Sunday, Jan. 26, 2003 / 1:02 p.m.

~On Evaporated Energy, Thoughts of 2002, and the Anachronistic Practice of Selective Canine Breeding In the Face of Mass Slaughter of the Undesirable~

I was lying in bed spooning Gladys under the covers, Norman was lying on my feet, all could not have been more perfect and cozy, when I had a coughing attack. You know, the kind where there's this current that runs up your throat, the back of your throat, from your lungs, your chest, you feel it coming, you try to suppress it, but there's really nothing you can do but hack and hack until it goes away, tears running down your cheeks, snot running out of your nose. It's lovely, really, and any cat that sticks around through it to the end is a real trooper indeed.

Gladys did, for a bit, then she got up, I think because she thought I was going to get up - she was feeling my body language - then she came back, we curled up again, and it started again. Up to blow my nose, wipe my eyes, and forget sleeping. It takes so much out of me, the coughing thing. Always has. I've always been prone to the attacks, every cold, every flu.

I lay in bed anyway, Gladys gone to her computer chair, Norman sitting next to me as I patted her and told her how beautiful she is. She is very vain, typical Aries, loves to hear the compliments. And my mind was so active, thinking of my other computer, how to fix it, do I really want to pay Brent for another one? Will he know what the other one has? What version of Windows? How much memory? What's the speed, the MGHZ? What programs are installed? Is there a monitor? $40? Or $50? I can't spend that now. I need to go buy a book on Windows '98, or MS-DOS, learn to fix the one I already have.

Then I start thinking about what's on the hard drive. My picture with Moby.

Then I start thinking about last year, how hard it is to believe this is 2003, how I find myself confused when talking about when something happened, saying "earlier this year" when I mean "last year", and then I started thinking about events of last year and how I never wanted to memorialize 2002, never wanted to think of it as a year, but as a part of a long chain of events in my life, couldn't even see it as one single period in time, but then I thought of all that happened last year....

This is me lying in bed, thinking how I should sleep, how I have to go back to work tomorrow, how coughing attacks in a call center environment suck in a big way, how this is my last chance for REST, with the capital "R", and the "EST" too, but instead I'm thinking how in 2002 I went to a major protest in Washington, got my picture in the AJC, along with a cheesy quote from a way too tired me. I got asked out by a 46 year old, and a 60 year old, within minutes of one another. I went out with both.

Moby's new album came out, and I became obsessed. I bought almost every album he every recorded and listened to him incessantly. I saw him perform live, met him after the show, got my picture taken with him, chatted him up, fell in love with him.....

I went to TWO tattoo conventions! I got FIVE new tattoos! That's insane! And worthy of one more exclamation mark!

That was all in calendar year 2002.

And I saw the Rolling Stones, the Rolling Fucking Stones! And they rocked! My first time seeing them and they're all pushing 60, and they're still amazing, and they still put on an excellent show.

And I went on a few dates. And I reconnected with a friend. And another friend moved away. And at Christmas I got cards from the wives of my relatives, and I worried.

And now it's 2003 and it's so hard to keep track. I'm just getting used to being 41 and now I realize I'm almost 42. Sydney Omarr wrote in my horoscope book for this year that I'll either change residence or marital status, but he was old and infirm and now even he is dead.

I just want to be healthy and happy. I want to be a go-getter, I want to start projects and finish them. I want to be active. I want to work out again, I want my limbs to have muscles I can actually feel inside of them. I want to be outdoors more, be closer to nature, hike, or canoe, or just sit and listen to birds and crickets. Pull ticks off my legs like in my dream......

That was me lying in bed on my last day of two to do so. So I got up. And Norman was beautiful still, and I sang her an "I love Norma song" and she closed her eyes and purred. I brushed her and got the 'sleepies' out of her eyes. And Gladys slept on her computer chair and I defragged this hard drive. It has 500 MB storage on a partitioned hard drive. 16 MB RAM. It connects to the Interweb via a 14.4. FAX modem. And I love that I know what all of that means and many people do not.

I've lost a lot of my energy. I no longer want to dust the entire apartment, vacuum, do all my laundry, wash the dishes and clean the bathroom. Now I want to lie down again. That burst of mental energy was something unrelated to my corporeal being. I don't know what it was.

Last night I read several pages of my diary from last year, and I got bored with it. It was SO tedious. All about my work nemesis, one "Lulu", and how she betrayed me, how I hated her, how I hated the world. And I would sit in my cubicle at work and write, write, write, because there was nothing else when I stopped. I cut my hair myself, several inches, and now I let it grow. I wrote about Bush's State of the Union, called him a funny looking little man with a permanent crooked smile and a Texas twang. And I couldn't watch him. I changed the channel.

Does he do it again tonight? Or tomorrow? Can I stand to watch him? Can you believe Powell says we'll fight this 'war' alone?! What the fuck? We're going to pretend we're at war with Iraq, send in our troops to kill and be killed, with no allies at all? With no support? Not even from within our own country? No one but Bush, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, Wolfowitz, Powell, Rice? Why not let THEM go in by themselves, since they're the only ones who want to do this???????

You know?

I say suit Bush up in some armor, give him a sword, a mace, whatever, let him and Hussein go at it for a bit. No point sending in a bunch of lower to lower middle class kids who just want a chance at a college education to do the dirty work of some crazed dictator(s).

My fingers are cold.

I watched some of the AKC Invitational Dog Show last night. And why? Well, when I was a little girl we had an Old English Sheepdog, a purebred. He was my protector, my guardian, my buddy, and when my parents separated he committed suicide by running beneath the wheels of a delivery truck. On a Cul De Sac. No traffic, but the truck. So the story goes. I didn't see it happen.

But we had the big, or so it seemed then, AKC book of dog breeds. I grew up poring through its pages of black and white photos of the various breeds. And not long after we got a poodle. Another purebred. Not that we were snobs. That one went to my grandmother for companionship and my mother insisted we adopt a very ill old poodle from the pound, one that was on her way to be executed lest we save her.

We had her euthanized anyway.

My point? Jesus, do I have one? I love dogs. Cats. Tigers. Animals. Period. And the world of the purely bred is fascinating, but anachronistic at best. When they profiled the "Breeder of the Year" last night, I could only think how much money that man must make from the sale of each poodle he 'creates', and how many millions of dogs are slaughtered by the "HUMANE" society, et al, each year, because NO ONE WANTS THEM. And it makes me gag.

I wanted to be thrilled at the variety of breeds, wanted to marvel at their variances, their coats, their snouts, their little doodads holding their 'bangs' out of their eyes, the judges feeling their testicles, checking their teeth, making sure they're fit to breed further 'champions' down the line. But I could only picture piles of dead puppies in some gas chamber. The muzzles, the eyes, the faces of frightened dogs that are left in cages until the day there is no more room.

Yet these Eukaneuba Champeens are worth hundreds of dollars, they're coddled and prized, they're selectively mated to other selectively coddled and prized purely bred dogs that look almost exactly the same. And why? To perpetuate the variety, the species, the specifics of the breeds. To make sure there will always be a Springer Spaniel and a Weimaraner and a German Shepherd and a Shih Tzu and a Maltese and........

It just seems..... anachronistic, as I said, for lack of a better word. We've gone too far to stick with something so peculiar.

And I want to give to the Humane Society, but I know firsthand that they do not make attempts to find homes for animals, they execute readily and freely.

Maybe it's like the races of humans. Do we need to always ensure there are purebred white people? Black people? Chinese people? Eskimos? What about the Native Americans? Must we always 'selectively breed' even within our own species to ensure the sameness of each, to ensure the variety of all????

Large sigh.......

Fingers still cold, I'll be moving along now. My energy has evaporated. I must take small steps to accomplish any one thing, but that is all.

Cost of the War in Iraq
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