TimWoolery.net Documenting the Journey and the Learning Curve

#86 – Bulimia

#86 - Bulimia

The thing about working in IT is that some times, you find yourself with some time between waiting for one thing to end and another to begin. Stuff like watching 117 backup jobs slowly grind to a halt after you’ve suspended them and then slowly coming back to life after resuming them. 20 minutes of downtime and you can’t really get involved with anything else lest the $100,000 robotic tape library decides to take a trip to Mental Disneyland. So this is what I do with my time…talk about the things that I think about. Talk about the things that are making me sad, upset, angry or afraid.

And after looking at the list, I realize that to just discuss the symptoms and treat only them is ignoring about 90% of the problem. Notice what was missing from that list? Anything positive. I’m sitting on top of what should be one of the most influential moments of my life (even more so than the year of nail-biting I went through before I met Nicole) and I find myself in this state of caution and ambivalence. I don’t think criticizing myself for not being more positive is the answer and so I just wanted to do a little psychic bulimia and get rid of the stuff that is weighing me down.

The last two weeks have been one of the most stressful and trying times of my life. To begin with, my wife had been experiencing what we thought was food poisoning – after a week she became concerned that she might be in a family way. She goes and gets the tests done, lo and behold, she’s pregnant.

So – almost no sleep at all that night, thinking about all the possibilities and above all feeling almost completely terrified – she gets up in the morning and tries it again. EPT don’t lie, boy – she was definitely preggers. I took the day off of work to wrap my head around it and the rest of the week I couldn’t really think about much else.

We went through what a lot of beginning parents have told me is normal: finding out that you’re about to be a parent is a pretty emotional experience. That information, culled from many conversations, brought me down from doing a bad Steve-Martin-type freakout (a la Steve Martin finding his rental car missing in “Planes, Trains and Automobiles”) to a level of cautious optimism.

The second big part of the reason I’m typing this was the birth of my sister’s kid. Cute as a bug’s ear (yeah, I know everyone says it) and born healthy. Can’t wish for anything more. As my sister and my parents are somewhat estranged at the moment, we weren’t expecting to see them at the hospital and didn’t. Until we left from our visit and about two hours later, get a phone call. Yes, they showed up. Yes, they made a scene. Yes, they left before anyone could do anything about it. More details emerge over time, they weren’t in my sister’s room – by coincidence, one of her close friends had gone into labor at the same time. However, due to complications she was in her own room on meds with high blood pressure and hadn’t even seen her own child. This is the stage upon which my parents broke out in the “Me-Me-It’s-All-About-Me” dance.

Pissed, I confront them. See, even as I’m prepared to accept that my bro-in-law can look out for my sister, I know that given enough time, my parents will treat me and my wife the same way they’re currently treating my sister. As Sam L. Jackson said in “Jackie Brown” – it was a clear-cut case of them or me. There’s a lot of history on this one – I don’t want to make this rant about it so let’s set it all aside for the moment and move on.

The family (meaning my grandparents and my aunt (mom’s sister) defend my parents behavior. This breaks down into a lot of phone calls for me because these are the people I’m really working hard at building a relationship with. I don’t want to let that go so easily. So, lots of phone calls from Sunday night until Wednesday.

Of course, the third piece of this was something that I wasn’t paying attention to while all of this other stuff was going on. I hadn’t seen my cat since Sunday afternoon. Wrapped up in all of this garbage, I was distracted and figured that he was outside and carousing as he often does. On Wednesday, my wife finally said to me – “Hey, have you seen the cat?” I was kind of surprised to finally realize, no – I hadn’t seen him. It wasn’t like him to stay away multiple days. Since our local HOA has been putting out newsletters and reporting on people getting ready to trap “stray” cats – I swung by the pound. He wasn’t there, although I thought I saw a cat that looked just like him.

Got home and was hurrying to see if I could find him before I had another appointment. Stepped outside the door to call for him and noticed that someone had placed a large plastic sack in this grape barrel that we usually have flowers in but is now just occupied with dirt. I couldn’t see what it was immediately but as I unwrapped the bag, my kitty was laying inside cold and dead.

I fell apart at that moment – kind of like someone who finds his dead friend on the floor, which this pretty much was. I called my wife and then my sister, not able to get much more than “He’s dead, I found him in a plastic bag next to the door”. I sobbed – I work 2 jobs, own my own house and I’ve got a baby on the way. All of this didn’t matter, I was crying like a 6-year-old looking at my dead cat.

There’s plenty more to that story – he was a year and a half old, I brought him home from the shelter and he became my cat, the first cat to ever really imprint on me – all the other cats in my family were always ‘family cats’. But this was my cat – he loved beef jerky, drinking out of the toilet and one of his favorite games was chasing me through our neighborhood. Playing hide and go seek with a cat is never boring. When he first came to us, we had a party in the neighborhood. It was raining and we walked anyway (it was close). He followed me through the rain and then sat outside under a bush waiting for me to come home. I’ve never had a cat be so attached to me and I was attached to that cat. I loved him.

His meows were so sophisticated that I could almost believe that he spoke English. He was the kind of cat that helped people believe that animals were reincarnated humans. He was complex, he was kind and he was the coolest cat I have ever known. When I went to the pool – he followed me up to the gate but refused to come inside. Instead, he kept trying to watch me from outside the bars and meowed unhappily because he didn’t like the water. The first time he watched me dive into the pool he got very upset and I had to get out and come over to carry him home.

I’ve never had a pet so stuck on me and having him around was great even though the other cat hated him and it led to several episodes of “hiss-scratch-bite”. He was the neighborhood ambassador – everyone knew my cat and liked him. I don’t even know what killed him – I didn’t see any obvious signs of violence save some blood on his cheek. His body was stiff, since I rarely use the door that he was at, he could have been laying there for over 2 days.

The downside of all of this is, since my hometown animal shelter is fairly meager, they were pretty unhelpful. The guy at Animal Services told me flatly that a police report wouldn’t be filed over the matter although he did update his pet services database. I’m growing a healthy dislike of the civil servants in my town…finding a helpful one is the proverbial needle-in-the-haystack. An autopsy would cost $300 – I didn’t find out until too late that the Humane Society does animal cruelty investigations.

I couldn’t bury my friend in my yard. I live in a condo and my backyard is solid concrete. I didn’t want Animal Services to take him and so I did only what I thought I could do – I put him in the garbage can for pick up. He’s off to the landfill now and I still am tearing up at the thought of this young, friendly and lively cat now being so completely and totally gone from my life.

As I put him in the can and wheeled it to the curb, I told him everything that I would have told him if he was still around to hear it. I told him that I was sorry, that I loved him and thanked him for being in my life. I cried at random times during the night, killing a bottle of Two-Buck-Chuck Chardonnay and barely sleeping.

He was so beautiful – his markings were striking and he looked like a pygmy tiger facially. He didn’t like to sit with me except when he felt like it and when he purred, he sounded like a Harley with a bad muffler. When we played, he drew blood and when I was down he knew and would come sit with me. I miss him so much right now.

The reason I’m writing all of this down is to get it off of my chest. I’m angry with myself for allowing all the stupid family garbage I’ve got going on to distract me from being there at the end of my friend’s life. He didn’t care about any of it, anything would be forgiven for some fresh tuna or cat treats. When I saw him the first time at the Humane Society, he was meowing and reaching for me like he knew that he was supposed to come home with me.

So on Thursday I’m at work and getting through my stuff right now and trying not to fall apart. There are times when I’m feeling totally rational and then there are times when I just feel like leaning against a server and start sobbing like a little kid. I just want my kitty back.

Eventually, I’m sure I’ll adopt another cat (don’t even suggest that cloning junk, not when there are thousands of animals getting euthanized for lack of a home every year). I’m not ready to do that right now, I have a hard enough time visiting them when I’m feeling totally okay. I love animals – a lot. I know that I can’t do something for everyone, so I try to do something for as many as I can. I don’t want to become some crazy cat person with 475 cats in my thousand-square-foot house. I know he would have been okay had he stayed indoors but I got him when he was six months old – he was an outdoor cat already.

The sum total of this week is that it is not over yet. My wife is taking off to see her family and I have this fear that something will happen to her or to my child. Although I am not superstitious, the past events have me feeling extremely uneasy. I can’t tell her not to go but I made her promise to call every day.

In the past two weeks, I’ve experienced so much family drama, so much personal junk and so much life-changing that I’m left feeling like a survivor of Katrina picking through what was left of my front yard. Here’s the funny part: none of it is really bad. What it is, is a bunch of stuff that I was not personally prepared to accept and now all that is left for you to see is the neurotic little guy that gets left behind when the positive parts of me go outside for a smoke break.

A little guy in a shapeless and frayed sweater, maybe he works in a library. He’s got thinning hair and nervously rearranges piles of paper from one desk to another. He’s got so much energy that he moves like a sparrow; twitchy and immediate. He is prone to saying unkind things in a moment of weakness. He is capable of saying a bunch of things to his friends and family that he regrets later on but can’t bring himself to admit for personal reasons. I wish this guy wasn’t such a part of me but after you experience a lot of unexpected and different shifts in life (and perspective) he comes out of the back of the room to take his usual place next to me. When he isn’t ignoring me, he’s telling me all the reasons why everything I hope for and want to do won’t happen.

I’m speaking pejoratively, lest you be tempted to reach for the phone and report a possible nut. It’s easier to treat all the negative garbage like someone or something that you can ignore and/or walk away from. I’m hoping that some day I’ll be able to walk away from stuff like this as easily as you would some stuffed shirt at a party. Just a quick “I’ve got to go, someone put dead ants in the punch” and then leave. But until then, I’m sitting here trying to find solutions to problems that 2 weeks ago I didn’t even know I was going to have.

Just like John Lennon said, “Life is what happens while you’re busy making other plans.”

- Tim Woolery, 12/28/2005