october 2, 2000. This goofy friggin' cat. One second she's meowing her head off, angry at something she lacks the complex vocabulary to describe. The next second she wants to be with me so much that she follows me into the office, snuggles into my lap and licks my hand until I extend the bread cutter deelie on the desk. Then she snuggles onto the bread cutter deelie beside me and falls asleep, all dreamy innocence and pink mouthed charm. (She makes me think that I'm going to be a bad mother, because my first reaction to her is to ask questions she can't possibly answer. "I just fed you! What the hell's your problem?" Yeah. That'll play well with an infant.) I suppose my problem is that I still think of her as a particularly annoying lifestyle accessory of the Boy, much like his professed affection for muscular expressionism in painting and David Foster Wallace-style postmodernism. I'm wearing him down on old David, by the way. It's the cat that requires a big adjustment effort from me. I need to get used to her guarded forays for love, in which carelessness from me or boredom from her can turn the moment from warm & fuzzy to angry & jagged, all with a swipe of her sharp little claws. I need to get used to the idea that my lap is not my own anymore: I may be able to chase the Boy into an adjoining seat, but I can't reasonably claim that a nine pound cat is too heavy to be borne. And I need to get used to her idiosyncratic and paranoid attitude to "outside" as a thing to be avoided at all costs and to be experienced immediately, depending on her mood ("no, I don't care that you're doing something, let me out right now!") But there's the rub, right? If I get too comfortable with my pet, what will you use to distinguish me from the hordes of other diarists? Hmmm? I'm ignoring the dishes right now. I've found that I have a choice lately: I can spend the rest of my life doing housework and keeping up with the paper, I can do my homework on time, I can watch interesting teevee or I can pursue my own projects. For instance, I'm choosing personal writing over housework, despite the fact that I'll have to do these dishes at some point or begin to eat out of containers. I've been juggling the elements rather badly of late. I usually get to class thirty seconds before it starts, uncomfortably aware that my homework is in some measure incomplete. But damn, what a good episode of the Sopranos last night. "Cunnilingus and psychiatry: those are the roots of the problem." Looking over the last few entries, I can see an alarming upsurge in domesticity. Hey, it's the only frigging thing I have to write about here! And moving from home to a residence with a meal plan hasn't exactly taught me good house husbandry: when the Boy or I cook a good meal, it impresses the hell out of me and I want to talk about that emotional peak. As for the "waiting for my man" stuff, it's kind of a big deal to me. Not just that my new husband is gone for long periods of time, but that there are few faces I can draw solace from in the meantime. There is alone, and then there is alone. I've always hated going to sleep by myself. It just seems like the walls get flimsier, the windows get more revealing and the dark more enigmatic. Yeah, I'm afraid of the dark. This is why people like me get married: it's a powerful comfort to know that there is someone with you in case of trouble, someone you can wake up in the middle of the night when bad dreams have chased you awake and you can't relax again. Without even the pale comfort of an uncaring sibling in the next room, I get anxious. This is why it's such a big deal to me. I've joined the ranks of women past and present that keep one eye on the hallway and fill their time with wholesome busy work. We're just waiting for our man.