Month: April 2008

So, in cleaning my room the other day, I found my old journals from high school and beyond. I decided I’d read through them one last time and then burn them, because believe me, there’s nothing in there that needs to be left to posterity.

Last night I was reading the last one, the one that ended sometime in 1994, and there’s a lot of crap in there, but there were a few decent bits of writing that interested, at least, me. Since I have nothing else to babble about, here’s a blast from the past for y’all.

July 25, 1994.
Not much going on here. I finished the latest John Grisham book, which probably should have been shortened by about 200 pages. But I liked the ending. It, basically, was about this lawyer’s last-ditch efforts to save a man on Death Row, who by the way was his grandfather. It’s funny: I consider myself to be an intense liberal, but when it comes to the Death Penalty, I’m all for it. I think Charles Manson should die, as well as his flunkies who performed the murders, and I think Jeffrey Dahmer should die, and basically anyone who, with malice aforethought (if that’s the term) killed someone. In fact, I think people who are legally insane should still be sentenced to death, because what are we going to do? Medicate them and send them out on the streets to stop taking their medication and go psycho again? If I were Jeffrey Dahmer, I’d want to die. In fact, I’d kill myself.

If I were ever sentenced to life in prison (and this is harmless speculation, because I’d never do anything to get myself that kind of sentence, unless it was kill Linda Gray [I do not know why I wanted Linda Gray dead.]), I would, one way or the other, kill myself. I can’t believe people can even make it through a couple of years, let alone decades, in prison. I’m given to introspection, but even I don’t want to know myself that well.

I finished reading Dave Barry’s latest book. The guy cracks me up, although I don’t think his books are the kind you should concentrate on reading all at one time, because the utter silliness of some of his stuff tends to overwhelm you. It’s the kind of book you should leave next to your bed and read one chapter at night, to make you laugh before you drift off to sleep. The thing that kills me, though, is that he’s as good at writing serious stuff as funny.

One of the last columns in the book dealt with the time his son was hit by a car, and how from the time your child is born, you’re overwhelmed with love for him or her. And it’s true. Sometimes when I look at Danielle – and she’s only five – I think, who are you? Where did you learn this and this? I’m your mother, and I’m supposed to know you, but there are times, kid, when you take me so much by surprise that it scares me. I don’t ever want to make Dani feel worthless. I don’t ever want to make her feel like her sense of worth in my eyes is tied to her appearance or how she performs. I want her to feel unconditional love from me, always. I want her never to feel less-than.

July 27, 1994.
I just finished reading Shot in the Heart by Mikal Gilmore [Gary Gilmore’s brother; you may remember the book/ movie about Gary Gilmore, The Executioner’s Song], which I bought because I read an excerpt in Rolling Stone, and a couple of really good reviews. When I finished The Chamber, I was still staunchly in favor of the death penalty. Now I’m not so sure. I’m the same age Mikal Gilmore was when they executed his brother Gary, and I just can’t imagine it. His book touched me in a way very few books ever have, and by the time I finished reading it, I was in tears. I’m even tearing up just thinking about it. It’s so sad.

Mikal seems to hold so much guilt over the whole thing, like the responsibility lies in his lap. I hate it that even though he couldn’t have stopped what happened, he still suffers for it every day. He believes ghosts haunt his bloodline, and that the Gilmore bloodline stops, and that’s how it should be. I wonder if everything he does and feels will always be overshadowed by the fact that Gary Gilmore is his brother. He said that people wrote to him and walked up to him and told him he should have been killed along with Gary. Forget about the sins of the fathers… what about the sins of the brothers?

According to Mikal, Gary felt there were several points in his life when his headlong rush toward self-destruction could have been stopped if only someone had tried a little harder to help him. But could anyone really have stopped him? What if he’d been loved, been adored, been cherished the way Mikal was by his father? And the most horrible aspect about the whole thing, I found out at the end of the book is, Gary ended up earning his father’s enmity for someone else’s sin. How many future Gary Gilmores are being formed right now, under our noses?

Sometimes I feel like I have not suffered enough in my life. I’ve been in the hospital several times for several different reasons, but overall, I feel as though my life has been strikingly lucky. I have siblings and parents who are all still alive. Nothing horrible has happened to them, the only grandparent I’ve shared some semblance of closeness with is still alive, and my nephews, niece, and child all live with no life-threats. I worried when [my brother’s first ex-wife] became pregnant again, my thinking being that with every grandchild brought into the family, the chances of something horrible happening to one of them increases.

I sometimes get this sense of foreboding. Like, because my life has had no real suffering, it’s still in the future. When I hear about children dying of Leukemia, I feel almost a sense of recognition. I have almost a knowledge that Danielle will be stricken with Leukemia, and it scares the shit out of me. Every time she starts to look pale and gets sick I think, this is it. This is the time they run a hundred tests and tell me she’s got it. This is when I start to lose her. But the truth is, I’m already losing her. She’s growing up and away with every breath, and I wonder if I’m numbing myself against the pain of losing her to the world by worrying about her death by a disease taking her life. Something I heard on TV a few weeks ago hit a chord with me:

“It sounds like you covet the struggle.”

Do I? Am I wishing for a struggle to come along and strengthen my weaknesses? God, that sounds horrible.

I want to climb into my wayback machine and pat myself on the head and tell me to shut UP, Robyn, GOD.

I find my complete lack of understanding about mental illness kind of funny. Like I thought that Jeffrey Dahmer was totally normal, with just this weird urge to kill and eat men, and if I were just – like – sitting at my desk one day and I was overpowered with the urge to kill and eat people, I’d just kill myself instead. God! So simple! Like, duh! Kill ’em all! Load up Death Row and charge up Ol’ Sparky and let’s get the bad guys gone!

Good lord.

I don’t remember a whole lot about Shot in the Heart, but reading my journal entry about it makes me want to re-read it. That whole thing about Gary Gilmore feeling like his rush toward self-destruction could have been stopped if someone had tried harder pisses me off. What a goddamn useless load of guilt to lay on someone else. I have no fucking patience for people who blame everyone around them for everything that goes wrong and take no responsibility at all for the shitty road their life has gone down.

I might just have personal issues with whiny little bitches who can’t bother to shoulder the responsibility for their own actions, though.

I don’t, for the record, covet the struggle anymore. I don’t think I really ever did. I do still have that sense of foreboding, though. It’s a low buzz in the back of my brain; I’m waiting for the second shoe to drop, and I suspect that I believe at some level if I expect the shoe to drop, it never really will.

HG’s improving little by little. He actually let Fred pick him up a couple of times last night and hold him before jumping down and running off. He hadn’t done that before (unless you forcibly grabbed him and picked him up, and even then he just went still and frozen in terror), so that’s a step. When we went up to visit at bedtime, I picked him up for a minute and he didn’t fight me. He hasn’t purred for us yet, but hopefully that’s not too far away.

This morning when I took his morning snack in to him I sat down with him, and he let me pet him. He wasn’t crazy about it, but he put up with it.

I wasn’t able to spend much time with him yesterday because I had an appointment and then ran errands and then the refrigerator repairman showed up and then Fred’s parents were here and then we went out to dinner and then it was TV time. Today, I’ve got plenty of time, so I’m going to go up and hang out with him a lot and maybe he’ll warm up to me and flop over and let me rub his belly and promise to be my BFF for always.

A girl can dream, no?

CHOMP.

Such a sweet boy.

Poser.

Foxfire Firefox tabs open: 9.

Gmail, Google Reader (those two are always open), Bitchypoo WordPress edit page, Sideswipe Mixer Blade, this picture of Newt, Chickens in the Road, Facebook Scrabulous, Sparklit poll results from 2002, Hulu.

Newt has a slurrrp.

Previously
2007: At least the floors are clean.
2006: Fred was no help, because he was standing there laughing his ass off.
2005: No entry.
2004: No entry.
2003: Nothing, by the way, pisses me off more than the crap that gets installed with the program you really want – Office 2000, I’m looking at you and your crappy Outlook friend.
2002: Mother Nature is getting ON MY NERVES.
2001: No entry.
2000: So if rainy days and Mondays always got me down, I guess I’d have been suicidal today.

I’m glad to know that I’m not the only freak who worries, upon spotting money laying on the street, that when I pick it up a Dateline NBC crew will spring out from behind the bushes and Chris Hansen will tell me to take a seat and have a cookie.

Dateline would never set up a trap for mere pennies or nickels or EVEN quarters, though. And I also doubt that they’d just leave money lying there. No, what Dateline would do is send a doddering old lady out to dodder up the street, spilling money all over the place and then film what people did when it happened. Chris Hansen would be all “You saw her drop that twenty, but you picked it up and kept on going!” and the thief would be all “I didn’t know where it came from! I just saw it sitting there!” and Chris Hansen would be all “You SAW it fall out of her pocket! Does she or does she not look like a woman on a fixed income who can barely afford to feed herself, let alone easily lose twenty dollars? She might have to eat CAT FOOD to make it through the month because she lost that money!”, and then we’d find out that the doddering old lady is actually a teenager who looks particularly old for her age.

Years and years and years ago – I was living in Rhode Island and the spud was a baby – I was down to two dollars in cash, it was a week ’til payday, and I just HAD to have a bottle of Coke, because of course you’ve got to have priorities, don’t you? I went to the nearest convenience store and grabbed my bottle of Coke, and I was standing in line to pay, and the old man standing in front of me was shedding dollar bills all over the place and I could SORELY have used a little extra cash and no one else seemed to be noticing what was going on and I’ll admit, I hesitated for a moment, but then I came to my senses (and also, I suspected I had a hidden camera pointed at me) and I said “Sir, you’re dropping money all over the place!” and he thanked me and I helped him pick up the money he dropped, and he went along his way.

These days I doubt I’d even hesitate before I told him he was dropping money, but these days I’m very rarely down to my last two dollars with a week ’til payday.

Last night Fred and I were laying in bed talking, and we heard the sound of a cat meowing.

“Is that Miz Poo?” Fred said.

“No, it’s coming from outside,” I said, and got out of bed. “That’s that cat I’ve been telling you about!”

Some nights when I’m lying in bed reading or trying to go to sleep, I can hear a cat outside my bedroom window meowing. I never get up and see what’s going on when I hear the meowing, because Fred sets the alarm before he goes to bed and I don’t know the code and I’m usually too lazy to dig for the remote. Also, it sounds like a cat talking just to hear himself talk rather than one in distress.

So I got out of bed and went to see if I could see the cat. It wasn’t Maxi or Newt because they were inside for the night. When I went onto the front porch, I could hear it off to the side of the house meowing. I called and called and it would meow back, but wouldn’t come close. All I could see were little white paws. Fred saw a gray tabby with white feet the other night, so I’m assuming it was the same cat.

When I looked at the food bowl on the front porch I saw that it was empty, so perhaps this was the cat’s way of letting me know. I filled up the food bowl and opened the front door to go inside.

Tommy was right inside the door, and before I could grab him, he went shooting by me. I yelled “STOP!”, shut the door, and went after him. He went off the porch to the left, and I went into the yard to grab him, then he disappeared. Luckily, Fred came out a moment later and could see where he was. Naturally, as soon as I went after him, he squirted by me and headed off to the yard on the other side of the house. With Fred and I both in hot pursuit, Tommy ran across the side lawn of our next door neighbors, headed for the road. I had visions of him running out into traffic, so I pulled out the big guns.

“Who ready for the snackin’!” I called in a loud whisper. “Who ready for the snackin’!”

I try not to do the snackin’ time call unless it’s really snackin’ time, but desperate times call for desperate measures. Tommy paused and looked thoughtfully at me, then headed back in my general direction. Fred went inside to grab a flashlight, and I tried the snackin’ time call again.

I cannot imagine what our neighbors would have thought if they’d heard us and glanced out their window. I was standing there in my red Big Dogs nightie, blue Crocs on my feet, bellowing (quietly) about snackin’.

Fred came out with the flashlight, I yelled about it being snackin’ time a few more times, and Tommy ran over to the bush outside my bedroom window and touched noses with Newt, who’d run outside when Fred came out. Tommy ran toward the yard next door, but this time Fred caught him and picked him up, handed the flashlight to me, and we went back inside.

And I never did get a good look at the cat who’d been meowing.

*****************

Smudgie has gone to the pet store. I set up the guest bedroom and put her in there yesterday morning and left HG in the foster kitten room. I left them alone for a couple of hours and then went to check on them. HG was like “Oh, it’s you. Whatever. DON’T TOUCH ME. Okay, maybe a little. Now let me nibble on your finger. Now go away. BYE.” Smudgie, on the other hand, ran over to me, meowing, purred, rubbed up on me, climbed up in my lap, and was just a big love slut. Since there was room at the pet store, I took her last night, because I don’t think they necessarily need to be adopted together. I think his reliance on Smudgie is keeping HG shy and skittish and if he gets lonely I’ll let Tommy or Newt in to keep him company (or Mister Boogers can go in and act like an ass – HG doesn’t seem particular about which cat he follows around and flirts with).

When I put Smudgie in her cage at the pet store, she sniffed around and went right into the litter box to hide, as the shyer ones always do – but in no time flat people were looking at her and exclaiming over how beautiful she is. She’ll be fine.

Last night there were small inroads with HG. He let Fred pet him several times and didn’t run away at the very idea. This morning, he greeted me with a meow when I came in with his morning snack and to clean out his litter box. He didn’t want me to pet him, but he also didn’t run and hide from me when I walked by, either.

Baby steps.

She’s not sleeping. She’s considering the best way to kill that mouse.

*****************

I found this picture of Tommy from last summer. He’s such a sweet boy.

*****************

Previously
2007: When one mows the lawn on a windy day when it hasn’t rained in a long time, one gets a lot of dust on one’s face.
2006: No entry.
2005: I am not pregnant, and I’m especially not pregnant with twins. I’m sorry to disappoint – some of you got REALLY excited, didn’t you?
2004: I can totally see the Bean clinging frantically to the top of the Jeep while I cluelessly drive around.
2003: But you’d better believe that if I had a penis, it’d be a big swingin’ one.
2002: “Walmart eating ass” will be the name of my seventh novel, in case you were curious.
2001: No entry.
2000: Well, I’ve got magazines to read, and naps to take.