Take your cats (your indoor cats!) to the vet and find out that they have fleas. (Hot tip!)
This is also a way to instantly discover the motivation to vacuum every crevice of your house.
Also a way to instantly feel poor. 19th century style.
Probably also not a bad way to cultivate obsessive-compulsive disorder if you are at all inclined in that direction.
Sorry for a bit of a gap in posting, my dearest and best imaginary reader. And so soon after I started! It really bummed me out to think about Tread-Lightly. So I avoided you. I probably shouldn’t ever write about him. Probably just your classic rumination. Maybe. I don’t know. The other day I was actually going to write something about how (super fun brief backstory) I used to have a Condition that prevented me from having sexual intercourse (a hell of a bummer, if you’re a heterosexual woman) and it wasn’t fixed until I was almost thirty and as a result of this I have a lot less experience with relationships than other people my age and I tend to experience rejection in a more piercing, annulment-of-the-self kind of way than most other people do. It’s so strange to think that it’s still so painful to see someone that you used to love even after you’ve stopped loving them.* I wish I could say that getting fixed four years ago gave me the amazing gift that is being able to fully participate in the mysteries of love and life and to fully live and love! etc.! The miraculous experience of being healed! But falling in adolescent-grade love when you are old just completely sucks and is completely grotesque, really. There’s nothing wonderful or esoteric about it. It taught me nothing but misery and I wouldn’t recommend it. Also the preceding almost-fifteen years of almost total celibacy and being told that I had a mental problem (when in fact I had a trivial, easily-fixable physical condition) gave me a deep bitterness and a deep anger that I will probably never shake. (Though I rarely admit this.)
You would never have been good enough for him: Tread-Lightly’s cats never got fleas. (But he didn’t have cats, Dora.) But if he did—I’m sure they would never have gotten fleas because he would’ve vacuumed every crevice of his house on the regular. Because his good, wholesome, midwestern parents taught him to how to care for himself. (No, you went to his house many times, it was messier than yours. And you know he didn’t take care of himself, whether he knew how to or not: he had a heart attack at 39.) Touché, brain!
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* Tread-Lightly explained to his coworker: “She and I have some familiarity with each other.” Inadvertently poetic, I thought. Because isn’t that all anyone can have with anyone: “some familiarity”? Oh so poetic. Now let’s never speak of him again!
dora random 