Broken Doll

Internet memes make me roll my eyes, but c’mon, a Goth test…

You scored as Fetish Goth. You are a Fetish Goth, you love to spank, tisk tisk, you love the leather.

Fetish Goth		95%
Romantic Goth		90%
Vampire Goth		80%
Mopey Goth		70%
Pagan Goth		65%
Goth Geek		50%
Perky Goth		40%
Raver Goth		30%

What kind of goth are you?

Sigh.  I am less pissed off than I make out to be, but I am mildly exasperated.

Really, all I want is for all the god damned pathological liars to stay the hell out of my life.

I do not want to run into her at Faire.  I do not want to know she is at Faire.  I do not want her anywhere within the sphere of my life at all.  It was bad enough she continued to hang out at group events years beyond reaching the supposed cutoff age.  I would prefer to not even be aware that she still exists.

I just want to go out and fecking celebrate finally being done with all this cancer shit without having her existence nagging at the back of my mind that yes, Virginia, truly evil people, while rare, do in fact exist.

Fuck fuck goddammit.

Because I totally needed another reason to stress out.

I feel like such a bad mommy.

Last night Merlyn was lying on my bed when I went to bed, and even stayed for a while after I tucked myself in. He hasn’t done this since the move, so all I was thinking was “aw, he wants to sleep with me again, how sweet…”

This morning there was a small spot of kitty puke where his head was.

There’s been a lot of kitty puke lately, but neither one of them let me catch them in the act so I have no idea if it’s just one or both of them. Plus I figured that it was mostly 1. hairballs from summer shedding season, and 2. when not hairballs, well, they both have a tendancy to eat too fast.

This morning Merlyn was curled up on the couch and not clamoring for breakfast. It suddenly occurred to me that he hasn’t been clamoring for breakfast for… two weeks maybe? The food dishes haven’t been getting emptied by day’s end lately, which I again wrote off to it being summer and they’re using less fuel to keep warm.

I pet Merlyn, and he seemed sleepy. Or lethargic. And I suddenly noticed that his hip bone was more prominent than it used to be. He was never a super fat cat, but he has had a little extra padding in the past couple years.

He jumps down, and I stand over him to get a birds-eye view of his back. Am I imagining that he’s distinctly narrower around the belly?

I pick him up. He doesn’t squirm, for once. No heft, either. He seems feather-light and I feel like I’m crazy, or making it up in my head, or just completely stupid for it taking me this long to notice. If he’s noticeably lighter than wouldn’t that mean he’s lost a good tenth or more of his body weight? It’s not like I’ve weighed him in recent history, so I don’t really have anything to compare it to. I don’t know.

Shit.

So I am freaked out and anxious and have to get through an entire day of work before I can go home and dig through his old vet records. It would appear that vets ain’t cheap nowadays, and while I have a recommendation from Sarah, it doesn’t appear that they’d be any less expensive than my original vet, so there’s not much incentive to switch at this point. I want to double check my last vet bill to see if I’m remembering their fees correctly, and luckily both places are open late-ish tonight and early tomorrow morning, so I hope I can get an appointment first thing tomorrow.

Why did I not notice this earlier? I know cats are very good at hiding when they’re sick, but how could I not notice him suddenly dropping a huge amount of weight?

Shit shit shit. I have a dozen horrible scenarios running through my head.

…which, ironically, upsets me a bit because it has taken this long to get here. Twelve days. I have today and tomorrow to enjoy this before I go back to chemo and start all over again. And “enjoy” might be a bit of a stretch since I have so much shit to do, and increasingly fewer days in which I feel good enough to do them.

But I am incredibly grateful — I am pain-free. I remember a time just a few months ago when I worried that I would never again know what that felt like. And it feels good. And I’m so happy about that. There is only that weird static-like not-quite-painful sensation that comes on during the ten-to-twelve days after chemo. There are no words to describe that. It’s not exactly pain, not exactly nausea, and “discomfort” is just too vague. I can’t even think of anything to compare it to — it’s like nothing else I’ve experienced. How to get people to understand what that feels like… how much it cripples me in small, subtle ways? I can’t.

But every once in a while I do notice the lack of pain. You become so used to thinking of painlessness as the default that you forget that it feels like anything. You don’t notice. But I do.

Effective Feb. 1st. The letter arrived today.

My apartment is freezing, there is a hole in my living room ceiling, and there is some sort of animal shit on the laundry room floor — an animal which probably got in through the broken door and shit which is now mixed into a pasty mud thanks to the leaking utility sink.

And yes, I’ve been politely talking to both my landlord and the building maintenance guy about these little items. Since June.

And oh yeah, I try to register a heat complaint with the city and am told, basically, that they won’t do anything unless I stay home from work to let the inspector in. Dude, I couldn’t care less what the temperature is when I’m not here. Come by in the evening when I am home and I’ll show you how goddamned cold it is.

I hate my landlord.