whiskey in a teacup . com

On the one hand, I’m glad my cat re-eats her stomach contents after she vomits onto the floor.  It makes cleaning up much easier for me.  On the other hand, it makes me wonder how often she does that when I’m not around to see it, and how many particles of cat puke get left behind on the hardwood.

I have empirical evidence that I am the only person living within a ten mile radius of Powderhouse Circle who actually understands how rotaries work.

For the past couple of weeks, Jared and I have been slowly working our way through the much-hyped high-definition “Planet Earth” documentaries. While I’m a sucker for any kind of nature/animal footage, I’m finding the series more and more unwatchable.

The first problem is the narration, which is written almost entirely in cliche and contains several weird references to the garden of Eden. The second problem is that this narration is read in droll tones by Sigourney Weaver, whose unseen presence gives me the uncomfortable urge to ask Jared if he is the keymaster. It’s very unpleasant to have your earliest notions of sex mixed in with your baby polar bears, even if said sex was probably way less elaborate and dirty than you remember, but hello, I was ONE YEAR OLD when Ghostbusters came out; that shit is all kinds of embedded in my psyche.

They should have just gotten Leonard Nimoy to narrate, like every other nature show does.

As promised: Illnesses, Injuries, and Infections.

The day we left Boston it was sunny and slightly cool. I wore jeans, boots, a tank top, and a light hoodie to the airport. On the long flight to Brazil I started to come down with a cold. By the time we landed in the hot, humid Sao Paulo airport, I was miserable. Hours later when we reached Maria’s house, I removed my boots and found that an unusual, grostesque edema had set in around my calves, right above the sock line. I took a cold shower and spent my first night in Brazil half asleep in front of a fan while the others went to dinner.

The next day I felt infinitely better, and better still after a lunch of fish made with the most enormous, delicious capers I’ve ever tasted. Things were looking up. Unfortunately, a few days later (at which point we were on the island) Jared fell ill with what I will delicately refer to as intestinal distress, and lost a day and a half to misery. I will let him decide how much of this story he wants to tell on his own site, but it was not pleasant.

We spent most of our time on the island playing speed scrabble by the ocean, which was entirely satisfactory to me. We would watch people wading in the water, and we noticed many dogs and horses running along the beach. One day, we (Maria, Eileen, and myself) decided to go for a horseback ride.

I had never ridden a horse before, and did not share a common language with the guy who helped me mount my horse. So when he repositioned my foot (clothed only in a sandal, attached to a leg wearing shorts) in the stirrup so that only my toes were resting on it, I stupidly ignored his advice and jammed both feet all the way into the stirrups, which seemed more comfortable. We took off with the horses and generally had a great time. I was informed that my horse was named Senator, which I figured was because he was very pretty but also kind of a stubborn jerk (when I pulled back on the reigns to indicate that I wanted less crotch-slamming and more smooth-gliding, he never cooperated), but later I was told that his name was actually Calypso.

Whoever he was, he basically knew his way along the beach, past the mangroves, with occasional treads into the water. My only responsibility was to steer him such that he didn’t propel my person into any low-hanging branches, but I am not very good at steering anything that doesn’t come with a clutch and a moonroof, and thus I received a small laceration to my right arm. As we trotted past some barbed wire, I became increasingly concerned, but luckily I made it through the ride unbutchered. Thank you, Senator!

When I leapt off him later, however, I realized why the guy had moved my foot: when you push your feet all the way into stirrups, part of the metal rubs against the junction between your feet and shins. If you are a jackass and not wearing proper footwear, this will result in the wearing down of the skin in that area. At first I just had a bit of raw skin on one foot that looked like it would resolve itself. It wasn’t until I was back in Boston that what had been a non-issue developed into a large, angrily red, painful raised bump that looked like it had abscessed. This repulsed me so much that I immediately followed my favorite medical aphorism (ubi pus, ibi evacua) and attempted to lance the area with the blade from my Leatherman tool. Disappointingly, all I could express from it was blood. At first I thought I was just being a pansy and not cutting in deep enough, but then I deduced that the wound was just in some inflammatory stage and had not actually turned into a walled-off sack of pus. I kept it clean, and eventually it healed on its own, but next time I go on vacation I am definitely taking my germ-phobia with me. I brought antibacterial hand soap into the tropics once; if I ever return I’m taking a bottle of sterile saline, an irrigation syringe, several tubes of bacitracin, and a variety of gauze bandages and tapes.

Now I’m home, with a brand new cold, just three weeks after the last one! At least I can say with relative certainty that I no longer have any funky horse bacteria incubating in my foot. And really, what more could a girl ask for?

Overheard at work today:

“So, are you going to the baby shower?”

“Only if they have Fanta and Hennessey.”

I’m currently taking a microbiology class, so my after-work days generally find me slogging through my eight hundred page textbook, occasionally smacking myself in the forehead, and realizing how little I retained from the “Intro to Microbiology” I took a couple of years ago.

This would be bad enough if, last night, I hadn’t felt a minor physical sensation that foretold a terrible impending doom. It began as the slightest tingling in my upper lip, so gentle that at first I tried to deny what I knew to be the awful truth. The tingle continued and progressed to an ache, and when I put myself to bed I knew that I would soon be waking up to that most familiar and hated of nemeses: the cold sore.

The pain and grotesque appearance of cold sores are punishment enough for the wanton teenage make-outs that gave me this accursed virus. Normally, study might provide solace from the knowledge that I look like a dirty, diseased whore, but not when the study is about goddamned microbiology. I’ve got your microbiology RIGHT HERE, universe. I get it. Stop reminding me, and leave me to my woe.

The cold sore virus is one of those particularly egregious little fuckers that hides dormant in your nerve cells until such time as you become stressed or sick, and then it leapfrogs its way along the nerve to erupt in ugly pustules on your lips. I picture the virus as a tiny homunculus with fangs and claws and a bad haircut, somersalting his way from the inside of my face to the outside, where he shines like a beacon that tells the world: this chick is gross. This little bastard used to visit me once a year or so, but lately it’s more like every few months. I cannot suppress him. I cannot avoid him. I did not ask to play host to this vile parasite, but alas, this is my fate. My nasty, nasty goo-filled fate.

And, lo, as soon as I finish writing this missive I must return to my studies, which mock and degrade me with every turn of the page. Go on without me, friends, and live your charmed lives of gloriously unblemished lips and unfunkified faces. Perhaps one day I will rejoin your ranks, if this microscopic dickweed will let me.

Man, fuck the Krebs cycle.

I had a brief dream this morning wherein Ben Stein was piloting an aircraft and explaining to me how the shapes of the engines could, at any time, cause them to fall out of the plane. I was getting nervous about this prospect when I realized that he was talking to me from within the main cabin, and no one was in the cockpit.

Did I mention that I did fine on all six of the flights to, from, and within Brazil? As soon as I sat down for the first flight, I simply felt okay with it. It was pleasantly anticlimactic for everyone involved. By the second flight I was already demanding that Jared trade seats with me so I could be by the window. I think the key to my success was a subtle dissociation between myself and my relationship to the outside world; I saw the clouds and the lights and the tiny houses and trees, but did not contemplate that I was actually above these things, and actually very far above them. Instead, I viewed them like paintings in a museum, or fish in an aquarium: with moderate, fleeting interest.

I don’t normally recommend sheer denial as a coping mechanism, but in this case it worked quite well for me. It also kicked in as naturally and reflexively as a yawn, allowing me to save my stores of anxiety for the various dune buggy and horse rides that would soon widen my eyes and whiten my knuckles. Read about those adventures sometime soon in Tales From Brazil, Part Something: Stuff I Thought I Might Fall Out Of and/or Off Of Into a Barbed Wire Fence!

Photos from Brazil are finally live on flickr.

Basic overview:  Jared and I flew from Boston to Newark, where we hooked up with Eileen.  The three of us flew from Newark to Sao Paulo, where we met Maria at the airport.  The four of us took a bus to Maria & Eduardo’s home in Piracicaba.  The five of us spent a couple of days there, then flew to Salvador and stayed in a hotel for a few more days.  Then we took a catamaran to an island called Morro de Sao Paulo, where we spent several days, before returning to Salvador for one more night, then flying home.

Instead of doing a giant recap, I’ll just post stories and thoughts at random over the next few days.  Stay tuned for Tales From Brazil, Part Two:  Illnesses, Injuries, and Infections!

When I got home from work today, I noticed what appeared to be the remains of a back-alley abortion in my bathtub. I’m talking about a surprisingly large, bloody glob with a creamy appearance and a few bloody smears scattered around it.

One thing I’ve noticed about cats is that, even when totally healthy, they can poop normally for months and then randomly take a big bloody shit that freaks you out the first time you see it. Petra has occasionally produced such shits, and she is also notorious for sitting in the bathtub, so she quickly became (and, after briefly questioning Jared, remained) my primary suspect.

However, despite spending a lot of time there, she never poops in the tub. Also however, I noticed that her litter box contained a recent, relatively normal and bloodless poop. So sometime before or after correctly pooping in the box, she positioned herself in the tub to leave me that lovely crimson surprise. The question here is, why? To welcome me home? To punish me for leaving?

I think the true answer is that her litter box needed to be cleaned, which I was too tired to do yesterday after getting back from the trip, and she wanted to leave me a reminder. Even the smell of cat poo in the box was not enough to rouse me from my fatigue and laziness, so she stepped it up a notch, and I don’t blame her.

Good on you, baby.