Letter Never Sent

Sarah is almost a new cat. It’s really weird and I just keep looking at her in gaping awe. Over the last two days she’s really turned around. Last night I noticed her actually eating pieces of her food instead of just sickily licking it and tonight she was gobbling it down with gusto. She would fish a large chunk out of the bowl onto the ground and then would bite off smaller pieces, toss back her head, and swallow it. I got down on my knees and watched her. I knew she was feeling better when I pulled up and she actually ran and bounced over to my car instead of walking like an arthritic old mummy. Is this where they get that adage about cats having nine lives? I’m ashamed to admit it, but at certain points I had given consideration to putting her to sleep. I’m so glad I didn’t. Let’s hope she stays this way. I may still need to have her teeth removed to prevent anything else like this from happening again.

I’ve actually moved webhosts. It’s done. Finally. A good friend of mine at work runs his own hosting business on the side and it’s actually going to be saving me some money. That is a good thing. Anyway, if you need a place to host your website for around 8-10$ a month, he’s the guy to talk to. I can vouch for him personally as he sits right next to me at work. If you like what he’s got tell him I sent you and he’ll probably give me a few free months. He even lets me pay via paypal so I don’t have to dick around with automatic credit card debits.

I’m feeling better. Whatever happens with Sarah will happen and we will deal with it together. I know she can’t live forever. If I can get her to eat more I think everything will be okay for a while. She pecked a little today but still isn’t eating enough.

I’m not dealing well with my cat being sick. She is sick and I don’t know how bad, but it really worries me. I don’t know if I can handle it. I feel like I’m doing a bad job and she’s going to die. I know this is my mind exaggerating things, but that is the way I think. Last week, I noticed that she had lost some weight and so I took her to the vet. Apparently, her mouth problems flared up again making several of her teeth infected and she was having trouble eating as a result. The vet wanted to have several of her teeth removed at a cost of six hundred to a thousand dollars. This would be preceded by an ultrasound to check her heart to see if her pre-existing heart murmur condition would allow her to be put under anesthesia during the procedure to remove the teeth as well as a series of blood tests to check for liver and kidney damage at the additional cost of four to five hundred dollars making the ground total somewhere in the neighborhood of 1000-1500 dollars. This was not even counting the cost of the initial visit. The alternative, which I’ve opted for in the interim, is to keep her on a ‘pulse’ therapy of antibiotics every two weeks to keep infection at bay.

At any rate, I’m really starting to feel overwhelmed. She doesn’t seem to want to eat much anymore and seems so listless. She comes up to me and seems to want something but I can’t tell what it is. I have to keep her on this special high-fat anorexic diet so she can put on some weight before any type of surgery, as well as shoot pills down her throat twice a day before she claws me.

Tonight, I came home from work and fed her and sat down in my chair so she could jump up on my lap. She kept trying to come closer to brush my face and purred. She seemed so gaunt. I just thought about how I am so bad at dealing with this type of thing: with people being sick or dying, with the possibility that someone or something you care about can just wither before you until they’re just a pair of distant watery eyes set in a sack of bones, how death treats no one with dignity or respect, not only taking life but slowly leeching and draining it. It also made me think about how at my grandmother’s funeral, when the rest of my family was crying and clutching each other that I stood off to the side by myself and beat back any sign or stirring of emotion, because caring means accepting this harsh reality and I had no strength to accept that. Love means allowing yourself to be truly vulnerable to pain and loss. I can think of few things I find more scary than that, and yet the alternative is a life distant from others and alone which is sometimes what I think of the life I choose. I’m just afraid that when I unlock that door it will fly off its hinges and everything I try so hard to keep standing will fall down around me.

I’m sorry I have not written in a while. I feel like I’ve been so busy running around and doing things I can’t remember the next day. It’s been of those week-long periods where everything starts to stack up: laundry, errands, neglected friendships. The to-do list gets way out of hand.

Yesterday seemed to start off sucky but ended up nicely. Due to lack of sleep from dogsitting Frankie, the cutest golden retriever in the world, over at Rachelle’s house the night before I was feeling mopey and lethargic. I just wanted to sleep all day. There had been plans to go to Enchanted Rock and do the outdoorsy thing, but no one really felt up to it being sleepy and bone tired. And, it was getting on into the afternoon which would turn it into an all day affair. I called Sab to tell him I didn’t feel like going and laid down in bed with my face in the pillow and moaned some more to myself.

Sab called later to see if I wanted to go shopping since he needed some new black pants and black shirts for his new job so we went down to the outlet mall for a little bit. On the way back we both complained about how much our hair needed cutting and he offered to cut my hair since he had a key to the salon. It was cool being the only one there. I remember this conversational moment when I was getting shampooed where I said something about how people look different when they’re lying with their face looking up and he said something about how people look different when their face is looking down. I looked up at him and he DID look different. When you think about how gravity affects your face you realize how your face is really made up of little chunks of muscle attached with fibrous tissue to the super-structure of your head. It’s creepy to think about how the muscles underneath move when someone is smiling at you.

After the haircut he said I needed to clean up my eyebrow bushiness a little and offered to do it for me. He busted out the tweezers and went to work. I kept wincing and tearing up at which point he stopped and said, “Get your eyebrows plucked LIKE A MAN!”.

Later, Jody and I went out to dinner and saw the new Richard Linklater movie, School of Rock. It was AWESOME. Nothing really innovative, but incredibly enjoyable. I’m a sucker for well-done movies involving children at the center. At at least 2-3 points I laughed and cried at the same time. Yes, Virginia. I am a sap.

Here are a few things I’ve come across that are worth mentioning:

MaryAnn and her husband, Eric, just had a daughter. Welcome to this crazy mixed up, wonderful world, Sarah!

Jody and I went to Oklahoma this weekend and I did and experienced a lot of fun and interesting things. Oklahoma was a lot less desolate than I had imagined. I always thought it would be more treeless and flat for some reason. It was very green and charming. There are native-american casinos all along the highways and many things like gas stations are named after different tribes or inspired by native american cultures. Here’s a list of a few things I particularly enjoyed:

– Seeing the milky way stretching from one end of the dark horizon to the other like a cloudy ring. I had never seen it like this before.

– Glowing firefly larvae dotting the rim of a pond at night. When I would step closer to look they would stop glowing. I finally detected a couple of them with my flashlight. Apparently, they feed almost exclusively on worms, snails, and slugs so I assume they were there to find food in the soggy ground.

– Fishing in the cool, clean air and watching the sun come up over the horizon. I hadn’t been fishing
in years.

Michael came to visit Austin and we got to hang out a bit. He’s really Susan’s friend, but I got to know him over im and spent some time with him while he was here. He’s a very nice and funny guy. Here we are at Hill’s Cafe:

Last night I was able to get off work to attend the bachelor party or whatever of a friend of mine I worked with at Fedex. We met at this pool hall over on Airport Blvd, the one I always thought looked super-seedy from the outside. Inside, it wasn’t so seedy but dim and smokey. I was under the impression initially that despite tradition there were to be no strip clubs, strippers or anything strip-related going on that night which really for some reason annoyed me. Maybe because it stunk of puritanism or matrimonial repression. Like most people I have mixed feelings on the subject of nude dancers, however my contrary nature keeps these feelings smothered and my justifications well defended. So after a few hours of playing pool, I started to get bored and tried to build up the necessary resolve among the group of mostly married or engaged men to browbeat the groom-to-be into going to the Yellow Rose. I was pretty soused by this time so I felt in the right frame of mind to do some brow-beating. Luckily, once the momentum started he just buckled. It helped that this guy, a relative or good friend of the bride, offered to pay for everyone’s cover.

It was fun. This same guy kept paying for everyone to have lap dances. He kept saying it was a wedding present. Do you send a thank you note for that sort of thing?

One thing that was weird was that I kept running into people I knew at the strip club like this dancer I had met at IHOP one night while eating with some people after work. She was drunk and eating by herself so we invited her over to sit with us. This sounds weird and it was weird. She seemed to be one of those people who’s lived the wild life for a number of years. She had that smoker voice and a touch of the sunned out, washed out look. She wasn’t doing too bad for thirty-six. Anyway, I saw her again which really isn’t that big of a surprise since she told me she worked there. I also saw this girl I used to work with at Hollywood Video when I first moved to Austin. At the time she was sixteen and still in high school and I was eighteen and had just started college at UT. It was weird to see her some eight years later all grown up and womanly. She was there with her boyfriend, and they were leaving soon on a trip to England. I talked to her for a few minutes which is all the time you can really expect in such a weird situation and after so many years.