Following is an e-mail to my oldest brother, who, like me, is a logophile. We often e-mail each other about interesting words we’ve discovered, or–just as often, now that we’re both middle-aged–asking the other to remind us of the word for.... He called me last night on that sort of quest.
"This morning, I got the message you left last night, trying to find out what the word is for when things are out to get us. Speaking of things being out to get me, my new droid phone doesn't beep every minute, like my last one did, to let me know I have a message. In fact, it does nothing to let me know I have a message, unless I happen to be looking right at it. I'm sure there's a setting somewhere where I could change this, if only I could figure it out. But for now, I figure I'm doing well just to be able to answer the *^%$& thing.
"Nope. I can't think of the word, either. I spent altogether too much time searching our old e-mails for it, but couldn't' find it there. I keep my own personal dictionary of fun and unusual words, but I took it off my work computer and put it on a jump drive. I wonder which jump drive? And I wonder where it is? No doubt, it's hiding from me. They do that, you know."
Later, his wife thought of the word: "resistentialism." This particular brother of mine does not understand resistentialism himself. My family is firmly split on this philosophy, with some of us knowing that chairs do, in fact, jump out and stub our toes, while the others are completely unaware of this quite obvious behavior on the part of things. Please note that the "resistance" in "resistentialism" is not on the part of the humans involved. It is not that we are resistant to things. The resistance is on the part of the things, which are locked in constant (and apparently mortal) combat with us–probably for domination of the planet.
Right now, it’s hard for me to say who is winning.
Thursday, December 29, 2011
Tuesday, December 27, 2011
Boxing Day
[This story was originally written as an e-mail to my friend M, so I've left it in that form. M and I had talked by phone for several hours the morning that I wrote this story. This story did not actually happen on the day after Christmas—Boxing Day in the British world—but you'll see why it's called Boxing Day. This story took place in January 2005.]
Dear M,
It was good to hear from you this morning. I just had to write to you about the experience I had immediately after our conversation.
I am here alone this weekend. Or, rather, the C family are on their way back from a gymnastics meet today. So, I'm taking care of the dogs. I could hear them barking and carrying on upstairs as we talked, and I realized that I needed to let them out. So, after we got off the phone, I started into the bedroom to put on shoes and go upstairs. My cat, Fenian, was stretched across the floor, just inside the bedroom door, asleep, with his paws wrapped around one of my shoes, which he often does. I thought it was rather cute, so I quietly backed out of the room and went to get my camera and take a picture. He usually sleeps so lightly that he wakes up before I can take a picture of him being cute, but I got the picture. Then I thought, "wouldn't it be awful if he was dead?" I looked closely to see if he was breathing. You have to understand that this happens all the time--at least a couple of times a week--because Fenian, like all cats, sleeps a lot, and then I become convinced he's dead. So, I looked closely and didn't see him breathing. Well, they breathe very shallowly, so I finally called his name. No response. So I nudged him, and still no response.
Well, the upshot is, my cat really did die. It is so bizarre. I felt like I was really in that Monty Python sketch we were quoting this morning. " 'E's not dead, 'E's just resting." He was still warm, but he wasn't breathing. Then I wondered, "How can I know he's really dead? I'd hate to bury him alive. What if he's in a coma? But then again, what am I going to do for a cat in a coma? I'm not exactly going to pay to keep him on life support and wait for that day 10 years from now when he will suddenly wake up and ask for a beer and a hotdog (or catnip) and act as if nothing has happened." The C family have more experience with dead or dying animals than anyone I know, so I tried to call them, but couldn't reach them. Then I called the vet. I felt ridiculous. What am I going to do, hold the phone out toward the cat and say, "Do you think he's dead?" The whole thing was so bizarre.
You have to understand that the thing is, this was so sudden, so out of the blue, I had no reason to expect it. He was middle-aged for a cat, and had not been sick. Just this morning, he'd done all of his usual things, woke me up to be fed (as I mentioned when I talked to you), etc. He had even come up to me when I was talking to you, looked like he might like to jump up into my lap, changed his mind, and wandered away. Evidently it was right after that that he went into the bedroom and dropped dead. I've just never had an animal die suddenly without being sick beforehand. And he never even made a sound.
The woman I talked to at the vet's office almost couldn't believe it either. After we talked about it for a while, she said she thought he really was dead. She got his chart out and looked over it. He'd just been in for his annual exam in October, and she just couldn't see any sign of anything. She said cats don't have heart attacks very often. She said I was welcome to bring him in if I felt like I needed someone to look at him and pronounce him officially dead.
I resisted taking him to the vet. I was going through all that in my head, too. This is the problem with being someone who lives everything out in her head first.
Scene: vet's office
Enter KB with cat-carrier box with holes in the top.
KB: I need to see the vet.
VR (vet receptionist): (perkily) And what are we here for today?
KB: (whispering so as not to upset other clients) Well, actually, I think my cat is dead. I just want someone to confirm it.
Later, in examining room at vet's.
KB: So, what do you think? Is he dead or just resting?
Vet: Yep, that's one dead cat. My official diagnosis is This Is a Dead Cat. I'm very sorry Miss B, for the loss of your beloved companion. That'll be $35, please.
Too weird. But his body was so warm. What if he wasn't really dead? I went and got the carrier and put him in it. He was still quite pliable. I stuffed him into the box. He looked pretty dead. Should I or shouldn't I? Do other people have such a hard time telling a dead cat from a live one?
After I had him in the box, I tried the C family again and got them. AC was very sympathetic; in shock, really, when she heard how active he'd been just this morning, and now dead. But he sounded dead to her. Still, being sympathetic, she said I should take him to the vet if I really felt like I needed that. I went through the above scenario in my mind again. I looked at Fenian's body and thought, "I love you, buddy, but I'm not sure I'm willing to go through that for you."
So I left him in the carrier and brought him into the living room. I let the dogs out and did some things around the house. Every so often, I would go and peek into Finn's box and check. Still dead? Yep, still dead. Finally, after a couple of hours, he was cold and the diagnosis was certain. This is one dead cat. I could nail him to his perch, but he'd still be dead. In fact, rigor was setting in, and I thought, "I don't want to bury him in the carrier, so I'd better put him in his final resting box before he gets too stiff." So I went on a search for a box. Finn is a really big cat, about 17-18 pounds. When he stretched out to sleep on my legs when I was in bed, he could reach from the top of my legs to my ankles: about 32 inches. This is no shoebox cat. I even had some large shoeboxes, but they wouldn't work. I found a box I'd gotten some stuff in in the mail during Christmas and tried that. So then I pulled him out of the carrier and put him in this box. It is hard to believe how hard it is to pull a large cat out of a box when he is, excuse the term, dead weight. He was incredibly heavy and hard to get out of the carrier. The box was smallish (but bigger than a shoebox) and square. I figured I would kind of curl him up, like how he sleeps, but he was a little too stiff to make him look completely natural. (Like looking natural was important at this point!) Still, I got him to fit in the box. What could I put in the box with him to send him happily off to Valhalla? Unfortunately, I had just thrown away one of his favorite toys--one I've had as long as I've had him--during Christmas. I couldn't really think of anything. Looking at the box, I thought, “It's still kind of a tall box. He could probably fit into something smaller.” So I got a box that was about the same dimensions but not quite as tall. Then I had again to wrestle his dead-weight out of one box and smoosh him into another. Well, he fit into that box but he was just a bit too big for the height of the box, which meant it didn’t close flat. Finally, I thought, “KB, it’s not like you’re going to mail him and you have to find the box that’s just the right fit.” So I transferred him back into the first box and was done with it. He is one of the most manhandled cat carcasses around.
After I had him boxed up, I returned to the question of some appropriate emblem to bury him with. He wasn’t much of one for playing, but his favorite toys (not counting the one I threw away) were the little plastic strips you pull off the caps on milk jugs and a little foam ball that was supposed to have gone on my car antenna but it didn’t fit. He could dance around the house with those milk jug things in a way that made you think he had live prey. They are all over the place, so I found one and put it in the box with him. I knew that foam ball had to be somewhere, and I set out in search of it. I knew he must have gotten it into some little inaccessible place that he couldn’t extract it from because it’s the only thing that ever made him give up the game until I found it and tossed it back onto the playing field. After a long search, I found it and added it to his box.
By now I was on a roll. I felt like if I was going to give him a pagan burial, I might as well go ahead and send everything he’d need for a happy afterlife. I wasn’t willing to eviscerate him and put his organs into canopic jars, but I figured I could at least provide for his little afterlife needs. I put some of his food and treats and catnip into little plastic bags and tucked those in with him too. Now he was ready to sail into the West.
In the meantime, the C family had returned home, and AC had come down and commiserated with me. Even she—who had no use for my ornery cat in life—was moved to tears on seeing his cold, stiff carcass crammed into a box. So, we cried over him and then went outside to survey the area for a proper burial spot. The Cs have buried their animals in the animals’ favorite spots all around the property. Since Finn was an indoor cat, he didn’t really have any spots that belonged to him. But he did spend hours every day peering out the “front” door, which overlooks the back yard and horse pasture. He could watch all the other critters go by: birds and the barn cats and all the dogs and the horses, and chatter at them, and dream about being outside. So I thought it would be appropriate to bury him anywhere in the area that had been his daily view. AC said that I could put a little cross on his grave to remember where he is, but I told her that I didn’t think he was a Christian.
HC is out there now, digging the hole, and we will bury him here directly. The one thing I told the Cs is that, though I loved my cat, I don’t want to see him again. Meaning, I don’t want one of those damn dogs digging him up and dragging him all over the neighborhood. This is a problem with dogs, so HC always makes sure to bury pets really deep. Fortunately, he has an attachment for the tractor that makes it possible to dig holes deeper than even our dogs are inclined to go.
So, here in a little bit, we’ll have a burial, and I will cry a little more, I’m sure, and then we will all move along. It takes me back to the conversation we had recently about the advantages of dropping dead unexpectedly versus having a long, drawn-out illness in which you suffer. Though it is a shock to me that Finn is dead, I am glad that I didn’t go through anything long and drawn out with him. As I’ve watched others struggle with a sick pet for a long time, I’ve always been bothered about it. On the one hand, because I am sentimental about animals, I would be willing to pay for some medical treatment for my cat, but on the other hand, I couldn’t afford to pay much, and at what point do you stop? And if you have to stop at some point, you might as well not have started in the first place. I would hate to spend hundreds of dollars trying to keep an animal alive, only to have it die anyway. And some people spend thousands. Well, I’m getting away from the sad loss of my cat, so I don’t want to go too far down that path right now. At any rate, I’m glad he went the way he did, without being in pain for a long time, and didn’t put me through all that agonizing. He was here and seemingly fine one minute and gone the next. That’s for the best, as far as I’m concerned, though I’m very sad and will miss him.
Love,
KB
Dear M,
It was good to hear from you this morning. I just had to write to you about the experience I had immediately after our conversation.
I am here alone this weekend. Or, rather, the C family are on their way back from a gymnastics meet today. So, I'm taking care of the dogs. I could hear them barking and carrying on upstairs as we talked, and I realized that I needed to let them out. So, after we got off the phone, I started into the bedroom to put on shoes and go upstairs. My cat, Fenian, was stretched across the floor, just inside the bedroom door, asleep, with his paws wrapped around one of my shoes, which he often does. I thought it was rather cute, so I quietly backed out of the room and went to get my camera and take a picture. He usually sleeps so lightly that he wakes up before I can take a picture of him being cute, but I got the picture. Then I thought, "wouldn't it be awful if he was dead?" I looked closely to see if he was breathing. You have to understand that this happens all the time--at least a couple of times a week--because Fenian, like all cats, sleeps a lot, and then I become convinced he's dead. So, I looked closely and didn't see him breathing. Well, they breathe very shallowly, so I finally called his name. No response. So I nudged him, and still no response.
Well, the upshot is, my cat really did die. It is so bizarre. I felt like I was really in that Monty Python sketch we were quoting this morning. " 'E's not dead, 'E's just resting." He was still warm, but he wasn't breathing. Then I wondered, "How can I know he's really dead? I'd hate to bury him alive. What if he's in a coma? But then again, what am I going to do for a cat in a coma? I'm not exactly going to pay to keep him on life support and wait for that day 10 years from now when he will suddenly wake up and ask for a beer and a hotdog (or catnip) and act as if nothing has happened." The C family have more experience with dead or dying animals than anyone I know, so I tried to call them, but couldn't reach them. Then I called the vet. I felt ridiculous. What am I going to do, hold the phone out toward the cat and say, "Do you think he's dead?" The whole thing was so bizarre.
You have to understand that the thing is, this was so sudden, so out of the blue, I had no reason to expect it. He was middle-aged for a cat, and had not been sick. Just this morning, he'd done all of his usual things, woke me up to be fed (as I mentioned when I talked to you), etc. He had even come up to me when I was talking to you, looked like he might like to jump up into my lap, changed his mind, and wandered away. Evidently it was right after that that he went into the bedroom and dropped dead. I've just never had an animal die suddenly without being sick beforehand. And he never even made a sound.
The woman I talked to at the vet's office almost couldn't believe it either. After we talked about it for a while, she said she thought he really was dead. She got his chart out and looked over it. He'd just been in for his annual exam in October, and she just couldn't see any sign of anything. She said cats don't have heart attacks very often. She said I was welcome to bring him in if I felt like I needed someone to look at him and pronounce him officially dead.
I resisted taking him to the vet. I was going through all that in my head, too. This is the problem with being someone who lives everything out in her head first.
Scene: vet's office
Enter KB with cat-carrier box with holes in the top.
KB: I need to see the vet.
VR (vet receptionist): (perkily) And what are we here for today?
KB: (whispering so as not to upset other clients) Well, actually, I think my cat is dead. I just want someone to confirm it.
Later, in examining room at vet's.
KB: So, what do you think? Is he dead or just resting?
Vet: Yep, that's one dead cat. My official diagnosis is This Is a Dead Cat. I'm very sorry Miss B, for the loss of your beloved companion. That'll be $35, please.
Too weird. But his body was so warm. What if he wasn't really dead? I went and got the carrier and put him in it. He was still quite pliable. I stuffed him into the box. He looked pretty dead. Should I or shouldn't I? Do other people have such a hard time telling a dead cat from a live one?
After I had him in the box, I tried the C family again and got them. AC was very sympathetic; in shock, really, when she heard how active he'd been just this morning, and now dead. But he sounded dead to her. Still, being sympathetic, she said I should take him to the vet if I really felt like I needed that. I went through the above scenario in my mind again. I looked at Fenian's body and thought, "I love you, buddy, but I'm not sure I'm willing to go through that for you."
So I left him in the carrier and brought him into the living room. I let the dogs out and did some things around the house. Every so often, I would go and peek into Finn's box and check. Still dead? Yep, still dead. Finally, after a couple of hours, he was cold and the diagnosis was certain. This is one dead cat. I could nail him to his perch, but he'd still be dead. In fact, rigor was setting in, and I thought, "I don't want to bury him in the carrier, so I'd better put him in his final resting box before he gets too stiff." So I went on a search for a box. Finn is a really big cat, about 17-18 pounds. When he stretched out to sleep on my legs when I was in bed, he could reach from the top of my legs to my ankles: about 32 inches. This is no shoebox cat. I even had some large shoeboxes, but they wouldn't work. I found a box I'd gotten some stuff in in the mail during Christmas and tried that. So then I pulled him out of the carrier and put him in this box. It is hard to believe how hard it is to pull a large cat out of a box when he is, excuse the term, dead weight. He was incredibly heavy and hard to get out of the carrier. The box was smallish (but bigger than a shoebox) and square. I figured I would kind of curl him up, like how he sleeps, but he was a little too stiff to make him look completely natural. (Like looking natural was important at this point!) Still, I got him to fit in the box. What could I put in the box with him to send him happily off to Valhalla? Unfortunately, I had just thrown away one of his favorite toys--one I've had as long as I've had him--during Christmas. I couldn't really think of anything. Looking at the box, I thought, “It's still kind of a tall box. He could probably fit into something smaller.” So I got a box that was about the same dimensions but not quite as tall. Then I had again to wrestle his dead-weight out of one box and smoosh him into another. Well, he fit into that box but he was just a bit too big for the height of the box, which meant it didn’t close flat. Finally, I thought, “KB, it’s not like you’re going to mail him and you have to find the box that’s just the right fit.” So I transferred him back into the first box and was done with it. He is one of the most manhandled cat carcasses around.
After I had him boxed up, I returned to the question of some appropriate emblem to bury him with. He wasn’t much of one for playing, but his favorite toys (not counting the one I threw away) were the little plastic strips you pull off the caps on milk jugs and a little foam ball that was supposed to have gone on my car antenna but it didn’t fit. He could dance around the house with those milk jug things in a way that made you think he had live prey. They are all over the place, so I found one and put it in the box with him. I knew that foam ball had to be somewhere, and I set out in search of it. I knew he must have gotten it into some little inaccessible place that he couldn’t extract it from because it’s the only thing that ever made him give up the game until I found it and tossed it back onto the playing field. After a long search, I found it and added it to his box.
By now I was on a roll. I felt like if I was going to give him a pagan burial, I might as well go ahead and send everything he’d need for a happy afterlife. I wasn’t willing to eviscerate him and put his organs into canopic jars, but I figured I could at least provide for his little afterlife needs. I put some of his food and treats and catnip into little plastic bags and tucked those in with him too. Now he was ready to sail into the West.
In the meantime, the C family had returned home, and AC had come down and commiserated with me. Even she—who had no use for my ornery cat in life—was moved to tears on seeing his cold, stiff carcass crammed into a box. So, we cried over him and then went outside to survey the area for a proper burial spot. The Cs have buried their animals in the animals’ favorite spots all around the property. Since Finn was an indoor cat, he didn’t really have any spots that belonged to him. But he did spend hours every day peering out the “front” door, which overlooks the back yard and horse pasture. He could watch all the other critters go by: birds and the barn cats and all the dogs and the horses, and chatter at them, and dream about being outside. So I thought it would be appropriate to bury him anywhere in the area that had been his daily view. AC said that I could put a little cross on his grave to remember where he is, but I told her that I didn’t think he was a Christian.
HC is out there now, digging the hole, and we will bury him here directly. The one thing I told the Cs is that, though I loved my cat, I don’t want to see him again. Meaning, I don’t want one of those damn dogs digging him up and dragging him all over the neighborhood. This is a problem with dogs, so HC always makes sure to bury pets really deep. Fortunately, he has an attachment for the tractor that makes it possible to dig holes deeper than even our dogs are inclined to go.
So, here in a little bit, we’ll have a burial, and I will cry a little more, I’m sure, and then we will all move along. It takes me back to the conversation we had recently about the advantages of dropping dead unexpectedly versus having a long, drawn-out illness in which you suffer. Though it is a shock to me that Finn is dead, I am glad that I didn’t go through anything long and drawn out with him. As I’ve watched others struggle with a sick pet for a long time, I’ve always been bothered about it. On the one hand, because I am sentimental about animals, I would be willing to pay for some medical treatment for my cat, but on the other hand, I couldn’t afford to pay much, and at what point do you stop? And if you have to stop at some point, you might as well not have started in the first place. I would hate to spend hundreds of dollars trying to keep an animal alive, only to have it die anyway. And some people spend thousands. Well, I’m getting away from the sad loss of my cat, so I don’t want to go too far down that path right now. At any rate, I’m glad he went the way he did, without being in pain for a long time, and didn’t put me through all that agonizing. He was here and seemingly fine one minute and gone the next. That’s for the best, as far as I’m concerned, though I’m very sad and will miss him.
Love,
KB
Saturday, December 3, 2011
Potty Peeves
Pet peeves, revisited. Okay, I already wrote a post on pet peeves a while back. But they were biggish ones. However, we all have these teeny, weeny little pet peeves—things that annoy us every time we encounter them—but they are so picayune that we never think to discuss them amongst our friends. Here are a few of mine, all relating to toilet paper, which, now that I think of it, seems to be something of a theme of mine. This list, though, is mercifully shorter than my first pet peeve post.
1. Those toilet paper rollers in public restrooms that are meant to limit your TP usage. I understand that their desire is to keep nimwads from taking a huge wad and then causing the toilet to back up (and then flooding the bathroom with raw sewage and going off and leaving the mess behind and not even bothering to report it to the business's staff). But really, do they have to make it so that they feed out one sheet of TP at a time? I mean, you keep rolling the thing, it dispenses one sheet and then stops rolling. You tear off that sheet, roll it again, and get one more sheet. It takes a LONG time to accumulate enough TP at that rate. And if it's one-ply, you might be there all day.
2. And as long as I'm on potty matters: Perhaps the one-sheet-at-a-time dispensers are better than those other dispensers. The ones that are like a big drum with a humongous roll of Eastern-bloc-grade toilet paper in it. The TP dispenses at the bottom. You roll out a generous (but not toilet-clogging) supply, yank on it, and find that it is impervious to tearing, even on the serrated edge of the dispenser. You yank again. Rather than it tearing, it just dispenses more paper. Oh, my. Don't these public-bathroom dispensers just go from the sublime to the ridiculous? You keep trying to get it to stop, and you finally have to reach down, hold the paper against the cutting edge and really yank hard. In so doing, the paper gets pulled so hard that it gets yanked into a tight tube of paper rather than a fluffy pile. You now have something more akin to butt floss than to toilet paper. You are on your own to figure out how to use butt floss, as I'm not going there.
3. And, the final toilet paper complaint of the day: when the two-ply TP roll gets off sync at the manufacturing plant, and the perforated lines on the roll you get are not aligned properly. It's hard to figure out where to stop it. Very small peeve, but an annoyance when it happens to you.
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