Cirque du Malaise

I'm sorta sick of writing about yoga, and I've heard from a few arguably tactless associates recently that they are sick of me writing about yoga too. So I decided to write about something different. That's right, my cats. Write what you know, y'all. I actually wrote this a year ago, but shhh, don't tell.

Read This Is All I Know About Budapest in its entirety on Open Salon.

As everyone in the free world knows, I have two cats. One of them is a sweet creature named Luka who doesn't have a mean bone in her body. The other is a serial killer. I love them equally. You might be surprised to find out, however, that Luka is the one who tends to get on my nerves a little bit quicker.

I have mad A.D.D. issues and distraction is a big problem for me. I have a difficult time concentrating on things that aren't inherently interesting, and unfortunately, HTML does not wet my whistle so much. So when I am trying to focus on unlocking a mind-numbing code puzzle for several hours, and for most of that time, Luka is about three feet away from me screaming at the top of her lungs for me to let her either IN or OUT the door, it gets a little frustrating.

Luka, for whatever reason that only her mysterious childhood knows about, cannot abide by a closed door. It makes her extremely anxious, and so, if the door is closed and I am sitting near it (where my desk happens to be), she can't help herself from desperately needing to be on the opposite side of the door at every moment. Whichever side that may be. I am usually pretty patient about it the first 2,999 times. On the 3,000th time, however, I tend to snap and yell at her: THIS IS WHY PEOPLE SHAKE BABIES!

It's really horrible, I know, and I'm not proud. In my defense, I have never (and would never) actually shake her. Nor can I ignore her. Her meow is of a particularly insidious decibel. So instead I am wearing a skid on my hardwood floor rolling my chair back and forth more times a day than I actually take breaths.

Oh, why can't I just leave the door ajar so she can come in and out of her own accord? Good question. Here's why:

Actual snake that Buda brought home IN HER MOUTH, shown in perspective.

The thing about cats is, you can't really get mad at them, because they don't have cognitive reasoning skills and they basically just look at you like you're being an asshole. In this way, they are a really good test of one's equanimity.

Not really, but that side of my personality that doesn't like to be bossed around (and by "side," I mean ALL OF IT) is a little bent out of shape right now.

I've been putting myself out there more as a writer, and that naturally means I endure a lot more feedback on my writing. I've been getting plenty of abrasive comments on my articles, especially the ones I've been posting on Elephant Journal, which (in case you've been missing them) is apparently where the hyper-serious militant vegans hang out. Yesterday I posted an article called I'm a Buddhist, but my cat is a serial killer: a somewhat tongue-in-cheek but also basically earnest diatribe about how Buda (my poorly-named cat) has been busy slaughtering the songbird population in my neighborhood and shattering mommy's already-fragile nerves.

[BTW you can read the expanded version of this post on Elephant Journal if you prefer...]

I swear I'm not trying to be provocative, but for some reason I'm a magnet for angry vegans, although the article I posted had basically nothing to do with my eating habits. Somehow they took a story about my kitty's hunting skills and decided to apply it to my personal ethics as a conscious meat-eater. I say "conscious" because I'm actually pretty mindful of where I get my food from, whether it's animal, vegetable or mineral. But.... I'm not a vegetarian. I was a vegetarian once. For 8 years, actually. It didn't work for me. I feel like 8 years is enough time to figure that out.

That's not the point though, and I am completely disinterested in getting wrapped up in yet another Twitter flame-war about the ethics of my food choices. The point is this: please don't boss me. I don't boss you! I don't care what you eat! I don't care who you voted for! I don't care what God you worship! I don't care how you feel about environmental policy! I really don't!

I mean, there is a time and place for expressing your opinions in the interest of making the world a better place, and I am all for kind, compassionate education, sans rhetoric or condescension. I read Eating Animals by the brilliant Jonathan Safran Foer, every Michael Pollan book ever published, and watched most of Food Inc in utter horror. I get it. The atrocities of factory-farmed meat are plenty of incentive to go the extra mile and source your food from more ethical places. I do my best, and 90% of the food I buy is from local farmers with presumably good intentions and practices.

These are my choices. Mine. On the other hand, if my friends eat factory-farmed meat, I don't judge them! If my friends ask me to stop at McDonalds on the way to L.A. so they can get a box of Chicken McNuggets, that's cool! Cuz, my friends are adults! And so am I!

Sorry about all the exclamation points. I feel kinda passionate about this. Not in an "I feel passionate that it's my way or the highway" ironically-violent-and-dogmatic-vegan kind of way; rather, in a lighten-up-cuz-life-is-hard-enough kind of way.

And I'm not saying I don't like vegans. I think being vegan is a really awesome choice. An awesome and extremely personal choice. I love lifestyle choices made from a heartful passion, and people that actually believe in something are R.L.A.M. I know some really amazing people who are vegan. (There is one vegan on this planet who I think is a douchy tool, but it doesn't have anything to do with the fact that he's vegan.) Lots of my friends are vegans, and that's just fine with me! Is it fine with you that I'm not?

Cuz honestly, it's none of your business what I put in my belly. And it's none of my business what you think of me.

I'll leave you with this Rumi poem:

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,

there is a field. I will meet you there.

When the soul lies down in that grass,

the world is too full to talk about

language, ideas, even the phrase each other

doesn't make any sense.

I went for a walk to the beach with my friend Melissa recently and we had a blast discussing our litany of irrational fears. To be fair, I think all fears are basically rational, as long as they could potentially happen, but some are more rational than others (it's an Animal Farm kind of thing).

There are obviously some things that are worth worrying about, like being almost 40, single, childless, and at the same time revolted at the thought of being in a relationship ever again. Also, not being able to pay my rent. You can't tell me that's not worth worrying about.

But some of the things that keep me up at night are pretty dumb, not to mention incredibly self-absorbed, like:

• Trying to remember the last time I got my teeth cleaned and panicking about whether my gums are receding (they are) and whether it's going to eventually cause all my teeth to turn black and fall out and whether I will be able to stomach eating everything pureed for the rest of my life.

• That I will die without ever having learned a foreign language fluently, and that I no longer possess the cerebral ability to learn a foreign language at all, because of all the pot I smoked in college.

I've always been a worryer, as evidenced by this early photo of 1-year old me, pondering the inexorable challenges that lie ahead.

• That I have a tapeworm.

• That I'll slowly go blind until I am trapped in my own body, unable to write, read, or cope, left to wile away my days in isolated misery.

• That anyone cool will find out that I actually watch that dumb show Glee and have even seen some of the episodes twice. Thanks a lot, Hulu, for stealing my soul.

• Wondering how I can make money off of hating the yoga scene in the Bay Area and whether or not I will eventually be assassinated.

• Wondering whether my neighbors think I'm a nutjob looneybag because I'm forever dragging dead animals out onto the porch with a hysterical look on my face and then apologizing out loud to said dead animals and begging them not to debit my karma since it's really not my fault my cats are born hunters with a taste for blood.

In regard to the latter, I have come up with a small solution to at least some of the carnage. I found a place in San Rafael that takes in injured wild animals. It's called Wildcare. The people there are amazing and they will rehabilitate, say, a baby quail that's been bitten in the neck by my cat, Budapest, and then release it back into the wild. If you ever come across an animal in need, please call them. This world is a terrible enough place without letting an animal die for no reason.

My adorable little murderer, licking her chops

It’s no secret that I am obsessed with my cats, Budapest and Luka. Sometimes, though, it can be a little trying dealing with those little murderous effers.

Budapest’s main pastime and dharma in this life is to kill things. I don’t begrudge her this and realize that nature is cruel and that it’s a cat’s God-given instinct to hunt. I am secretly proud of her every time she brings home a tiny warm dead body to show off. Budapest had a mysterious and unquestionably challenging childhood and I find it touching that she has managed to not just thrive but that she has taken to cold-blooded murder so cunningly. It warms my heart that she has found her path.

However, I am also an aspiring Buddhist with my own path and so have an obligation to protect life whenever possible (or at least, convenient). So, when the baby bird she brought home today looked to still have its wits about it, I felt compelled to pry it out of Buda’s jaw.

That was only the beginning. Once freed from the clutches of certain death, the baby bird dropped to the kitchen floor, panicked, and ran under the stove. So then I had a quandary, because I certainly wasn't prepared to leave the baby bird to die a slow, lonely, terrified death under my stove. I am partial to "freeze" in fight/flight/freeze situations, but after I got that over with and looked around, I realized that no one else was going to deal with the situation, so once again, I was on my own.

I quickly inserted fresh batteries into my headlamp so I could see under the stove (I had a premonition when I finally bought them at Home Depot the other day), found a long stick in the back yard, and went about gingerly compelling little tiny fragile bird out from under the stove with the stick. Mission eventually accomplished, but of course as soon as it hit daylight it panicked again and ran behind my fireplace, with both cats in full pursuit.

Jesus Christ. I won't bore you with the rest of the sloppy rescue scenario details, but I did eventually manage to get the bird in a box, after a few more cat-jaw-prying incidents. I took a look. It was in shock, breathing rapidly, eyes wide open, but didn't seem to have a broken neck and no tooth-mark stab wounds. It wasn't moving, but it appeared lucid. So, now what?

After a series of panicky space-outs and pointless phone calls to local vets, I eventually ended up on the line with the after-hours dude on call at the Humane Society. He offered to swing by and pick it up. So, I took my box full of freaked out baby bird onto the front steps to wait for him (it's kinda tricky finding my house and I didn't want to waste a moment). I ended up sitting, and waiting, and sitting... for quite a while. The whole time, I stared intently at the baby bird. Monitored it's breathing with my eyes. Made sure it was still coherent. Watched its eyeballs track my movement. I felt confident that it was gonna be okay.

Turns out it was more than okay. The moment the Humane Society truck pulled up and I turned my attention off the baby bird for one split second, it suddenly jumped up and out of the box and sprinted off into the bushes. Leaving me with an empty box and a lot of explaining to do.

At first Humane Society Dude eyed me skeptically as if I just made the whole story up for a little attention on a gloomy Monday night in Mill Valley. He informed me that he had a wounded fawn to save up the road. "For God's sake!" I said, "Go to the fawn! Why did you come here first?"

Just then, we heard an unbirdly loud chirp from the bushes to my right. H.S.D. said, "Does that sound like your bird?" Now, keep in mind that I had known this bird for an extremely traumatic and brief half hour and that I had heard it chirp only once in a blind panic as it raced around my kitchen trying to escape. Also keep in mind that my cottage is surrounded by birds that chirp nonstop at all hours of daylight and at every possible pitch. So, for me to discern if that particular chirp was "my bird's chirp" was kind of a tall order.

Sure enough though, it was. Because a moment later, we glimpsed said bird screaming through the underbrush. So, H.S.D. decided to believe me that there was, in fact, a bird to begin with. Which was nice. But, unfortunately, it wasn't nice enough to actually help us find the bird and help it. At this point, of course, I was starting to wonder if my maniacal fixation on "helping" it was actually any help at all.

So, H.S.D. took off to deal with the injured fawn, and I retreated back into my cottage to chastise my cats for being such bloodthirsty sociopaths. They gave me blank stares.

I have no idea what the moral of this story is, except that obviously I should just put the Humane Society on speed dial, at this point.

How often can you say that Monday was the best day of your life? I had such an amazing day on Monday. Three good things happened. THREE. When was the last time you had three good things happen to you in one day, never mind a Monday?

1. It was raining (already one of my favorite things), and as a result, my cats couldn't (wouldn't) go outside. By some miraculous stroke of benevolence, Budapest decided that she would experiment with hanging out in my lap. For about three blissful minutes, she let me pet her and did not hiss or growl. I was in rapture.

I took this lovely picture on the Temelpas Trail over the weekend.

2. Later, I got bored with the drudgery of writing legalese copy about baby clothes, and saw the mailman pull up (always the highlight of any work-at-home day). I got two—count them TWO–letters with cash in them. One from my dad. $50 to "go buy yourself a cocktail." And the other from Leslie, who apparently was under the misconception that she owed me $11, and mailed it to me from Austin... with a signed snapshot of Jeff Bridges from the set of his latest movie. Awesome refrigerator material. I really love Jeff Bridges.
3. I took a break from work and went to the Mill Valley Library to get a new book. (I finished my last book, The Tale of the Rose, last night and it was the kind of book you have to immediately follow up with another book so you don't wallow too much.) I have this running list of books people have recommended to me. As I was going down the list, the first one I found was Amazing Disgrace, by James Hamilton-Patterson. Somehow, in all these months of having this book on my list, I had neglected to realize that it is the sequel to one of my all time favorite books, Cooking With Fernet Branca. I am indescribably excited to read this book.

It's all about the lowered expectations. And this is exactly why I am not an optimist. If I was an optimist, I probably wouldn't have been all that impressed with this Monday. But as a committed cynic, it was a pretty phenomenal day, I'll tell you what.

Last year I wrote a blog about how I was pretty sure that my animal totem is a hummingbird.

So what does it mean when your cat decides to start hunting and murdering your animal totem and bringing it home to you as a sacrificial gift?

The other day Budapest proudly and enthusiastically maimed, tortured, and ultimately killed a tiny baby Hummingbird right in front of me. (For those of you wondering why I didn't save the hummingbird, its neck was already broken by the time it reached my services, thanks for asking.) I'm not a cold-blooded accomplice to murder; neither am I the sort of person who can bravely kill an animal to put it out of its misery. So instead I was rendered helpless and fascinated and near hysterical as I watched Buda turn the entire affair into a long drawn out horror movie.

However, I am the sort of person who takes close-up pictures of dead baby hummingbirds.

Curiously, just the day before, I had been having a conversation with my friend Joseph about the concept of "letting life happen." Joseph is one of your average basic natural Buddhas. He has an amazing ability to stay positive, relaxed and equanamous even when faced with things (and people) that would make a normal person tear their hair out.

While he was giving me this compassionate talking to, I was feeling very resistant. His main point was that it's always best to BE FLUID instead of trying to control or fight life.

I wasn't really feeling it. I think decisions have to be made, at some point. But watching Buda murder the bird, I was racked with decision paralysis.

Should I pry the bird loose from her jaws and let it die a slow, natural, lonely death outside? Nope, can't handle that thought.

Should I help Buda corner the bird—which keeps getting away from her for brief glimpses of possible salvation—so that she gets it over with quicker? Um, that seems kind of sick.

Should I trap the bird in a tupperware container? Hope it will run out of air and suffocate, thus ending it's suffering earlier? No way dude.

Should I go get a man? (I must admit I did try that particular tactic, but couldn't find one handy.)

In the end, I let Buda do her thing. I was riveted in horror, but I just let life happen. Or death, as it were.

Nature is brutal.

So is life, I suppose.

And Buda? Extremely proud of herself and full of glee at her accomplishment. Until a few hours later, when guess who's mom came flying into our house looking for her baby? Not a pretty sight, watching your ten pound cat get chased around by a P.O.ed 5-ounce hummingbird.

It's like The Nature Channel at my house 24-7.

In our Artist's Way group this week we had the assignment of writing a short personal ad describing ourselves.

"Porcelain-skinned beauty with sharp wit and sailor's mouth seeks no one. And she hopes you're not seeking her either, because the likelihood of you being amenable to her irreverent attitude, desert dry sense of humor, and exaggerated sensitivity resulting in daily panic attacks or crying spells is very slim. And besides, she probably needs to prove to herself that she can do it on her own anyway."

Leslie is so pretty that sometimes I actually can't stand it. In a good way.

This is not actually my personal ad. You probably gathered that from the first two words. My bestie Leslie wrote this. She is indeed a porcelain-skinned beauty. And apparently, she's also an amazing writer, because I had to steal this. I love it so much, and the rest of it might as well be about me.

I too experience daily panic attacks and crying spells (which is why we're friends, obvi). This past Wednesday night was a shining example.

I had been up at Spirit Rock at my dharma class, had meditated for a good 45 minutes, spent an hour strolling the hills by myself taking pictures, and then had a lovely drive home, listening to classical music in the subie. By all accounts I was relaxed, centered and equanamous.

It was an absolute setup for disaster.

Shortly after I got home, this happened:

Apparently Budapest (me, if I was a cat) decided she didn't like the new pine pellet kitty litter I so thoughtfully bought in an attempt to not give her intestinal cancer. Guess where she decided the second best place in the house to pee would be?

In case you can't tell, this is my sleeping bag hanging from a meathook in my bedroom.I can't let it within five feet of the floor any more, for reasons that are about to become obvious if you read on.

My good friends know that I have an unnatural attachment to this sleeping bag. It was a gift from The One Who Shall Remain Nameless. It's the most expensive, nicest thing I own. It's my favorite color. It's arguably the most comfortable item in the world. Every morning, I wrap myself up in it to drink my tea. Many afternoons, I curl up in it to take a nap. At night, I surround myself with it and read novels or watch bad sitcoms on Hulu. It's probably the only possession I have that I am so attached to that I couldn't let it go easily. It's practically my boyfriend.

I'd say this sums it up nicely.

So, I'm sure it was no accident that Buda chose that spot to hunker down, look me stone cold in the eye, and unload a human-sized amount of pee right into the dead center of my sleeping bag.

The ensuing very un-Buddhist reaction on my part was no joke. I immediately burst into tears, dropped to my knees and started yelling "Why, Buda! Why?!?!?!" in true Scarlett O'Hara fashion. When that didn't draw an immediate apology from her I got up, stomped around the house in utter histrionics, gesticulating wildly toward the cat, then the sleeping bag, then the cat...

Soon enough I realized I better deal with the situation promptly, so I made a big dramatic show of transporting the whole mess into the bathtub and then panicking (out loud) about whether or not to use laundry soap even though the tag specifically says "Never use detergent OR put in a top loading washing machine."

I won't drag this story out any more, but I did end up using laundry soap; I did end up throwing it in the washing machine; and I did feel like a major asshole for yelling at my cat and have been groveling and overcompensating ever since. Being a tiny little version of me, Buda is now acting super dramatic herself and flinching every time I look at her.

God love that cat.

I know that children are supposed to give your life purpose, but these cats are taking years off of my life, I swear.

I have this kind of karma with cats. My previous kitty, Milla, whipped through several of her lives quite quickly in the 11 years I knew her.

• There was the time when she face-planted out my second story window in Oakland, landing sinuses-first on concrete and crawling bloodily up the stairs to the front door, where I found her, near-lifeless and whimpering, the next morning. Thanks, beautiful French windows.
• There was the time she got hit by a car (a car!) in D.C. and disappeared for days, staggering back with a broken hip and broken spirit.
• And there was the time when I had to give her parasite medication (gross) and she OD’ed during the night and heaved dramatically around the apartment until I was near to having a nervous breakdown.

But nothing compares to my new dynamic duo, Luka and Budapest. Between the two of them, there have been more tree climbing debacles in the last two weeks alone than I’m pretty sure most cats endure in a lifetime. They were indoor cats until a month ago. I had the brilliant idea that I would liberate their spirits by moving them to the country and letting them roam free. I didn’t count on their fetish for high places being a disaster-magnet.

In the last two weeks, I have spent a cumulative maybe 15 hours of my life trying to coax them out of trees.

The first three times, things (eventually) went swimmingly. They tired of the tree thing, and with the help of my very brave rebellion against vertigo, I was able to meet them halfway and get them down and/or they figured it out on their own.

Yesterday, unfortunately, Buda decided to trump my skillz and outdo herself. I let her outside for a few hours, and she disappeared. I found her a few houses down, crying and pleading from a good forty feet up a tree. How did she get up the tree? Presumably she ran straight up it like a spider monkey, because there were no other branches under the one she sat perched precariously on, crying, helpless, looking at me imploringly.

A lot of my friends have given me the advice to just “leave the cat up the tree” and let it come down eventually. The humane society assured me that she would “probably” make her way down in 24 to 48 hours.

24 to 48 hours? And until then, I’m supposed to camp out under the tree in a sleeping bag and headlamp and read a book? We have raccoons and coyotes in this neighborhood, and apparently some very angry big black birds who were NOT pleased that Budapest was in their tree. It was starting to sound like an Alfred Hitchcock movie, and something had to be done.

So, with the help of my extremely lovely neighbors Neil and Karen—who I know think I am a whackjob cat lady, but who were so very kind and entertaining during the ordeal—we called an emergency arborist.

Yes, an emergency arborist. Or, as I like to call him, Mexican Spiderman. M.S. scaled the tree in a harness in about two seconds flat, manhandled my feral monster into a box, and hoisted her down. She never even knew what happened. He was truly heroic, and I had to resist the impulse to hug him.

$75 dollars and ten years off my life later, I have to wonder what is going on with this whole cat-up-a-tree epidemic.

Is it God’s way of saying, “Really? You wanted children? You can barely handle pets.”

So, I a few months ago I wrote a somewhat tongue-in-cheek blog about animal totems.

Well, this morning I had an awesome session with Katherine Taylor, who owns a company called Bay Area Body Talk:  Energy Medicine for People and Pets. I met Katherine recently and was curious about her work. She came over to my place and met my demons kitties, and she gave us a group session during which I learned… wait for it… that I am the dominant female in my household. Take that, Budapest!

Katherine also did an energy reading on me sans kitties. During this reading, she told me that the raven was coming up as my current animal totem.

I did some more research of the thorough, reliable five-minute google kind, and learned this about the raven as an animal totem:

• It is their natural talent of “recycling” which has gained ravens a bad rap. By “recycling”, we mean: eating dead animals. Interesting, given my recent transition into a non-vegan household.
• They don't wander far from where they were raised and will only get a new mate if one of the pair dies. Um, yeah, that’s not true at all.
• Ravens are known as the "keeper of secrets" in several native tribes, and are the teachers of mysticism. Sadly, this one's not true either.
• Their black color and diet of dead animals associates them with the vast void of darkness, which is representative of the unconscious. This one kind of bums me out; I don’t know why?
• Raven flies to us with heightened awareness and greater understanding of our consciousness. It is with this new perception that we begin seeing into the hearts of others and experience their feelings. Raven asks us to experience the transformation it brings within our multidimensional self, and be reunited with the mysteries of the universe so we can expel our inner demons. Okay I can get with this.

I don’t really know what this all means, but Katherine also told me I need to let go of some things (hmm, wonder what?) and get more grounded in my new home. She has a point there.

Cheers to Mill Valley!