Our Morning Routine

One of Dixie's obsessions is my hair elastic. If I have my hair in a pony tail, when I am sitting on the couch, she will jump onto the back of it and try to claw the elastic out of my hair.

We have also developed a morning routine around the elastic.

Every morning, the second she hears the shower stop, she starts scratching on the door. I open it and she, knowing that when I take the elastic out of my hair to shower, I place it in the soap dish, lithely leaps onto the sink.



Within seconds she has knocked the elastic off the soap dish and into the sink.



Normally, she'll snatch it up between her teeth, jump down, and take off running and jumping to the bed, where she'll drop it in front of sleepy Karel, hoping to initiate a game of fetch.

However, as I am sick of losing hair elastics to kitty fetch, I have learned to place the real elastic I use in my hair with an impostor: the elastic I've given her as her permanent toy.

Thing is she KNOWS when I use the impostor. And she views it as entirely inferior.

Once she knocks into the sink, she sniffs it, sits back up and stares at me.


I'll go into the kitchen, put some water on to boil from coffee, and walk back, and she'll still be there, giving the evil kitty eye, this time from the other side of the sink so as to best magnify the effectiveness of the kitty curse.

And who said cats weren't smart? Mine is-- frighteningly so at times. Good thing she's cute-- even when she's trying to control my mind.

The agony and the ecstasy

Being a near-30, well-educated waitress, bartender and, let's not forget, freaking intern, I have my good days and my bad days.

Last Monday was a Bad Day. I was mentally formulating a blog post at work. Being distanced from the emotions now-- in fact, being contentedly on my roof deck, drinking a negra modelo, listening to Bob Marley, and admiring the growth spurt of my sunflowers-- it is difficult to re-imagine precisely what was going through my head. From what I can recall, it went something like this:

"The woman at table 3 just grabbed me by my lapel. Literally grabbed me, and asked me, menacingly, 'Did you not hear what I said to you on the way to the bathroom? Don't you know how many times I've been in here?'

She was upset because she had told me she wanted to pay the bill, but her son had asked first, so I decided to be Switzerland and placed the bill gently in the middle of the table at the end of the meal.

Shaking her off of me, I tried to recoup in the kitchen. I grabbed a chunk of bread out of the supply reserved for the paying customers, stole off to a corner, nibbled away and stared absent-mindedly at... a toilet. The filthy freaking kitchen toilet. The crapper was the capper: I am a rat. Vermin.

Disgusted, I tossed the nibbled-at bread into the trash and walked back out onto the floor, scratching my arm. And scratching more. This has been happening since the onset of spring, my arms itching at work, non-stop, hives rising up. I am allergic to this job. I am having a corporeal reaction to the malnutrition of my brain, calling out for help..."

The version running through my head last Monday was more angry, less comedic, but equally melodramatic.

And then there are nights like last night, when I remember, almost-30-year-old waitress and intern aside, I'm pretty damn fabulous. Well, at least a lot of the things I've done are fabulous.

The moment of realization came when I mentioned, off-handedly, to a couple of my bar regulars, whom I've known for a year now, how my former students have gotten in touch with me through Facebook.

"What? You were a teacher?!"

A high school teacher, yeah.

Delighted gasps of incredulity.

Moments like this, I remember: I'm not just a near-30 waitress/bartender/intern. I have this whole other life-- other lives, really. For the most part, Teaching, surviving, traveling, up-and-moving to New York because I simply wanted to. And it's all the more fun to have the ability to turn people's perceptions of me completely upside-down. There's something to be said about living an unexpected life-- the good days AND the bad days.

I recently learned that pregnant female polar bears, when unable to consume the amount of calories necessary to sustain and support a cub, are able to reintegrate a fetus back into their body.

I wish humans had evolved to possess this process.

Maybe then tragedies like this could have been avoided.

A New York Moment: First in a series?

Guess who's back?

So, I've been meaning to write this series highlighting crazy moments I happen upon in NYC, particularly in the subway, but didn't get around to it until now. Keep pestering until I provide more-- trust me, I could hibernate for the next year and still have tons of material to use.

A short one tonight, as it's late.

Two things spotted on the subway on my commute home tonight, on two separate platforms:

1.) Man vomiting profusely as all strolled past nonchalantly.

2.) Large rat accompanying me up the stairs to the street at my stop. Lucky for him he didn't follow me home-- Dixie would have taken care of him for sure. She's a bad-ass.

Dixie!

Finally... This took a while!

No, but, really?

Tripp?

I guess the habit of naming children bizarrely is genetic. Uncle Trig and Nephew Tripp. How... adorable.

Sigh...

Protest leader Chamlong Srimuang and airport officials warmly shook hands and Chamlong bowed toward a Buddhist shrine featuring a portrait of the country's revered constitutional monarch, King Bhumibol Adulyadej.

The two sides embraced and shouted, "Long Live the King."

Only in Thailand...