Birds

Yesterday evening S and I went running together. This was a first, as normally S prefers going to the gym over taking a run around the neighborhood; plus, he's naturally a faster runner than me, so we hadn't ever explored the idea of becoming running partners. On a whim yesterday evening, though, I called S from work and asked if he might want to join me on my usual three-mile loop, and he agreed!

So we took off around 7:30, and to my surprise, S was able to jog at a very slow pace in order to stay alongside me. Because I tend to pant heavily when I run (insert lewd joke here), I told S as soon as we started that this might be his first chance ever in the history of our relationship to talk freely and at length without my interjecting comments and opinions the whole time. Hee. He actually grinned at the idea of rambling on uninterrupted, so off he went, regaling me with stories about work for the first 15 minutes or so of our run.

Once we turned off the main road and entered our friend JP's neighborhood, we passed many cute cats. Cute cats that seem to understand that hanging out beneath cars or in the center of the road is not advantageous to their health, unlike our local scrappy outdoor feline, Hip-Hop, who disregards all personal-safety concerns whatsoever. The cats we passed were all hanging out on front lawns or on the edge of the sidewalk, watching us as we ran by.

On the way out of JP's neighborhood, we ran beneath a huge, circling, shrieking cloud of crows, which was freaky. Crows (or ravens, or starlings---I'm not sure which) do this, as I learned in my first apartment in Maryland a few years back. There, we had a problem whereupon several hundred crows (or some other similar-looking, scary black birds) would circle two large trees by our parking lot, shrieking and crapping all the while. They would fly around and shriek and be generally creepy for a few hours, then they'd finally settle in the branches of those two trees and quiet down a bit. Those trees, with all the black birds on them, looked like something out of a nightmare. The problems with this situation were many: For starters, the birds would circle and shriek early in the morning, beginning at 5:00 a.m. or so. The sound was deafening and very disconcerting. Secondly, a few hundred birds crapping in our parking lot was bad news. You should've seen the cars. They were COATED. So was the ground. You had to watch your step the entire way. Plus, that much crap smells bad. Kind of musty. It was a problem, and unsanitary. Finally, the city sent someone over to attempt to scare the birds away for good. He started by using various loud devices: whistles and clapping things. That didn't really work. He then graduated to mini-explosives. That worked, a bit. Finally, he used a rifle to shoot blanks into the air, over and over, thereby rendering the birds too terrified to stick around. Eureka! Problem solved.

Anyway, we passed beneath the birds last night, and one peed on me. Not as much as when I got peed on by a bird on Melrose one time, but still. There was a guy in his front yard waving a newspaper at the birds (totally ineffective) and generally cursing them, and I shouted, "One peed on me!" I'm not sure why I yelled that. But he was sympathetic and shook his head with what looked like bitterness, as if to say, "These damn birds are a nuisance!"

It's interesting how some birds are frightening and loud and ugly (pigeons, crows, vultures, the more-aggressive seagulls), while others are adorable and pretty and lovely singers (finches, cardinals, nightingales).

When we finally got back home, I iced my calf with that same bag of Peruvian scallops and popped some Advil, which is now becoming my usual routine. We then settled in for a night of "Amazing Race" viewing and Jonathan Ames reading.

Toonces, the Cat Who Could Drive...Her Owners Crazy

I am so tired. I am so tired. I am so tired. I am so tired.

Last night Toonces was especially active. When used in reference to Toony, "active" is a cute little euphemism S and I have adopted to mean "defined by sprinting and leaping and battle-crying, resulting in little to no sleep for the two of us." Last night, I think the toy mice were to blame for Toonces's "activity."

Chilling on the couch (i.e., rickety futon) yesterday evening, S and I discussed---for the millionth time in the two years since we first adopted T. Kitty (like P. Diddy. Get it?)---how we don't play with her enough. She's rambunctious and super-playful, and she likes very much to engage in mock fisticuffs with all manner of erratically-moving string-like or mouse-like objects. In fact, she seems to thrive on this type of exercise. S and I, on the other hand, can think of other, more-enjoyable things to do after a long day at work than shake the Cat Dancer cat wand in the middle of the living room, for several minutes on end, while Toonces stalks it from various points around the room's perimeter. I mean, it's fun for the first ten minutes or so. But as time wears on, Toony's set-ups and choosing of vantage points and hiding places from which to stalk the wand become more and more elaborate. She'll spend five full minutes wriggling around beneath the bookcase to find the perfect little lookout point, then she'll sit there and follow the wand with her eyes for another eight. Meanwhile, there one of us is, standing in the center of the living room, bored, shaking the Cat Dancer halfheartedly while waiting for Toonces to finally make her move. Sometimes when I'm doing this, I repeat the words, "Look Toony! Come get it! Come get it!" so many times that I kind of work myself into a trance, and my mind sort of floats out of my head and goes somewhere else.

OK, anyway. After comparing levels of guilt about the piddling amount of playtime we
each make for Toony, I wondered aloud if her several hundred toy mice had all ended up in the usual place, beneath the television stand, since I hadn't seen them littering our hardwood floors in the last few months or so. S guessed the mice were indeed beneath the TV stand, and he set out to retrieve them with the handle-end of a Swiffer mop.

Bad idea. Well, good at first. Then bad.

Toony freaked when she saw her long-lost toy-mice prey come bursting forth from the
TV stand in one forceful swoosh of the Swiffer. She gave an excited little chirp and set about batting at the mice with her paws and scurrying after them as they sailed across the floor. "Oh, how cute! She's so excited!" we idiot pet owners cooed. We spent the next several minutes watching Toony fling her mice down the long hallway, then chase frantically after them, then bat them around for a bit, then start the whole shebang over again. Our "We're too lazy to play with the cat" guilt was eradicated for the time being.

Unfortunately, the fun and games didn't end when S and I climbed into bed at 11:30. No no; Toony was only getting started. She spent the next several hours whipping herself into a toy mouse–induced frenzy, which manifested itself as lap after lap of hallway sprints, nails clicking and clacking every step of the way; little victory mews and cries of attack when a mouse was successfully conquered; and what sounded to me like a whole lot of crashing into walls. I barely slept. S, who sleeps like he's dead, slept just a bit more than I did. It was bedlam! I wondered if the neighbors were kept up by the clamor as well.

This morning, when I "woke up," (as if I'd been asleep!), I felt more tired than when I'd gone to bed. Today I'm having trouble reading and concentrating. It's pathetic! And what irked me more than anything was that as I was leaving the apartment this morning to go to work, I caught a glimpse of Toonces lounging luxuriously on my side of the bed, yawning and snuggling up against a fold of the comforter, preparing for a nice long nap.

The Bedroom of Stifling Nostalgia

It's Day 9 of 10 that I'm spending Chez Parents in good old G-land on the opposite coast. Upstate NY really is beautiful in the summer. The warm breeze stirring the pine boughs and rustling the lush, green grass is almost enough to make one forget the dismal Northeastern winters, which stretch from November all the way to April. More than anything else this past week, I've been enjoying my parents' big, quiet backyard, especially the shade of the maple tree, which was "my" tree through childhood and which now is large and full enough to provide a pleasant spot for reading.

The expansive shade of the maple tree is far, far more soothing than the comparatively oppressive space contained within the four walls of my childhood bedroom on the second floor of the house. This room, with its faded orange carpeting and very nineteen-seventies collage-style wallpaper, has changed little since I left it for good in the spring of 1997. The canopy bed is gone, the posters honoring the band INXS and various NY and VT ski resorts have vanished, and the stuffed animals have relocated to the attic, but there still sits a full bookcase on one wall and a bulletin board replete with high-school relics on another. The closet, though thoroughly (and courageously) sifted through and organized a few years back by my mom, still contains boxes of papers, notebooks, letters, and diaries from what were evidently my emotionally turbulent middle- and high-school years. It was these boxes I approached today, at the gentle urging of my parents, in an attempt to weed out those items that could be discarded once and for all.

The thought of opening these boxes and coming face-to-face with my younger self filled me with dread. Last time I did this, I think a full year ago, I came across a paper I wrote about how, when I grew up, I wanted to do work that focused on helping women with eating disorders, or something similarly counseling-related. (Reading that made me feel a bit guilty about having recently joined the ranks of Corporate America.) I cracked open my massive junior-year English project titled "The Physique Mystique," a study of contemporary literature with women's body image as its focus. I read a journal entry from the same time that explored my choices as a young woman on the brink of adulthood. I was surprised by what seemed like an intelligent, idealistic, thoughtful young me. The surprise quickly dissolved into panic, though. I wondered if anyone would describe the current me as intelligent, idealistic, or thoughtful. I wondered if I'd squandered any sort of potential I displayed in high school. I felt sick and anxious trying to determine if high-school me would be proud of adult me. In the fretful aftermath of that closet clean-out, I decided it was time to make a few changes in my respectable but unremarkable adult life. I started writing again, and a few months later, began volunteering on Saturdays. Small steps, certainly. But taking initiative and action, however minor, has helped a bit in keeping the "What am I doing with my life?" anxiety at bay.

So. Anyway. Today I was again faced with the daunting task of reliving bits and pieces of my adolescence and judging how my thoughts and ideas from back then measure up against the life I'm living today. Daunting, indeed. These situations are always greatly exacerbated by my lifelong propensity for writing everything down. I've kept a handful of diaries over the years, and I tend not to throw out letters, notes, and drawings that seem meaningful at the time. Everything's documented. It's all there on paper, and it often makes me cringe.

Today I found quite a bit of incriminating personal writing from my adolescent and late-teen years. Among the yellowed papers was a word-processed self-improvement plan that I vaguely remember typing up in a fervor one college summer. It included everything from "Apply skin medication EVERY DAY!" to "Reduce number of bingeing incidents to zero." I also found, presumably from high school, a scribbled diary entry titled "People Who Never Fail at Anything," with a list of 20 or so names listed beneath. Some of the names are repeated. Many of them are kids I went to high school with who got better grades than me, were involved in twice the activities I was, and were accepted to Ivy-League schools. Some of them were good friends of mine. Even one of my grandmothers made the list. On the next page, in the same ink and feverish scrawl, is a paragraph about how talentless, stupid, and ugly I believed I was in comparison to those on the list. Ugh. Painful! I threw that out and made a mental note to Google a few of the people on the list of whom I'd lost track.

Among the other, less emotionally wrenching artifacts were a few fairly embarrassing diary entries in which I'd listed in numerous ways how much I loved or was bored by my boyfriends; there was one particularly silly entry detailing how elated I was to be asked to D's junior prom. It was incredibly goofy, yet also kind of sweet. I mean, I really don't get excited like that anymore about most things. I also found some drawings that a long-ago coworker from an old summer job had covertly delivered to me in the office whenever he wanted to have lunch, as well as writing authored by myself and my classmates from the overnight, week-long field trips to Nature's Classroom taken in fifth and seventh grade.

So I guess what I'm saying here is that each time I enter my childhood bedroom and begin sorting through my old things, I'm reminded of the person I once was. Sometimes I get a kick and a laugh out of it; other times I'm disturbed by what I find. In both cases, though, I'm prompted to reflect on my life as it stands now and to compare it to what I imagined my adult life would be.

So, how do I measure up this go-round? Not bad, actually. It seems I've evolved a bit from the self-absorbed person I was ten or twelve years ago, and I now rarely compare my accomplishments, or lack thereof, to others'. I don't think I'm talentless, or stupid, or ugly...just lazy and a bit unorganized, with too many interests and not enough "stick-to-itiveness," to borrow a word from one of the Nature's Classroom writings. When faced with the opportunity to daydream under a shady maple tree or force the contents of a closet into some kind of order, I'll always choose the maple tree.