Feline Warrior

I now have “Jane Says” by Jane’s Addiction in my head. Dang it. (Love that song, but it’s hard to write now.) It throws me back in an almost violent way to a different time of life.

Back to the point of the post:

Agnes was crying. Finally she broke through the tears to tell me that she’s feeling worn down. Her man apologizes but then does the same stuff over and over again - rendering the apology meaningless. The other related habit he has is to do the double-back apology: He apologizes but then blames her. It has the same result, nullifying the apology.

How the double-back apology works is this: Say you and I are at the grocery and somehow you run over my foot with the grocery cart (called, in some places, a “buggy”). I yelp, “Ouch!” and you look at me kinda mad and say, “I’m sorry but YOU should watch where you put your feet!”

That’s the double-back apology. And really it’s not an apology at all.

So Agnes is all sad and blue and I don’t know how to console her, except to do more of my rather stupid suggesting of ways to repair it. You know, “Well, you could try using ‘I’ language and tell him how you feel, how it hurts your feelings.” If you’ve ever done that with a friend, you know how colossally pointless it is. And it just makes it worse.

The double-A word combo for today is Agnes / apology. Agnology… ? Apolognes… ? Either way, it sucks.

Woman has pencil removed from head - Yahoo! News

Things that make ya go “ouuuch”!

Snippet: After being plagued for 55 years with the torment of a pencil lodged in her head, a German woman has finally had it removed.

Okay, one more snippet:
Margaret Wegner, now 59, was 4 years old when she fell while carrying the 3.15 inch-long pencil, which went through her cheek and into her brain.

“It bored right through the skin and disappeared into my head,” Wegner told Germany’s best-selling newspaper, Bild. “It hurt like crazy.”

Um, yeah! I should think it hurt like crazy!

Thank goodness for modern technology and Frau Wegner was able to have the damn pencil removed. Can you imagine? 55 years with a pencil in your head?!

The weather lately has reminded me of living in Washington, DC. The sensation of pollution sticking to one’s skin, contact lenses feeling like paste nestled tightly against the pupils and the overall ickiness of dampness that just doesn’t stop.

Well, until you go indoors - to air conditioned comfort. If you don’t have air conditioned comfort, it’s awful. Oh, I have it now. But in my poorer days, I had one crappy window unit that would gather water inside and make a hideous buzzing nose. I’d have to turn it off, open the face plate and sop the water out. The more humid it was, the more often I’d be doing that particular task. Needless to say, nights were hell.

Now, though, I’m fortunate to live in a home with central air. At the risk of sounding hideously corny, I must say that I am truly grateful for my place in life. Sometimes I piss and moan, but really… it ain’t bad.

And on that note, an evening shower and then to bed!

I’ve been thinking about how we yank up well-established roots to build housing where we generally won’t establish roots.

Where’s the respect? And who wins?
Trees: Zero

Selfishness: 50

Stupidity: 50

Karma: Zero

The correct answer: Nobody wins.

Music for opening the soul…

I’m tired and I’m slightly grouchy. And I spent serious quality time in my gardens today - well, tonight after work. Spouse outta town, came home, had a sammich, some marvelous sun tea, then out to water, dead head and pick some tomatoes. Oh, and I’ve found that after dead heading my marigolds, I can sprinkle the little dead heads around veggies and day lilies and the local snacking rabbit won’t munch my plants. So there’s your take-home gardening tip for today.

Hours increased at work, finally and today Gordita suggested that I join her for walks at some nearby outdoor place (an arboretum?) - anyway, after work walks with my pal. Fun *and* healthy! We said that we’ll be training for our next 5k. (We were practically last in the one and only other 5k we did, so we truly do need to train if we want to do more - which we keep saying we do.)

So much to be grateful for… a rich life, to be sure. And yet tired and grouchy. Just goes to show you… something. I see it, but it’s just a hazy shadow - don’t recognize it yet.

So that’s all good stuff. But I seem to be dehydrated and can’t get enough water - but I’m tired, so will have to stop drinking water and hit the hay. First, I’m going to click on that link up there and listen. It’s another “shut your eyes and listen” types o’ deals.

Be well…

I watched the movie “Quinceañera” last night and it gave me weepish memories. Good but sad; easy but hard; weepish but… well, just weepish. Just like how hearing the song “Unforgettable” (by Nat “King” Cole - solo) makes me long in a deep and achy way for my Grammy.

Watching Tio Tomás Alvarez with his grocery cart of champurrado, chatting with the ladies, in his garden with the green bottles reflecting light, his niece and nephew’s images nestled with love and care among the Holy Virgin statuettes… it took me back.

The movie “Like Water for Chocolate” (”Como agua para chocolate“) does the same kind of thing to me, although it’s truly been years since I’ve seen it. The abuelita in that movie also evokes rivers of tears.

But these tears, the weepish memories, are for feelings, sensations and the desire to have them back (melancholy?). I miss my Grammy constantly. I think of her still just about every day. Her singing, funny little dances and oh, that food - I don’t believe I will ever have anything like it again in my lifetime. Food that is infused with love cannot be duplicated. The food prepared by my Mexican grandmother Rose was such that I cringe and want to slap anyone who uses the words “Mexican food” and “Taco Bell” in the same sentence. Or at least as if they are one and the same. (If I hadn’t clarified that, I’d have to slap mySELF!)

So as a child, I might spend a week in the summertime with my Grammy. Her Los Angeles neighborhood, at one time beautiful and sweet was, at the time of her death (Lord, 17 years ago…?), changing drastically. The graffiti was becoming more prominent and the beautiful little stucco houses were showing signs of impending doom, the creeping in of gangs.

Anyway, there we’d be, the two of us, riding the city buses to get to our destinations of the day. We’d go sometimes to Olvera Street, shopping, looking around, sometimes eating. Orange Crush in the bottle - glass bottle, that is. You just can’t tell me an Orange Crush tastes the same from plastic. Oh, she’d embarrass me by calling -loudly- my full name if I somehow managed to get out of her sight for a moment.

In downtown LA, we’d go to the tortilleria, where I’d be in awe of the women moving with such precision at the conveyor belt. We would eat churros, which are the Mexican version of my favorite kind of food - fried dough with sugar. (The American version being, of course, funnel cake.)

Stopping to get Chinese sometimes, a special treat breaking up the special treat of her cooking, if such an idea even makes sense. Oh, me practicing my flute in the living room while she cooked, her Spanish-language radio station blasting at the same time… my little heart suffering little fractures until I’d stop and she’d come into the living room and say, “Mi’ja! Why did you stop playing? It was so beee-youu-tee-ful,” and then the fracture would instantly heal - and expand with the joy of receiving praise from my Grammy.

Mass in Spanish… I understood not a word, but I loved it just the same.

Oh, I haven’t mentioned, maybe, that at least when I was a wee lass, being bilingual wasn’t exactly the way to be. My mom didn’t speak Spanish to us, we didn’t learn it at home. And despite my growing up in California -with all those Spanish names for cities, brown people everywhere and being connected to Mexico and all- I grew up in a place and time where being Mexican -even half- wasn’t cool. I mean… somehow it might come up conversationally in school and a kid would say, “You’re Mexican? Huh. You’re not like them…” shaking his or her head towards a group of cholos.