Lifetime movie, no matter what you say, I will never believe that Jennifer Beals is a prissy, lonely, introverted spinster. Take it from an expert: we don't look like that.

PS: we don't have to fake alcoholism, mostly, and your candy-coated depiction of an AA meeting just makes me want to watch Fight Club again.

And the love interest is Dr. Squishyface.

Seriously, Lifetime movie, what is up?



ETA: fortunately she got a makeover, so now she is a viable romantic prospect for Dr. Squishyface, who I guess thought he was too good for her before, even though he has The Nicolas Cage.

Dude, if you have waterfall hair? You have to face up to certain realities, okay?

Hah! You thought this was about CiCi again, but no. I mean I do have another CiCi story, but as Nathan Lane's character said in Jeffrey, evil is boring. It's one-note.

So forget that, man.

Instead, I will tell you that I had a writing setback yesterday, and have only just realized it. I pulled a big boner on both projects, and will have to revise what I wrote, at the expense, no doubt, of today's quota.

Plus, I'm just gonna say it, all right? My Big Bang story is getting away from me, some. I did not go into it with the desire or expectation to write some epic like people do. I mean, if you know my stuff, you know how unlikely that is.

And okay, so it's only about 20,000 words so far, but...

Look, I wrote this throwaway joke a while back, about a new age book called Healing the Inner Children of Your Past Lives Using the Ancient Secrets of the Ascended Masters. I wasn't thinking about anything at the time beyond the fact that I have seen utterly fucking ridiculous books like those at new age bookstores.

But then, a shameful number of days later, it occurred to me that anybody who's at all conversant with the Stargate universe would see that and just assume I was referring to The Ancients and Ascension, and not a new age concept.

I should've just changed it. I mean, I've got a "water has feelings" joke lying dormant in this story, and there are scads of new age books about water having feelings. I could've gone that way. Instead, in my questionable wisdom, I was all, "No man, keep it, it's Writing with a capital W!"

So now this dude who was supposed to be a figure of fun with the life expectancy (as a character) of a sheet of Kleenex is, like, the antagonist, man. Now I have to do something with him.

I just wanted Rodney to provoke him into fisticuffs in the middle school parking lot in front of the trashy kid's teachers and his stripper mom.

So help me god, if this story turns out to be huge, I'm going to make a serious phone call.

Summer Thunder is the kind of bad movie that you have playing in the background and glance at occasionally when you hear something that makes you think "No way did she just say that," but not so bad that you can't tear yourself away.

It ought to go without saying at this point that there's no third option where maybe the movie is good. It is The Pits. In fact when I Googled it, I discovered that it's part of a "guilty pleasures" collection, which is odd since watching it is manifestly not a pleasure.

I will say this for it, though: when I Googled the lead actor, I discovered that although he is not all over teh intartubes for acting, he is all over teh intartubes for photography and book cover design. Which is lucky, since... this is not a star turn that I am observing, at this time.

I promise to let you know if they ever explain how a man with a grotesquely disfigured penis ever made it big doing mainstream gay porno. Prepare yourself, though: something tells me they won't do it.

Remember that evil whore CiCi who told little kids that their cat ran away because they were mean to him?

Okay, so here's what: I called in sick one day a couple of weeks ago, and then a few days later, she pretended to care, and asked me how I was feeling.

I say she only pretended because after I answered her, she told me that she would never call in sick no matter how bad she felt, because it's selfish and irresponsible.

Well, guess who called in sick today?

Suck on that, biotch!

I'll tell you something else, too: I just told Sukhwinder what she said about my sick day, and Sukhwinder--who is just as religious as CiCi is but about a thousand times nicer--said in all seriousness that CiCi's illness was god's judgment upon her for what she said to me.

This entry was originally posted at http://lucitania.dreamwidth.org/8841.html. Please comment there using OpenID.

Well, and so my brother and his fiancee were forced to euthanize the dog they adopted only maybe six months ago. She had cancer, and it was the kind of cancer where you have to make the decision straight away, not the kind where you have all kinds of time to make your peace and whatnot.

And now, perspective: I has it.

Because you know, I've spent a lot of lot of time being incredibly angry and outraged over Pan's plight, but... at least she has a (relatively) open-ended ticket. At least we had nearly two years of innocent bliss together before I had to know that there was anything to know.

And who knows how much time we still have, you know? It could be--well, not ages, probably, but a while. Pan is such a big part of my life that I can't even imagine life without her now, even though I know that time will come a lot sooner than it should.

(A fact: each workday at around 2pm, I start thinking about her nonstop, and counting the minutes till I can go home and see her. Pan loves weekends because they mean dinner at 1:30 and unlimited snacks, but I appreciate the unlimited [if dangerous] snuggles.)

Imagine if you only had six months with somebody you loved so much, you know? Poor those guys.

Anyhow, tonight the subject of gratitude is on my mind, and so I wish to give thanks for the things in my life which make me happy or have helped me in some way. I apologize in advance for any qualified statements/backhanded compliments that I may make.

( Read more... )

When your cat has a bad night and then the next day she comes over and makes intense, prolonged eye contact with you and assumes the pose your vet told you would be hers when it was time to have her destroyed to save her from suffocating to death.

It was just a coincidence, apparently--she's all curled up and purry now--but Jesus fucking Christ, the universe. It's hard enough living with this without your "funny" little fake-outs, or drills, or whatever the fuck that was supposed to be.

God, she sounds terrible.




ETA: I will say though that there is something curiously adorable about tickling her belly to make her breathe.

You know, nearly every time I visit Passive Aggressive Notes, I spot the thing in the sidebar where it says "Follow PAN on Facebook and Twitter," and just for a second, I think, I KNEW it!

Okay, her windowbed, right, it's a pet-sized papasan chair that's been filled with sweaters to make it flat--I just wanted the elevation of the frame, really--and then padded with several blankets. It's gone through numerous incarnations over the years as I've tried to perfect its configuration, and now, at last, I think we have a winner.

For one thing, it's stable in a larger area than before, so if Pan doesn't want to be in direct sunlight in the afternoon--she loves direct sunlight normally, as most cats do, but with her tube top, I think it burns--she can just shift over instead of quitting the area.

For another, it really is flat on top now, not bunchy, or easily squished around, and so, more welcoming of a flat-out sprawl.

So although mainly she still performs her Neighbourhood Watch duties, sometimes she makes herself flat, soooooo flat, flat like a carpenter's dream.



"How'd you get to be so flat?" I ask her.

"You don't need to know all my secrets," she says.

Plus: look at her little squished-up chin, there. One of my greatest joys with Pan is that although she is really very choosy about when and how she will accept pets, she likes a little chin rub now and then. Cat chins are irresistible and you know it.

The best though is when she plays Little Baby Jesus.

At first I thought she just looked like a little person this way, you know, in my mind's eye I dressed her in tiny green overalls and a straw hat, but now I realize that she totally has that Away in a Manger thing going on. Here it is close up:



And here it is as I see it from my desk.



It might seem totally gratuitous to post them both, but really it's only slightly so. In the distant version, you can see her personal Care Bear on the windowsill, Tenderheart. I keep him there as a representative of my love, so it will be near even when I'm out, or asleep. I am not joking about that.

Sometimes when she has visitors in the middle of the night, Pan throws Tenderheart out the window in all the excitement, but that's one of the benefits of living in a ground floor suite, babies: no matter what she throws out the window--toys, friends, her paw--I can always retrieve it in the morning.

Pan is doing Okay, by the way. I think she's a bit bored--still very few visitors this year, oddly--but her condition has not worsened noticeably, and she enjoys her popcorn, and the Fancier Feasts.

(Fancier Feasts, you appeared at the perfect time. I didn't know there were so many flavours till just now. I must investigate this.)

I am also doing Okay, although like I say, I tend to crack up some on Thursdays, and I deeply regret that Pan's secret air balloons mean that I can't squeeze her as much as I would like, or, you know, at all.


ETA: oh my god, PetSmart carries the entire line. I know where I'm going this weekend.

At lunchtime, I wrote about John's mean neighbour accusing him of "giving pro bono BJs to winos."

I was so in love with myself at that moment, man. I don't even care if you don't think it was funny, because I did. I SO did.

The bon temps continue to roulez here in Big Bang Town.

I bought this book after my dad died, Losing a Parent or whatnot. Basically the only thing I took away from it was, you should set aside a certain amount of time each day to allow yourself to grieve, and then you can go about your business otherwise, without that informing everything you think and feel and do.

99% of the time I force myself to pretend like Pan is fine and I am fine and everything else is fine--for her sake, really, because otherwise her dwindling time is going to suck bigstyle, when I'm home.

But this is the second Thursday in a row on which I have been weepy and depressed over her, so I guess this is my day.

Just for your information: her condition has not worsened especially since the bad news came down. It's just something I know about her, her imminent death, and have to acknowledge occasionally, like when my mom gives me a pile of money for her Fund, or I have the epiphany that it is now Okay to give Pan whatever food she wants, even if it's unhealthful.

(I'm not giving her bacon or whatnot, by the way. I'm just not sticking her with the Catkins diet that she only ever ate when she was really hungry.)

I know this lady at work who hits me up for favours kind of a lot in the interest of getting the hell out of her awful janitorial job. She always looks abashed, and says I should ask her for something, if there's something she can do.

This afternoon I typed up the mission statement for her planned daycare, and thinking about what I could ask her for--not because I want to really, but because it seems like she wants me to--I thought to ask her to pray for Pan.

This lady is a devout Catholic, and tells me about her prayers all the time, and I don't really believe in it, and I know Pan is going to go no matter what, but maybe... not so soon. You know?

No atheists in a foxhole and all that.

Oh my crazy girl. She doesn't deserve this horseshit.

Our landlord finally moved the giant tractor trailer that's been right outside her favourite window for months, and so she has a view again, and she's so much more engaged in the outside world than she has been, recently.

Anyway. I'm not telling you so you'll say something. I'm just telling you because I need to tell somebody.

I have a large, discoloured callus on my right knee, which I have cultivated over the years from all the times life has called upon me to fall to my knees on the floor to provide snuggles to Pan.

Oh, she loves her after-dinner snuggles, though she'd never admit it.

Oh man.

My Big Bang story has... not a flimsy premise--it's got a plot and all, and you know I never do that--but it's not, like, meaty. And I've got to turn in at least 40K, so I'm not being as... expedient... with what I write as I normally am with fanfic.

You might think I've always been a ramble-happy windbag, but actually my long [and original] fiction is much more generous in that respect. *I* like that about my work, but I haven't really inflicted it on the world at large. I wonder what the reception will be.

You know what I'm really enjoying so far? It's not set in the past, this story, and it's not a flashback extravaganza or whatnot, but a few times now when I've made references to John's past, I've had to ask myself: did X exist when John was fifteen (or whatever age)?

It shouldn't be that hard--he's not much older than I am--but you know. Sometimes your memory is faulty, or you're writing about something as an adult that you weren't exposed to as a child.

It's a thing, with me: I make these stupid, pointless throwaway comments that I love beyond reason, and then I go to insane lengths fact-checking them so nobody's going to read them and say, "Heeeeeeey..."

Dropping a Mento into a small glass of Diet Coke does not have the same effect as dropping one into a two-litre bottle of that fine beverage.

I did the dirty work on this one, and was disappointed, but intrigued.

Just as an FYI, some total scoundrel tricked me into signing up for sgabigbang, so now in addition to my previous goal of completing the first draft of my novel by Christmas--of which there is only one chapter, currently--now I'm on the hook for a 40,000 word story due... September 29th, by the looks.

So basically, for the next little while I'm going to be spending some or all of my leisure time writing fiction, crying, and cooking bacon in the microwave to stay alive.

However!

You are still required to observe International Pan Month, which according to the VOKRA calendar takes place in June.

The Gorgeous Ladies of International Pan Month are:

* sean_kennedy, who has provided lifts to the pet store, Panstuffs, and photos of Pan from her prom mom days (and who fully intended to build for her a vast scratching post made from a fallen tree);

* Miss Elaine, Pan's personal stylist, who lowballs me egregiously on our jobs even though she has to drive here from another neighbourhood and isn't exactly banking for retirement on what she gets from me anyway;

* kormantic, who has given me sacks of money over the years, but specifically gave me some money recently which went almost entirely toward buying Panstuffs and bulking up Pan's Fund for the event which will not be acknowledged except at such times as said Fund is bulked up;

* My sister, who has also given me sacks of money, and who basically carried me both emotionally and financially during the three months of horror between Pan's Big Maybe and the eventual diagnosis;

* My other sister, who recently hunted up Pan's chicken snacks, and who once sent Pan a care package after Darla's bratty cats took refuge here and chewed up or peed on everything Pan owns;

* you, who as you know have said many kind and supportive things over the past few months (and in some cases also offered us money);

And of course, Lieutenant Pan.

See you in 2011!

&hearts M

My sister somehow found a place that carries Pan's beloved chicken snacks and will ship to Canada, and she very generously ordered 3 tubs for us, which we should have in 4-6 days.

So, does anybody have any experience with reishi mushrooms that they'd like to share? (Effectiveness or lack thereof, and etc.)

Many holistic remedy sites have recommended them for treatment of cancer in cats (and other living things) and I wonder if this is for real, or total BS as ES Clear appears to be.

Like I said before, I don't think mushrooms will cure anything, but I wonder if they would help.


ETA: I know not everybody wants to hear about this all the time, or even any of the time, so I'll try not to harp on it a lot, but... I was just thinking that there are a finite number of times in this life in which I will have the opportunity to smooch Pan's little chicken leg--even fewer than if her rage were my only impediment--and it made me so sad.

Well, the verdict has been handed down about Pan's mysterious chest cloud, and basically the only way it could've been worse is if the veterinarian had euthanized her immediately.

( Cut for people who can't or don't want to know what the fuck. )

...as a public service to people who, like me, are skeptical of conflicting information found on teh intarwebs.

I will tell you that canned pumpkin is a goddamn miracle food, both palatable and effective. Also that you can keep it in the can in the fridge with no ill effects, for a reasonable length of time.

About a teaspoon each day is sufficient; it is not dangerous for your cat to eat more of it, but you may find that some of it will go to waste if you dish it up in plentitude.

You can find it in the baking section at your supermarket. You want pure pumpkin, not pumpkin pie filling. It is inexpensive.

And now we will speak no more of it.

\0/

Well, it turns out that although cats cannot taste sweetness, they can taste grossness. My efforts to edit Pan's food for content have met with mixed results.

There is no possible way that I can wrestle her by myself to get her mouth open and administer a full syringe of the Stomach Lube, and so I have done the only other thing I could think of: I've been squirting it on her paw when she's not looking.

At first she licked it off immediately, horrified and outraged. But I'm supposed to give her three full syringes every day, and I can only squirt so much on her before she turns into the Tasmanian Devil, and so: last night I had to keep squirting her, every so often, till I was satisfied that I had "been adequite," to borrow a phrase from Lindsay Lohan.

So after a while, when I did it, she gave me the stinkeye as if to say, "Fuck you! I'm not ever licking this off! Soon my paw will look like a plaster cast! You will never be the boss of my bowels! NEVER!"

Then she'd run away, trying to act all nonchalant, only to go apoplectic with frustration, stop dead wherever she was and lick her paw furiously.

"God DAMN it!" she seemed to say.

It kind of sucks, I don't mind telling you. I mean I can see the humour in it, but mainly, yeah. It kind of sucks. The worst part is that when she finally acquiesced to the Stomach Lube's demands this morning, I was tearful with joy as I scooped her litter box, saying "thank you" over and over again.

Just imagine what the government thought when it saw that while watching me with its secret spy satellites, you know?

Anyway I have to keep giving it to her tonight. I called and asked.

:-(