a little insurance

The subject of life insurance arose during book club the other night, with the general consensus being that men were, on the whole, peculiarly sensitive about the issue. I, for instance, have yet to convince the Guy that it would be a good idea to buy into his company's life insurance plan.

"You should get life insurance," I say.

"No," he says. "You'll kill me."

And there the matter rests until I bring up the subject again, and no amount of coaxing or persuading will sway him. He has envisioned a future with life insurance, and it is a picture that Does Not Contain Him. He has no doubt that this is because I'm lurking somewhere off-camera with a newly cleaned knife and suspicious bleach stains on my sleeves.

"You could make it out to your mother," I remind him. "That way you could take the burden of taking care of her off your brother--"

"No," he says. "You'll kill me." He is a stubborn man.

"What possible motive would I have for killing you? I wouldn't even make any money off it."

He eyes me, the mad little glitter of paranoia dancing in his slitted Asian glare. "You'll figure out a reason," he says, darkly. "You and your evil Japanese machinations."

We have a small trust issue in our relationship that we still need to work out. One would think that believing one's wife will kill one if given an excuse would make for a somewhat hostile relationship between husband and wife. The Guy, however, takes it in stride. He assures me that, with the exception of this one tiny character flaw, I am an excellent spouse.

In all other respects -- again, excepting this utter lack of basic trust, and his unwillingness to be in the same room with me when I'm holding a knife -- our marriage seems to be quite stable.

It does rather make me wonder why the divorce rate in the US is so high, though. If we can survive my alleged homicidal tendencies, and my husband's Run Away Screaming Like A Panic-Stricken Chipmunk When Yuhri Brings up Writing Wills tendencies, what kind of lame excuse is 'Irreconcilable differences'?

animal tails

April.

What a bloody month.

A bloody irritating, stressful, fucking month.

So, I've been a little bit quiet of late. There are several reasons for this. For one thing, I'm taking a class through UC Berkeley Extension, which has been eating up my Saturdays, Tuesdays, and Fridays.

For another, I'm attempting to put together a scrapbook of wedding photos for my grandmother, to be delivered before my first wedding anniversary. ("She's very old," says Mom, less as a reminder than as a threat. The subtext, loud and clear, says: You'll regret it for the rest of your life if she dies first.)

One of the mourning doves on our balconies threw out my back.

Our apartment is a mess.

My work is trying to kill me.

April.

(Fuck April.)

It seems to be going around, too. Flamingo has had a spectacularly bad month -- her cat Marcus, the only other cat Heisenburg has ever been willing to approve of (mostly because Marcus once attempted to smother me in my bed) died a little over a week ago from cancer. Several of my friends have dropped entirely out of the picture due to pressures of work and home and family. A couple more friends got royally screwed by taxes and are now floundering financially. All in all, this has been a criminal month.

On the other hand....

I was walking to the office kitchen the other day, when I happened to glance out the window overlooking the parking lot. There was a cat licking our cars.

I kept going. It took a few seconds for my brain to catch up with my eyes.

Cat, my eyes offered up. Licking cars. Lick lick. Cat.

...what? said my brain.

My footsteps flagged. I paused, frowned, and backed up several steps to stare out the window again.

See? said my eyes, triumphantly. Told you.

Oh, said my brain. It isn't big on commentary.

"K!" I shouted down the hallway, to my colleague on the other side of the building. "There's a cat licking your car!"

...and then I went to the kitchen and did whatever it was that had sent me to the kitchen to begin with.

When I came back out into the hallway, there were several people pressed against the window, staring out with interest at the parking lot. The tabby, which had been dedicating itself to K's front bumper when I'd left, had moved on to a loving exploration of her wheel well. The little pink tongue was busily cleaning the car's paint. By the time I'd joined my coworkers at the window, the cat had moved on to something suggestive involving the hubcap.

Even from the window, it was obvious the cat was purring. Well, I would've been too, if I'd been doing what the cat was doing.

"That," opined one of my colleagues, "is truly weird."

We watched, transfixed, while the cat worked its way around the car door, the back wheel, and the rear bumper. We moved down the hall to watch from a different window while the cat thrust its nose into the tailpipe and then attempted to eat it.

K's car is something unique, a red PT Cruiser with flames painted on its sides, and a silhouette of Elvis scrawled across with his autograph over the trunk.

"Maybe it's an Elvis fan?" someone else suggested.

The cat gave up on the tailpipe, gave it a final, regretful lick, then moved to the other side of the car. We dispersed to our cubicles.

The next day, en route to the kitchen once more, I glanced out the window and found the same ginger cat carrying on an intimate conversation with K's license plate.

I didn't bother to tell K. As far as I could tell, there was no tongue.

I've mentioned before that mourning doves have periodically attempted to make crash test nests on our balcony. This has been ongoing for several years now; I regret to admit that I am unable to tell whether these are the same mourning doves or different mourning doves. Doves, no matter how hard I try, all look the same to me.

(Heisenburg, peering over my shoulder, has instructed me to note that he has the same problem with Caucasians. "They're all pink," he says.

I'm feeling surprisingly ambivalent about her self-proclaimed open-mindedness.)

These are sad examples of wit and wisdom in the animal kingdom. I speak of the mourning doves in this particular case, and not of my peculiar roommates. Where they are building their nest this time is anybody's guess, though I strongly suspect the balcony light fixture, a small steel shelf without guardrails that juts out a grand total of three inches from the balcony wall.

There is something vaguely tragic about watching the doves go about their happy homemaking, a feeling not unrelated to the schadenfreude of daytime television. From time to time, one will perch on the balcony lattice with some choice piece of straw in its beak. If the observer is fortunate, she will then have the opportunity of watching the dove fall off the lattice, with mixed results. Flamingo and I discussed the possibility that they did not comprehend cause and effect as it related to our balcony floor and pain; while it may be unreasonable for me to expect better of an animal with a brain the size of a green pea, nonetheless it seems to me that our visitors simply aren't trying hard enough.

"I wonder what goes through their minds when they're flying," I mused over Yahoo Messenger. "'Tree, wall, flow--' WHOMP. Do they envision a world in which a cruel and arbitrary God strikes them down at whim?"

Flamingo's response was both erudite and specific, and far beyond my biological grasp. Lacking the ability to comprehend, I was left with my pleasant images of a mourning dove-hating Lord of Hosts, perched in the heavens with a croquet mallet at the ready.

On Wednesday, one of our whomping mourning doves caused me to throw out my neck.

This is a symptom of old age, I suppose, or a signal to me that I have an inordinately heavy head. I was working from home at the time. Pleased with my productivity -- I always work better from home -- I paused to stretch and do some housekeeping: picking up discarded socks (mine) from the floor. Head down, raking up the fuzzy white toecloths, I was startled by a sudden WHOMP at the balcony door. I jerked my head up, heard a pop, and found myself flat on my back for the next four or five days.

"I am in excruciating pain," I informed my boss when asked. "I hate you all."

There are a surprising number of things in the world that one can hate when in the depths of an embarrassing agony that prohibits neck movement. The world is populated by infinite variety. Mail. Telephones. Packets of peanuts. Gravity. People who creep up behind you and then yell, "Guess who!" I was unable to turn my head in either direction, tilt it up, tilt it down, or rotate it in any way without pain. Not liking pain, I didn't do any of those things.

You'd be amazed at how many things you use your neck for. Standing up? You use your neck. Going to the bathroom? You use your neck. Answering the telephone, turning on the television, typing on the computer, eating? All necky activities.

It's not every day that you're brought low by a bird so dumb, he mistakes bricks for thin air. "We would eat them," said Heisenburg, "but they made you throw out your neck. You're old and and have a bowling ball head. You look like an idiot without neck functions. It's funny. We are amused."

It's been a week now, and I'm feeling much better, thanks. I can turn my head left, and I can turn my head mostly to the right. I can (mostly) drive. I can stay sitting up for hours without having to lie down.

And I've got these marvelous orange pills from my doctor that make me very happy. Big pills. Great big orange happy pills. Yay, pills!

Tomorrow I'm going to go outside and shave one of those doves. Hearing that WHOMP when the smash into our windows is bad enough. Somehow, that puff of feathers that happens in the aftermath seems to lack dignity. We are not a Warner Bros. cartoon. It's time certain houseguests learned that.