Twentysomething

Yesterday was my 20th birthday. After the shock of realizing I was now Very, Very Old (specifically, Twentysomething Instead of Teenaged), I dubbed myself a Magic Birthday Fairy Princess Ballerina. I have an absurd love of birthdays.

Someone once informed me that my top three favorite things seemed to be:
1. Birthdays
2. Surprises
3. Shiny Things

So Joe and I went to the zoo and had a fancy pretentious lunch and went to all the pet stores and played with the puppies and my parents took us out to dinner and we had cake at my apartment and my friend Emma came over and I had many many presents and then we typed very long sentences about how absurdly I love my birthday.

Just as Lucky to Die

So on Sunday I dropped Sid off at my boyfriend's house while I went to work from 11 to 2. At about 3, I went back to see him. It was pretty obvious that his condition was sliding downhill...and quickly.

We spent the day together, he and I, and he slept on my lap. He ate a little baby food, licked a few drops of juice off my fingertip, and even nibbled on one of the pancakes I made for dinner.

Joe came over that evening, and Sid began to have trouble breathing. He draped his body over Joe's leg and positioned his head on Joe's hand. He rearranged himself periodically, but kept his head at a 45 degree angle. He began to make a funny clicking sound with his teeth, and he opened his mouth wide, an odd thing to see a rat do.

When the rattles began, I started crying. Twenty minutes passed, and Sid rattled and trembled. We didn't know how long it would be, and I picked up a leatherbound copy of Leaves of Grass, turned to Song of Myself, and began to read aloud. I kept one palm on Joe's leg, tucked against Sid's belly. After 40 pages, I put down the book. Sid breathed a little more normally now, and he crawled down from Joe. I sensed what he wanted, and pulled a blanket around my knees and fashioned a little cave of fleece. He crawled inside and hid.

Only a few minutes passed, and suddenly the blanket jerked. I saw a flurry of motion under there, and I whipped the blanket away. Sid struggled to my leg, pulling himself into my lap. Wide-eyed and clearly panicked, he jerked and twitched and kicked his little legs, desperately drawing empty breaths. He shuddered one final time, and the little lump of fur relaxed and lay flat against my lap.

Smile

YouTube these:
- "What's a Girl to Do" by Bat for Lashes
- the Dramatic Chipmunk
- "Get What You Want" by Operator Please
- "The Moneymaker" by Rilo Kiley

Go here:
- BUST
- Cute Overload
- Go Fug Yourself

Eat:
- orange soda floats
- Symphony milk chocolate
- Fruit-a-Bü strawberry Smooshes

Watch:
- Rock of Love
- Rent

Read:
- Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J.K. Rowling
- The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen

Do:
- ride a bicycle
- snuggle the fluffy white cat
- wander aimlessly around Wal-Mart

This is the recipe I folow to stave off depression as my workplace sucks and boyfriend's cat, Nigel, remains missing and my rat slowly dies.

They Don't See You Like I Do

So Sid (the rat) is sick. He had an upper respiratory infection the week before last, and he got off the meds for that last weekend. Now, though, he's got new problems. He has what appears to be SDA, which isn't fatal alone, but severely compromises his immune system. His respiratory infection seems to be back in full force, which could kill him. I've put him back on his antibiotics in accordance with the vet's advice. The biggest problem is his loss of appetite; rather than eating lab blocks like I insist, Sid has put himself in charge of his own diet. He only eats things that he deems worth the effort, so he's been feasting on grapes, yogurt, cooked pasta, peanut butter, and shelled, unsalted sunflower seeds. I worry about him, as I know this is a terrible diet for a rat, but at this point, I'm willing to let him have whatever he decides he's willing to eat. In the past couple of days, he has ignored his water bottle and only drinks out of a spoon or off my finger. He insists on being out of his cage whenever I'm in the house, begging and clattering at his cage door as soon as I arrive home, so I cook, clean, and eat with Sid on the couch/bed/floor. Bob is wholly dissatisfied by this arrangement, and we have discovered that Bob is either terrified of Sid or terrified of what I would do if he threatened Sid. Bob will hop up on the couch to cuddle me, Sid will dart out from under the blanket and nudge Bob's paw, and Bob will leap sideways off the sofa and run away.

I know that's boring, but it's what I'm thinking about lately.

I Guess I Clean Up Well?

So I got asked out by a complete stranger in a Wal-Mart today. First time for everything?

And A Little Child Shall Reason

More kid stuff, but it kind of proves my point.

Today I babysat my former boss's two girls. We went to the pool, where we ran across a little black girl who used to come to craft night religiously. She hugged me delightedly, made fast friends with the girls, and they all played in the sandbox. The younger of my boss's daughters has trouble enunciating, and the black girl observed that she "couldn't understand when she talks, but that means you have to listen carefully and not make fun, because you can't make fun of people just because they're different." Three little boys wandered over, and I listened as the children discussed teasing. They compared observations gleaned from parents, animated movies, and the Disney Channel (which, on a side note, is the single worst influence on children today--you should see some of the idiotic and cruel behavior those programs present as "cool"). With all the furrowed brows and measured speech of a U.N. summit, the six children ultimately decided that Being Mean Is Bad, and We Should Be Nice Because Mean Things Hurt Our Feelings, and Hurting Anyone's Feelings Is No Good at All, Though, Unfortunately, Hurt Feelings are Part of Life. After coming to this conclusion, they promptly got into an argument about "your" sand and "our" sand, and looked to me to referee--and were bemused yet pleased with my novel proposition that the sand was there for everybody and they ought to share it.

13 Clocks

Yesterday a little girl crouched on the floor of Wal-Mart, staring intently at a still-boxed doll as her mother browsed DVDs. She grinned broadly, hopped, and cried, "Mommy, she's beautiful!" I couldn't help but fondly smile as I recalled my own Samantha, a curly-haired brunette doll in a yellow dress whose eyes opened and closed. Her mother smiled sheepishly and bit her lip as she glanced at me. A few aisles later, I walked past a baby with a shock of beautifully bright red hair, and I smiled again.

One time I was helping a precocious little boy bend pipe cleaners for the paper monkeys we were making together. He and his little brother and I had talked about Star Wars and dogs and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
The older boy informed me, "I like coming here because you know about Turtles and Darth Vader and stuff."
His brother bounced in his seat and agreed, "Yeah, you know everything! How come you don't got kids?"
I must have giggled and said, "Well, because I'm 19 years old."
The first boy asked, "How come you don't act like a grownup? I mean, you don't treat me like a little kid."
"Do you think I act like a little kid?"
"No. I just mean that I don't talk to most grown-ups like this."
I paused. "Put it this way, Matthew--are you a person?"
The littler one interrupted gleefully, "Well, yeah he is! I'm a person, too!"
"See, that's all I'm concerned about. You don't have to be six years old to want to talk about just Darth Vader and silly dogs." The older boy nodded, seeming satisfied, but frowned. "Are we friends, Allison?"
The other wriggled and shook his head. "Course we're friends, Matthew!"
Matthew, unconvinced, waited for me to answer. "Sure we're friends. I like being friends with kids. You're a little better, a little purer, than a lot of adults I know. You haven't had any time to get cynical yet."
He never asked me what cynical meant, but he seemed reassured as we poked the pipe cleaner through the circle of the monkey's body. Michael swooshed his monkey around like a lightsaber, and we horsed around at the kids' table the way friends do.

Perhaps I Dream Too Much Alone

Thievery is the way of the day--I steal my upstairs neighbor's wireless to write this.

I recently moved into my first apartment. It's old and a bit damp; a drywall seam marks the below/above-ground line throughout the apartment. There's a charming little archway between the kitchen and living room, and the doors are a beautiful dark wood. I've furnished it in college-girl style: mismatched dishes, 70s furniture, an old school desk that doubles as my office and my dining room. Buddha statues perch next to a stuffed robotic Boobah, which I swear was unintentional. Five baby mother of thousands plants share a pot on the shelf over the too-shallow kitchen sink, and an old fish tank and its accessories waits for ambition to tug it out of the hall closet and give it purpose again.

I have two roommates of sorts. Siddhartha, an elderly little brown rat missing part of his tail, spends his time rearranging his cage, stealing bits of whatever I'm eating as he sits beside me on the couch, and mycoplasmotically wheezing. He just completed a course of rat antibiotic after contracting an upper respiratory infection following the deaths of his buddies, John Paul, a champagne-colored rex, and Nietzsche, a hooded fawn. They both died of old age, long outlasting Sid's brother Mohandas. Nearly a year ago, Mo died after developing some kind of rat encephalitis that led to a two-week struggle of falling down whenever he walked and eating only a porridge of lab blocks, vanilla wafers, and cream. Sid and I spend lots of cuddle time together while we both wait for him to die, as is the custom with 2-year-old rats, I hear.

Our other, more energetic roommate is Bob, a beautiful white long-haired cat with three extra toes (six on one front paw, seven on the other). Bob moved into my boyfriend's house after his roommate drunkenly brought him home from a friend's farm. He spent a year at Joe's before I got this apartment, and I dutifully cuddled him as he yowled in the car during his ten-block move. He turns up his nose at sharing meat products, preferring to lick the foil tops of yogurt, sneak bites of Swiss Cake Roll, and crunch down barbecue Pringles when I have a salt craving. (As you can see, sharing food with animals only minimally disgusts me.) His main advantage over Sid is that I can talk to him, which is less crazy cat lady than it sounds, and he looks up at me knowingly and meows back. He's remarkably well-behaved. He comes when called, looks away guiltily when I catch him eyeing Sid, and uses his scratching post dutifully, though he insists upon waiting until company comes before he shits profusely in his litterbox, which, despite all the nag champa incense in the world, makes the apartment smell like a pig ranch for fifteen minutes afterweard. Another distinct cat-over-rat advantage is his complete lack of focus on chewing the down duvet on the sofa, which seems to be Sid's favorite pastime lately.

I've been living the liberal art major life, waitressing and bicycling to the library and driving out to the country to remind myself of the landscapes that were only two blocks away back home. I stay up until four in the morning most nights, playing Animal Crossing and Harvest Moon and watching DVDs on my cable-less 19-inch television. I knit and play out of old John Thompson lesson books on a cheap roll-up piano; I alternate between classic literature and Oprah's Book Club selections; I draw oil pastel portraits of Little Edie Beale and eat peanut butter straight from the jar. Living alone has its good points.