Recently in Misc Category
About a week and a half ago, Kate and I drove out to Monroe, WI to adopt two kittens. It's about a 2-and-a-half hour drive from our apartment, so we left early in the morning and drove out to Stoughton to the Parents place. Lexi printed off directions to the Green County Humane Society while we were en route, and we took back roads through small unincorporated towns and places like Brooklyn, WI. When we arrived there the place was nearby a large grouping of trailer homes, and it looked like sheet metal with a makeshift roof thrown over it.
Kate was a little concerned, but we pulled over on the gravel and went inside. I had already called, filed an online application, e-mailed and called again, so they were familiar with us as soon as I told them my name and pointed out the way to the Cats. It's tough, sifting through all the animals, any of which we would be happy with. Kate and Lexi took to some of the initial cats, and I realized there was a small back section that was for staff only. The girl volunteering told me I was welcome to go back there, but to only handle one animal at a time.
The back room was a night-and-day difference to the main room. It was colder, a lot of the cats were younger, and some of the smaller cages had 3-4 animals inside. These were the desperate ones, and immediately they began to pace and meow, in complete contrast to their skittish front room counterparts. A few that caught my eye were sleeping or keeping their distance, so I moved to one that was vying for my attention. The one directly above him began to reach out his paw and bat at my head.
I called Kate and Lexi inside and we scoped a few out. There were two black ones we really liked, the first was very cuddly and purred immediately once we tok it out. The other was the one that had smacked me around on the head a bit, and we took him into the front room to see him play. As soon as we set him on the floor he ran to the nearest cage and grappled his way to the top. It was impressive, but also worrisome. This was an escapist cat. The volunteers let him be for a bit, and we kept looking.
After a while we talked to the volunteer and she disappeared into the back room for a moment, emerging with a small, female calico. Right away she took to Kate and although she seemed nervous she was very playful. Pretty much from moment one I knew we'd be walking out with her. I talked it over with Kate and expressed my concern that in making a commitment that was going to limit our future choices in apartments and remain with us for over a decade, that I would rather have at least one of the two cats be a small kitten so that we can experience that. But, I was okay with this cat, Margie, and we adopted her.
When we set the cat carrier down in a room full of cats to pick her up, she left the small boy and his mom that were playing with her and came running over, climbed inside, sat and began to purr. She was incredibly well behaved on the ride home. As soon as we got home she ran and hid under the futon, but after an hour or so curiousity got the better of her and she came out to play.
We've renamed her Asuka, after Asuka Langley-Soryu from Neon Genesis Evangelion.
Granted, Kate hates anime and knows nothing about Evangelion, but I'm pretty happy with the name myself. Within a few days she fully let her energy out, and her favorite things to do are to knock glasses of water over and attack our feet at four in the morning. I've learned to make sure I have at least three layers of blanket over my feet while sleeping, and I try to make sure I wear socks to bed--or else she'll sink her teeth into my toes to try and get me up.
We are still planning to get her a companion in a few months, she definitely needs someone to play with while we're at work/school. It's a little strange, after growing up with several animals, to feel completely clueless on some basic tenets of cat care. She has toys, catnip, a scratch post and she's spoiled with tuna several nights a week. I still want to get her a larger structure to play on.
But, at least now I have my own cat to stick in an oven?
Three Dreams have stuck with me fairly vividly over the past week:
1. Monster
I dreampt that there was a collossal being of light attacking the city. Which city was indeterminate, but I believe it was an analgram of Chicago and Milwaukee. Kate and I had just moved to a new and modernized (and expensive) apartment and I had somehow realized a way to manage my time so that I had a part-time job, was attending classes full-time, and had a couple days off each week to work on side projects. I wish that part of the dream was still clear, but at the time it was a perfect, manageable system.
This being stretched out into the clouds, and it was just two massive legs of light coming down to the ground. The earth shook with each landed step, and although it could stand on top of things sometimes, more often part of it would phase into a building and the structure would dissolve where touched, ruining the building's integrity and sending it crashing to the ground.
Kate and I were in some stupid fight when the being emerged from a mist that had overtaken a huge body of water, and when it appeared light filled the sky. Kate had been facing it and I had not. After a moment I realized she was being very quiet, and although her right eye was still looking at me I noticed that the other eye's color had turned solid white. You could still make out the parts to it, but the eye was lifeless and saw nothing. She didn't even seem angry or worried about it; She just looked at me as silently, with an intense expression of resignation as if something had just... broke.
Of course, in my dream, we were part of a group that might be equipped to figure out what was going on and stop it. I ignored them and took Kate into the car, trying frantically to make my way towards the massive leg-like beams that were toppling our new city. I knew that there was a world-renowned Optometrist in the area and I was determined to get to him before Kate's condition worsened. When we did get through to an assistant he was on a boat in the harbor. I was told that he wouldn't just leave and abandon us, but that our entire area was effectively under quarantine and that he wouldn't be able to come close enough to help until things were safe, regardless of if that might be too late.
According to Maya, large parts of this are very similar to the book Blindness, which I have never read but received as a gift from her a couple years back.
2. Lost
The other night I dreamed that there was terrible storm that was causing massive floods. Several of us were in a boat that kept threatening to capsize. We would hit a massive wave and the nose would sink deep into the water, spilling the now-grounded fluid all over us. A few times the boat did flip but was incredibly light in our hands and was easily righted. There was a girl with short blonde hair with us whom no one trusted and we suspected that the world was a different place now, with different rules and alliances and that she might be there to betray us.
This part of the dream kept mixing with another, in which I was someone else on safe ground in a two-story open room in a seedy bar. There were men who had come in with murderous intent, trying to pick a fight. They had emptied the bar of everyone except for myself and this girl from the boat. It became obvious that the girl was with them, was in on a plan of some kind. They all drank milk and talked about what horrors they were going to enact upon me (most involving a sharp knife) and boat girl looked a little mixed up about the whole thing.
It was almost as if I were living both parts of this dream at the same time, and I knew where to pull on the ropes that bound me in the bar part of the dream as I looked at that person through my own eyes back on the boat. Boat girl was mouthing the words in the bar from behind a bar counter as I saw her whispering them into my second self's ear during a moment of watery panic in the past. Although I don't remember the exact words spoken, I know it was a message of sabotage, about something that I could do to this Milk that was being drunk in the past, to affect the present. I watched the not-me jump off the boat and swim to what appeared to be a grim fate, and then faded back to just the one set of eyes as I was the not me in the present moment, looking at the three of the criminals who had drank the milk writhing on the floor in pain. There was a scuffle with the surprised fourth man, which ended with him being choked into unconsciousness on the floor. Boat girl looks at not-me with a new, hardened look in her eyes, handing me a sharp hunting knife that was going to be used on me moments earlier and tells me that simply incapacitating these four is not going to solve anyone's problem. Not-me realizes that I have been played and that this new situation is perhaps the most dangerous of them all. Her demeanor is no longer nervous or troubled, but challenging. Not-me looks at the knife in my hand and the not-quite-conscious 'bad guys' on the floor, and I wake up.
It was a very David Lynch-like series of events. I don't know how to properly explain it, but I was in both places at the same time and two people at the same time. I have been fully lucid in dreams before, fully aware that I am dreaming, and I've experienced what it's like to study someone in your dream with such an intensity that you shift to their perspective, but I've never experienced two separate POV's at the same time before. It was weird.
3. Retirement
This dream followed or preceded the 'Being of Light' dream. In either case it was on the same night. In this one I was walking around near the Lakefront part of Milwaukee, on the one-way part of Prospect Ave. I bumped into my friend and multi-employer co-worker Chris and his brother Mike. They were supervising a massive overhaul of two towering high-rise buildings, both of which they had just purchased to turn into luxory apartments/hotel suites. Apparently they had both just done very well with online poker and were getting into real estate.
A large crowd of people were growing. Some were there to gawk at the renovations, some were passing by. Some were picking up people from a steady stream that kept emerging from one of the building's central entrance. Taxis were being hailed. Chris kept chuckling about the whole thing, and after a moment I realized that everyone coming out of the building was elderly. Chris explained to me that while one of these buildings had just been office space, the other was actually a ritzy retirement community. A few of the wealthy occupants had decided to stay on and were pleased to be able to upgrade their room to something with a view, but nearly all of the occupants had no income of their own and were being ousted.
Chris, eyes tearing up with laughter, finishes with "and now all these fuckers are out on the street!"
Epic. Epic stuff.
Ugh... so my buddy Dan's been feeding me the Love Hina manga books for the past few weeks to help pass the time at work. I just finished the 14th (and final) book. I knew the story from the series but when you have 14 books to tell it it becomes a bit more convoluted. It could be argued that this shit isn't too many steps up from cheesy serialized airport novels but at some point I actually became captivated and wanted to see where the characters end up after the anime leaves off...
Semblence of a point aside, I'm really in kind of a foul mood now that I'm done with them. This is what happens when you take in too much of any one thing. Even though they had complete closure on everything since I've spent large chunks of time over the past week getting through these books it feels abrupt that it's just... done.
Run down of the weekend:
Oktoberfest. Not much to say on that. Pulled into La Crosse at about 1:30 AM, got up about 6:30 AM and went down to the parade grounds to push T-Shirts for B & B Graphics, my relative's company. It was alright but there was less free beer handed to me, the beer that WAS handed to me was fuckin' PBR, and there were zero drunken propositions I was willing to take up. Last time I did this, a few years back, there was more of those criteria met but I was also underage and had a girlfriend so I couldn't fully appreciate them. Still a decent time and decent cash for 2 hours of walking up and down a mile and a half stretch. Couldn't get a hold of the 2-3 people I was attempting to get a hold of until I had decided La Crosse partying was bust and headed back into Madison- so that was kind of lame.
It's 3:30 in the morning and I'm lying on the floor of the most hardcore Super 8 Motel in Waukegan, IL that you could fathom. Which isn't any different from a regular Super 8, I think at the annual Hotel Family Reunions they're all that decrepit elderly great-aunt-or-other who smells oddly of old hats, moth balls and - strangely enough - kerosine. You don't really want to give in and embrace them but eh, what can you do?
...literally. I'm not trying to do a lame-ass emo lyric blog title. Really, I'm not. Our walls have lead paint. We had to sign an agreement not to lick them when we moved in. And I can see why, now that they are getting so damn clean.
I've officially been in the new apt since Wed night. I've got about 8-10 boxes worth of stuff piled on my old room's floor awaiting actual boxes, and then they are getting shipped off to Mike and Maya's basement. I've got a lot of shit. I've got a lot of shit I'd like to have at our place. I have a library scattered around my floor. I've got furniture. I've got dishes! But my new room is equivalently a dorm room. I had to make the switch to a Futon to accomodate the spacial change, and I'm still not sure exactly where to put my 400 or so DVD's, but I think I can just get some small boxes and seriously just have them slide out from under my "bed"...
* Having to order and pay for my dad at Chipotle because he was drunk and could barely manage "Steak.. thing. With steak." when asked what he wanted
* Succesfully using a blatant "we have to go look for Jay because he's really wasted and we don't know where he is" lie on the inebriated to keep them housebound
* 8 glasses of lakefront beer for a $5 entrance fee
* DDR
* Gibbons losing to me and Jay at pool when he should have wiped the floor with us
* The largest collection of drunken parents I've ever seen
* Getting totally called out by Winnie from The Wonder Years when I didn't think she'd catch on
* MUCH drama avoidment
* Batman fucking Begins. Excellent as a film in general and the first Batman movie to capture the feel of the comics. I'd say easily the first 45 minutes left me with a bit of a dropped jaw at "No way are they actually doing this right..."
This helped pass the time a bit, however. Nice. Who's in Milwaukee Thurs and down for Leine's Lodge? Looks like the majority of people I was hoping would come are bowing out or refusing to make the trip to Madison. I may be adamant and just sit alone, drinking. and eating pizza. alone. but with pizza.
Is it still angst and emo if pizza is involved? I, for one, will take a stand and say that it is not.
-A lounger chair being launched off of the balcony onto the concrete below, before a scattering of people to gather and toss the remains before complaints arose.
-Random girls trying to score coke.
-Random guy with hammer trying to take dents out of floor directly above our apartment....
-People breaking into Dan and SS's empty apartment for who the hell knows.
As far as I'm aware these people were all scorned, I personally saw Tom wander into SS's old apartment to tell people to get the fuck out of the entire building, but for the most part it seemed things were ignored and then insulted later. As stands-- lameness points for the night.
I did somehow end up with a bag of bagels, though, which is excellent!
