In one of those expected turn of events, I can no longer squeeze into spaces that once used to easily fit me. In restaurants, I get stuck between chairs. Entering my house, I never seem to open the door wide enough. I walk into walls. And, in related news, food seems to land on me, where once it might have fallen on a napkin in my lap. If I could eat more elegantly, this last one would not be an issue.
When not eating or trying to navigate the increasingly tighter world, I am often asleep. It's hard to stay awake for more than 8 hours at a time, which made my most recent sleepless night (last night) even more unpleasant. Rob is out of town, so Smokey wandered the house looking for him FOR HOURS. His rotation included stomping into the bedroom and hopping over me, meowing and walking around until he had established that Rob was, in fact, not there. This did not stop him from checking every 15 minutes, usually just as I was about to fall asleep. Smokey, despite being 7 pounds, manages to walk like a baby elephant through the house. Emma punctuated his antics by howling into the night at random intervals for totally unknown reasons. She doesn't share Smokey's deep connection to Rob, so I'm pretty sure she was just being an asshole.
Last night I also finished Kurt Vonnegut's Armageddon in Retrospect. I loved it--it opens with a letter from Vonnegut's son Mark, who calls his dad "Kurt" and who also calls him out on some of his more nonsensical thoughts:
"I'm as celibate as fifty percent of the heterosexual Roman Catholic clergy."
What? Mark Vonnegut called this "a sentence with no meaning." But then there are so many sentences full of meaning, that you just kind of go with it. There's a letter home after Vonnegut was released from a POW camp in Germany, and the short fiction that follows is all connected to his experience of World War II. The book is almost exclusively about war, which is a theme that ran through our house this weekend. No, we're not fighting, but we went to see Avatar, rented The Hurt Locker, and had friends over to watch that annual battle known as The Super Bowl (was it just me or did the commercials totally suck? I have reached my yearly quota of Budweiser ads, for sure.)
I'm thinking the theme for this week should be a little different, maybe fluffier and not so bomb-oriented. It could help the cats sleep easier, if nothing else.
Jack is TWO!
10 years ago
3 comments:
Got to defend Vonnegut, a man I admire. The sentence means he has sex. Don't forget about "Look at the Birdie." It is a previously unpublished group of his early short stories. I think they would make interesting one-act plays.
Ok, I get that. But read it in the context of the speech it was a part of. It's totally out of nowhere. Or...try this one from the same speech:
But seriously, my fellow Hoosiers, there's good news and bad news tonight...the bad news is that the Martians have landed in Manhattan, and have checked in at the Waldorf-Astoria. The good news is that they only eat homeless people of all colors, and they pee gasoline.
From that one I get a George Carlin vibe.
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