notes from the road
Sep. 19th, 2008 08:31 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dragonlady7Am currently in the Godforsaken weird little horrorshow that is Cortland. (Actually it's not that bad, it's just not good either.) Fi's apartment is a disaster. It is messier than mine was at its worst. This shocks me, because Fi is borderline OCD. But as I wandered through the ransacked apartment, I kept finding pennies on the floor. Of all things, pennies.
"Oh," she said, "[ex] throws them away."
I was shocked by that-- as they've been desperately poor their entire relationship, and when you're living hand-to-mouth a fifty-cent roll of pennies is worth the three minutes it takes to roll it-- but it didn't actually strike me until I noticed yet another penny (I'd been picking them up and putting them into a jar-- I had about fifteen by that point. And it's only a three-room place). "I thought you said he throws these away,"I said.
"Yes," she said. "Oh, just like he throws everything else away-- he just drops it where it is."
That's the kind of person [ex] is. He leaves things where he last had them. He finds a penny in his pocket, he doesn't want it, so he drops it on the floor.
That would explain the state of the place.
He actually had the nerve at one point to tell her they were having problems in their relationship because he only ever saw her in the apartment, which was so messy it was "dragging [him] down". She agreed, but then he said, "You could keep it a little nicer." When she protested it was mostly his mess, he was shocked and insisted that she was a major contributor.
But she has a plastic bin hung on the door that is literally an inbox and outbox. She has a notice neatly stuck to the entertainment center deciphering which day rentals are due back, and marks the day with a paper clip whenever she gets new movies. She does all the dishes every time she leaves town for work, and without fail comes back to a full sink. She has this ridiculous categorization system for her underwear. She handmade a fabric insert for her purse so that everything she carried regularly had its own compartment. She doesn't throw pennies on the floor.
And before she moved in with him, his house looked precisely like their apartment does now.
We'll see what she's like in our house. I'm messy. I know that. I tend to accumulate things I'm using, in little piles near where I sit-- a stack of papers on the coffee table, an accretion of sewing materials on the end table, a magazine on the couch, sort of outlining my position with a blank space where my ass goes.
But I put pennies in the penny jar, or, more often, carry them in my wallet and spend them as the need arises. And I lovingly care for the crazy objects I hoard. [Ex] has a way of seeing something that will fill his current need, then using said object, even if it has another purpose for which he will shortly need it, and even if the use of said object will destroy it for further use. For example, his sleeping bag pad, which he used, instead of a large piece of cardboard that was already sitting on the porch, as a pad under his back while he was changing his oil. Now his sleeping bag pad is saturated with motor oil, which is not removable.
The house is full of shit like that.
Including the pantry closet, into which he has simply tossed all of the cardboard to be recycled. In a big pile. And some garbage is mixed in with it. (And fruit flies. You can't inhale in that area of the kitchen. I already swallowed one.)
The couch is covered in his clothes, which the cats have peed in. It is a known issue, that if he leaves his clothing on that couch the cats will for some reason decide to pee there. Fi has, in the past, simply removed his clothes from that couch (and told him so) every time. But she was out of town. So she came home to an apartment reeking of cat pee.
"I don't care," she said. "It's his couch. Just don't put anything on it." But it's a small apartment. We have nowhere to put things. So... we're just putting all his stuff into a box when it gets in our way, and that box... well, it's on that couch, because we have nowhere else to put it.
It smells great in here, incidentally. In case you were wondering.
We were up until 2-- not really packing, but Fi was haphazardly going through the apartment just figuring out what I could pack today. I have two pages of a legal pad full of things I can pack, take, clean, etc. I will probably nap first, though, because I am exhausted and feel like I've been breathing sandpaper-- a combination, most likely, of an existing sore chest from the weather change, plus cat-ammonia plus dust and dander in high concentrations plus not drinking enough water because I never do when I'm talking. Talking dehydrates me!
This makes Fi sound like she's all distracted and broken-up and all, but she's not really. She's pretty together, and actually feeling slightly guilty over how not-broken her heart is. It's just that she has so much shit to do, and [ex] has basically just left her with the apartment, and it's a fucking disaster, and most of the garbage is his, but she has a lot of stuff, and doesn't know how to get out because she has to be away on business for the last three weekends she's in this place. And she's been traveling for work, and hasn't had time to recover yet, and there just isn't any time.
I forsee myself coming back more.
Also [Ex] is looking for ways to make her out as the Crazy Ex to his new girlfriend (with whom he was hooking up slightly before he dumped Fi, though he contests this-- not the hooking up, but he insists they'd broken up before he dumped her, which is a neat trick of circular logic that makes him not have broken his promise to never ever ever cheat, since his father cheated on his mother etc etc Dramatic Story). So yesterday while he was here packing things up, Fi was at the computer checking her email, and there was a Myspace message from a friend, originally his friend but now mutual, and she answered it-- commisserating over the breakup, telling her she could do better [a common theme among all his friends' reactions-- what does that say???], and she basically just agreed. Well, she finished the message, hit "send", then hit "home" on the browser so it would go back and he could check his email. But the computer hung a moment. She went to brush her teeth, not noticing. He saw the browser window. He saw the "Message sent!" page. He sat down and hit "back". And it went. It went right back to the message, and he read the whole exchange.
There's the justification he needs! She badmouthed him to a friend he doesn't even like and is regularly cruel to, and now she's the Crazy Ex! He is in his glory now-- worked himself up to a fine indignant rage, and stormed off. Now he's totally justified in whatever he does, right? He can be a total asshole!!
Which has lit the necessary fire under Fi's ass. She will have nothing in this apartment that she does not directly need to live. I told her to reverse-pack-- take everything she DID want, put it into suitcases, and I was taking the rest.
So that's what I'm doing today.
I'm taking the rest.
I need a damn nap first, though.
Remington, Fi's little gray sweetie (I am going to find a picture on this computer and upload it, hang on a sec) is about Chita's size, but much rounder, and the effect is a very stubby cat overall, while Chita, though the same size, looks like a long and tall cat. Memmers (or Remi) is aggressively cute-- it seems to be a defense mechanism. When she purrs too hard, she sticks her tongue out.
We are pretty much 100% definite that we're taking her with us back to Buffalo tonight. She's already agitated and disconcerted over all the upheaval-- the cats knew when [ex]andFi broke up and have been unhappy. So we'll just give her one more major trauma, and then things will be stable and relatively consistent in Buffalo. Hopefully for a good long while so Memmers can settle down. We're just going to keep her and Chita mostly isolated for this month, unless they seem to show favorable interest in one another. It's not that big a deal for us to leave doors shut. Z and I are home all the time, so both cats will be safe and can be observed. I don't mind making a point of doing my work at the desk in Fi's room so I can sit with Memmers many hours a day.
So we're becoming a two-cat household tonight, or early tomorrow. We'll see how that goes. Thanks for the suggestions-- they mostly mesh with what I've found online, as well.
That's an oldish photo of Memmers. Who, as I type this, just stepped on the printer and turned it on, excitedly explored it as it danced to life in the manner of inkjet printers, and then turned and leapt from the desk to my shoulder to the back of the chair, where she is purring contentedly and watching the printer blink.
"Oh," she said, "[ex] throws them away."
I was shocked by that-- as they've been desperately poor their entire relationship, and when you're living hand-to-mouth a fifty-cent roll of pennies is worth the three minutes it takes to roll it-- but it didn't actually strike me until I noticed yet another penny (I'd been picking them up and putting them into a jar-- I had about fifteen by that point. And it's only a three-room place). "I thought you said he throws these away,"I said.
"Yes," she said. "Oh, just like he throws everything else away-- he just drops it where it is."
That's the kind of person [ex] is. He leaves things where he last had them. He finds a penny in his pocket, he doesn't want it, so he drops it on the floor.
That would explain the state of the place.
He actually had the nerve at one point to tell her they were having problems in their relationship because he only ever saw her in the apartment, which was so messy it was "dragging [him] down". She agreed, but then he said, "You could keep it a little nicer." When she protested it was mostly his mess, he was shocked and insisted that she was a major contributor.
But she has a plastic bin hung on the door that is literally an inbox and outbox. She has a notice neatly stuck to the entertainment center deciphering which day rentals are due back, and marks the day with a paper clip whenever she gets new movies. She does all the dishes every time she leaves town for work, and without fail comes back to a full sink. She has this ridiculous categorization system for her underwear. She handmade a fabric insert for her purse so that everything she carried regularly had its own compartment. She doesn't throw pennies on the floor.
And before she moved in with him, his house looked precisely like their apartment does now.
We'll see what she's like in our house. I'm messy. I know that. I tend to accumulate things I'm using, in little piles near where I sit-- a stack of papers on the coffee table, an accretion of sewing materials on the end table, a magazine on the couch, sort of outlining my position with a blank space where my ass goes.
But I put pennies in the penny jar, or, more often, carry them in my wallet and spend them as the need arises. And I lovingly care for the crazy objects I hoard. [Ex] has a way of seeing something that will fill his current need, then using said object, even if it has another purpose for which he will shortly need it, and even if the use of said object will destroy it for further use. For example, his sleeping bag pad, which he used, instead of a large piece of cardboard that was already sitting on the porch, as a pad under his back while he was changing his oil. Now his sleeping bag pad is saturated with motor oil, which is not removable.
The house is full of shit like that.
Including the pantry closet, into which he has simply tossed all of the cardboard to be recycled. In a big pile. And some garbage is mixed in with it. (And fruit flies. You can't inhale in that area of the kitchen. I already swallowed one.)
The couch is covered in his clothes, which the cats have peed in. It is a known issue, that if he leaves his clothing on that couch the cats will for some reason decide to pee there. Fi has, in the past, simply removed his clothes from that couch (and told him so) every time. But she was out of town. So she came home to an apartment reeking of cat pee.
"I don't care," she said. "It's his couch. Just don't put anything on it." But it's a small apartment. We have nowhere to put things. So... we're just putting all his stuff into a box when it gets in our way, and that box... well, it's on that couch, because we have nowhere else to put it.
It smells great in here, incidentally. In case you were wondering.
We were up until 2-- not really packing, but Fi was haphazardly going through the apartment just figuring out what I could pack today. I have two pages of a legal pad full of things I can pack, take, clean, etc. I will probably nap first, though, because I am exhausted and feel like I've been breathing sandpaper-- a combination, most likely, of an existing sore chest from the weather change, plus cat-ammonia plus dust and dander in high concentrations plus not drinking enough water because I never do when I'm talking. Talking dehydrates me!
This makes Fi sound like she's all distracted and broken-up and all, but she's not really. She's pretty together, and actually feeling slightly guilty over how not-broken her heart is. It's just that she has so much shit to do, and [ex] has basically just left her with the apartment, and it's a fucking disaster, and most of the garbage is his, but she has a lot of stuff, and doesn't know how to get out because she has to be away on business for the last three weekends she's in this place. And she's been traveling for work, and hasn't had time to recover yet, and there just isn't any time.
I forsee myself coming back more.
Also [Ex] is looking for ways to make her out as the Crazy Ex to his new girlfriend (with whom he was hooking up slightly before he dumped Fi, though he contests this-- not the hooking up, but he insists they'd broken up before he dumped her, which is a neat trick of circular logic that makes him not have broken his promise to never ever ever cheat, since his father cheated on his mother etc etc Dramatic Story). So yesterday while he was here packing things up, Fi was at the computer checking her email, and there was a Myspace message from a friend, originally his friend but now mutual, and she answered it-- commisserating over the breakup, telling her she could do better [a common theme among all his friends' reactions-- what does that say???], and she basically just agreed. Well, she finished the message, hit "send", then hit "home" on the browser so it would go back and he could check his email. But the computer hung a moment. She went to brush her teeth, not noticing. He saw the browser window. He saw the "Message sent!" page. He sat down and hit "back". And it went. It went right back to the message, and he read the whole exchange.
There's the justification he needs! She badmouthed him to a friend he doesn't even like and is regularly cruel to, and now she's the Crazy Ex! He is in his glory now-- worked himself up to a fine indignant rage, and stormed off. Now he's totally justified in whatever he does, right? He can be a total asshole!!
Which has lit the necessary fire under Fi's ass. She will have nothing in this apartment that she does not directly need to live. I told her to reverse-pack-- take everything she DID want, put it into suitcases, and I was taking the rest.
So that's what I'm doing today.
I'm taking the rest.
I need a damn nap first, though.
Remington, Fi's little gray sweetie (I am going to find a picture on this computer and upload it, hang on a sec) is about Chita's size, but much rounder, and the effect is a very stubby cat overall, while Chita, though the same size, looks like a long and tall cat. Memmers (or Remi) is aggressively cute-- it seems to be a defense mechanism. When she purrs too hard, she sticks her tongue out.
We are pretty much 100% definite that we're taking her with us back to Buffalo tonight. She's already agitated and disconcerted over all the upheaval-- the cats knew when [ex]andFi broke up and have been unhappy. So we'll just give her one more major trauma, and then things will be stable and relatively consistent in Buffalo. Hopefully for a good long while so Memmers can settle down. We're just going to keep her and Chita mostly isolated for this month, unless they seem to show favorable interest in one another. It's not that big a deal for us to leave doors shut. Z and I are home all the time, so both cats will be safe and can be observed. I don't mind making a point of doing my work at the desk in Fi's room so I can sit with Memmers many hours a day.
So we're becoming a two-cat household tonight, or early tomorrow. We'll see how that goes. Thanks for the suggestions-- they mostly mesh with what I've found online, as well.
That's an oldish photo of Memmers. Who, as I type this, just stepped on the printer and turned it on, excitedly explored it as it danced to life in the manner of inkjet printers, and then turned and leapt from the desk to my shoulder to the back of the chair, where she is purring contentedly and watching the printer blink.
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no subject
Date: 2008-09-19 02:22 pm (UTC)So when I'm trying to print something that I don't want crumpled and ink-splattered, I have to stand in front of the printer like a goalie and block her while the wiggles and squirms and does her best to get around me and kill that little man.
Sometimes I turn it on and just let her go at it. She just puts her paw in where the paper comes out and fishes around. She can't hurt anything. For years I stuck to my guns and told her no in hopes of teaching her not to bother the printer, but nothing I said or did seemed to have even the slightest impact on her little death-to-the-waving-man mind, so I gave up. I'm actually thinking of using it to lure Pixel out of my bedroom after the move, because I suspect she'll huddle in fear for weeks there unless I do something to convince her to give the Scary House a chance.
no subject
Date: 2008-09-19 07:07 pm (UTC)I saw a YouTube video of a cat fighting a printer, but they'd added cheesy explosion sound effects, so it was lame.
no subject
Date: 2008-09-19 07:09 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-19 07:18 pm (UTC)One of my teammates takes videos on her phone of her cats all the time and they're really funny, especially when my teammate whips these out while she's drunk to show everyone. So amusing.
no subject
Date: 2008-09-19 07:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-09-20 03:40 am (UTC)My mom has a cat that HAS to sleep in the printer tray. He's barely able to fit in there, and it kind of creaks and groans every time he gets on it and cat parts stick out all over the place. I'm waiting for the day he finally breaks it.