, they were not so much so about not harassing the escsorts. Especially when we were visited by a couple of relative bigwigs in the pro-life movement, both of whom were getting up in the escorts’ faces trying to get us to talk to them. We asked them not to talk to us because that’s standard operating procedure, and while we’re usually somewhat lax about it we try to be more strict when we have a big group like this, and then that got them mad and they started in with the voice-raising and the lecturing about how we’ll all burn in eternal hellfire, and all that fun stuff. Really delightful people, they were.

I’m engaged in an ongoing struggle with my issues with religion, because I know it’s not fair to have a knee-jerk negative reaction to people or situations simply for having a religious bent, when there are such varied religions and such varied ways that people interpret and practice their beliefs even within one religion. But people like these guys just don’t make it any easier for me to vanquish that knee-jerk thing I have. The really weird thing was that with these obnoxious new guys yelling at me, I found myself rather wishing that some of the regulars were over in my area instead. At least I know them. I know their quirks and which ones are likely to get into religious debates, and which ones will call me evil and which ones will tell me how much Jesus loves me, and which ones will race to beat us to an incoming patient. (And also, quite a bit about their personal lives. It’s amazing what people will gossip about even when you’re standing two feet away, once they’ve decided you might as well not exist.) They’re a familiar quantity and apparently I’ve developed an odd sort of “I don’t like you at all and I really hate a lot of the things you do and say, but you’re such a regular part of my life now that it feels weirdly wrong when you’re not actually where I expect you to be” feeling toward them. Which requires further pondering.

But I think first I should go separate the cats for a while. They’ve been running around the living room together for several hours now, and perhaps that’s enough for a first introduction.

I still think of them. People I knew, people I had known since we were children in school together, people who were friends of my parents, who died in a burning, crumbling tower one September morning while I was asleep in a hotel room in Canada.

Which isn’t to say that I think about them very often anymore, but sometimes I do. Mostly when I visit home or I talk to my mother and she tells me how things are where I grew up, how things have changed, what happened after. Or today, when I opened up the New York Times and read a review of a book about the place I grew up, the people I grew up with, what’s happened to them since. I thought I would be just fine reading it after two years, but suddenly I was crying and an hour later my throat still feels tight and my eyes are stinging.

I feel badly even expressing this much sometimes, because I know that being from a commuter area outside New York is nothing like being from New York, especially when I don’t even live in that area anymore. I lost people, but they were people I had once known or people I knew vaguely, not family members or close friends. I don’t want to be a big emotional vampire drama queen about the whole thing, so I don’t talk about it much, and when I see that skyline I don’t say a word to anyone I’m with even though it feels like a kick in the stomach every time. I don’t want to co-opt anyone else’s hurt.

I just want to say that I still think about them. I still remember. And I’m still waiting for it to stop hurting so much.

I swear I have no intention of becoming Current Events Commentary Girl. That’s just not my thing. I kind of wish it were, because I am embarrassed at how little I sometimes know about what’s going on in the world. Or how if I do know about something, chances are that I know just enough to sound like an idiot when I talk about it. So I will never be Current Events Commentary Girl. But yesterday the 9/11 anniversary was weighing on my mind, and today it’s Paul Hill. Although really Paul Hill has been weighing on some part of my mind for the last week or so, since I read his execution was coming up.

I remember I first became aware of Paul Hill around this time in 2000, when I was at the film festival in Toronto and saw a documentary called Soldiers in the Army of God. The Army of God is one of the most extremist anti-abortion groups, the ones who get involved in shootings and bombings and anthrax mailings and disseminating information on where people who work in clinics live and can be harassed and killed. Paul Hill had pretty strong ties to these people, and was a personal hero to a lot of them. He was interviewed at several points during the documentary, and he was sort of blank-looking, and genial in a creepy way as he talked about how he’d planned and carried out the killing of a doctor and an escort, and how he hoped to inspire others. It was really chilling. Then I sort of forgot about him for a few years, until I started seeing news articles last week about his impending execution. And it was chilling all over again in a whole new way, because when these articles talk about how he’s going to be seen as a martyr and how this may inspire new waves of clinic violence — that’s me they’re talking about, now.

Not that my little clinic would be a likely target for anyone, as it’s just not located well for an attack and our regular protestors are fairly calm. But it’s certainly not out of the question either. I do think about that almost every time I get ready to go downtown and do my rotation at the clinic. I can’t think about it while I’m there because I would never get done what I’m there to do. I’m there to make a possibly difficult decision as easy as possible on the women who have to make it, and I have to be confident and reassuring and cheerful and helpful, not anxious and wondering whether today is the day one of the crazies decides to take a shot at one of our doctors or nurses. So once I get there, I don’t worry about it anymore. But I think about it on Saturday mornings when the alarm goes off, just for a minute, and it’s scary.

I’ve had a couple of people ask me if I’m going to stop for a while, but I didn’t have to give it any serious thought. You don’t really get into this kind of thing if you’re only willing to do it when it’s safe, because it’s never really entirely safe. There are a lot of very intelligent, educated, reasonable people who oppose abortion, but there are also a lot of dangerous crazies and you never know when one of them is going to think God wants you blown away.

There aren’t many things I would die for. I have my beliefs about a lot of things and they’re strong, but they’re not that strong. There’s just the three things. I would die for my little sister. I would die for my mother. And if it were my turn, I would die at my clinic on any given Saturday. But I would certainly prefer not to die protecting my legal rights, and I would prefer no one else die protecting my legal rights, and I am a little worried about what might be coming.

And on another, different yet equally depressing note, I’m a little disapointed in myself for feeling a bit happy that that man is no longer breathing. I am absolutely anti-death-penalty in every possible situation, and I don’t think it’s right that he was executed. But nonetheless, whatever my rational side thinks about all that, some part of me is just happy he’s dead.

How’s that for a terribly depressing entry? I promise I will write something cheerful tomorrow to leave you guys with before I vanish for my vacation. If nothing else, I’ll put up cute kitty pictures or something, just so my poor web page isn’t sitting here all death-obsessed for the next week and a half.

Man. I totally bailed on that promise to update with something cheerful and full of warm fuzzies before I went on vacation, didn’t I? I had such good intentions, too. At any rate, vacation is over and I am now back at work. Which is partly a sad thing because I had a lovely time and saw lots of great movies and had fun with Blake and Amy and Delphine and generally enjoyed Toronto, but partly a good thing because it is lovely to have my cats back and sleep in my own bed. Plus the last couple of days, apart from the occasional torrential downpour, have been lovely cool sunny fall weather, which is the best kind of weather as far as I’m concerned. It’s