thinking about our home

We are still debating the “get a new kitty” thing at the house.  Taylor is very vocal lately, which he has never been before.  He’s constantly at our sides, which he really never did.  He lets you pet him, he plays, he runs around the house.  He cries and moans until we feed him a little treat.  I thought maybe he was just doing that to get treats, but last night he didn’t even eat it.  He played with it for a little while and then went back to crying and whining.  It’s not like him.  We think that he misses someone to beat up on, like he had with Lillith.  He would just stay hidden, come out to bat her around a little, give her a bath and then go back into hiding.  Now he’s always out.  He sleeps by my side.  He follows me around in the mornings.  Today when I was about to leave for work he stood in front of the door.  He never does that.  I’ve been leaving the television on when I leave the house, but it doesn’t seem to be doing the trick.  But we are really worried about bringing in a new cat.  What if that’s exactly what Taylor doesn’t want?  What if he’s happier by himself, and we just don’t know that this is the happy version of Taylor?  I mean, one was a bit of a friendly bully, and this Taylor is sort of a whiny bully.  You can pet him for a while, but then he’ll bat at you.  It used to be he’d bat at you right away.  If we bring in a new cat is it going to make Taylor feel second?

Oh, and if we get a kitten that’s so much work.  If we get a grown-up cat how do we know they’ll get along?  Taylor has only seen one other cat in his life and that was Lillith.  There was a bad evening where Eric brought home a kitten that he found so that Taylor and Lillith could play with him (Eric hasn’t really had pets before).  He was shocked to see the cats acting so angry about their friend.  I saw the fleas on the kitten and we took him to the shelter, where he was promptly adopted.  I still felt like an evil bastard for two weeks, though.

So, right now we know that if we get a new kitty it would be in October, after we are both done with our respective plays and have time to regulate the kitties.  It feels like something is missing right now, but we are worried that we’ll be expecting this new cat to be like Lillith, and if it isn’t that we will resent it.  I’ve never really dealt with this before, and Eric hasn’t ever had a real pet before, so this is all new to us.  We don’t know what to do.  I just don’t know what will make Taylor content.  All I know is we aren’t getting a puppy.

I have friends that just got a puppy and it’s like getting a baby.  They can’t go anywhere because of the puppy.  One of them stays with the puppy at all times.  When they go out, the puppy goes out.  Talk becomes about the puppy.  And we can see from Beth that the puppy becomes a huge part of your life.  It has to.  You’ve got to get this puppy into a “good dog” and that takes a lot of work.  Cats tend to just do these things on their own.

So, no puppy.  Fish aren’t going to do anything for Taylor.  I can’t stand the smell of hamsters.  Taylor would torture a rabbit.  I can’t stand birds inside a house.

And we aren’t having a baby.

So, either we’re a three creature household or we have to sit down and decide if a new cat is the best thing.  It took a while for Taylor to start mourning, and I think it’s because he thought maybe she was just out getting better or something.  I think now he knows she’s gone, and that’s starting to bother him.  I don’t know how to get his best friend back.  It makes me sad.

Last week I was cooking dinner and I thought I heard the sound of Lillith when she would run down the hall towards the kitchen to get something to eat.  I looked up and Taylor was staring down the hall in the same direction.  We both stared for a second, and then I shook my head and went back to the stove.  That’s when I heard it again.  Her little bouncy mew.  I looked up again and this time Taylor was on his feet staring down the hall, moving his head around trying to see something.  I would have thought everything was my imagination, except that Taylor was looking in the same place I was.  We don’t live on the first floor.  There are no neighboring walls where the hallway is.  The television wasn’t on.

I never really believed in spirits and things until all of this stuff started happening.  And it’s all because when I think I see something I see Taylor looking that way, too.  Now I’m not so sure.

I’m not trying to get all freaky or crystally here or anything.  I just don’t understand everything.  I found a pork chop bone on the floor on Thursday.  They were on a counter that Taylor usually can’t reach.  Now, he probably got to it, I know, but he doesn’t really like pork chops.

I just miss her.  It’s been a month.  It’s still hard.  It’s hard when I’m home.  It’s hard when I go to sleep.  It’s hard when I watch television.  That was always our time together.

Okay.  I’ve got to talk about something else.  I’m getting too sad.

So, I’ve been in this play for two weeks now.  I don’t think I’ve explained my costume.  Instead of shaving my head I pull my hair into six little knot-knobby things on top of my head.  To go full-out goth/punk, the costume designer has my eyes lined in dark black.  There’s blue and grey eyeshadow going over my eyes and down to my cheeks.  My mascara runs down my face to my jaw line.  My lips are painted deep purple with a lip ring in the middle of my bottom lip.  There’s a tattoo that says “Baby” on the back of my neck.  Oh, and there’s a giant blue star outlined on my forehead.

Because I often go to the performance straight from a rehearsal, and because it takes forty-five minutes to get into hair and makeup, I do the preparations before I leave the house for the evening.  And it never fails:  I have to stop at the store on my way in for something.

I’ve noticed a big change in the way strangers treat me when I’m dressed up in this fashion.  I figured I’d get the stares as I walk down the street.  That’s not such a big deal, I can handle that.  But it’s the other things that start to bother me.  Men don’t hold doors open for me.  People laugh when I order a pack of cigarettes.  I don’t get carded for anything (I’m always carded for everything).  People stare at my fingernails when I pay for things, since we cover ourselves in mud right before the show and I haven’t been able to get my nails clean for anything.  Last Thursday a woman almost hit me with her car as she was backing out.  She just kept staring and forgot to hit the brake.  She didn’t even apologize.  It was my fault, you see.  I look like a freak.

It happened again last night.  We were all out back warming up in our costumes and a man was parking his car staring at us and just ran right into a fence.  I think we scared him.

Since I go from the show to Monks shows on the weekends, I have to wash my face and sometimes hair in the sink at the club before the show.  I have three bags with me (makeup, props, and my big bag o’ stuff that has my day’s things in it).  Sometimes I have to change in there.  People will come in and tsk at me like I’m squatting in the club.

I have such a headache today.  I know it’s because I have the evening off and Eric and I have planned on spending the evening together.  I always get sick when I come off of performance, and in three weeks when all of these things are over, I’m going to be rather exhausted.  I’m trying to not get sick, though.  I don’t want to get sick.  Besides, I don’t think I’ve earned any sick days at my new job yet.  (Which I really enjoy, if you guys were wondering.)

This weekend I proved that I do indeed have a problem with impulse shopping.  Eric and I had an extra hour so we decided to go to Target to look around at buying a new water filter.  We didn’t get one, of course, but I did buy a new lamp for my office, some clothes,  a new shower curtain, some cleaning products, and an inflatable chair.

I bought an inflatable chair.  I told myself it will help when we have company because we never have enough seats.  Somehow I convinced myself that someone would want to sit in the inflatable chair.  To make things worse, I bought an inflatable ottoman to go with the inflatable chair.  Some would call it a pool toy, but the box says “Inflatable Ottoman.”  At one point I thought, “I’ll take this to work.  It’ll look cool in my office.”

Well, I inflated the thing yesterday.  It’s not going anywhere.  It’s too big for my office.  It’s very blue.  It’s kitchy and retro I guess, but it really doesn’t match the Pottery Barn look I’m trying to achieve in the living room.  Right now it sits in the spare bedroom.  I’ll pull it out the next time we have company and see if people want to sit on it.  I guess I need to inflate the ottoman, too.

The problem is once I inflated the whole thing (which took an hour with a hand pump– my arms are killing me), I realized that I have a cat.  I have a cat with back claws.  I have a cat with back claws that likes to use them whenever he can.  I realize now that it’s only a matter of days before Taylor decides he wants to sit on the tiny blue chair that is right at his level and he just tears that baby to shreds.  If we get another cat, that’s more claws to worry about.

I’m thinking of getting a new cat so I buy blow-up furniture.

The life of an impulse buyer.  We don’t always make the smart decisions.