Oh, Mollie: How The Times Have Changed

Back when I was a child Crayola was a lot different. While there still existed a plethora of colors, the naming convention had not yet taken on a life of its own. Sure, some colors had creative names but it really hadn't gotten away from them yet. I can recall when Orange became Jack-o-lantern, for example. But gray was just Gray. There was a color bias, you see. The blander the color, the less likely it was to be called anything other than some variation of what it actually was. Brown was brown. Black was black. White was white. Light gray was simply Light Gray -- now it's something like, Baby Seal.

Baby Seal!

Which I guess is better than Gray 1, Gray 2, Gray 3 and so on, but still. So out of control has the naming of crayons become that sometimes I don't even know what color children are referring to when they're drawing anymore. It does however present the opportunity for a magical experience, if you close your eyes and simply try to imagine... "My rainbow is made of Fuzzy Wuzzy, Magic Potion, Laser Lemon, Inchworm, Robin's Egg, Lapis Lazuli, and Cyber Grape!"

Oh, really?

My favorite is obviously Laser Lemon.

Those are actual names of colors right now. Though with the addition of new colors, older colors have been renamed or retired. Prussian Blue is now Midnight Blue and Mulberry is gone the way of the Dodo bird. You probably don't know what that is, come to think of it. Or what that means, for that matter. The Dodo was a flightless bird. Not like a penguin though as it couldn't swim either, which is probably why it no longer exists. It looked something like this though:

I cannot fly or swim.

I also remember having to endlessly experiment with less than 80 colors (can you believe it?) to try to bring my imagination to life. Sadly, to my dismay, the colors I created were never repeatable because at that age there was no scientific process involved whatsoever. No measurements taken, no names written down for future reference. Now there are 133 colors! You don't even need to mix them anymore.You have no idea how good you have it.

I'm surprised they haven't just started naming them after Pokemon yet. Or maybe they have? Pikachu Yellow. Caterpie Green. Wobbuffet Blue? No? Maybe? Aw, c'mon.

Why Is This Happening?

Is the speckled one their leader?

There are chickens. Perhaps alien? As chickens are not a native species around here, but they keep turning up. I think they may be waiting for a message because they are usually by the mailbox. I'm told perhaps I should ruffle their feathers seeking trinary data. There are three of them...

Hide & Seek

This morning Aaron went out into the living room to finish getting ready for class. I followed him out there, as without a hearing aid we can no longer have conversations from different rooms together. Not that that was ever particularly efficient anyway. When I got out there though, he was gone.

At first I thought he had left without saying goodbye and I made a face closely resembling this one: =( Then I noticed his bicycle and shoes were both still here. Sometimes he hops into a closet when I am not looking so that he can startle me when I least expect it. Even when I know it's coming, it still manages to startle me. Like some primitive part of my brain still insists that maybe it won't be Aaron but the monster that ate him. So I cautiously began inching towards the pantry in the kitchen.

Then I notice the cats. There is a small square between the sofa and the recliner where an end table should go, but we haven't gotten around to buying one yet. Instead we keep a duffel bag with video game consoles back there. And the cats are like this:

!

I drew and colored that in 2.5 minutes flat. Yes, there is really that big of a size discrepancy between our (fully grown) cats.

It very quickly became obvious that Aaron had jumped between the sofa and the recliner to spook me but the cats had completely decimated his cover. Rather than wander around aimlessly looking in closets I just started cracking up. I walked over and told him he had to come out so he could see the cats betraying him. So confused were they by his behavior that they were still staring at him strangely when he stood up and got out. Then it was off to class for real-reals with him.

I retreated into the computer room with a hot cup of chai and a bowl of oatmeal and decided that despite the temperature and the rain, I wanted to open the window. It smells very crisp and clean outside because of the chill in the air, but because of the chill in the air I'm also huddled under my robe clutching my tea for warmth. I guess in some circumstances you cannot have your cake and eat it too. I'll be damned if I'm not always going to try though.

Rebel, Maow

In our household, I am in charge of the chores. You know, daily things such as washing the dishes or changing the litter box and weekly things such as doing the laundry, dusting, or sweeping. In trade, Aaron is solely in charge of the cooking. He's the better cook anyhow (understatement of the year right there). Once or twice a month, as needed, he will help me do a complete top-to-bottom cleaning of the apartment. All in all a fair arrangement, considering most of the meals he prepares for us are made from scratch. Not cheap frozen dinners or anything like that.

However, about once a month I become overwhelmed by these mundane daily tasks. The addition of even one more tedious activity on my to-do list causes a cascade effect and the end result is a revolt against tedium in the way of refusing to do ANYTHING. That's right. I do not simply decide not to do the chore which caused the rebellion in the first place, or even the other boring tasks which had lead up to this point. I completely stop functioning altogether. Dishes go unwashed. Art goes unfinished. Tea isn't brewed. If it were not for Aaron, dinner would go uneaten because I'd refuse to cook for myself.

Instead I sit on my laptop Googling random things and watching endless videos on youtube of cats doing funny things. Sometimes I even stray off topic and wind up watching hours worth of people doing funny things. Every once in a great while, so shut down am I, that I simply watch the same video, over and over and over again. Usually Shatner of The Mount. Maybe it's William Shatner himself, or perhaps it's the idea of Captain Kirk climbing a mountain which just grips my brain and won't let go. I don't know. It's like some sort of mental vortex I can't escape from.

Shut up. Stop judging me!

But not all hope is lost on me. Occasionally I manage to snap out of it and bring myself to do something requiring more brain power. Such as draw something random. Like so:

It's a cat!

But I can't even be arsed to actually scan it for you. Or draw it on good paper for that matter. Instead it is haphazardly drawn on a piece of 5"x3" lined paper and I took a picture of it with my cell phone.

You're lucky I drew anything for you at all. I was just going to watch Shatner talk about teeny tiny toes for the 100th time. I'm going against the grain this month, though, you see? I reached that point where normally I rebel but rather than completely shut down, I forced myself to do the dishes anyhow. Only now no one is home and I feel like I deserve a reward. I can't simply reward myself, that doesn't count for anything. So now I sit here staring at the publish button feeling like I somehow got cheated.

I require cupcakes, or muffins, or something equally satisfying to devour. SATE ME!

Can't Help Myself.

Am I alone in being completely incapable of not piling random objects on top of sleeping cats? I don't see how anyone could not take advantage of such a situation. It's like that same small part in all of us that compelled you to write on the first kid to fall asleep at the slumber party has survived in me.

7 bottle caps is too many...

But 6 is just fine.

The belt to Aaron's robe, now drizzle!

Is this not okay? He's fine.

To be fair, he started it.

Particularly when you have a cat like mine, that constantly stomps all over everything and decides to sleep on top of it like a fatty fat fat. Whether they're comfortable items or not (keyboard, shoes, weights, dishes). If it is okay for him to sleep on my things, then it must therefor be okay for my things to sit on top of him while he sleeps. That's how it works. Right?

You Drink It Too

When I was little my teacher, who was by all accounts a staunch conservationist (otherwise known as a hippie), decided to inform us all at the ripe age of nine that the Earth has a limited supply of water. That the water we drink today has been the same water being recycled by Nature, over and over again since the beginning of the world.

Many of the other children could not seem to fathom this prospect. There was water in the toilet, water in the sink, water in the bath tub, water in our pools, and water constantly falling out of the sky. In fact, the state in which we lived was surrounded by water on three sides! How could it be a limited resource?

I too was kind of in disbelief even though I knew much more about the world than many of my peers at this age. My response initially was, "But the Earth has more water than land!" Not comprehending that he was referring to fresh water and that salt water didn't count. Once he clarified that, it made a lot more sense. To me anyway. The other kids still seemed thoroughly unconvinced and/or totally confused. That's when it dawned on me: if all of what we were being told was true, that meant that dinosaurs had PEED in our water!

Unable to contain this news, feeling it very important and something that all of my classmates should know before they continue blindly drinking dinosaur urine, I blurted it out. The class fell completely silent for several seconds before, in unison, thirty children screamed, "EW GROSS!" Our teacher stood at the head of class dumbfounded, totally incapable of reigning in our disgust. The look on his face hinted that perhaps this was something that he himself had never considered.

Just as we had all sworn never again to drink the vile liquid, he doomed us to a life of dino-pee, "You have to drink water or you will die." I'm sure that many parents filed complaints that day. Both because their children were now refusing to drink any water and because their nine year old children were suddenly questioning their mortality.

I'm not sure where I was headed with this, other than I was concerned about the planet's limited water supply for all of the wrong reasons.

It Is Finally Over

September started with a cold then continued right on being crappy as predicted. A number of minor inconveniences and problems stacked on top of three much larger tragedies starting about mid month, which lured me into a false sense of comfort. Silly me.

The first being a friend of mine's father being sick. Not like ate too many pies in one sitting sick. Cancer sick. I've been through this with one of my own parents, in a September no less, and know just how world-shattering and helpless it can make you feel. You wait endlessly on the edge of your seat surviving solely on the hope of good news. I hope they get it. My friend is a great person and if I've learned anything about great people it's that they've got great parents. I'm wholly convinced that being awesome is a genetic trait, not an acquired one.

The second tragedy was more bad news from Ohio. This time my own parent. While working, my mother fell from a beam thirteen feet or so onto her back, damaging her spine. She was rushed to the hospital because she was unable to feel her legs. She managed not to break any vertebrae and after some many hours the feeling returned to her lower extremities which was an enormous relief, but there was still substantial damage. Hopefully nothing permanent. Right now they are taking it one week at a time...

The last was the destruction of my hearing aid, as accounted in the previous entry. Leaving me once again completely deaf. The icing on the proverbial cake, if you will. Luckily I have a lot of supportive friends and family members so the devastation has been lessened a good deal simply by their existence.

In that vein, the lack of closed captioning on Netflix is a little surprising. It is sporadic at best. Some shows are not closed captioned at all. Others are closed captioned at times and not closed captioned at others. Take Torchwood for example, it's not closed captioned until nine episodes in. Why? I don't know. Netflix likes to mess with you, I guess.

Then, just to remind me that September would be back next year, my cat exploded into poop. The litter box is in the restroom, which was occupied at the time by someone else. A human, meaning the door was shut. Which meant Neelix could not get in. He sat patiently outside the door, like he normally does, waiting his turn. Therefor I really thought nothing of it. I had completely forgotten that earlier in the day he had insisted on devouring an entire Lily leaf despite all of my attempts to stop him.

Knock, knock. I have to poop.

So when he wandered into the office and starting making terribly screaming sounds that even I could hear, I immediately knew something bad was happening. I turned around and he was kind of hunched near Aaron's desk looking pitiful. I thought, "Aw, he must really have to go!" I figured I would just gently usher him towards the bathroom and open the door, apologizing to the occupant on behalf of the cat's need to get in. We did not make it more than two feet before the cat cried out again, turned twenty degrees with his back end pointed away from me, and EXPLODED into diarrhea. Right on the floor. Keep in mind my cat craps like a man under normal circumstances and, yeah, pretty shitty situation (pun completely intended).

As if that were not bad enough, we had company coming over in less than thirty minutes. I had to forgo taking a nice relaxing shower to instead clean up feces. Yaaaay. Thinking back, I should have saved, "the icing on the cake" for this event. Oh well.

Screw you, September.