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.
20
Oct 03
The shifting balances of power
I found a few good articles over at Antiwar.com on the shifting of different alliances and relationships among the major world powers. No one really seems to know for sure which way the world is headed, but it seems clear that the role of the United States as the ‘sole remaining superpower’ (something you hear in American media) is increasingly being challenged more and more openly by the advocates of multilateralism. In response, the US foreign policy establishment has acted with a flurry of diplomatic and institutional activity, in addition to the usual implicit warnings against opposing the US.
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Describing EU integration as “irreversible” in the paper released Monday, Beijing marveled at Europe’s 25 percent to 35 percent share of the global economy and its projected 450 million population once it expands into the former communist bloc next year.
The “white paper” follows a flurry of Sino-European ventures, including the Galileo global satellite system, described as a direct challenge to the American Global Positioning System monopoly in space.
The two sides are also working together on nuclear research.
France and Germany have been pushing hardest for closer ties with China, hoping to cash in on a lucrative market but also to develop a strategic alliance as a counterweight to American power after the diplomatic trauma of the Iraq war.
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Jones has launched a counter-offensive to European plans for their own defence structures. Last week he inaugurated the “Nato Response Force” . The NRF, which will eventually be 21,000 strong, contains elite units from many Nato countries, ready to be deployed to troublespots anywhere in the world at just five days’ notice. The force has its own dedicated battleships, warplanes, troops, logistics and intelligence. Jones refers to it as “global”, ready to take on the challenges of the 21st century – primarily terrorist threats.
The NRF’s readiness to act in just five days, however, will depend on Nato politicians also being able to take decisions quickly – and given the furious rows over Iraq, which did not even involve Nato as an organisation, that could pose problems. But here Jones has an even more interesting plan. At present, Nato takes all decisions unanimously. “In future,” Jones told me, “ nations will probably have to consider whether the will of the majority can continually be stymied by the opposition of one or two nations.”
19
Oct 03
All done
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.
17
Oct 03
Moving
I’m moving to a new webhost to save myself some money. Things may act a little funny over the next few days as I switch the DNS over to his name servers.
16
Oct 03
New to me
The wikipedia gang has some new projects I just came across: wikiquote, wikibooks, and wiktionary. It is good to see this sort of thing.
11
Oct 03
Just so you know
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.
10
Oct 03
Sarah
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.
06
Oct 03
Dear diary
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: