I've had a lot of "I don't want to" creeping into my life lately. I don't want to venture outside in the heat and spiders. I don't want to do the onerous jobs like laundry, vacuuming, or catbox duty. I'd like to go show my support at the Pride Parade tomorrow morning, but I don't want to drive into town, pay to park, stand around outside, or deal with big crowds of people, now that both of my bestest buddies have scheduling conflicts and aren't going. I can't tell whether it's spilling over from or to the big decisions we have on deck for next year. I'm starting to push back against some of the key elements of the plan, like how much downsizing I'm willing to do in the long run. I can picture myself traveling light for a few months in the gypsy caravan, but once the rolling catbox comes to a final stop, I don't think I can tolerate as small a forever house as the man wants to build. As I mentioned a day or two ago, the inside of a shipping container, once it has insulation and drywall installed, is a snug seven feet wide, maybe a hairsbreadth wider. My laundry room, where I always feel a wave of claustrophobia, is six feet wide. There is nothing that could convince me that just three containers, even the forty footers arranged in a U shape around a courtyard, will be enough to make a home. The bedrooms and kitchen around the edges of the courtyard would be too narrow to fit in furniture. The man's response is that this is intended to be a remote mountain location, and the idea is to live outside (he writes in all caps) most of the time. There is no part of that sentence that I find acceptable. I don't even know where to begin to express how horrifying that is to me. I'm an inside cat. I like being outside for short bursts, but the wind and the bugs and the sun and the feeling of being exposed all get to me very quickly. I'm lucky to make it two hours outside. He wants me to just have a tiny house where we mostly store our stuff, and spend the rest of my life outside in the woods? This man has been to the beach with me. He knows I lose my mind after 90 minutes. What on earth possessed him to think I would go along with that plan? He almost divorced me a decade ago because I flat out refused to go camping in a tent ever again (back before the physical therapy to fix my dysfunctional S-I joint and gluten-free living to fix the other issues I had with camping). I even dislike big family or company picnics with a passion that would surprise most people.
I am starting to reach a stress level that is branching out and affecting all aspects of my life. It took me four or five tries to get enough of a head of steam to go to the mailbox and take the trash can back from the curb today (it was supposed to be done last night). I think it is possible to unwind from this awful knot that is raising my blood pressure and spilling anxiety on everything I touch, if I were just to win a couple of the negotiating points. The difference between building a U shaped shipping container house of a twenty foot base and two forty foot arms (of the U), and an IUI with double containers on the arms is minimal in materials cost, but it would make a world of difference in livability. Realize I'm talking about creating rooms that are about fourteen feet wide instead of seven. The room I'm sitting in right now is a fifteen by fifteen square, and I've always considered it a bit snug. I am not unreasonable. I'm just not willing to spend the rest of my life tense and worrying that cabin fever and claustrophobia will send me running for an ax and a gallon of bleach. Sure that sounds extreme, but so does being stuck in the remote mountains in the winter with a choice of freezing in the snow or being cramped in a tiny bunker with a herd of animals and a man who thinks television is only for the weak.
I think it's time to pour a glass of wine and close the night with a little celebration of what the internet told me was world cat day, or something like that. Around my house, it's always cat day. A certain obese huntress is very happy with me right now. I had a fine toothed rat tail comb in the pile of junk I leave on my footrest (from putting more blonde highlights in my hair yesterday), and on a lark I started working on the mats on her back that she is too fat to groom properly. Big girl has the thickest coat of any short-haired cat I've ever met. (The vet had a tough time piercing her thick skin one year for vaccinations, too.) While that makes her well-prepared for our potential cold weather home, it makes her decidedly less fun to pet, when her fur gets gross. I discovered that she absolutely loves that comb, with a passion I never would have guessed existed in her. I was her valet for the entirety of the night, and she is now glossy black and relaxed, and as happy as a little kid on her birthday. If only I could persuade Athena to sit close to me for that long, so I could straighten out her hairy mess. That would just end in a band-aid moment if I tried.
My mother spent the evening scanning in some more old photographs, like one of herself looking stunningly gorgeous at 25, and she sent me one of my favorites that I knew existed, but haven't seen in years. So prepare yourself, I'm actually going to put in a photograph Of Myself, showing early promise as a fair-weather gardener. I also have a picture of the handsome devil who started it all, my first cat, who was the love of my life from when I was three until his tragic early death when I was eight or nine. How could anyone have lived with a cat like that, and not ended up believing that they were the vastly superior species?
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