I'm a dog person. I've always been a dog person, since I was a toddler playing with our wiener dogs Barney and Linus (so-named because he carried around a security blanket). Look -- everyone agrees on the attributes of cats. It's just that dog people see them for the annoyances they are, and cat people, blinded by love, proclaim them endearments. "After my vacation my cat was so mad he peed on the carpet twice. He loves me so much!"
Now I am rooming with a cat person and dating another cat person, and had to play the allergy card to veto cat ownership. (I'm not allergic to all of the cats all of the time, but I am allergic to some of the cats some of the time; perhaps I'm allergic to all of the cats some of the time, or some of the cats all of the time.) But some cat friends of ours have a six-week houseguest with a severe cat phobia ("... when she heard we had a cat she turned white; and she's black!") and so I agreed to host the cat for six weeks. My chief motivation was to learn more about my allergies.
So I started snuggling with the cat occasionally, when he would deign to snuggle. And I felt compromised by that. How could an avowed non-appreciator of cat attributes snuggle with integrity? But I liked it. Finally I resolved the intellectual tension by deciding that cats are cuddly but they are not lovable. I will not love them. But I will cuddle with them.
And I will clean up after their vomit. Just this morning, while I was in the shower, the cat was going from room to room vomiting on all the floors. One morning I was a couple of minutes late to a 7:00 am video meeting with the Italians, and had the following exchange.
ME: Sorry I'm late. The cat threw up on the carpet right before I left.
DOUG: So?
ME: So I cleaned it up right away.
DOUG: Look. I've thought about this. The cat's going to vomit on the carpet whenever the cat wants to vomit on the carpet. At best, you're going to be there to notice it promptly and clean it up 20% of the time. Your carpet is doomed anyway -- don't feel like you have to clean it up promptly just because you can. Just let the cat throw up when it will, and clean it up when you have time.
My cat friends assure me I will miss him when he is gone. We'll see.
My uncle and namesake Gerald Nolty died in June, or, as we say in Texas, passed away. He had a bad ticker, but he was young (59) so it was a surprise even though it was not surprising. I knew Uncle Gerald was a good man -- as I overheard my cousin say to my Dad just before we entered the church, "There's no doubt he was the best of us." But as I sat in his memorial service and person after person testified to the good things they had seen him do, I realized I had failed to appreciate how good he really was.
I guess that's not surprising. I love my family, and love to be with them. But my time with them is so limited, and so prescribed by lifelong traditions, that I know there are things my California friends see that my Texas family never sees. They might have some surprises, too, if they sat through a memorial service for me at Pasadena Mennonite.
Beth says I'm morbid.
After two years of depression, and almost a year of taking anti-depressant medication to bathe my brittle brain in a warm sea of serotonin, I made some surprising and rapid progress recently. The best way I can put it is that I finally feel like my life works again. I like it.
So I decided to stop taking the pills and see what happened. I wouldn't have been surprised if I plunged back into depression. When I first told Mom, she said, "Stay away from everyone you love, you're going to be cranky." A few days later she amended herself. "You're going to need them, but warn them how cranky you'll be." But it came off almost without a hitch. There wasn't much emotional fallout but physically it was no picnic -- my brittle brain didn't like being deprived of its warm bath, and has responded by giving me some vertigo, particularly when I'm physically active. Fortunately, "physicist" and "physical" seldom go together. Staring at a computer all day causes no discomfort.
The whole episode has driven me further in the direction of "free will skeptic". I think we do what we do, and it doesn't make sense to say we had a choice. Maybe someone who wasn't us would have done something different, but we couldn't. Something I could call "me" tried very hard for a long time to choose to look on the bright side and to take things as they come and to get work done even if I didn't feel that great, but somehow those choices weren't available. Now they are available, and of course anyone who knows me knows that that's what I'm choosing (how could I choose anything else?) I'm getting work done and enjoying life. I'll probably finish my Ph.D. in a couple of months.
My covenant community now has a covenant! Urban Village, a neighborhood outreach of Pasadena Mennonite Church, has been meeting formally for almost two years. Mostly we've tried to figure out, now that we're committed to each other, what it is we've committed to. We finally agreed on a covenant, with a preamble and 9 value statements. I want to do a nice web page for the covenant; I'll give you a pointer when it's done.
On my birthday, Beth organized a few friends to attend Bob's Boys in Blue Beach Bag Baseball Birthday Bash at Dodger Stadium -- it was Beach Bag giveaway night at the stadium, so everyone who attended my birthday received a gift. She also took her first venture into e-commerce, ordering me a beautiful Dodgers jacket from dodgers.com. Unfortunately it has a heavier filling than the photo implied, so I probably won't be able to wear it except in the off-season.
Later in the month, on Fireworks Night, we didn't pay to get in but toward the end of the game Beth and I drove around the hills above the stadium, in search of the Perfect View. We parked the car by a blockaded road; I was sent to scout it out, because the shoes Beth had on were "not walking shoes". I had not realized that any other kinds of shoes were sold, nor that if they were sold anyone would take a notion to buy them. Anyway, by good fortune the shoes I had on *were* walking shoes, and I hit paydirt when, rounding a dark bend, I saw five Mexican families illuminated by the stadium lights they were staring at two miles away across a valley. We were able to navigate the car there, and fifteen minutes after the game they extinguished the stadium lights and gave us a nice show. Angelenos -- from downtown go northwest on Sunset and turn right on Douglas to the top of the hill. Next Fireworks Night is Labor Day.
QUOTE OF THE MONTH: "I still love Wesleyan theology, but Wesley makes more sense to me now that I'm a Mennonite than he ever did when I was a Nazarene." -- Doug Harrison
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