Anyway, what has happened? Firstly and most obviously, Jennette Fulda of Make My Blog Pretty has—wait for it—made my blog so pretty. We are now called “Awesomesauce!” Because really, there’s no other word for it. I’ve switched to a bloggy kind of format, so that I can post entries more often, shorter ones with no pictures, if I don’t want to make a picture go, which makes it ever so much more totally and completely likely that I’ll be putting words up, I can’t even tell you. I loved my last theme, but it was an arduous task that took the lives of my brave women and men each and every time I endeavored to post a new entry about things and the business. So if I wanted to just jabber about hair product or Hershey’s kisses, instead of writing something substantive, it wasn’t going to happen. But now it can! Holy crap, I can write entries about my toes every single day! I won’t. BUT I COULD. And that is such a beautiful thing for me and my muse. And by “muse” I mean “check me out, I’m a pretentious asshole!” (Note: I don’t have a muse. But it’s possible I’m still a pretentious asshole! Yay!)

Anyway, contact Jennette if you want someone fast, furious, talented, communicative, wonderful, affordable and who smells nice. To design and code your blog, I mean.

What else. I moved in with E and his roommate; I have a writer’s garret upstairs and I can’t even stand how awesome it is. Okay, it’s more “where I keep my stuff” than “writer’s garret,” but it is pretty much still completely lovely. Living with E is as terrific as I had hoped; I am fond of Roommate J, we all take turns cooking (some of us, and now I’m coughing into my hand but it sounds like I’m saying “me!”, much more terribly than others of us). We grocery shop. We’ve stopped eating fast food more or less. I have quit drinking diet pepsi, and now spend all day drinking water and tea. You can go back and reread that sentence, flabbergasted amongst you. I know. I don’t fucking believe it either.

I still have the best agents ever in the history of them—they are supportive and smart and savvy and one hundred percent on my side and holy of holies, etc. I’m writing my book now, and it is a big kind of flailing mess, but I’ve got an amazing writing partner who cheers me on hard and pats my head and tells me “hooray!” and kicks my ass when I don’t write and I think I’m going to have a (bad) draft by December 20. Then a holiday break, and then a rewrite and we’ll see what happens from there. Hopefully only good things. I have ideas for YA novels, and YA fantasy novels and regular novels, too, and ideas for tearing apart my grad school novel and rebuilding it in a bionic sort of fashion, and I feel happy about that, and more hope is there too.

I paid off my car; I’m in the process of figuring out my significantly five-figure tax bill and that is such a relief I can barely stand it. I am considering, seriously, plastic surgery for the poof that is my belly, which drives me nuts and makes me self-conscious. I had a consultation, during which the nurse invited me to admire her excellent and professionally done boob job. It really was spectacular. It’s still just a thought.

My inbox has three things in it; I visited San Francisco for three weeks and lived like a damn hell ass king, and came home with a new freelance client. In general, I feel good about my life and my choices and the choices I’ve made for my life, and I like candy.

So that is to sum up.

I’m sure that there’s lots of stuff that I will remember that I wanted to talk about, and the exciting thing is that now I can! And totally will! This is what I hope. I miss this, have missed it, don’t want to miss it any more. Hi, you guys! I missed you too.

Sometimes the post was to explain away an absence of posts for days or weeks or months and sometimes it was to round-about apologize to the friends in the audience who may or may not have been reading who may or may not have even been my friends any more, to say—I’m sorry I’ve been flaking. But it is hard to put on pants when you are choking in a black hole under a night sky that is drowning in sorrow, am I right? Except without the danger of possible embarrassment and potential ridicule and or doubt and or skepticism that might arise if I actually was brave enough to resurface and apologize in person.

Sometimes the post was to purge, and to say, hey, things are hard and I am sad and I just wanted to say that. My biology is messed up, my headology is a wreck and I never learned any useful coping mechanisms and here we go again. I’ve been aware of the endless cyclical cycling and I have always had the feeling if I were to look at a wide-angle shot of all the things I’ve ever written over the course of my online life, a very clear pattern would emerge and then I’d have to go cry into some pudding.

I’m pretty tired of documenting my bouts of depression. I’m tired of them occurring, and I’m tired of them hanging around, eating all my cold cuts and drinking all my beer and leaving crumbs on my couch and thumbprints on my mirrors. I’m tired of giving in to depressions and accepting the idea that occurs to me, that I cannot function and always I will be sad. I’m tired of saying that I’m tired of it.

I’ve been doing this a long time, and trying to cope with it for about as long. There’s not a lot left for me to do, besides  electroshock therapy. Medicines, doctors. Going for a brisk walk! Buying myself flowers. Making lists that include the items “get out of bed” and “take shower.” Aerobics. Sunlamps and heat lamps and changes of scenery. Just giving into the lying in bed and crying until I am all cried out. They help; they don’t cure. What I want is a cure. What I want is to never again have to write a post full of metaphors about being smothered under wet blankets/frozen in an icy sea/beaten with flannel-wrapped hammers, accompanied by an acknowledgement that I have a great life and am very lucky and I don’t mean to be ungrateful and I’m really sorry, I am, I am.

photo by loop_oh

I lucked out in the cat lottery, and because of that I am not afraid to sing the praises of my sweet little man, to acknowledge that I am a Cat Person, possibly verging on Crazy and Lady, if I’m going to be honest with you. I am crazy—about my cat (see what I did there?), to the point where I will talk about him on the internet without shame, and I will tell you also that he worries me.

He is not independent and brave and strong; he does not prefer the solitude of his own company and greet me as a tolerated interloper when I return. In fact, he gets very lonely, my sweet cat. He yells a lot. He tells me how sad he was and begs me never to leave again. He is a tragic figure, all big yellow eyes and sad round head. And then he grooms my nose until it is red and raw and I don’t know if I am being loved hard or punished roundly.

For the longest time I thought that the solution would be to get him a friend. I don’t want my fat little buddy to be lonely without me—I want him to be happy and fulfilled and Captain Purrs Contentedly of the Happiness and Tuna Brigade. Since his preferred solution is off the table—sometimes I need to shower and experience unfiltered daylight under the sky—I thought mine was a reasonable compromise. A kitten! A little pal who is fun to be with! Someone he can teach and mentor and love and cherish and cuddle and boss around and talk to! Someone to keep him occupied and alert and active! I am a genius.

Somehow I never got around to getting a kitten, because it involves a lot of planning and responsibility and an upturning of established routines and it is kind of expensive, a kitten. And what if I got a kitten and they didn’t get along? That is what stopped me from snatching up and hosing down the stray that appeared next to E’s house last year. What if it was a really bad idea? You’re not going to believe this, but sometimes I have really bad ideas.

When Jayrad asked if I could babysit his friend’s kitten while he went away on a romantic mountain biking weekend with his buddy, I said okay! Because I am a good person who likes to help, and because I thought trial kitten! A kitten trial! Fang is going to be so excited!

Fang was the least excited I have ever seen him. Fang was, in fact, the unhappiest cat you’ve ever seen. From the moment tiny, beautiful little Zoe the Glamour Cat entered his life, he considered it entirely over. He paced the length of the apartment mowing. Mow, mow, mow, mow, mow mow. I am unhappy. I am still unhappy. I CONTINUE TO BE UNHAPPY WHAT IS THIS TINY ORANGE THING I CANNOT EAT I AM UNHAPPY.

Zoe was unconcerned. Zoe was a tiny sweet kitten who rolled over and exposed her belly for love at the slightest opportunity. Zoe was made of love and cuteness. Zoe wanted to be your friend and my friend, Fang’s friend and the couch’s friend and the friend to everyone everywhere. Zoe was a Love Cat and Fang was unimpressed, and something inside me did not care because HOLY CRAP KITTEN.

Kittens are cute, you guys. They have big eyes and tiny paws and you want to eat them on a stick. They bounce! They play! They are in love with the world, and you, viewing the world through their big, wide eyes, fall in love with it all over again! Suddenly I understand May-December romance, and am ashamed.

I returned Zoecakes to her rightful owner last night, and Fang is as happy as if the Kitten Interlude had never happened. He is lying on my forearm as I type, making it difficult to hit the shift key. He will soon roll over and put his feet in my face, and then fall backwards, recover ungracefully and groom my nose studiously and with great concentration. We will neither of us discuss the kitten, because it is better that way. And also he doesn’t remember five minutes ago, let alone last evening.

I want to be perfect and unassailable. I want to be absolutely bullet proof. I want no one to ever find fault with me, because there are no faults to find, no cracks, seams or crevices. You can’t dig your fingernails under the edges of my mask and yank, because there is no edge because there is no mask because there is just me, all the way down, and every stop of the way–perfect.

Of course no one is, everyone makes mistakes, everyone has endearing flaws and charming faults and that is what makes them wonderful and with a little communication and just a smidge of work and compassion and understanding everyone can accept everyone else’s interesting quirks and winning idiosyncrasies and love-them-because and not -in-spite-of. Hooray!

That doesn’t stop me from wanting to be perfect–I accepted long ago that I need to give up perfection in general, don’t worry. But I still carry with me a streak of the -ism that coats everything I do in a thin, greasy sheet of frustration and irritation. I want to be good at everything, and immediately. I want to pick up a bowling ball and roll a hole in one, I want to complete The New York Times Sunday crossword puzzle in ink in under twenty minutes, I want to have a designer’s eye for color and a decorator’s sense of shape and proportion and have a spectacular home that makes people gasp and a sense of style that makes people shake their heads admiringly. I want to paint, draw, knit, sew, sculpt, dance, sing, photograph, and do all of it so well that I ought to get Major Awards for all my attempts.

I want. I don’t. I have tried each of these things, and in some of them, I am reasonably good, some of them I am okay, in some of them I fail egregiously and the result should be dropped down into the bottom of the sea. When I was younger, this would mean that I would immediately cease to try entirely and I would never, ever, ever again pick up a piece of pastel chalk because I was so terrible and being terrible made me angry and the idea of practice made me angrier, because why wasn’t I good just naturally? Why couldn’t I be perfect? Why why why why I HATE YOU and snap goes my pencil or the pool cue, and I am jealous and envious of the people who are better than me, just naturally because they are lucky and I suck and why do they get to be good and so what if they spent years practicing it is not fair.

I think maybe I am growing up, a little. See, I know a shitload of talented people, and I hate hardly any of them. I particularly seem to know talented photographers whose photographing is really just stunning–they have an eye for composition and color and subject and they have read their camera manuals and they take their cameras wherever they go and they take pictures wherever they are and they are just good.

Me, I have a little point and shoot whose manual I have never glanced at, whose settings are a mystery to me, whose button makes a satisfying click. I do not take good photos. Some of them turn out well because if you take four hundred pictures, luck will have at least one of them turn out surprisingly well. My pictures range from bad to boring to surprisingly cool, and I still take pictures. I still carry my little camera around with me–or I used to–and take pictures of things that make me happy, and upload them to Flickr. Some kind of switch flipped in my head, and just the act of being creative is meaningful to me. Just the act of writing that sentence means I ought to be smacked in the back of the head, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true.

I went for our dog walk yesterday, and I took hundreds and hundreds of photos all the way up the mountain and back down and the hour and a half flew by and some of the pictures, I absolutely love and some of that is because I love my dogs and some of that is because the pictures are funny and some of that is because I  lucked into a beautiful shot or because nature cooperated. And all of it makes me happy. I am never going to be a great photographer, anything approaching perfect–even if I had the time to practice, I don’t have the sensibility, I am not good at shaking off the cliche and finding the real picture, and it turns out that that is more than fine, that I am less than perfect.

It is not unusual to forget things, to require an outside brain that is made of paper and is operated with a pen. Almost everyone needs lists and reminders and notes and strings around their fingers, and I am only a little embarrassed that I need to add things like “take vitamins” and “shower” to my to-do lists. But the blanks in my head are special kinds of blanks, holes, spaces. Usually they are just ordinary and unremarkable to me, but when I see other people accessing their long-term memories with ease, I am reminded that this kind of swiss-cheesiness is usually only found in the elderly or the not so bright.

So I try to hide the fact that my memory is so terrible and that it is possible that I need to have a chip installed, or a chimp following me around and taking dictation, or a collection of stories that I have carefully composed after interviewing a list of participants that I can pull out when a story of my life is required. I have very few funny stories to share, as a result of my disability. And I have taken, over the years, to just agreeing when people tell me something unless it immediately clashes with my sense of how the world ought to go. It is exciting that Ryan Reynolds is playingDeadpool , yes! I don’t remember who Ryan Reynolds is, but I will refresh my memory when I am alone. Oh, I love Belle and Sebastian. And when I get home I will find some songs on my iPod and remember what they sound like. Please do not call me on my bluff because that is just embarrassing, okay? Okay.

Of course, I remember some things with vivid clarity and in four dimensions with a soundtrack and closed-captioning, but no one believes me when I swear-to-god that I remember this, and clearly, and they are the ones who are wrong. Because usually, I am the one who looks confused when they tell me that I swore I loved Russian ballet and my favorite color is red and I had sushi for lunch. When I am right, there is no justice because I am so often wrong, and I might as well have been raised in a pod of some kind because my childhood is pretty much a blank, except for a handful of those so-vivid moments.

Lately I’ve been having a series of those vivid flashes, where I remember something: a moment, a person, a face, a phrase, a movement, a gesture, a smell or a sound, “We used to call our boss, at the kosher chicken place I used to work? She was very, very tall and very, very wide, and we used to call her The Great Pumpkin!” I told E, plucking at his sleeve, interrupting our conversation.

He didn’t understand why I was so excited, and I didn’t either, at the time. Why I get so excited, when it happens. It feels like I’ve been given a gift from my old and broken-down brain, that I have lucked into something precious and inviolate, and I want to share it immediately, regardless of its relevance. I used to sit on the floor of the basement, which was my room, which had red plaid carpet, and I would cut up my brother’s skate magazine and create enormous collages and they were very beautiful! I stood in the rain by the entrance to the Louvre and there were no banks anywhere and we were broke and I cried and cried and said I wanted to go home, and my feet were so cold and I was wearing a blue t-shirt dress that I had gotten from Victoria’s Secret that I really wish they still made. We stood in the street outside my friend’s house, and I was leaving in the morning, and he put his hands on my waist and I realized that I really wanted him to kiss me, but he didn’t, and he never did.

Maybe this presages a whole-hearted return to memory and remembering. Maybe my entire childhood will return in glorious, living color, and not just the parts that are so painful and sharp that I can’t repress them the way they need to be repressed. Maybe I will start to remember entire phone numbers and recipes and my list of responsibilities and someday people will believe me when I say that I remember something clearly, though I doubt it.

My baby brother and I spent a ridiculous number of hours in the basement with our Nintendo and our enormous collection of games, flailing our arms and yelling at the screen and mashing buttons and throwing our controllers and stomping around and hunching forward filled with grim determination and saying things like YOU CAN DO IT GO GO GO GO YAY YOU WIN YOU ARE SO GREAT! My brother was so great far more often than I was–he was the one who could koopa the troopa out of those little fucking turtles and save the princess and find the wand and discover the treasure and blow right through the enemy line.

Me, I spent a lot of time falling off platforms and getting frustrated, and eventually I was just content to sit and watch as he won, though I would provide extremely valuable advice and wisdom and unassailable observations like, You just died, and You have to kill the guy. We were a very great team, and would pour over the Nintendo Power magazine looking for clues and information and secrets and maps to guide us through the dungeons that we could not figure out how to get through on our own, which made us greatly furious and full of anger. I was the official Map-Reader and Keeper of the Tips, and interpreted directions, and together we destroyed the 8-bit world with our magic and might.

Though I was never good at the behind-the-controller portion of the gaming, I stayed a gamer, playing role-playing titles that more or less only require you to navigate your little man through a story and around dungeons and choose spells from lists in the correct orders in order to destroy the evil bad guys who were full of evil and badness. I never quite got over the sense that I couldn’t do it on my own, and for every game I purchased I would purchase the strategy guide, which was less a guide full of strategies to employ and more a step-by-step hand-holding extravaganza full of maps and bulleted lists in large, bold-faced type. Gaming for dummies, essentially. I was a dummy.

It has been years x years since I’ve played any games, until I got a Wii for my birthday because I have a spectacularly awesome boyfriend. But it took me awhile to actually appreciate my Wii–I was afraid to play it. I wouldn’t be good at the games. I would be so sad when I was bad at the games, and embarrassed, and there was no one around to take the controller and let me be the map person with the very good tips. Because I wasn’t really using it, I lent the console to E and his house of boys, who discovered almost immediately that you can hook the sucker up to the World Wide Web and start doing amazing things like visit other Wii consoles and download classic games.

“Oh my god, for real? For real, for real?” I shrieked when I came into the living room and they were browsing a list of games that included Secret of Mana and The Legend of Zelda and Donkey Kong country, and I jumped up and down and exploded with rainbow fireworks of gleeful hyperbole. Greater than the greatest thing ever! I spent a lot of time downloading games. “Why don’t you play the games you already downloaded?” E would say. Because I can’t and will be bad at them, I didn’t reply. I just kept downloading games because it made me happy to own them, and reminded me of my brother. Kid Icarus, holy crap, we were obsessed with that game, download thank you!

Sick this past weekend, on the couch, tired of reading. I turned on the Wii (you can do it with the Wiimote! Wiimotely!) and I hesitantly clicked on The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past, and started to wander through the game, gingerly and a little afraid. Crazily afraid! What is there to be afraid of? It is a game. They are pixels. I hate not being good at something immediately and spectacularly. I hate to be wandering through a puzzle feeling as if I have missed something, that I’m clueless and lost and unsure of what’s going on and completely walking by things that are utterly obvious. I hate the feeling that I may have made a mistake.

I was tempted to get off the couch and go get my laptop and find some step-by-step walkthroughs that would tell me exactly what to do and how to do it and when, how to go through the dungeons and defeat the evil and save the day, but I was sick and tired and didn’t want to do anything but move my thumbs, and I persevered, bravely, through the dungeons. And I beat the dungeons and I defeated the evil and figured out what my items did and where to get bombs and how to get flippers and increase my health and save the day and a few days later, I am jonesing to play, flush with accomplishment, feeling like a badass. Feeling competent.

You know, I hate Learning Valuable Lessons so we’re going to pretend that didn’t happen, and I am not quite as dorky as I appear, and that no one needs a strategy guide to navigate my remarkably simple psyche. I’m going to just go downloadTetris Party, now.