It's sad when you...

forget that you've ever had a pet in your life, especially when you have two very sweet cats are at home (the other home), waiting for you to return.

I don't even know when I'll see them again.

Cat Randall

I wish all of my readers (the few of you that there are) knew my dear Catherine Randall. She is, honestly, one of the best random people I've ever met. It all started through Elaine our sophomore year in college, though I don't remember much about it, then. The following year, after returning from a semester abroad, I ended up moving in with a stranger who was a friend of my best friend (Elaine). I didn't know this girl at all, and it wasn't an optimal situation, so I thought. I was nervous about meeting someone and immediately moing in with her. Would we have similar interests? Would she understand when I needed the room to be quiet so I could get work done? Would our showering schedules conflict? Was she a clean-room person or messy (which is intolerable to me)?

Turns out, Cat is very much like me; we have many similar tastes and ideas, while managing to be very very different. Living with her that semester was one of the best college experiences I had, and now she's one of my absolute favorite people on Earth.

One of her dissimilarities from myself is her musical talent. Cat has the voice of an angel. I go up to Taylor to hear her perform as often as my crazy life allows. I'd pay any amount of money to hear her sing, and I'm not just saying this because she's my friend.

After her performance with the Marion Philharmonic Orchestra this afternoon, I couldn't even keep track of how many people approached her to thank her profusely for her "stunning", "spectacular", and "phenomenal" performance. The head honcho of the MPO told her that all she had to do was send a recording of this performance to any grad school she was interested in and that would "seal the deal" as far as he was concerned. After she sang the aria, I had tears in my eyes.

What makes me sad is that I am so busy, I haven't had time to talk to her much after her great operatic feats this month. I always have to jet back home to study, write papers, and read the unending supply of dry articles and case studies for classes, just to be on the verge of being caught up. I'm afraid she doesn't understand how much I am inspired by her voice, by the talent she is using to enrich people's lives.

In case you ever read this, Cat, I hope you know how much I love you and the opportunities I have had this year to hear you perform. You're gifted, Chics.

Why do I sometimes feel that living in New York City in a frigid rat-infested warehouse of an apartment with no food would be more real than what I'm experiencing now?

Anything would be more real than what I'm living now.

How can doing something you love bring so much dissatisfaction and restlessness?

Cracker-logged

Does it mean you've eaten the entire row of crackers if there are broken corners left at the bottom of the bag?

I have what some might call a bit of an eating problem. It occurs when things are packaged in obsessive-compulsive pleasing packages, asking the hungry individual to eat until the package is finished, because it cannot be closed adequately to preserve freshness after first opening it.

This is my problem with saltines (tonight's issue), girl scout cookies (as Kelly understands), Fig Newtons or anything else packaged in those damn trays (Oreos, Keebler cookies, and the like).

I can't help myself. Seriously.

Maybe I need therapy for this.

Yesterday...

- I got a professional massage from a girl younger than me. This must be how it is to be grown up. Professionals can you younger than me. Granted, she did go to summer classes to get her certification after her junior and senior years of high school, still I had a momentary feeling of being old and out of touch.

- I got two, count 'em TWO, messages from Maddie. Hi, Lana. I wasn't sure if I was going to leave you a message where you would talk back to me or not. K, talk to you later. Bye. [silence] I think I'm gonna call Evan now, 'cause...[she cuts out]. I couldn't really understand the second one, but nothing brightens my day like hearing her little lispy, fairy-princess voice.

- I did something I have never done before. I bought a DVD on the day it was released. RENT came out yesterday, and because I had seen a commercial for it, which reminded me it was coming out this week, I bought it. Marketing at its best! Em, we can watch it while you're here, so you don't have to wait for it to come up in your BlockBuster queue. I'm so ecstatic about owning that. A four-year dream in the works (four years ago I saw a theater performance in London and have been spellbound by this amazing musical ever since).

- I ate hot fudge sauce out of a jar with a spoon.

Confessions are over and I must get to class.

Olympic sports? really?

What's up with Olympic sports that don't require athletic ability?

How can you be Olympic material without being uber-athlete of the century?

Skeleton.

That's all I have to say.

Dreams really do come true

On the bus this morning, I had one of those waking nightmares. This is how it played out in my mind: as I was sitting there on the crowded bus, I blinked and my right contact blinked out of my eye onto the dirt-encrusted floor. The people entering the bus ground it to a fine powder.

I visibly grimaced at this horrible thought and determined to put drops in my eyes to ward off any unwanted blinking-out of contacts today.

I forgot the drops by the time I stumbled into the library (it was very cold this morning; my joints were stiff).

As I was driving home from Kelly's house tonight, I was about 2 minutes away from my house, pulling up to a flashing red light, when I blinked my right contact out of my eye. It stuck to my eyelashes, so I quickly plucked it up and deposited it into the safest place at the moment - my mouth. I have hard contacts, so it's not quite as disgusting (okay, yes it is, but this is what they taught me to do when I got my contacts in 3rd grade).

My vision is bad overall, especially at night. But I tried manuevering my car home as best I could. (I may have once shut my left eye, the one with a contact, just to see if I could have made it home without vision correction - not a good choice.) I almost hit a couple of the yellow "narrow road" signs, along with their speed bumps and weird road-narrowing curbs.

I don't know if I've ever had one of my day-time nightmares come true before; granted, this wasn't exactly the same - my contact was not crushed by mud-caked shoes - but it was oddly similar.

Does anyone care about today?

It's Valentine's Day. I keep forgetting.

But Katie was so wonderful and got both Bird and I flowers and cards. So thoughtful.

For me, V-day is one that I avoid. Although I am wearing pink today, it's because I like this pink shirt a lot, and I didn't even know it was a pink-wearing holiday.

Saint Valentine was a great person - he was imprisoned for helping martyrs in the Roman empire. But there's also his patronage, or what he is the Patron Saint of. This is the best list I could find:

affianced couples, against fainting, bee keepers, betrothed couples, engaged couples, epilepsy, fainting, greeting card manufacturers, greetings, happy marriages, love, lovers, plague, travellers, young people

This information is taken from the Catholic Forum website: http://www.catholic-forum.com/saints

Enjoy today, but not because it's a Pretend-You-Love-Someone or Forced-Gift-Giving-Even-When-You-Don't-Know-the-Person day, but because the saint, who's day it is, was a pretty great guy. He helped people.

Help someone. Smile at someone. Just because.

I love Google

I have a personalized Google homepage that gives me all kinds of information I want - the temperatures in B-town, my hometown, and Phoenix - so I can feel good that it's warmer here than elsewhere, but still I dream of years without winter.

I also have a Word of the Day category. I don't know who is generating this word, but I love today's:

spoony: foolishly or sentimentally in love

Spoony. Great word.

The Woman in Class

I realize that sometimes older students (meaning over 40) are insecure and try to make up for their age in supposed knowledge. This is displayed in a number of awkward and usually annoying traits, the least of which is not the fact that they talk too much, usually repeating themselves several times in the same run-on sentence, as well as throughout the class.

One woman in a particular class of mine believes that because of her work experiences she holds the key to the theme of our class, Management. I find few things more annoying that hearing, "well [this] worked in my library because my manager did this," or "I have found that [some managing technique or aspect of communication] works best in my situation and here's why" after which she launches into a 15 minute rambling about something we don't care about. It isn't relevant to the rest of us, many of whom have yet to work in a library setting.

This woman talks and laughs at a decibel that I don't find appropriate for librarians, especially considering the extremely quiet demeanor of our instructor.

Today, said woman and I were the only ones in the room before class began. (This will never happen again, I assure you.) She began by telling me how she was ill this past week with puking and diarrhea, which she caught after her son returned to his school in Kentucky. She reiterated several times how she had been feeling bad (before the puking, fever, diarrhea) and she just knew something was wrong with her son. When she called, she found him in the hospital and she "was ready to drive down to Kentucky to take care of him, no matter how bad" she was feeling. I'm sure every college boy would love for his mom to come to school and pick him up.

At this point, she told me never to have kids until I was ready to drop everything to take care of them. Duly noted, Lady.

From that comment on children, she brought up her daughter, because, sadly enough, her daughter has expressed since she was 11 years old that she never wants to have kids. The woman acted like it was a completely new phenomenon for girls to say this...but I told my mom this all throughout my growing up to make her mad and sad all at once. The woman began telling me why her daughter didn't want kids, beginning with really heavy, out of control periods when she was in middle school. This girl had to go on birth control at an extremely young age to deal with it. "Ain't nothin' else wrong with her. Just that." That's it? I was nearly throwing up at this point, and thinking it could not get worse.

Turns out, recent tests have shown that the daughter has what I would call a cleaved uterus. Let me explain, as the woman did in the empty, echoing classroom. Her daughter was born with this split uterus, so two of them, which also means she has two cervixes (I don't know how else to say that, and I'm sick that I actually wrote it). Every month, it was as if this poor girl was having two periods at the same time. God bless her!

My face (Oh Elaine, you should have seen it!). I know I wasn't hiding anything. I was disgusted, horrified, and so sad for this woman's daughter, who must have wanted to DIE in middle school.

At this point, I was wishing for a means of purging myself of the information that she had so openly dumped on me, a complete stranger (I've never spoken to this woman before). As another girl entered the classroom, the woman indicated that it was okay by her if her daughter never had kids, but she worried that her son would make up for it. Great - her son's a nympho. Brilliant. Needed to know that just about as much as I needed to know something about her daughter's two cervixes.

I actually gagged each time I wrote that word.

Any suggestions for flushing my mind?

Quote from class

My collection development professor is a riot. He never tires of Dan Quayle jokes and always balances his partisan jokes with one from the other side - so we've had quite a few Teddy Kennedy and Bill Clinton jokes, as well.

Today my favorite had nothing to do with politics.

If anyone ever asks you in an interview, "What are you?" Rather than saying the obvious, such as "I'm a librarian" or "I'm a student" or "I'm an ass," give them this answer.

I am a naturally-occurring entity, not packaged for commercial distribution.

For the record

Today's high in Bloomington is 41.

In Rochester, it's supposed to get up to 33.

In Peoria, Arizona, where I want to be, the high is to be 76.

Which is better? You pick.

I dreamt last night that I was in a hostage situation. Some lunatic had taken my parents, brother, and myself, along with several other people I didn't know, hostage in my dad's office building.

The man in charge terrorized us by choosing one person to ask a question, and if the person didn't answer correctly, he would say, "Okay..." and shoot them on the spot. He was indiscrimate in his murder - a child, a mother, an elderly person. It was horrific.

It was one of those dreams where you aren't sure if you're sobbing in real life or just in the dream. But I was so scared for myself and my family. He almost killed my dad, but didn't, for some unknown reason.

I can't remember the middle part of the dream, but at the end, we were leaving the office, my dad had the gun tucked in his belt and was carrying something out to the street, and the lunatic was following us, still picking on people but he had no gun and therefore no power.

In my soul, I still thought he could somehow regain control and kill more people. I wanted to stop him, but I didn't know how. Until I saw the gun.

I grabbed it, and before my dad could say anything, I rounded the front counter in his office and screamed out the lunatic's name (though I don't remember it now). When he looked at me, the hatred and fear overwhelmed me and I shot him twice in the chest.

I can't express the relief I felt. Not remorse. I was glad I didn't have to fear him anymore, fear the situation happening again. There was no chance that he could terrorize us again.

It's a disturbing dream, and I wonder if it plagued my sleep because of a conversation I had this past week about the death penalty. No one has a right to take a life, we were saying, and People need to find closure elsewhere.

In my dream, I would not have ever found closure had I not known this man was dead, perhaps it was sweeter because I killed him, too.

A strange perspective, a strange dream.

I think my friend Elaine has the most beautiful hands. They're so dainty and thin. I've always loved them, and probably never told her. (Hope it doesn't creep you out, Friend.)

Today on the bus, a normal-sized Asian student was sitting in front of me talking, using his hands when necessary. I didn't even realize it until after the first five minutes, but I was staring. No, not because he was of a different ethnicity than myself, it was because his hands looked exactly like Elaine's. His nails, his fingers, his knuckles, even. I don't know if it disturbed me or made me nostalgic for hanging out in Buster Brown while Elaine cooked, sewed, or read.

The other thing that happened today...well...after surpise house-showing, with only a 45-minute call ahead, from our very considerate landlord, a lovely run with Katie, conversation with Emily and then Maddie, I had class for the second time today. I am always drained on Wednesdays, and today was no different. Lost was a rerun, so before putting in the last disc for Season 1-I'm only 2 episodes away from finishing, I made myself a Cape Codder (apparently, that's what Google just told me it's called) and grabbed some berry Cheerios. A great dinner, I might add.