Please read the archives!

The archives are full of cool stuff that I really wish people would read. As I approach the one-year anniversary of Planet Deedums on Blogspot, I've concluded that last year's stuff was way more entertaining and engaging than my most recent whiny-diary entries. If you've been here all along, you've likely seen it, too.

So please, indulge yourself in some classic musings of yore. You'll be glad you did!

Too bad I don't get free earplugs anymore

It's occurred to me recently that I've become a little self-absorbed in my posts, mainly obsessed with the dating thing. (Yeah, I know, I hear you all going "a little?!" Quiet now, the lot of you). It's like this quest for a decent, smart, childless, nice guy has become this all-consuming thing; it's less about the actual guy and more about the pursuit at this point. While amusing and entertaining, it's also exhausting and frustrating. Therefore I shall put it aside for a while.

You're welcome.

Anyway, I've got a new obsession coming up right around the corner - I start my drum lessons on Thursday! I am told I should wear earplugs when I play, which I'm kind of thinking is a little like telling a blind person to put on sunglasses. But yeah, I wish I'd done this back when I was working for the safety place and could get earplugs for mad cheap - at least then I could give them away to my neighbors.

Time to vent the spleen!

Ever put your foot so far into your mouth you’re not sure if you’ll ever get the taste of shoe leather out? Well, yeah. That’s what I did recently. But that’s not what this entry is about, since I’m more or less hoping it’ll blow itself over and life can proceed as normal. Until I open my big mouth again, that is. So much for resolving to stop giving a shit what people think of me.

No, kids, what today’s entry is about is…food. Yeah, food. And men. But not just any old food, not just any old men. I’m talking about my love affair with Thai and Indian food, specifically, and the fact that I’ve discovered that the single male population of this area has an outright aversion to Eastern cuisine. Thai and Indian are my favorite foods ever, and obviously I don't really get to eat that stuff unless I go out. So when someone asks me out to dinner, I immediately suggest Thai and their reaction (at least the last three guys I've gone out with) has been "Ew, NO WAY." It's really disheartening. My third choice is Middle Eastern, which gets shot down just as quickly.

So that's why I get stuck eating *yawn* Italian. Or, *snore* "American" food. Don't get me wrong, that stuff is good, too, (and hell, let's face it, if I don't have to cook it or pay for it, I'll eat it), but shit, where is people's sense of adventure? Maybe it's because I grew up in a totally white-bread, Anglo family with a mom who cooked straight out of the Better Homes and Gardens cookbook (you know the one, with the red and white checkered cover, uh-huh, yep, that one), but I've found that people who've done so can go either way: either they crave more variety and interesting things (like I do) or they stay stuck in their meat-n-potatoes rut (like the guys I seem to be hooking up with lately). I’m finding a lot of compromises being made at my expense lately, and frankly, it’s really beginning to piss me off.

Now, my faithful blog-watchers, you all know that I'm a strong-willed, fiercely independent, opinionated, feisty, stubborn woman. I might not be the prettiest flower in the garden, I'll never be on the cover of Cosmo, but I'm sharp and I'm fun. But you know, deep down inside is a girl who just wants some company, someone to talk to and hang out with and go places and do stuff with, someone besides my friends (though I love them all), and someone who's not just a (sensitive readers, pleas avert your eyes) “buddy with benefits” (yeah, I totally edited that). I want the total package - intellectual, emotional, and physical stimulation and fulfillment. Someone who can be a companion and help share the things in life that bring both of us joy. However, I'm finding that the things that bring me joy (music, art, history, architecture, books, coffee, wine...) don't bring single men my age the same kind of joy they bring me - and in recent cases are actual sources of repulsion for some. This guy I went out with last night - a metalsmith/jewelry designer, no less - told me he's never been to the Albright-Knox because "Honestly, there's nothing there that I can't see in a book." Oh. my. god. And he calls himself an artist. Wow. That'd be like saying you don't want to go see your favorite band play live because you can just sit home and listen to the record.

I’m no art snob myself, but there is something honestly breathtaking about standing in front of an original piece of work. What immediately comes to mind is Pollock’s Convergence. No image in a book can ever command the kind of feeling you get standing in front of the original – the thing is a beast! It’s like 13 feet wide and 9 feet tall. There is an energy, an excitement, a certain emotional response that is evoked from stepping up and looking at an original Van Gogh, a Mondrian, A Lichtenstein...or how about Chuck Close's Janet, the nuances and details of the hundreds of tiny circles that make up her face, her hair, her earrings, her glasses, and knowing that the guy painted this from a wheelchair with a fucking brace to hold the brush to his hand...you just can’t get that from a book, I’m sorry. You just cannot.

Anyway, my last relationship having been long-distance, I'm used to being alone, used to going out alone or with friends to do stuff, not really used to combining the two things. So when I finally got over jerkface and decided to put myself out there again, I realized how much I don't know about the opposite sex, about the game and how to play it. I'm learning quickly that "Sex and the City" isn't so fictitious. I just can’t decide if I’m a Carrie or a Samantha.

I suppose it would be whichever one really likes Thai food.

First entry of 2006: Warning, it's a downer.

Fear not, faithful blog-watchers, I am back. A lot can happen in two months, and while I will attempt to pace myself and break the "catch-ups" into several shorter entries, there's a lot to cram in here.

So anyway, you may want to sit back and get comfortable for this one - it promises to be quite lengthy. And as promised in this post's title, this is not going to be my typical wry witty stuff - so if depressing stuff isn't your thing, you might want to skip this one and wait for the next entry, which I promise will not be so bumming.

*takes deep breath*

Okay. As most of you know, my beloved kitty, Lepew, passed away three days before Thanksgiving. It's been a rough adjustment for me, and while I've been longing to write out my feelings about losing her, I really just hadn't had the strength until now.

As we approach what would have been her 19th birthday (February 28th - we'll never know the exact date, but that's the one I'd made up based on the vet's estimation of her age when I got her), it's starting to only now really sink in that she's gone. If you knew Lepew, you knew how she had this awesome resilient, enduring, almost magical, other-worldly quality to her - like she was going to live forever. Starting with the circumstances under which she came into my life (thrown out of a car as a malnourished and abused kitten,left for dead in a ditch outside my house, and narrowly escaping life in a shelter by a completely shocking display of sympathy by my father), she was a weird but miraculous creature (not to mention the cutest one ever). She would disappear and reappear seemingly out of nowhere, like she could walk through walls. She was strictly an indoor cat, but would escape and put me through hell trying to find her, only to turn up right behind me, looking at me as if to say, "what are you freaking out about? I've been here the whole time!" If she weren't so damn cute it would have been creepy.

One time in Chicago I spent an entire day canvassing the neighborhood with flyers and kitty treats after discovering my back door wide open and Lepew nowhere in the apartment, only to come home to a message from my upstairs neighbor telling me that he'd found her in the hallway outside his door. Mind you, this was the inside hallway, the door to which I could not recall opening at all that day. Another time when we lived in New Hampshire she got out and we found her stuck in the wall in the boiler room of our house. Just shortly before she passed away, I woke up in the middle of the night to the dog whining to go out. When I opened the door and stepped outside, I looked across the street and saw Lepew, scampering across the street like she owned it. She apparently had gotten out earlier that evening, undetected.

No matter what, when she was lost or sick or even when her age started catching up and she began developing problems with her thyroid and her kidneys, she always came through with flying colors. So when she got sick so suddenly that Sunday night in November, I just couldn't process the finality of it. It never really sunk in that it could be the end. Even as I watched her struggle to walk, as I watched the "third eye" creep over her beautiful yellow-green eyes, as I wiped the drool and snot off her face and begged her to be okay, I just couldn't believe it. I just kept thinking it was going to be okay, she was going to get better. I was going to wake up the next day and she'd be yowling for food, climbing on my head, drinking from the toilet again. Even when she wasn't fine the next day, even when I called the vet and made the appointment for the following day to put her down, even as I prepared myself by shutting all the doors in the house so that if she needed to die at home she wouldn't crawl off and hide to do it, I just kept thinking it wasn't going to happen. I was going to come home from work that night, and everything would be fine. Alas, it was not to be.

She died while I was at work, something I felt so terrible about, because I'd wanted to be with her in her last moments - the only consolation I was deriving from deciding to put her to sleep was that it would allow me to do so, in fact. She just couldn't hold out, though, and died in front of the fireplace in the living room. She was not alone, I kept telling myself. She was in the company of Alex, her canine companion of more than 13 years. I'm sure that her old canine companion, Digger, and her Cousin Tootsie came to get her and showed her the way over the "Rainbow Bridge," (that special place, for those of you who may not be familiar, where our pets go when they leave us).

Even still, nearly three months later, I expect to see her sitting on the toilet seat when I open the shower curtain. I reach up to pet her when I'm lying on the sofa. I still, in my half-awake state every morning, instinctively try to be careful to not trip over her as I make my way to the kitchen, where it still invokes a sense of slight discombobulation when I don't see her bowls on the floor or her food on top of the refrigerator. I still call out for her sometimes, like I'm expecting that she'll just come walking through the wall when she's good and ready to come out . . .

And you know, maybe that's because she really is still here -- I just can't see her. She really was a weird little cat. :-)