So, I am slowly working through the fall gardening, leaving the biggest mess for last, but number three on my list of ridiculous things that have gotten completely out of control, was the front flowerbed where the little tree that had all the caterpillars in it this spring is. It had been washed over in a flood this summer, so everything I planted in it had washed away and all that remained were a handful of ancient irises from before my time. And big areas of soil were missing and some really clay-y dirt had been washed into the bed.

And then some privet babies had taken it over and I had just given up all hope of ever bringing back any semblance of sanity to it.

Until today, when I weeded the whole thing and dug up the ancient irises and set them aside to be put back after I was done with my trip to Bates, where I picked up some topsoil and brought it home to fill back in the bed and amend the crappy stuff that had washed into it.  I also went and dug up the three of nm’s irises that survived in the other bed (which is number one on my list or ridiculous things that have gotten completely out of control). And I bought some crocus bulbs at Bates because they’ve having this great sale (and folks, now is the time to plant bulbs; it’s also a great time to plant perennial flowers, like coneflowers and black-eyed susans, which they still have).

So, the soil was brought up to snuff and the irises went back in the ground and the crocuses were also strewn in the bed and now I can cross that off my to-do list.

Thanks, Mom, for making me feel confident about my iris-dealing-with abilities.

I guess on a side note I should say that my doctor’s visit went fine. There is nothing else wrong with me on top of the PCOS and he’s happy with how the metformin seems to me working and I should continue to try to lose weight, but that was the extent of that discussion.  I did show him the remains of my giant rash, which I was working on the last time I went to see him, and I said I didn’t think it was connected, but if I had been more insistent 10 years ago about informing doctors of the things that were wrong instead of just taking their word that I was fat and just not trying hard enough, they might have caught the PCOS then. So, I showed him where it was all healing up.

And he looked at it, on my arm and all under my boob and said, “Yeah, I, too, don’t think it’s anything, but it’s not that hard for me to imagine how an endocrine problem could cause this, so let’s just run another blood test to be sure.”

So, it was great. And, in honor of being “more” active, I am going to tackle one of the beds that got flooded this summer.

Anyway, that’s not why I’m writing this post. I’m writing this post because I ended up talking to some of the folks from Chapter 16, who I did not make out with, but totally would have, if they would have but asked (I also kicked Kleinheider’s butt and then shook my butt at him in a friendly, but taunting manner, after which, he hid outside on the porch. Bah.).

Ha, sorry, I got so distracted by how much fun I was having drawing this historically accurate artistic representation of what happened between me and Kleinheider, I almost forgot to get back to my main point.

The Chapter 16 folks.

So, we’re standing around talking about books and they’re talking about how 6,000 copies for a piece of literary fiction is not a bad sales number.

And I guess I knew that was true, but to hear someone who knows say it?

I don’t know.

And it’s not that I think 6,000 copies is some small amount. But, if you figure a dollar a book in royalties, how does $6,000 mean anything in the face of the amount of work that kind of writing takes? It’s not just that writing fiction is a skill, but it’s also then a luxury. You have to have some means by which you have a lot of free time and no dependence on that as a steady income.

And shoot, no wonder authors and publishing houses were/are so caught up in Oprah.

And I’m constantly amazed by the disparate communities, even within our own community, that know nothing of each other. I don’t quite know how to articulate that, but six thousand people could read a book that no one else has ever even heard of and that book has done okay. Not great, but okay. Even though only six thousand people have read it.

I know that, between this, Pith, and my guest stint at Feministe, I’ve had more than 6,000 people read me. Shoot, more people than that probably read me over at Pith in a day.

I don’t know. My thoughts are jumbled but I wonder about the future of publishing. It’s funny because people are always complaining about writers on the internet giving it away for free.

But really, in the vast scheme of “trying to put food on the table,” how is $6,000 for years of work not pretty much the same as “giving it away for free”?

It’d be nice if I had a cool, funny, thoughtful post here. I do not. In fact, I am weirdly filled with rage. That is how freaked out I am.  I know that, no matter what, everything will work itself out, but damn.

Go look at this cool gardening blog one of you pointed out to me.

For Pith, I spent my lunch hour looking at how dangerous the rural parks in Nashville are. I honestly don’t care if people can carry guns in our parks or not. But I do care that parks that are demonstrably very, very safe are being singled out for an exception to our “no guns in parks” rule because they’re so rural.

I mean, if they’re less dangerous than urban parks right now, what exactly is it about those parks that warrant needing to be able to carry a gun in them?

It’s not the crime, of which there is, basically, none.

So, what? The people? Rural people suck so bad that, if you’re going to go to a rural park, you need to be able to shoot them, if necessary?

Fuck that.

Either there are guns in parks or there are not. Don’t single out the rural parks like they or the people around them are some particular problem when they’re not.

One of the greatest moments in American music is the beginning of The Stanley Brother’s version “Blue Moon of Kentucky.”  The backup singers come in first, all “Blue Moon,” “Blue Moon,” and you can guess that it’s a country song because the stringed instruments are a little twangy, but there is literally nothing to prepare you for how I assume it’s Ralph’s voice come crackling across the top of the song, like a weak point in a sheet of ice, finally giving way.

And the way he sings “Bloo Mooooon of Kin TUK eh” is just… I don’t even know, just fucking genius.  If you were floating in outer space on the far end of the moon, you’d still hear that “TUK” clear up there.

Everything about the performance assumes you already know the song. No one’s really enunciating, so much as almost scat singing their way through the song, or doing it in the style of the coon hounds. But every time I hear it I feel lucky to live in such times.

If you love dogs and getting teary-eyed, click this link. Otherwise, don’t.

I got my coveted Google Wave invite yesterday. Not that I had any idea what Google Wave really was, but whatever. When the future comes knocking, you don’t sit around wondering if you will need the future in the future, you know?

Anyway, it’s neat. It like instant messaging and email tied in with some blogging functions (like the ability to post pictures and maps and polls) all in an environment where everyone working in a particular wave can collaborate at any time.

I don’t yet see how it will work with friends. That’s probably a failure of imagination on my part. Obviously, I’ve been testing it out on friends. But I don’t really experience it with them as anything more than just a really robust email program.

But when I start to think about using it at work… If I could force everyone in my office to get on Google Wave tomorrow, I would.

I don’t think that’s feasible right yet. There needs, for instance, to be a way to send regular emails as well as participate in waves, so we could, for instance, all have a discussion about a project internally and then the one of us who is responsible for contacting the outside vendor could do so through traditional email. Or maybe not. Maybe you’d just have a two-person wave.

I don’t know.

I just know that I will be shocked if we are not all using this or something similar at work very shortly.

Jesus, people, this has been a weird and, in many ways, sucky week. I’m hoping that’s not an omen for my trip to the doctor, but I am a superstitious fool and it’s hard for me to not read into these things.

I tried to write about it last night, but the suck is related to things off-limits to Tiny Cat Pants, and my vague distress was all pretty cliched.

I have noticed, though, as a benefit to getting older, that when you have crappy days that make you question the whole direction of your life, it no longer feels like “Oh I suck. Oh my life sucks. Boo hoo hoo.” but “I’m fucking doing the best I can here. Why are these people ruining it?!”

It’s nice to have terrible days that are not also plagued by self-doubt.

I admit, it’s been a long time since I’ve had a full sized Snickers. Usually, the Butcher will bring home a bag of the miniature ones and then we’ll fight about who ate them all. But today I had a full-sized Snickers and I must ask, are Snickers smaller than they used to be? Like circumference-wise? I swear this thing was like the size of a Twix.

People, it’s barely even seven o’clock in the morning and I have already had a cat dangling from my bare boob by one claw. Not that there’s an acceptable hour of the day to find a cat’s whole body dangling from a claw in your bare chest, but at least, in the evening, after a few drinks, if you look down and find a cat embedded in your chest, you can just assume you fell in with some animal-loving inverted-suspenders. Or that you are merely a means to an end for cats who enjoy suspension.

But first thing in the morning? When you’re standing in on the garage steps in nothing but your nightie?

I now see why firemen wear their whole uniforms when they rescue cats.

Anyway, there’s not much to tell.  I was driving home last night, as I am wont to do, cruising from 5 Points over to Dickerson, across Trinity and up White’s Creek Pike, just me and the dark, interrupted occasionally by the lights from the signs of clumps of businesses, listening to Left Lane Cruiser, which is a band I should say more about, but won’t, just feeling like it was the kind of night where you hope to run into old women with cigarette creases at their bright red lips and men with oil deep in the folds of their hands.

I did not run into those folks, but I also couldn’t get my car in the garage, which apparently meant that the cat could not get down from the storage area above where the car goes. Normally, he just leaps from there, onto the roof of the car, and right down my windshield into the house. But this morning, he could not do that, because my car was still mostly in the driveway, at a strange angle with only the front right headlight actually in the garage.

So, I told him he would have to go onto the ledge over the outside door and then onto the outside door itself, where he would be close enough for me to grab and lift him down. Since this is the same cat that will go and fetch the dog when I need him to when it suits him, he understood the gist of what I was imparting.

However, since this is an animal with a brain the size of a walnut, once all paws were off the door, one paw was on my chest and almost instantly, that claw was sunk into my boob. And I, having a brain also the size of a walnut, immediately panicked and, people I am not even making this up, let go of the cat.

Yes, so for an incredibly stupid second, the whole weight of the cat was hanging from one claw embedded in my right boob.

It was sheer instinct.

Luckily, some even deeper, less stupid instinct grabbed back hold of the cat and lifted him up so that his claw could get loose from my flesh.

“Damn it,” I said, though it startled me, because I hadn’t realized I was going to say anything out loud at all, “I knew that was going to happen.”

But, of course, I did not.

If you don’t watch it, Ghost Adventures is a show in which three giant douches (I used to think it was two giant douches and a poor put-upon sweetheart, but I was wrong) go around and, after a flurry of “Dude”s and “Bro”s, get locked into supposedly haunted sites in which they yell at ghosts and behave rather douchily towards each other.

Last week, they were investigating an abandoned home for the developmentally disabled. And, as they usually do, they interviewed various people about what it was like–the tv reporter who had discovered deplorable conditions inside the home, the people who were sent in to run it and help close it down after said deplorable conditions were discovered, and a woman who lived at the home.

It could have been a disaster–a giant douche interviewing a woman with conditions giant douches are normally uncomfortable with.

But instead, she was treated just the same as everyone else who was interviewed and she spoke about her (non-paranormal) experiences and explained why she behaved how she did when she was in the home and how it was in response to the deplorable conditions.

And then the douche was off to the next interview.

It was really nice to see her treated just like everyone else interviewed on the show–as someone who would, of course, have important information to impart.

It shouldn’t be a big deal. But it really stood out because you so rarely see it on TV.

It also made me wonder if one of the reasons I like these kinds of shows is not for the ghost stories, but for the chance to hear real people talk about their real stories (no matter what those stories are).

I don’t know.

How it’s set up here at work, there’s a main IT department that gives advice to the people with IT duties in each department.  This is pretty hilarious because I am our office’s IT person.

What’s hilarious about this, you might ask?

Yesterday, I “solved” a co-worker’s computer problem by installing Vista.

I keep asking the main IT folks if I can’t relinquish my IT status, but the answer is always no.  Apparently, once you’re in, you’re in for life, regardless of how little you actually know.

Holy cow! I came across this story while doing the Morning Roundup over at Pith, about how Councilmember Sam Coleman wants Nashville to allow guns in our more rural parks because they might be dangerous.

And I really can’t decide which is worse–that at a time when the Parks budget is being gone over with a fine-tooth comb and when people’s jobs are on the chopping block, some Councilmember is going around naming which parks he thinks are so unsafe that you need a gun to go to them? If the Bell’s Bend Park gets closed in order to save money because it’s so “rural” and “isolated” and “dangerous,” because of Coleman’s slander, I’m going to be pissed.

Or the insinuation that the rural people in Davidson County are such a bunch of evil rednecks that we hide in our parks and just wait for naive, unarmed city folks to come into our parks and then it’s just all Deliverance all the time. I mean, who else does he think are going to sit around rural, isolated parks just hoping that someone might come by?

It’s just so fucking insulting, to insinuate that people need to arm themselves against us, because we’re so damn dangerous.

And I also don’t want to open up a  whole other can of worms, but it’s not like they frisk you at the entrance to the parks. The point of having our rural parks gun-free is not so that they are actually gun-free, but so that people who aren’t used to rural noises, including animals that get very close to you in the brush or the sound of gun-fire echoing off the hills more close to you than you might expect, don’t feel like their first reaction should be to reach for their guns and start shooting.

Yes, that’s right, you urban Barney Fifes. We are just as afraid of you as you are of us.

So, I’m coming back from walking the dog and who is sitting at the edge of the AT&T lot, hollering away, but the orange cat. Whew and we got the stink-eye.  And then he herded us back to the house. From the outside, it certainly must have looked like I was walking the dog and cat, but trust me, the cat was walking us.

I was talking with the Professor about this a little bit yesterday–not about the strangeness of our cats, but about walking, and about navigating healthcare professionals who are so focused on weight. I mean, in my own case, I have to wonder where the balance between one’s mental health and one’s physical health is? Because if I have to weigh myself every day and carefully measure what I eat and know my numbers the way some guys know sports stats, I can tell you from experience that I will be in a very bad mental place, especially if it results in what it usually results in for me, where I am hungry and miserable and still fat, and still, according to well-meaning family members, never going to get a man to marry me, and still, according to doctors, lying or not trying hard enough.

So, I’m trying to figure out how to negotiate a way to emphasize health sort of uncoupled from weight.  And I’ve been wondering about what kinds of guidelines we would use?  Would you say that a person should be able to lift 10 pounds ten times or twenty or whatever?  Do ten pull-ups (in the interest of full disclosure, I have never done a pull-up in my whole life. I’m not sure my arms actually work that way)?  Walk three miles in an hour?

I mean, you start to see why weight becomes a stand-in for health.  Even if it’s completely implausible that every woman who is 5′7″ should weigh 130 pounds, that’s a lot easier than collecting charts and data about what someone with arms that long or legs that long or these breathing issues or those could possibly do.

But it seems to me that there should be some guide, even if it’s only keep your heart rate above x but below y for z number of minutes a day, that is not so intensely focused on women’s bodies and on women’s bodies as belonging to everyone who can see them and not just to the woman herself.

I just don’t know what it is.

But I feel like a guide like that “heart rate x for z minutes” is something I could work towards without feeling like a failure as a human being. So, I’d like to keep my doctors focused on that.

But damn, I’m fighting this urge to just go along with whatever the endocrinologist says in the moment, bitching about it, and then ignoring it because I hate it, rather than standing up for myself and being clear about where we need to put the focus, because I don’t want to be seen as somehow non-compliant.

But I also don’t want to think about food that much. I know a lot of women who think about food all the time and, I love you guys, but I’m kind of horrified at the thought of that. I think about food at the grocery store and at mealtimes and otherwise? It doesn’t really cross my mind. I’m not a big snacker, even less so now that I’m on the metformin and my blood sugar is more even throughout the afternoon.

But the ways that women can know how many calories are in a thing and how many grams of fat and how much this and how much that and can hold in their minds what they’ve had to eat for the past week or longer? If you can do it, more power to you, but nothing about that interests me.

And having to live my life that way?

I just won’t do it.

So, maybe I am noncompliant after all.

Oh god, you know, it’s only Monday. The appointment is four days away and I am already this worked up over it.

I swear.

Ugh, I forgot to take my pill yesterday morning. Seriously, of all the things that wig me out about being medicated for the rest of my life, the ease with which it becomes such a part of your routine that it can just so easily slip your mind scares the shit out of me. I need a low level of anxiety reminding me to check and check again to make sure I’ve done it, but I don’t have that. Luckily in this case it was just the Pill, but I forgot to take the metformin the day before the Butcher’s birthday and I spent that whole day feeling like I was fixing to die.

Anyway, I think GoldnI is doing some of the best blogging on Cooper of anyone in the country right now.

And it doesn’t look like Tom Wood’s story about soldiers being exposed to dangerous toxins by KBR and Halliburton is behind the paywall yet, so read it and weep while you have the chance.