Willful disobedience

The cat has become insolent.  I don’t have a clue what’s gotten into her lately, but she’s being bad for the first time since we’ve had her.

She’s not allowed on the table.  Yet, when I come home I see her all cuddled up in a nest she’s made from the tablecloth, curled next to a place mat.  When I yell at her, she has the audacity to look at me with an expression that can only be described as befuddled before sauntering off  the table.

I have been finding her on the kitchen counter, again giving me that “what, you don’t like this?” look.  When the kitchen window is open and the birds that live right outside are chirping, I don’t get all that mad.  I mean, I make her get down but I understand that a front row seat to bird buffet is hard for a cat to resist.  But last night I came in from the back porch and passed by the kitchen on the way to the stairs and saw her leap from the counter.  The non-window counter.  What was she doing?  Staring at the coffee maker?  Licking the dishes in the sink?  I don’t get it.

If she’s not doing that, she’s openly taunting me.  She hops up into a dining room chair (allowed), stares me right in the eye, and then reaches out a paw to the table.  This causes me to menacingly say her name.  At that point, she tries to play it off.  “Oh!  No no no, I was just stretching, you see.  Not doing anything bad at all.”  And then she tests my limits by stretching toward the table a couple more times until I actually yell at her.

I spend a lot of time yelling, it seems.  I remember saying once that yelling at my old cat, Koda, made me sound like James Brown.  It was a constant, “Ow! Get Down!” funky groove that echoed through that condo.

I can see the cat, right this moment, all adorable and napping on the couch.  She is so deceptively innocent.  And everyone loves her.  Guests threaten to steal her, especially once she’s laid a heavy flirt on them by rolling onto her back and gazing at them in adoration.  No one ever listens when I warn them of her trickery.

But soon I’ll head to bed and not long after that she’ll wander in, prance along my hip, and purr at me.  She will crawl all over me and chatter, convincing me I’m her favorite person in the entire world.  All will be forgiven.  Until tomorrow, when I find her making eyes at the table once more.  Horrible cat.

What we do

Some of our best conversations have taken place in the front seat of a car while we wind through back roads after midnight.  Too bored to stay home and too poor to go out, we just drive.  Taking curves at top speed, racketing through the dark with the music up and wind buffeting our hair until we need help later to fix the knots . . . I am happiest here.

Intentionally getting lost with her has become a favorite pastime for years.  If we have even a glancing knowledge of the area, we can always find our way back without fail.  No maps, no GPS—we rely on intuition and dumb luck.  And if we fuck it up, we turn around and find what looks familiar.

I play with her hair as she keeps one hand on my leg.  I tickle her at stop lights and we sing songs that make us gasp from giggling.

So we drive on and on, and once the singing has petered out (me with my constant harmonizing, her with her B-52s and Muppet-inspired shrieks) the talking starts.  Everything is covered eventually.  We have pored over our pasts, our families, our greatest fears, our triumphs.  Here is where we talk about our future and what we want.  An easy thing to do with infinite miles stretching out before us.  We spent our sixth anniversary in the front seat of a car, trying once more to land somewhere after fleeing a storm.  We have laughed and wept here, fought and loved.   We have warred and reconciled;  confessed and made grand declarations.

And every time I look over, catching her face in the brief gleam of someone else’s headlights, I realize just how great it really is.  Because there are few things better than tearing through the black skies and whispering back and forth, “just a little further.”

Finally!

It finally happened, I got a second reader.

For those of you not in the know with academic bullshit, I need at least two readers for my Master’s thesis in order to graduate.  I’ve had a first reader in the bag for months now, but no one, and I mean NO ONE else in my department was remotely interested in what I’m doing.

What I’m doing, by the way, is a musical/phonological analysis of poetry by Langston Hughes.  Same thing I presented at the conference back in November.  And, gosh, my phonology, syntax, semantics, and sociolinguistics professors just weren’t interested in this metrics stuff.

So my advisor and first reader, M, actually started shopping around the department for me.  Which is really sweet.  And yesterday morning I had a meeting with a professor and he agreed to be my second reader!!  He claims to be fascinated by what I’m doing, but warned me that he doesn’t know exactly what I’m talking about.  My response: “Great! That means you can call me out if I don’t explain something clearly.”

He’s very cool, he already gave me great suggestions, and he’s fine with me submitting in the summer.  And he really likes some of the ideas I have for further-reaching applications of this music notation method that I’m using.  So double yay.

I sent myself a message

I was having an odd dream early this morning.  I don’t remember the details, but C was in it and as we clutched each other in a panic, she said “We’ll never jump very high or far when the ground is so easy to stand on.”

I woke up and couldn’t quit thinking about it.  Before I fully woke up and forgot it, I grabbed my phone and texted it to myself.

Maybe it means something huge and important, maybe it’s symbolic.  Getting beyond a comfort level?  Taking chances?  I don’t know.  I haven’t thought about the deeper meaning yet.  But it’s interesting.

It begins

The great decluttering of 2009 has started.  Yesterday C and I bought a new tv stand:

Isn’t it pretty?  This replaced our giant metal shelf (the kind you find in restaurant kitchens) that we’ve had for years and years.  Great shelf, it’s come in handy, but it tends to attract all means of clutter and crap.  Also, we just signed another year lease on our apartment and we figured we might as well make our space look more the way we want it to.

However, getting rid  of the massive holding space of the giant shelf meant throwing out a lot of crap.  And by that I mean ditching TONS and tons of VHS tapes.  All the home-taped stuff went in the trash (6 seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (mine), Designing Women (C), Cagney and Lacey (also C), and random movies).  The VHS movies we bought are going to Goodwill, except for the few things we haven’t been able to find on DVD.  The rationale is two-fold.
1) We haven’t even hooked up the stupid VCR in over 2 years, yet we’ve persisted in dragging it and all the tapes with us every time we move
2) We have Netflix and a Roku player to watch instant Netflix on tv so, really? Just ditch the stupid tapes.

And wow! It looks so much better.  C and I put it together last night in just under 3 hours.  This was no small feat, as the stupid, whatchamacalits, the screws that go into a turning thing and you have to precisely lower a piece with these screws poking out of it into the other piece with the circle things and everything has to be lined up perfectly or nothing will work . . . that was not always going so well.  And then today we dismantled the shelf, sorted through everything, and transferred the tv and components.  Amazing!!

The only problem is that now we have this giant expanse of blank wall, which makes us crazy.  For those of you that remember apartment living, white walls are evil.  If you’re not allowed to paint, the only way to combat the oppression of all that soulless blank space is to fill it with art.  Nothing we own is really working in that space whatsoever.  It’s very annoying.  So the next purchase will definitely be taking care of that.  I’m hoping for something metal and circular, like wrought iron.  But I don’t want it to be all cutesy and overly swirly, I don’t want our living room to scream “Hey, can you tell how much we like Pier 1 and World Market?” I mean, we DO, but I don’t want to advertise it.  My favorite wall decoration is a big old piece of wood with the New Orleans riverfront on it, showing the St. Louis Cathedral in the background, and below are all the flags that flew over the city.  It’s beat to hell, looks old, and I love it to death.  My parents got it when I was 8 and I’ve coveted it ever since.  Christmas of 2007 they gave it to me as the ultimate present ever ever.  It will be with me until I die.

In the same vein, we also have a great big mirror with a nice wooden frame, red morrocan sconces with stretched, henna-dyed goat skin, and a series of pictures by Harriet Blum (she takes photos of Lousiana landscapes and tints them with watercolors).  So what else could I put up in this space?  Ideas or tips on where to find deals are more than welcome and appreciated.

Next up on the decluttering plan is books: we have a lot and we’re finally going to get rid of them.  This is asking a lot of me, but I will make myself do it.  The reign of the packrats will end!