a time of fullness

IT'S FINALLY COOL ENOUGH TO WEAR PANTS. (Not that I ever wear pants at work; I'm solidly a skirt person.  But at home I like my schluffy exercise pants and it's been too fucking hot to wear much of anything at all.  I hate you, human-caused global climate change.  I weep for you, planet dying of fever.  I welcome you, fall temperatures.)  Glory hallelujah.  Amen and amen.

Also holy shit this Sudafed is no joke.  (I generally keep myself well stocked with various medicines, Gatorades, ginger ales and chicken soups, because having lived half my entire life alone, I know how to prepare to care for myself during illness.  Side bar: I don't even feel sad right now that there's no one to take care of me while I'm sick, which has always been the hallmark of my I-hate-being-single mourning/whining.  Now I'm like "aw fuck yeah I can sleep in a quiet house without anyone bothering me."  I think I was so seriously miserable in my last burning circus of a relationship that I broke through the other side of even giving a shit.)  I bought the really good stuff -- the kind you have to show like four different forms of ID to even look at.  The kind you have to sign in blood for.  The kind you only have to take once a day.  Thanks to this marvel of modern medicine I have spent the last two days blazing through my work hours in a giddy spaciness that sort of vibrates at the edges.  I looked it up today to figure out why the fuck I've been so over-the-moon happy (I mean, I'm in a pretty good mood generally, especially now that I'm in a voluntary seclusion and better rested, but this soaring glee is a bit unusual), and it looks like pseudoephedrine has an impact on norepinephrine-dopamine reuptake, which is what my antidepressant does, so I guess I'm like double the happy.  Don't get me wrong, it's awesome; it's just gotta be weird for the people who have to work with a giggly, beaming goofball when they're used to professional and no-nonsense.  This is all-nonsense.

Oh well.  I am a many-faceted being.  They might as well see the sillier side of Sarah now as later.

So having got that amphetamine-addled preamble off my chest, here's the post I have intended to write since this morning.
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This is a time of fullness.

As with most metamorphoses, it took profound upheaval to reach it.  I don't subscribe to the philosophy that growth must come from pain; but growth certainly comes from change, and change, to the human brain, however ultimately good, is nonetheless tumultuous and stressful.  In the last four months, I:

1. Learned that my mother has ovarian cancer and went through a summer of travel across states to help where I could (Note: I will not be writing much about this topic for the foreseeable future.  At the moment Mom's treatment is going great, and I am unspeakably grateful, and that is all I can say about it);
2. Ended another terrible relationship;
3. Moved to a new apartment; and
4. Moved office locations and accepted a promotion.

The changes encompassed every facet of my life: family, personal life, home, work.  All in flux at once.  It was the most exhausted I've ever been.

But again, the changes themselves, with the exception of my mother's illness, weren't painful so much as stressful.  The breakup was both brilliantly done on my part, and deeply liberating (I really have broken through some ceiling that I've never been able to breach before; this level of satisfaction and happiness with my own life, on its own terms, is something I never dreamed I could achieve); the move was holy-shit-so-exhausting but I love my new habitat as dearly as I hated my old one, and the closer location to work cuts my daily commute from 2.5 hours to less than one; and the promotion has catapulted me along my chosen trajectory of enacting much-needed reforms in my office.  Undertaking all these changes at once definitely tapped out my reserves (I've been a pretty dry cistern for the last three years, so I didn't have much to draw on to begin with), but even in the middle of the irruption I knew I just had to get through a few months of insanity before everything evened out and coalesced into a beautiful sea change.

Which it has.  I can say without hesitation or qualification that this is the happiest I have ever been.  Which happened when I finished all the change-events, and allowed myself over the last couple of months to do nothing but rest.  And suddenly: joy.  So much joy.  My apartment is still a hectic jumble of boxes; there's still so much to do at work; but everything feels peaceful and unhurried.  And I love my quiet, solitary hours at home.

It is from this joy and fulfillment and happiness that I am starting to write again.  It's been a long, long time since I've considered myself a writer.  You can basically track my writing by my blog posting, which has been essentially defunct since 2009.  Eight years in the desert.

I thought I lost it.  I would sit and try to write something, but it was all stilted, forced, shriveled.  I thought that was it, for me.  It hurt me, but I couldn't fix it.  It just wasn't there.

Undoubtedly there are many reasons for all of it.  I lost my favorite blog reader and blogging after that felt weird; my first Great Change launched around that time as well and my internal perspective was shifting so fucking rapidly that I barely had time to catch my breath, let alone process it, let alone write about it; and then I didn't know how to write about it, because I found myself in a new emotional landscape that I wasn't equipped to describe; and then I embarked on a series of shitty relationships (my taste in romantic partners, with two exceptions, has trended toward the abysmal, although, I think, for no longer) and stretches of in-between recovery time that took over my life and left no room for writing.  Those were all factors.  But primarily, I think, now that the words keep welling up within my metaphorical soul and spilling out and I can't stop writing (yesterday I blogged, and worked on my new piece of fiction (!), and journalled): I had only known how to write from a place of pain, and not a place of wholeness, and it's taken this long, and this much rest and repletion and joy and fulfillment, to arrive in a space where I can be creative again.

It's a really good lesson to absorb.  I need to protect my peace and my wholeness, so that I can write.

This feeling -- this feeling of being myself -- this is amazing.  I am almost wholly Sarah.

And from this place of fullness, I can create.  I can turn my hands and my brain and my entire sense of being to my best-loved, and best-suited, craft.

It is so, so good.

a teeny bit about my job

I can't believe how much I love my job.

It's been a combination of luck and the force of my personality, to be honest.  Luck that the job opened up just when I gave up on teaching and started casting around for something new, and luck that the attorneys I was initially assigned to assist are all fantastic people to work for; then luck that I got to know people who are, or who became, people of influence in the firm.  The rest is personality and will.

Part of what I love about my job is finally working in a place that's big enough for my ambitions.  I've taken my initial position of "legal secretary" and added management and policy development, with an eye far up the ladder over time.  I am well respected in an environment that does not yield itself to a great deal of respect.  I am well respected because I do good work, I am friendly and outgoing, I am smart and competent, I am firm and decisive, I speak my mind, and I don't tolerate bullshit.  It's a role I've grown into, and quickly.  I've only been at the firm a year and half and I've already earned a promotion and started a policy-making focus group within my department.

It's weird, realizing that I'm good at politics.  (I've come a long, long way since my rawboned fledgling days at the homeless center all those years ago.)  I do politics my own way (that is to say, with sincerity and openness), but I know how to make and leverage connections, I know the right things to say, the right arguments to make.  I know how to set a goal and gather support for it.  I know how to get what I want.  I know how not to give a shit when people don't like me.  I know how to use all that for good.

It's pretty fucking great.

I could rave all day about how much I love my attorneys.  I assist three at present; there have been some secretarial reassignments since I came on board, so of the three I initially started with, I've retained two, S. and B. (one of which I kept because I went to my supervisors and demanded to keep him--sometimes when I think about all the brassy, ballsy things I've done at this job I just sit and giggle, I can't believe they've all worked, and also, since that appears to be all it takes to make shit happen, why haven't I thought to just make demands all along); the third (D.) I knew I wanted to assist from my first week on the job, and about six months ago he went to my supervisor and told her he wanted to be assigned to me, and it was done (M.'s recounting to me later made my heart swell with pride, because the people at the top know who I am).  My attorneys are all vastly different personalities, with vastly different positions in the firm hierarchy, and I get along with all of them splendidly, and have really solid working relationships with them.  B. and I are work-spouses who are mostly incredibly nice to each other, occasionally grump each other out, and frequently spend long minutes on the phone together muttering absently to ourselves before realizing we don't need to be talking to each other.  S. and I are old-school-style boss-and-secretary (except that he thinks me a magical computer wizard), with a lot of benevolent cordiality and occasional political commiserations.  D. and I are still figuring each other out, but there's a lot of mutual liking and respect there, and working with him is teaching me to be even more assertive and personally powerful, which I appreciate the hell out of.

And that's not even bringing the management and policy-making aspects into it.

I fucking love my job.  For the first time ever.  I've turned it into a career, and I have a clear vision of where I want to take it.  And I can get there.

The last eight years have seen a few distinctive shifts in my personal development.  2009-2010 saw me burst out of a chrysalis of trauma and depression into healing and coping and joy and freedom.  2017 has been the year of real blooming.  (So I'm a butterfly and a flower.  A butterflower.  Don't mind me, I have a cold right now and this is the Sudafed talking.)  It's been a damn hard year, in places -- completely exhausting.  But this is the most, and most marked and permanent-feeling, growth that I've undergone in a long time.

I've always learned and grown in my own time.  Often that's been later than I would have expected, or than others have expected.  But it's better and deeper for taking so long.

I still have a long way to go, with a lot of things.  But I'm getting there; and even better, I love where I am right now -- not just where I plan to be.

Also?  I love writing again.

sorry, not sorry

We have no intention of having children, and have a dog and cat who are clearly the only kids we want. 

I grinned as I re-read that delightful sentence from my childhood best friend with whom I recently reconnected after at least twenty years (Facebook may have unforgivably cost us the election, but damn it's great for connecting with people).  Aside from marrying young, J. and I followed similar life paths, including shedding our faith (god I love talking with fellow ex-pats from religious fundamentalism; when you run into someone who comes from the same strange subculture as you did, you can swap stories without having to translate anything, which is refreshing), and not having children.

It wasn't the outcome I expected (and as people never tire of reminding me, kids could still happen); since very early childhood I have always dreamed of love and marriage and children--ambitions which eclipsed all others.  I planned to marry right out of college and devote myself full-time to my husband and our three or four children.  While I reserved small dreams to myself--I always intended on writing--I never planned seriously for any career; employment, to my college-aged mind, would serve merely as a placeholder until I could meet Mr. Right and settle down to my real life of wife- and motherhood.

Thank gawd none of that came to pass.

Looking back on that cultural brainwashing infuriates me.  I have clawed my way up to an amazing career, but it took me until my mid-thirties to even really get started.  Everything that came before this was haphazard and accidental; if my talents and ambitions had been fostered, if I'd been taught that my goals for what I wanted with my own life as a sovereign human being should always come first, if I'd been encouraged to plan for a future that holds no guarantee of domestic partnership, if I'd been told, as men are told, that it was imperative to plan for my career because a profession is both necessary and fulfilling, it might not have taken me as long to get here.

And that enculturation runs deep.  Long after I gave up my faith, I maintained the assumption that what I wanted most was love and family.  It led to many years of lonely grief as my short-lived relationships all failed one after the other, and the years of singleness overwhelmed the scale.  It's only been within the last few months that I've started to question whether family is something I really want.  Love and marriage--yes, I still want those.  Not as badly as I once did, because I'm realizing with increasing clarity what a gift this time is that I have all to myself, and what a glorious life I am capable of building on my own.  But someday, once I'm established, once I've built a foundation that limerence cannot shake, once I've met someone who is truly what I want, I would like a life companion.

Kids though.  I cannot decide where I land when it comes to kids.  I have moments where I wish I could kiss a sweaty, tangled little forehead goodnight, plan a magical Christmas, watch a little person become a bigger person, help someone find their way in a big daunting exciting world.  I have moments when it hurts me to realize that the likelihood of any of that happening is decreasing every day.  I always thought I'd be a good mom, and it's weird to think that such a lifelong assumption will most likely go unproven.  

But then I think about all the things I don't have to deal with.  Diapers.  Teething.  Fevers.  Tantrums.  The noise and the mess.  Giving up prioritizing your own schedule and wellbeing pretty much forever.  The sharp drop in marital happiness and personal fulfillment that nearly all parents experience.  All that sleeplessness.  The horrors of pregnancy and labor and post-partum depression.  Homework and sports.  Endless complications.  Middle school.  Constant financial crisis.  The weird culty mentality that most parents I've met subscribe to the instant they have kids.

Yeah, I'm really glad I haven't had to experience any of that. 

So when I read J.'s "we definitely don't want kids" statement (from the tone it sounds like she's had to defend her decision to far too many people with zero actual stakes in but plenty of opinions regarding her life) my response was...interesting, to me.  I wanted to give her a giddy high five.  

Maybe I don't want kids.  (Hahaha since the window is gradually closing I'm thinking that's maybe a happier conclusion to reach than "I wish I'd had them when I was twenty-five.")  I'm cool with that, if that's the case.   

Of course, when you reach your mid-thirties and are thinking about the possibility of dating again sometime in the next 15 years, you have to weigh whether you'd take a partner with pre-existing kids.  I've dated guys with kids before; it was enough to make me realize real quick that I wasn't in any hurry to go popping little people out of my own vagina.  Parts of it were great; I had a really strong bond with one child in particular, and I loved the little routines we built together, the songs he liked me to sing to him at bedtime, the books he liked me to read--and the milestones we reached together, like teaching him to shower and get his own breakfast--and the goals we set together, like helping him deal with his extreme emotions.  But a lot of it sucked, including the stark reality that my relationship with my significant other would never come first, and the realization that I had to set myself aside for the sake of children that I hadn't signed up for.  And even though the kids were the reason I stayed in that relationship so long, I emerged from it realizing a lot more than I had before about exactly what having kids entails, and it gave me serious pause.

Would I date a guy with kids again (or a woman with kids)?  I guess that would depend on the guy (or woman)--and the kids.  It wouldn't be my first choice.  Sort of like having kids at all.  But I could be persuaded, I think, with the right person (the right people).

Just not right this second.  People my age now have mostly younger kids, and younger kids aren't my jam.  Since I'm not really seeing myself taking up dating again in the immediately foreseeable future, there's not a whole lot of worry on that score.  I have shit to do right now, and dating doesn't really fit in with my plans, so kids are a moot consideration at the moment in any case (I will consider fostering, farrrrr down the road, when I'm established; but I'll be damned if I take up single parenting that starts at the kid's infancy.  Nope nope nope).  

One long rambling blog post later...in short, I'm not 100% solid on the kids conclusion, but I'm definitely over 80% on not wanting kids.  That last 20% is confusing; I hate that I can't really tell how much of my residual possible desire for kids is an internalized cultural expectation, and how much of it is genuine, and how much of it is simply a willingness to be open to the best life as it comes.  I tend to know myself very, very well ("Know Thyself" is sort of my life's pursuit), and not knowing this drives me fucking nuts.  

It doesn't help that underlying this margin of uncertainty is a suspicion that some dude could come along and try to talk me into something I don't really want and I might give in because women are also trained from birth never to trust ourselves.  I'm tired of men telling me what I want, tired of female uncertainty being interpreted as an invitation (or a need) for male direction/interjection/interference.  Uncertainty is not the absence of agency, thank you very much.  And then there's the highly enculturated neurosis of the "ticking biological clock" (which intellectually I reject; I have genes that would benefit the human gene pool to pass on like intelligence and resilience, but also genes that I'm just as happy not to inflict on a child like crippling depression; further, there's no inherent merit in having biological children, and arguably there's quite a bit of non-merit in insisting on producing biological children on a frighteningly overpopulated planet with shrinking resources and millions of orphaned, homeless, and unwanted children in need of a good home).  A number of people who advocate for having kids put forth the bullshit argument that you're never really ready anyway and parenthood is something you can't possibly plan for emotionally until you just do it, which is both absurdly egotistical and ludicrously self-righteous, not to mention founded on laughably specious logic.  (Like, no one says that about getting a pet.  You know you'll have to spend money and time caring for a dependent living being, which factors heavily into a responsible person's decision whether or not to adopt one.  "You can't know until you commit irrevocably to it by doing it" is the same nonsense put forth by the Catholic Church regarding the Eucharist; I converted to Catholicism before jumping the religious ship altogether and confirmed that the Eucharist is exactly what you make of it, which is what I thought to begin with.)  My uncertainty is plagued by nefarious cultural factors that I don't trust at all, and which make me narrow my eyes a bit at the remaining 20% of myself that whispers that I might want kids.  Do I?  Do I really?

I suppose where I'm really landing is my own agency.  I'm not entirely certain what I want, and that's perfectly okay; there's no hurry to figure it out, and there's certainly no need to have someone else around to help me decide.  In the meantime, I'm deeply happy that I have kicked off my thirty-sixth year in my present circumstances.  This isn't the life I had envisioned.  But in more ways than one, it's so much better than anything I even knew to wish for myself.  And that includes (for the time being, at least) being single, and child-free.

singleness rocks, part 1

So, I'm not going to lie.  Singleness is awesome.

It's taken a long time to get to this FUCK YEAH point.  But several lousy relationships and nearly a decade after my regular blogging days, I'm pretty thrilled to be where I am.

It's funny, the things that hit you.  Yesterday I was reflecting on the privacy.  Or rather, the complete irrelevance of privacy.  I can shit with the bathroom door open or stride around the apartment naked or belt out random snippets of songs or fart in bed without worrying about my dignity or anyone else's sensibilities.  It's great.

Just now I was mowing down some hummus (homemade; I'm starting to do things around the house again in a way I haven't had the energy for in at least three--but more realistically eight or more--years) and trying to remember who it was I knew who wouldn't eat hummus because they didn't like the texture, and I sat bolt upright on the couch elated by the realization that I don't have to tolerate anyone's weird food habits anymore.  All of my exes had weird food habits.  More than one of them hated tomatoes.  One wouldn't eat vegetables.  One wouldn't eat meat.  This one didn't like foreign food; that one didn't like cucumbers; that one hated hummus and yogurt and pudding and anything else that was neither definitively solid nor liquid.  This other one hated olives.  Another one hated coffee.  Lettuce.  Wine.  Fish.  Bananas.  I can't keep all their stupid idiosyncrasies sorted in my head anymore, and thank god for that--trying to keep that shit straight when I wanted to cook was fucking maddening.  It was like dating a class of adult kindergartners.  JUST EAT THE DAMN TOMATO OHMYGOD.

Not having to mentally juggle someone else's endless lists of food-hatreds while planning a menu and trying to balance it with what I like?  That's gold.

I was reading recently about how women are responsible for the vast majority of the mental labor that goes into running a household, so that even when men offer to help, the men are just thinking in terms of helping with the execution of a task, while women remain solely responsible for planning not only one task, but every accompanying and related task for every part of what makes the household function.  All day.  Every day.  And when you're planning the kids' lunches and getting them up and dressed in the morning and timing their schedules so they all get enough sleep but still get showered and out the door to school on time; then planning throughout the day all the errands you have to run that night, and what menus you should plan out and shop for based on what's on sale, and what special events are coming up, and when to start dinner and how much to prepare and how long all the prep work will take, and whether or not you have enough time to do some laundry while dinner is cooking...well, when you have the massive events-planning of two or more lives constantly running through your head, someone half-heartedly asking "What can I do to help?" is more a hindrance than a help just for asking rather than stepping in to try to take on some of that mental planning.

My own planning is fun for me.  It still occupies a lot of my mental space, but it's all by me, for me, of me, and the reduction in planning that I deal with just for being single is pretty damn sweet.

Also I can eat whatever I want without someone else whining about how they don't like perfectly normal and delicious food.

Like this amazing hummus.

so what

Settling into a new place takes forever.

I don't know what happened in the last few months - some kind of personal metamorphosis, again.  It's not as dramatic as past metamorphoses.  This feels more like...glazing, like in ceramics.  Or maybe firing, after the glazing.  2016 was the glazing.  2017 is the firing.  Like some kind of finish is happening, so that I can move forward to do what I've always wanted to do.

Carole told me once that after I left the house she shared with her mother and stepfather after an evening of fun and laughter and ranting with them, Mike looked at her and said of me, "She's going to be a terror when she realizes what she is."

I think I'm starting to realize what I am.

That's manifesting in all kinds of interesting ways at work (I am KILLING IT with my career, holy shit) and in my personal life (I am NOT INTERESTED in bullshit anymore--that latest round of bullshit with the last loser crystallized into a giant NOPE in my brain), which I'll get into at some point, maybe (I'm cagier with spilling all of my guts on the Internet than I used to be).  The salient application at the moment is how I'm approaching settling into the new apartment.

Even at the beginning of the summer, right after the move, I felt all freaked out and stressed with how much work there was to be done, and how meager the reserves I had to draw upon to do it.  But as I recovered from the latest relationship (notice I didn't say that I had to recover from the latest breakup) and started to tackle adjusting to the new position at work, and realized how critically important it is to rest and have some quality of life, I stopped giving a shit about how quickly I'm getting unpacked and organized.  The kitchen is totally organized, and the bathroom; my bedroom is just about there; the living room functions; and the rest is all boxes and piles of awesome junk, and I'm okay with that.  For the first time ever I'm happy, really, deeply, truly happy -- I fucking LOVE my job, I love my city, I love my apartment, I love my life: having more time because of a shorter commute, having evenings to spend at home, cooking on weekends, exercising early on weekday mornings, exploring new TV shows and new books, reveling in my lovely little Simon-eyes, buckling back down to a budget, beginning to write again, feeling like I'm finally starting to make a difference in the world around me -- so what does it matter if there are boxes everywhere?  There's no rush; I'll get there.  It'll all come together in time.

Also I think I'm beginning to worry less about other people liking me.  I'm cool with not coming across as friendly and warm.  I have shit to do.  People who are worth my friendliness and warmth will get it; people who aren't, won't.  I don't have time to play nice, so I'm training myself out of it.  It's taking the people who don't know me as well a little aback, I think; the people who know me better seem to be taking it in stride because this has been me all along.

I like not being pushed around as easily anymore.  And it's all because I stopped giving a shit.  Which is extending to every corner of my life.

And I love it.  I feel unleashed.

god only knows

After all these years, I am delighted to still be writing about Simon.  (Also, after all these years, I am delighted to finally have embraced the split infinitive. For those whose grammatical training in English stemmed from the Victorian era and cannot read "to boldly go" without cringing, I refer you to John McWhorter's Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue, in which he lays out so sound an argument in favor of the split infinitive that I converted to its acceptance on the spot.)  My lovely kittyboy approaches his sixteenth birthday sometime early next year (hm, I should probably appoint one. Lol I'm a terrible kittymama - no birthday celebrations in fifteen years; I might as well be a Dursley.  I'm leaning toward January 4th; for some reason that feels right), and our fourteenth anniversary of meeting at Easter, and our twelfth year of companionship this Christmas.  At fifteen, he remains full of sass and sweetness, still pert and bright-eyed, and only bushy-tailed when a loud noise scares him.

He's the most adaptable cat I've ever heard of; he acclimated to being hauled out to South Bend, Indiana, twelve years ago, then being hauled back to Erie, Pennsylvania, three years later; he survived a move into my grandmother's mobile home with me, then back into my parents' house for three years, then to my apartment that I dubbed The Eyrie for three more; then the trip back to Michigan to a cramped, cheap little condo for two more years while I spent far too much time at my ex's place; and then the enormous upheaval of the move to the current homestead.  With each change, he has remained his faithful, affectionate, playful self; and with this last change in particular, now that it's just the two of us again, in a large old apartment resplendent with 1920s arched doorways, hardwood flooring and stucco walls, he is relaxed and happy, and I can't look at him without hearing him break into the soft, rhythmic purr that snags a little in his nose - my favorite sound in all the world.

My Simon has seen me through a lot.  I've always had my pet songs for him (har) - "You Made Me So Very Happy," "You are My Sunshine" (or, "You are My Simon"), "Sweet Caroline" ("Sweet Kitty Simon"); lately I've been singing a lot of "God Only Knows."  Because without this cat, this adorable, sweet, loyal, devoted companion, who has literally stood at my shoulder staring down into my face all through my darkest nights, I don't know that I'd be here today writing this.  Every day I look forward to going home to him; every morning I love waking up to his FEED ME yowls; I laugh when he trips me up in the hallways, or trips himself up because he's too busy staring backwards into my face as he walks to pay attention to where he's going; I smile when he settles down into a catloaf next to me on the couch in the evenings.

I know our time is short.  At the moment he is in perfect health (I had full bloodwork done up on him a month ago, and, uncharacteristically for fifteen-year-old cats, he has no renal or liver issues; his hips are only arthritic enough to have necessitated my converting a plastic storage bin into a custom litter box that he can easily step into and easily crouch at full height in, but which certainly don't impede his countertop foraging anytime I step out of the kitchen); but fifteen is old, and though I cherish hopes of him reaching his twenties, there's no guarantee.  My breath catches when I think of losing him (god, what I wouldn't give to have the ability to reverse aging; I would go into extravagant debt to have Simon with me forever); I can envision no greater personal loss or anguish, and I know I'll have to feel it at some point, much sooner than I'll ever be ready for.  But that only underscores the incalculable preciousness of the present that I have with him - a present in which we have each other all to ourselves, and in which I can give him an easy old age full of mommy-love and support and creature comforts and a stress-free environment without roommates or other animals.

Even now as I type this from my lovely balcony on a perfect autumnal-summer afternoon, I know that when I walk back into the house, a fuzzy little black face with vibrant yellow owl-eyes will be running to greet me and demand his dinner (which he will have to wait another 90 minutes to receive).

This precious little nine-pound bundle of sinew and old hips and silky-soft fur and dexterous monkey-paws is my pride and joy, my perfect companion, my favorite person, and I am so glad to still be writing about him, after all these years.  God only knows what I'd be without him.  And here we are.