a wolf angel is not a good angel

Whether your 2007 has been wonderful or terrible, here’s to a better 2008.

Luckily, I am having a white sand Christmas.

I have, so far, read ‘Gone, Baby, Gone’ and ‘The Last Town on Earth’, a lovely book about a town that quarantined itself during the flu outbreak in 1918. I am (re)starting Anna Karenina, and then I will head towards another pile of serial killer novels. Lots of books.

Hope everyone is having a somewhat calm holiday.

Here she is, even scrawnier than she looks in this photo. I am trying to rehydrate her, so she gets alternately water and watery milk (along with cat food). I’ll buy kitten milk for her too, which is better balanced for cats, and higher calorie.

I was sitting on the couch holding Conrad Black (the unincarcerated kitten version) and Eva-the-unfriendly starts meowing outside. I know it’s Eva because no other cat in this house meows so loudly. Sister, I say, go let in Eva. She doesn’t like Eva and claims she will run away when she sees who is opening the door. Perhaps, but then she will also stop meowing, so it counts as a win. My sister goes outside and looks and tells me that it doesn’t look like Eva, she thinks it is Matilda.

Matilda!

I go outside and though it is dark and she’s in the bushes, it does indeed look like Matilda. I try to go out but can’t find the right boots, grab two similar left shoes, ask my sister’s friend to find me my boots, and instead my sister gives me my father’s far too big boots. I run out in the foot of snow with snow melting into my feet and she meows a bit more then runs away from me. Hops, really, because the snow is too deep to run. Away.

So I am running after her with my feet and calves freezing off, since it’s minus seventeen degrees out and they’re both soaked, and she runs into my neighbour’s back yard, and I call her for a while, then shake my head and jump their (low) fence. She runs under the deck (has a 5 or 6 foot high unlit storage space underneath), still meowing for me to follow her. My sister has followed me out with a can of wet cat food and catnip, and I open them and try to place them somewhere for her to eat. Eventually I can grab her neck while she’s eating and yank her out from under the whatever they have there.

I take her back inside, make everyone touch her bony bony body (she might weigh 2 pounds now, but maybe not — her normal weight is 4-5 pounds, because she is a runt), and feed her more (she ate about 2/3 of a can of wet cat food). She is currently curled up asleep next to me, and I am figuring out the best way to kill her. I was sure I was never going to see her again.

So my cat is back. It might have taken a month, and there is very little left of her (she is otherwise fine — a little shaky at first, and one small cut, and otherwise nothing obviously wrong), but she is here. I was going to thank people for the nice thoughts, but it was too depressing, so I didn’t. And now I can. Welcome back, Til.

I just read a book about Nefertiti and her sister, along the lines of Margaret George’s biographical fiction (is there a better name for this? I am too lazy to look it up). And I realised how much I enjoy this genre, especially about people I don’t know much about. Help me find some other authors who do this. I’ve read the set about Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine (too lazy to look up the author, again), and I also read things that are less fictionalised and more non-fiction (like Alison Weir) — but there are a lot of boring non-fiction books out there (and boring fiction), and it’s hard to pick out books in this vein sometimes.

I’d ideally like books that aren’t about the Tudors.

So my cat seems to be gone for good. I am very upset. Distraught would be a good word for it.

Appropriate responses to this post are all along the lines of “I’m very sorry”; inappropriate ones include “I’m sure she’ll come back”, “why didn’t you do [whatever]”, “have you considered trying [something else]”, “she’s only a cat”, and anything else that suggests that I am too upset, a bad person, a stupid person, or anything that suggests that I should be hopeful. (I admit: part of me is hoping that this active “lost cat” post is the magic thing that makes her return. But I also know that it won’t happen and she’s never coming back.)

Tonight, my 14 year old sister, after I had made both challah and sugar cookies: “Oh shit, can we eat bread?”

A few moments later, she explained the story of chanukah: Moses was making bread and didn’t have enough bread and he had to use oil instead, and then the electricity went out and instead of baking more bread he used the oil for a candle, and it ended up lasting for 8 nights, so we celebrate for 8 nights.

Lately I’ve been thinking quite a bit about my sister — the middle one, the crazy one. When we were little, we were great friends, or as great as you can be with our age difference. Did it start changing when I became a real teenager? Did it start when she started to lose it, so slowly no one quite understood, at around 10 or 12? Does it matter?

For years it was ok, in a way; my friends had no siblings, or had terrible relationships with their siblings, and it seemed ok, normal. Sibling rivalry! Whatever! It was in books and movies and tv were about friends, not sisters. And now suddenly all my friends have good relationships with their siblings, travel together, socialise together, are friends. I see my mother and my aunt. I know my father talks to his siblings regularly, too. And here I am, with my sister who hangs up if I pick up the phone when she calls, who turns her face away when we are in the same room, who . . . well, it’s pointless to list the litany of things my sister does to hurt me. Or that hurt me: I am not entirely sure whether they are done deliberately to cause pain or if it’s just a nice side benefit for her.

I have another sister, and we get along well, but she’s fifteen years younger than me instead of four and a half, and that’s a real difference.

So maybe she hates me or resents me or is jealous. I don’t know; she doesn’t know, either, I don’t think. Even if she does know, it doesn’t matter, because she doesn’t intend to do anything about it. Oh, yes, there are more issues than just her being nasty to me (and everyone! I’m not special), she’s altogether insane and incapable of living in the real world, her cruelty to her family is part and parcel of the whole thing but probably not the worst for her. But those don’t impact me, now, though in time I will have to help support her.

What I’ve realised lately is that I do not mind, quite so much, the abuse. Not that I love it, because it’s unpleasant, it’s abuse. What I mind is the lack of relationship. And I think this is part of why I will never cut her off entirely: I keep hoping she will decide she wants to be part of a family. Wants me to be part of hers.

This weekend I watched ‘Enchanted’. There are a lot of very reasonable criticisms to be made of this film, none of which I am likely to make, because I really liked it. If you have seen it and would like to be critical, fine, but (1) it’s not a parody or a satire, so don’t complain about how it didn’t parody earlier Disney movies in this scene or that and (2) it’s a fairy tale which, for the purposes of the show, had to have some kind of happily ever after. I loved the 2-d animation, I loved the homages to older Disney shows, I loved the huge song and dance numbers (and am only slightly annoyed that they took out one with the actor who had played Elphaba: don’t hire Broadway people for musicals and then cut their songs), I thought it was sweet and cute, and if they do add in the missing musical number, I will likely end up buying the dvd then.

Also my cat is missing again (since either Sat or Sun, I do not remember), and I’m feeling slightly neurotic about it, because she hasn’t returned even in bad weather. (As a general rule she doesn’t, but I feel that she should.)

I am feeling much healthier now, which is very nice. From a baseline of healthy, I feel terrible; from a baseline of how terrible I felt Tuesday, I feel like I could spend the night dancing. Well, except that I’m way too tired and I don’t like dancing.

It’s snowing here proper, snow that stays and doesn’t melt away, and it’s new and it’s white and it’s no longer sleeting, so I am briefly pleased at how pretty it all is, especially with the sun and the barely below freezing temperatures. (Also pleased at: new hat and gloves and fleecy shawl.)