Really McCain? The best you could come up with is someone who is against gay marriage but "has gay friends?" I'm sure she has black friends too. How modern of her.
I took the furry kids to the park, mostly due to the fact that I was getting this look- Along with the threat of getting nothing done with two rampaging bored beasts underfoot all day.
Best part of the day? Penny dunks her brother, Jerry, and glides away. Girls rule!!
In honor of 2008, the year of the Rat, I cheerfully announce the official arrival of my newest family member, Natalie Joy, the enucleated, hairless Rattus Norvegicus. That's a bald, one eyed rat, to the layman.
She tiny, and young, and unstoppable. Her eye was removed due to trauma and infection. If thy right eye offends thee, pluck it out. (Though, in this case, the left eye was the culprit.) She's altogether the perfect mascot for the new year.
She's hairless. Aside from a little peach fuzz she is completely unarmored against the cold. She is completely happy to depend on her family to make sure she stays warm. I want to be like that. I am tired of constantly playing defense, of burying myself under layers of emotional armor so I don't have to depend on anyone else to help make things right. I want to be naked and completely assured that someone will always be there to keep me warm.
She's missing her left eye, due to surgery, and her stitches come out on friday. She is completely without fear or worry. She makes no attempt to use her one good eye for bilateral vision. What's going on over there does not concern her. She stares straight ahead at what she wants, and damn everything else. Someday I will be like that. I will turn a blind eye to the past, to the things that hurt and make me angry, and I will focus only on what brings me joy. Hanging onto something just because it is a part of us no matter how much pain it brings us is foolish. Sometimes you just have to let it go and do without.
Natalie is joyful. She is full of affection for her new family, and excited about everything we have to offer. I am so happy to have her here.
2007 is dead. Long live 2008! Long live the bald little one-eyed rattie!
Michelle is having a relationship with a hairdryer
[Dec. 18th, 2007|11:21 am]
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mood
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calm
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After no electricity for 7 and one half days, I learned something valuable about myself, which is that I happen to like electricity. I'm not married to it, you understand. I think I dealt with the inconvenience admirably. There was much reading by candlelight and blanketty fun, covered in dogs and cats and hippies. Really though, electricity=hairdryer=fabulous. The sun shines today, blindingly through the space left by the fallen trees. The ice had gotten to me. The grey days and early nights, bookmarked by the crash of falling branches heavy with ice, eventually make it seem like you are completely isolated, completely forgotten. Julius, my oldest rattie, died a few weeks ago, and the cold and loneliness were hard on his brother, which in turn was hard on me. It was difficult not to over identify with the little guy. I, too, was cold. I, too, had lost my larger, older brother that had often been a blanket to me. The absence of his slow, steady presence was magnified in the lightless cold. Poor Marcus. I know what that's like. My mother's best friend, my aunt of spirit but not blood, died last Thursday during the ice storm. Her cancer overcame her and she was gone. Her family and friends surrounded her in the cold, and a generator powered the machines that monitored her very last breath. I went to her funeral yesterday. My mother is inconsolable. Her son and her best friend are gone. Helplessness is a sensation I struggle with in the best of times, and it overwhelms me now. I want so much to take all of her pain away. Someday, years from now, maybe I will begin to deal with my own loss, but for now I worry about my mother. She is strong. She has survived the early death of her father, the death of her first husband's body, her second husband's conscience, and now her son and her oldest friend. I have never been so determined to be healthy and happy in my whole life. It is the only thing I can give her. That said, here we come upon another death. 2007 is breathing its final, ragged breaths. I can not say I am sorry to see it go. In its suffering it has wounded all of us. No one I know escaped it untouched. But 2008 is the year of the Rat, the cleverest and most industrious of us all. I have determined that next December will not find me crying in the dark, will not find me cold. Within me is a great tolerance for pain, sure, but there is also a tremendous capacity for joy. 2008 is a year for joy, mine and everyone else's. I wish you all the very best. From the deepest parts of my heart and soul, I send you joy.
I'm sorry it took me so long to write. It's not that I didn't want to, believe me. Somehow I got it in my head that I should wait until my head was clearer, my thoughts prettier. This morning I realized that there is nothing in this I can make into poetry. You deserve words more elegant and perfect than I will ever create, but all I have are these.
I miss you. My grief is quiet and cold. It never leaves me. Thank you for your letter. Nothing stops her sadness, but it has brought our mother peace, and for that my gratitude is without end. I wanted to read it at your funeral, but I was as ill-equipped to speak then as I am now.
I wish that I had more for you but that's all there is. I pray that you can take it as the sincere effort it is. I love you, Brother.
Michelle
re-posted in various other places, because I have little else to say.
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fyrebryhte's journal
cheerful
