While I was snapping this particular photo, which might be my Christmas Card this year, all I kept hearing in my head was a voicemail autoprompt:
“Good morning. Please enter your extension and PIN.”
deet deet doop, beet beet doop deet
“You have selected ‘BUILDING MAINTENANCE’. You have one thousand four hundred ninety two new messages. To listen to your messages, press one…”
Still contemplating my absentee ballot. Here’s where I stand so far:
Five reasons I’m fine with an Obama win:
1) The statement “America is a racist country” gets packed off to a long-overdue retirement.
2) I never again have to listen to anyone tell me that a candidate I like is “unqualified”; and I will have proof at last that the only real job requirement is a reassuring manner of speaking.
3) The stupid notion that some type of military service is a prerequisite for public office can be bid farewell, and it can push who did what in/during the Vietnam war out the door with it.
4) A mixed-race president has symbolic value beyond words. And since I view the president as basically a national symbol, I’m fine with voting for someone based on that value alone. No navel-gazing about if it’s okay to vote for someone on looks here; if Obama looked like Joe Biden, this entry would be called “I Want A Female President, Just Not Hillary”.
5) A whole generation will move from being tediously enthusiastic about the Obamessiah to being disgusted with the whole system in the span of four years.
Five reasons I’m fine with a McCain win:
1) A whole generation will move from being tediously enthusiastic about the Obamessiah to being disgusted with the whole system in the span of four weeks.
2) I don’t like Obama’s campaign. At all. Answering every question with the phrase, “We don’t need to continue the failed policies of the last eight years” is not a reason to vote for you. It is a reason to vote against Bush. And he’s not running.
3) Symbolic value and qualification for office-wise, I’m nearly as happy with Sarah Palin as with Obama. If she was on the top of the ticket, I could flip a coin and cheerily go either way.
4) If we’re going to elect someone who promises scads of tax cuts, is aggressively religious, favors capital punishment, supports the Patriot Act, supports gun ownership, and opposes gay marriage, I’d prefer that person be a Republican. Removing completely the illusion of a Red Team-Blue Team split over anything but abortion would be a downer even for me.
5) He’s too old to reasonably expect a second term. I appreciate self-limiting candidates.
Either way, the white male preppie pretending to be jus’ folks monopoly we’ve endured too long is over, and that, to me, is a bigger victory than just working out who gets to sit in the big chair and justify not doing what he promised until 2012. So I’ve got that going for me. Which is nice.
Against everybody’s better judgment, we boxed up the cat and took him to the vet for a distemper shot and general inspection today. He was fine in the carrier, he was fine in the car, he was fine in the waiting room. (We has to sit while they reviewed his file, which has “NOT PERMITTED TO BOARD W/US” scrawled on the cover with a Sharpie.)
The fun began in Exam Room Two.
He didn’t start growling right away. The two orderlies, the doctor, Luna, and I discussed the best way to shuck him from his shell in ominous silence. Then they put him, still in the carrier, on the scale, and the room filled with the sound of angry bees. One of the orderlies produced a bright blue Velcro canvas funnel-thing, which turned out to be a combination blinder and muzzle. I dumped him onto the exam table. The bees increased in volume, and incorporated a noise like a helium-powered car with a bad starter. I put my hand on his back, pinning him to the table like a butterfly. (I saw the vet do that once, and it worked reasonably well.) One of the orderlies slipped the hood over his face. She velcroed it behind his ears, and the noises…intensified. This is where Luna had to leave. (”He didn’t sound like my snuggly kitty. He sounded like a velociraptor.”) The vet weighed the cat carrier while two orderlies held the cat down. Then she stuck him with his distemper shot, and everything went to hell.
Do you remember the moment in Lethal Weapon IV, during the fight at Murtaugh’s house, when Riggs briefly gets the drop on Jet Li, and then Jet Li disassembles Riggs’ gun with one finger so fast that you can’t figure out what he did? The cat, Jet Li fast, ripped off the muzzle/mask and his collar, while SIMULTANEOUSLY scratching one orderly and slashing the other. I opened the door to the carrier before he could flee the premises or take a hostage, and he got in so fast I didn’t see it. One second he was on the table, and a blink later he was in the carrier, back to the wall, screaming “EVERY LAST ONE OF YOU! SONS OF BITCHES!”
The discussion in the waiting room as we settled the tab and left:
“He ripped off the MUZZLE. I’ve never seen anything do that before.”
“Me neither! My God. Just tore it off?”
“It was on, and then it was on the floor, and he was in the carrier.”
“That can’t be possible. How did he do it?”
“I don’t know — it was so fast.”
“What was so fast?”
“The cat in that carrier ripped off the muzzle when Shirley gave him his shot.”
“He ripped off the MUZZLE? The BLUE ONE? REALLY? I’ve never seen ANYTHING get one of those off.”
Etc.
Cats are very strange. Right now, the amazing kung fu velociraptor is snoozing on my lap while I type. Couldn’t be more peaceful.
I’m not sure which is a more unanswerable question: What do we see in him, or what does he see in us?
Another laptop has been configured to run the Schiavo 2.0 OS. For those of you scoring at home, that’s two cellphones and three laptops in four years.
Say a prayer for the car — and, come to think of it, the cat — and please stand by.
I am not a person given to fussiness, nor am I given to berating tradespeople. With nearly all falsely-advertised items, let alone food, the maddest I get is maybe an eye roll. But something about trying to find one ripe avocado from a crate of avocados, all of them plastered with “RIPE” stickers and all of them unyielding as golf balls, leaves me possessed with the desire to start lobbing the things at the service desk and shouting “THERE OUGHTA BE A LAW!”
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