stillsostrange

I would have fought. The cat, ever contrary, didn't want to.

I've lost many animals over the years, but this was the first time I had to say the word and choose the hour. I would have held onto any reasonable hope, but the vet didn't offer any. Siggy has shouted every day of her life since she could vocalize; yesterday she didn't speak at all.

My heart has been stone before, been steel, been still; it will be again. It is not now.

It happened last night. I woke up this morning and the house was so quiet. There was a cat on the foot of my bed. My housemate's cat, not mine.

I miss my cat.

So, last night Steven and I went to a deathrock night in San Antonio. We had a fabulous time. We also ended up leaving just as storm was blowing down from Austin. We hit about fifteen minutes of bad hail, which we spent sheltered under a gas station awning. Hail passed, and we went on. I eventually fell asleep in the passenger seat, as is my wont at 2:00 am.

I woke up to the sensation of the tires losing contact with the road. Steven cursing. The car spinning. My eyes never opened for this. I doubt it lasted more than a few heartbeats. Next came an impact. I shouted at this point--whether it was articulate or not I'm not sure. What I was thinking was mostly What the fuck?! Immediately after the first impact came a second. This one hurt. I yelled something again. A short time of confusion and annoyance followed, and then the car finally stopped moving and my eyes opened to rain and a wet divider and the remains of the passenger side airbag and the headlights of oncoming traffic. Luckily we had spun into a wide grassy median ditch, safely out of the way of any other cars. My right arm hurt like hell. ETA: I forgot a telling detail: the burning chemical smell of airbag propellant.

We sat there for a short span of time. Steven asked if I was okay; I said my arm hurt. At this point I thought to test the arm, and determined that it wasn't broken. I suspect I'd had a leg propped on the dashboard, so I was extra lucky that wasn't broken either. Northbound traffic kept moving.

Steven tried moving the car, but it was firmly wedged in the ditch. At this point I called our babysitter with what was probably a shocky warning that we would be late. This was, thanks to DST, at 3:30 am. After that... Reader, I updated Facebook. Yeah. Sorry. But then I thought to call roadside assistance! Steven talked to roadside assistance, and they eventually transferred him to 911. Several minutes and many cars has passed at this point, and finally one person stopped to ask if we were all right. By then sirens were inbound.

Cops and a fire truck showed up to determine that we were neither dead nor drunk nor on fire. I hadn't moved from the passenger seat at all, being a bit shocky, in pain, wedged in a ditch, and having foolishly decided that I didn't need my jacket that night. I got to sign waivers declining a trip to the hospital. The cops seemed a bit bemused by my torn fishnet and shiny glam goth pants. Eventually I crawled out of the car, and some nice officers put us in the back of their cruiser. They took us to the nearest sheltered spot, asked more questions, consulted about tow trucks. It was now 4:00 am and we were on the southernmost edge of Austin, so I decided not to wake up any of my friends. The cops called us a cab. The cab dispatcher said something that translated to "It's 4:00 am on the first Saturday of SXSW. Good fucking luck." And because of those conditions, the cops were getting a lot of calls at this point. So eventually they dropped us off at the nearest 24-hour fast food place and left us waiting for the cab.

We sat there drinking bad coffee listening to the absolute worst canned music selection ever for another hour. The cab was not coming. Steven called them again. Finally I broke down and called my parents, because someone had to relieve our poor babysitter. My parents returned the babysitter and stayed with the kids. At some point I finally checked a mirror and determined that my arm was friction-burned as well as bruised, and that my artfully torn fishnet top now had authentic battle damage.

6:00 am came. The cab did not. So finally my parents came to retrieve us. My father returned us to our house at 7:30 am. I wandered around in a daze, taking pictures of the fishnet pattern burned into my arm. I finally went to bed around 8:00, very gingerly.

Four hours later I got up to go with Steven to check on the car. It had been towed--to where, we're not entirely certain. Hopefully this will be sorted out quickly. Right now I'm upright only by the power of caffeine, and the fact that it hurts like hell to lie down. I did make one sensible attempt to go to an urgent care clinic, but the one that was open was out of network, so I'll call my doctor tomorrow. I did not go to work today.

I am very lucky, not only to not be hurt and to have not injured anyone else, but to have had people to call, people asking if I was okay, and people to email at 4:30 in the morning from the back of a police car.

I am a medical marvel. Or at least a dental marvel. I went in today for a root canal, only to have the root canal expert look at my X-rays, poke my tooth, and say "That's some crazy shit*. Go to a specialist. Hang on, lemme call one." He then talked to said specialist on the phone for a while, showed him my X-rays, and reported back: "He can work on it, but there's no guarantee that would be a permanent solution."

Apparently my tooth has something like a hell mouth**, and is disintegrating from the inside out. It's a pit of horrors contained by a thin layer of enamel. No cavity or trauma caused this: I am just that fucking special.

Which is how, dear reader, I came to have an appointment on Thursday for an extraction, and eventually an implant. As exciting as having titanium screws in my skull sounds, the part in between where I spend several weeks toothless does not appeal to me. But the idea of getting a stopgap treatment only to have another abscess later--or worse, to have the tooth crack--appeals even less.

I should have asked if they could just give me a titanium jaw full of shark teeth, but my insurance probably won't cover 50% of that.

* Perhaps he said it more tactfully than that.

** You say root resorption, I say hell mouth. Let's call the whole thing off.

The buzzing sound a dental drill makes. At least that is my fear. There is a Bad Thing happening in my mouth, and I will go to the dentist in a couple of hours. Of course, I'm terrified that I already know what it is. That word starts with A. And the A-word leads to the R-word. The R-word sometimes leads to the V-word, which means I would miss Comic Book Day tomorrow.

I'll be over here, keening and rocking for a bit.

ETA: Sometimes I hate being right.

Oh, November. My love-hate relationship with you and wordcount continues. But since it's been a while since I had a word meter...

Dreams of Shreds & Tatters (until someone comes up with a better title)

1448 / 80000 words. 2% done!

That is all of the first scene rewritten. Now it has dialogue, and characterization, and foreshadowing, and people doing things other than sitting on couches. Amazing, I know. The next scene is pretty solid as is, except for bad dialogue. After that the heavy lifting starts.

All I wanted to do was paint the bedroom. That's it. I've painted other rooms in the house with reasonable ease and speed. Why would the bedroom be any different? I'm still not sure why, but different it certainly is. Some unholy combination of new paint color plus the awful original beige has led to the Hell of Paint. We worked on it yesterday, we worked on it for hours today, and we will be working on it again tomorrow. I had other projects to get done this week before matociquala comes to visit, but those have fallen by the wayside.

If the next coat doesn't make it look nice, I'm saying fuck it and hanging lots of posters.

But! Tonight I'm abandoning home improvement to go see the Psychedelic Furs! I'm been trying to see the Furs for years, but something has always thwarted me. I have five hours to avoid thwartsome things and achieve concert victory.

I had to have a cat euthanized tonight. Not one of my cats, but this doesn't make me feel a whole lot better.

I pulled out of the bookstore tonight to run errands, and immediately saw a cat lying in the road, moving. He didn't move when I hopped out, but was alert. He let me touch him, and then scoop him up and put him in the car. Luckily, there's an emergency clinic close to the store, so I headed there. At first he seemed so calm, but he finally got annoyed when I stopped to double-check directions, and I could see his back legs weren't functional. I was hoping it was only a broken leg, but when I took him into the clinic I could feel that something wasn't right.

It turned out his pelvis had been shattered, with nerve damage. The vet, who was very nice, was reluctant to recommend surgery, since even after an expensive reconstruction she couldn't give me good odds he'd ever have used his legs again. So I petted him and told him how nice he was and signed the form.

I know it's pretty amazing that I've lived to the age of 31 without having to sign that form before, or witness it done. I've had a long lucky streak with animals, of taking in strays with easily fixable problems, finding homes--or, in the case of the several who've died, of not having to make a decision about it.

He was a very nice cat. I'm glad he didn't die alone on a cold road, but that isn't really a lot of glad at all, in the end.

38,000 words into Kingdoms as of today. Hurray for forward motion. This thing is much less streamlined than the last two books, POV-wise. I hope it turns out okay at the end of the draft.

My thoughts on bullying are as angry and incoherent now as they were twenty years ago. Like yuki_onna, I hesitate to use that word because it was never physical. It was scorn, rejection, mockery, from the ages of 9 through 16. It wasn't until after college that I could walk past a group of people laughing and not flinch, assuming they were laughing at me. The knowledge (delivered by the Schadenfreude-machine that is Facebook) that many of my "peers" who picked on me peaked at 16 and can barely spell now helps a little, but some days not nearly enough.

I'm a card-carrying misanthrope, and I come by it honestly. All I can hope for is to leave the world a little less miserable than I found it, and that often seems impossible.

Today I acquired a diagnosis of bronchitis, some totally useless azithromycin, and some promethazine. Fun times, fun times.

I'd been wondering all day why I was in such a vile mood. Then I realized that I haven't exercised or written in over a week, nor had coffee, nor anything remotely sugary and delicious. (I have lost weight on my deathbed, but it's probably all atrophying muscle.) To make matters worse, I keep seeing people blogging about The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake. You'd better bring enough for the whole internet, is all I have to say.

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15. Midway question! Tell us about a writer you admire, whether professional or not!

If you don't already know about barbara_hambly, greygirlbeast, or matociquala, then what are you waiting for? Go start reading!

If we get to pick on not-yet-professional writers, then I haven't read nearly enough from either ultharkitty or fadeaccompli. What I have read has been funny, grisly, sad, and beautiful. Sometimes all at once, sometimes in turns.

(Yeah, I'm not crazy about the word "pimp" being used to mean "recommend", but I haven't come up with something clever enough to replace the tag with yet.)