Year of the Mange

I had a dream this morning that the Social Security administration was indirectly responsible for my mother being placed on a list to be shot into space and used as a proto-chemical/genetic test-dummy. Her memory was going to be erased a few times a day (this being the part that bothered me) so my brother and I donned a van as disguise among futuristic cars and went about trying to save her naive and good natured self from said fate. The entire city was built around the Sonic-esque launch pad. The future was dirty.

On an entirely different note, yesterday I received some experimental cereal. I've included a picture below. It arrived in a box in a box with a questionnaire. Upon reflection I now vaguely remember being contacted by some kind of market research group but the cereal was almost wholly unanticipated. It seems benign enough but the ingredients list contains all kinds of questionable things (chocolate, caramel, toffee and malt among them) - not exactly my Honey Bunches of Oats with Almonds. As you can see I am in test group "C".



My contemplation of when to assay said cereal has been interrupted by my current illness (read: unwillingness to ingest anything, bar none, much less something made with anything more complex than grain staples, let alone products complicated in extraction, compilation and maintenance (emusifiers) at which thought my stomach contracts violently in concurrence). Phil was sick last Thursday, in a kind of "every organ/discrete segment of my body is trying to die simultaneously" way. He was throwing up every 20 minutes or so for hours, wearing four layers with the heat up above 100 degrees in the room, shivering and trying to still his soft tissue contractions. It was quite sad to see and in spite of my inherent flight response when it comes to stomach illness I managed to care for his sorry state as best I could. Having survived the ensuant sleepless night, GYST Emergency Meeting and weekend and having had mild illness throughout, I presumed I was in the clear. Oh but no. 'Twas not to be. So now here I am, compounding my ailments with stress and guilt at having missed classes yet again due to illness and knowing full well I'll be gone the better part of next week.

The upsides to this: I managed to convince myself to avoid classes today while awake and anxiously feverish last night so I didn't end up vomiting in class or making myself worse as I have been. Also I managed to finish Book of Days which I'd never gotten the chance to see to the end and Moby Dick, from my freshman class, which I had clandestinely left hanging at the last two chapters and failed to reach the end of due to overexertion, merely faking reflective awe and somber post-Melville ruement during the discussion (amazing to me that these English Lit discussions can be argued without actually ever spoiling the unread chapter for you).

Phil is gainfully employed and making a surprising amount of money with far better benefits than his last job offered. He is also working part time (weekends mostly) at Phoenicia due in part to his interest in the food preparation and the opportunity to expand some of their business prospects and in part to their inability to read English and obvious need of aid in the tax-filing and overall management department. For now he's content to explore their complex produce-barter system and try to pick up some Greek.

Per the title: If you ever find yourself feeling secure in your knowledge of your neighborhood and surrounding area, its people and customs and resources, you might consider the friendly wake up call offered by Oriental Markets everywhere. I happily took some friends there, excited about the exploration (as I always am) then walked around uncomfortably, trying to navigate the foreign display structure and avoid the inscrutable gazes of every other person in the store, being the only (and obvious) non-Asian there. While my friends converse about various delicacies and shipments and ware I peruse the shelves and freezers, in my class-taught open minded way thinking things like "Ah! Note fish milk sacks. I might like those if I were to try them.", "I've never seen so many old, dead fish hanging in the open air" or "I wonder if the squid things go with the blob-sauce or the spiky fruit, or if their combination is distasteful or expressly taboo". Naturally these thoughts take me down the road of cultural considerations and musings on what my palette would fancy had I been raised in somewhere more coastal. I fleetingly consider the prospect of purchasing something that looks as though it might conform to FDA standards before realizing I have no idea how to prepare it. My friends find their New Year-related gear and we go. This becomes an almost-yearly tradition for me.
Unable to avoid the small generational voice of my peers that flies, cock-eyed, into the side of my inner-cranium in a repetitive and ornery bid for pity sometimes, I yielded and secured some Pocky.

This has been the long and rambling discourse of a heat-addled and infirm mind. Please discard at your convenience.

Vet Pic

A very unhappy Dakken and Sanura at their latest vet appointment.

Extrata

I was gifted today with the ability to discern the exact taxa of my density. It lasted but a moment before flitting into a nearby tree as all bright things do but I saw it, and no one can prove otherwise.

I may not be a special kind of dense. While I am not dense in the many ways that most commonly jump to mind and wave their hands distractingly (the ironic self-denial dense, the left-the-oven-on dense, the tactless malsocialized why-can't-you-make-our-lives-a-little-easier-by-practicing-your-narcissistic-absent-minded-mayhem-somewhere-else dense, the dear god why dense or the humble elder dense, the run-of-the-mill born-this-way vanilla dense..) etc. I am certainly in the absent-minded-professor-sans-pants category somewhere. I am the kind of dense that thoroughly enjoys the NPR programming about Martin Luther King all the way through my 30 minute drive to UCR only to realize in the parking lot that my school is the only one that doesn't recognize national holidays.
(As a side note I do feel the need to mention that I continued enjoying the programming most of the way back as well.)
This would have been a boon had I recognized the situation before pulling myself back out of bed into negative temperatures and stressing about the time all the way there.

My cats are sick and sneezing nasty all over my homework, in turns. My room mate is about to become a cop (wont that make our neighbors feel secure) and I'm already behind on my work, dehydrated, exhausted and confusing my calendar. I just rushed back the my dorm room to the realization that I had the wrong day and time. Today would have been relaxing had I not thought it tomorrow.

I had a revelation today that I simply must share. Most creatures that metabolize proteins are left with nitrogenous waste in the form of ammonia. Ammonia is quite caustic and soluble making it dangerous for more complex creatures to keep around so most of us convert it to urea or uric acid. Many marine creatures also encounter the problem of having a lower overall body salinity than the surrounding fluid, said condition being otherwise known as hypotonic. This creates an environment in which it is difficult to conserve water. Long story short sharks in particular deal with this combination of problems by storing their nitrogenous waste in their tissues. Meaning, if you eat shark meat, you're also eating shark urine. I've been told that soaking the meat in strips for 4-8 hours in salt water and then another 4 hours in milk will mollify the taste but the scent will remain. This is just one of the many (retroactively reaching) reasons I do not consume sea food with the exception of chowder (though even that is a stretch for me).

Aside from my continuity errors things seem to be progressing at a jaunty pace. Phil still continues to make me nervous by walking down the hall and making statements like "Well behaved women rarely make me dinner!" in response to motivational door stickers, exampla gratia. I've rediscovered Skype and am waiting for someone other than handsomly-voiced British pranksters to call. I'm wondering how I'll be procuring food tonight but that's just another exciting element in the fun-filled action-packed adventure that is my life. I realized today that all of my frustration about not having time to exercise really boils down to nothing when I'm hacking up little bits of detritus in the morning. Sometimes we need reminding. Anyway, enough with the ranting. I was going to share with you a touching and heartwarming story about an FBI agent the government encouraged to participate in a Klan killing of a woman during the Montgomery march but I decided we're all broken enough for today.

I shall conclude by posting some pictures my mother's friend took while they were in Switzerland, which I found noteworthy.

Carry on.

Or...the pictures will be inaccessible so I will post one of my mate squishing my cat. Whatever.

A Vegas Halloween

I was able to speak to Erin last night, which was nice, because I thought she'd be in Jordan by now, trying to figure out why everyone kept trying to sell her mish-mish. She related a rather gruesome medical tale (and all of her medical experiences are gruesome as far as I can tell, she's living in a Lovecraftian wet dream) about one of the many cats that have fallen ill recently.
I derive a sick and perverse pleasure from hearing Erin tell these kinds of stories, even though this one happened to be particularly un-funny, because I can read her expression even online. Her expressions when it came to this story fell into the category of particularly traumatized and reminded me of the time we stayed in what had to be the third-most-shady-hotel-in-Vegas (which, for Vegas, is saying something) when I managed to inadvertently traumatize the entirety of my company when I recounted what I considered to be an amusing childhood story.
The story itself is about my family's run in with Satanists on a trip to upstate New York. Though the growing expressions of disbelief and horror on my companions faces assured me that the story was not, as I had previously considered, funny, per se, Erin's expressions were. There were a few times I had to stop and laugh and then reassure everyone that I was in fact relating a true story, as corroborated by my parents, and not laughing at them so much as at their reactions. In any case, that experience has given me cause to put the facts of the story down here, such that if anyone might find it interesting or for whatever reason care to refer to it, it would be available. What follows is completely and verifiably true in so much as anything can be.

When I was 5 years of age we took a road trip (as was common in our family) up to Upstate New York to see my grandmother on my fathers side, as well as to tour around the countryside a bit. On one day there we were in the extremus of upstate, away from the region in which my grandmother actually lives and were planning on staying in a bed and breakfast my father had booked ahead of time. It had been an unexpectedly long drive due to weather complications and when we found the bed and breakfast in question we were all quite tired. We went up to the door to check in and a woman missing her two front teeth on both jaws answered. She invited us in but warned us that they didn't have any room for the night, they were booked solid. My father protested that he had made the arrangements in advance but she said she knew another hotel that had vacancy and she would give them a call. But first, she insisted on showing my parents around as her husband was an artist and she wanted to show them his studio. We were all invited but after seeing the first few pieces of women, missing their front teeth, being tortured in various ways, my parents opted to leave the kids outside with grandma. Apparently most of the rooms were full to the ceiling with similarly foreboding images of dead or dying people with the occasional sculpture of menacing animals. We all waited out back while the woman called her friend, beside a pit containing what could have been nothing other than an alter, covered with pentagrams. My mother mentioned that it seemed strange that not only had they not met the husband who was supposedly there somewhere, having toured the entire house, but that there hadn't been a single sign of life or piece of luggage suggesting that anyone else was actually staying in any of the guest bedrooms in this supposedly inundated hotel.

A side note that's probably not worth mentioning but that I found strange when my mother brought it up when telling me the story later (as I was five at the time, a lot of this story has been narrated to me after the fact by different people who were involved on some level) was that we stopped by a park to stretch our legs at some point before proceeding to the next hotel. We were all quite tired and the storm was closing in on us and my parents wanted to be sure we had zero energy upon arrival. While in this park my mother claims that one of us found and brought to her a small necklace with an amulet on it. The amulet itself was a pentagram on one side, with a Third Reich symbol on the other. My mother took it away and put it in her purse. The part of this that piqued my interest when related to me later was that she could never find it later. The likelihood of it simply falling out of the purse pocket she had placed it in was, as she put it, "quite unlikely".

We arrived at the next bed and breakfast to be greeted by a different woman, also conspicuously missing her two front teeth on both sides. It was about this time that my grandmother mentioned that she had read a lot of articles recently about tourists being killed by some cult of satanists or somesuch in this area. Great. Well the storm was now upon us, we were all exhausted and there was no where else to stay that we could find anywhere near here. My dad decided we would make due with whatever they had to offer here. What they had to offer was a slightly-renovated barn. During this time the woman kept inviting my brother (3) and I into the house saying she had some sweets and wouldn't we like to meet her kitties? She made it clear however that my parents were not welcome into the house. We were herded away into the barn and told not to talk to the lady. Once inside my father, who was by this time a bit creeped out, went about checking the beds and securing the one room barn unit. The windows had no coverings whatsoever and the doors had no locks. We placed pillows from the couches in the window frames and my dad grabbed a dresser against one wall to block the door. When he went to move the dresser he discovered it was on wheels, which were completely silent. He also noticed that the wall behind it moved a little when he shifted the dresser. When he scrutinized the wall he found a seam. He pushed on the wall and it gave way, two invisible doors opening outwards into the night and just outside was a dark colored van which had been backed up to the opening. Livid, my dad went about rearranging all the furniture in the room, stacking the heaviest against the outward swinging doors and moving the mobile dresser with various loud objects behind it against the main door. When we'd completed this and were all starting to settle down, the woman brought us fresh baked blueberry muffins. Now as I mentioned before I don't remember much of this trip, but this is one element I have a vivid recollection of. With the inclement weather and the rush to find a place to stay, complimented by the lack of restaurants (nigh anything) in the area, we hadn't had what one might consider a proper meal. When you're five, dinner is very important. The muffins were fresh baked and smelled heavenly. I wanted one more than I wanted anything else in life. However, presuming (probably correctly) that they were poisoned, my mother absolutely forbid us from even going near them. I was so angry. I went to bed hungry and was convinced I would never forgive my mother for her cruel denial of nourishment. Only two things happened that night, that I can recall. My parents slept very lightly, when at all, as you might imagine. My sister woke us all with a blood curdling scream around 1 AM for reasons unknown, as she was usually a very quiet baby. When my parents got up and milled for about an hour my mother became very still at one point, then called me father over and had a long, whispered conversation. What I would later learn was that the picture hanging to one side of the door that during the daylight seemed to be logs in a recently extinguished fire pit and a tranquil forest scene was by night unmistakably burning corpses with a hooded smoky figure looming over the forest and the lake. We woke up the next morning, packed up early and waited for the lady to get up so we could pay and leave. While my parents were packing the bags the woman gave both my brother and I small wooden cats carved into the form of napkin holders, each a different color, that she had written little notes on. As my father was paying my mother loaded us into the car and began kicking the gravel around on the drive absent mindedly. The woman came over to say goodbye and wave to us with her gapped grin and my mother noticed that she was trying to discreetly recover the tiles that were covered by the gravel. Before driving off my mother uncovered one of the tiles and she claims it was the same pentagram with Third Reich symbol within it that she had seen a similar version of in the park, prompting her to notice, as we drove away, that it had been removed from her purse.

People listening to this story seemed appalled at the fact that I still have that little wooden cat in my room back in Illinois. Someone asked if I had purified it with sage or...some such thing. I don't know anything about mysticism but I can tell you it still sits on a shelf as a token to remind me of the weird lady with the cats, or as I know the story nowadays, my near death experience involving Satanists in Upstate New York.

Radix

So.

Let us for the moment ignore the fact that whereas I hate this weblog/livejournal nonsense I have been convinced to partake if only for the sake of those I know as friends. While I may have a more realistic journal (detailing nothing noteworthy nor conducive to blackmail I assure you) in another location, the presence of this one is straightforward. It will be kept strictly for the mundane exchange of common information and to assuage my fear of missing out on the recent fad experience of vomiting all over a new and exciting commons - the internet. Here (should you end up here and I'm not sure why one would) you might find some beguiling resources on occasion, a story or two, a few inscrutible pictures and not a few reasons why life is not worth living.

But Cat, you say in earnest solicitude, how can you possibly begin chronicling your witty daily banter now after all these years of profound and comical effusion? Well now I understand your concern but I'll gently remind you that is not what this is for. Aside from being a burdensome distraction this blog-thingy will conveniently serve as a means to move files around and display images to people I don't really want plowing through my personal albums. Additionally, it's a helluva lot easier than typing the same information numerous time to multiple people. Anyway, I'll curtail my attempted disclaimers at that.

I decided to cave one night this past October when I was both mistaken for a transsexual hooker and given a cat that thinks it's a bird.

This is very much like drowning in cotton.