Potential Literary Cat Names

I am having a devil of a time deciding what to name this little kitty.

So far, I can only come up with puns or thinly-veiled literary references.

1. Meowgaret Catwood

2. Sylvia Cat-th (although I do hope she doesn't stick her head in the oven while I'm away)

3. Catnip / Catniss Tabbydeen

4. Virginia Meowlf (... or drown herself in the toilet)

5. Hester (or become pregnant)

6. Morwen (THIS WOULD BE ADORABLE)

Thoughts?

Dream Journal

This weekend in Milwaukee, my parents revealed that they usually always remember their dreams. "Do you?" they asked me and I had to say "no, generally not, but mostly because I roll out of bed full of panic in the mornings for no real reason and that is not an environment conducive to remembering dreams".

No worries, the panic generally subsides after about a minute, but it's true - this urgency replaces all other thoughts in my brain when I open my eyes. Why? I have no idea. I'm getting a kitten this week though and I'm hoping that will help.

This morning was different, though. Last night I fell suddenly asleep at about midnight and slept for about 10 hours, but it doesn't feel like it, because my subconscious spent that time DOING EVERYTHING. Normally I neither remember my dreams nor share them with people, but today is different, because you guys: Dream Nazis stole my purse. I am not kidding.

I was on a bus trip, riding past the Alps with two friends, who were a few seats ahead. The bus was packed with people and their stuff, and I had a vague notion that we had long passed the place where I was supposed to get off. "Stop, you guys," I said, "we've got to get off here and look for another route, this one isn't going where we need to be," and my friends acquiesced - we pulled the chain and the bus pulled into a station, and basically slowed down long enough to push us out. We hopped through the doors, our luggage was tossed out the side, and the bus rolled merrily on its way.

"Wait," I said, "WHERE IS MY BAG."

The friends shrugged. Theirs was here! They stood, enjoying cigarettes, while I pawed through the heap of luggage, and still - no backpack or purse. Oh my god, where was it? Had I left it on the bus? I paced back and forth, searching madly.

"Everything is in there, you guys," I said.

"No big deal," faceless friend 1 said. "I have a purse you can borrow."

"YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND, I NEED MY WALLET," I howled, and combed and combed again, and off to the side I saw a cave, and I marched in and asked if anyone in there knew where my bag was.

The enchantress inside - who resembled Carmen, another fiction writer here - said, "No, but I have a glass in which we can search for it."

"A glass," I said, "a scrimshaw glass?"

"Certainly," she said, and we concentrated on it and it produced the most magical series of colors.

"I know where it is," she said suddenly, and we were outside a shack, and it was 1941. Outside, the villagers were buried up to their waists in sand, while indoors a group of blonde Nazis, their boots up on the desk, played cards and drank whiskey.

"Do you know where my purse is?" I whispered to a grandfather and little girl, who stared at me, silty and somber, and nodded, pointing indoors. I barreled in, leaving Carmen the enchantress outside to guard my friends and their bags, who'd wandered over to 1941 as well.

I don't know why my purse was the most important thing in all of this, but I do know that I found it easily, in the laundry room. Everything seemed to be in order! My clothes had been pawed through, but I rescued them from the Nazi laundry room and shoved them into a garbage bag, for easier transportation. A bottle of tequila was half-drunk, but you know those Nazis, always drinking everything. I wandered into the room where the Nazis were playing cards and said,

"Damn it, Nazis, why'd you take my purse?"

and the soldiers shrugged, sort of guitily, caught in the act. They understood what was going on, but didn't quite understand my words, and I wanted to shame them properly, so I barked it at them in German.

"WARUM HABT IHR MEINE WERTSACHEN GESTOHLEN?"

Then they were somber, and impressed, and they apologized, they said they didn't realize I'd be so serious about wanting it. I nodded and marched out to thank the silty villagers, shaking with righteousness. Then I took further stock of my valuables. Everything else was there, but the only thing missing was my smartphone. Oh god - had the Nazis had used the superior future technology to build some kind of bomb? I stared back at the shed, worried.

Luckily, no. Yaa, another fiction writer, wandered out from the shack, where she'd apparently been taking part in the card game, and she told me, "It's there, in the bottom of your bag, the way it always is. You know, it sort of gets lost in there, and I made sure they didn't notice it..."

I felt for it - yes, there it was. The Nazis had plainly missed out. I said, "Thanks, Yaa," and we all high-fived, and then I woke up, and laughed out loud in my cold bedroom.

Lessons learned: beware of Nazis, keep track of your valuables, and if you think you've lost your phone it's probably just buried beneath all the crap in your purse. Thanks, dreams.

How to Celebrate

We'd invited friends but they couldn't find us, sequestered as we were under my favorite wooden bridge. As it turned out, they wouldn't have fit anyway.

"It's September 11th, Nader," I'd said, "as an American I deserve to go to that faraway spot by the river with the fire-pit between the two streams," and so we had made the trip, our bikes piled optimistically high with meat and potato salad. When we arrived, we found that two German families had already taken it over, and that if we wanted to remain, we'd be reduced to the stones by the river instead.

"The stones are always so hard to sit on," Nader said. But still he spread our blanket over them and put two beers in the river - we were here, for the time being, and we'd make the best of it.

It was warm, then, and the Isar was sluggish with late-summer heat. "I'm going to swim," Nader said, and he wandered out up to his calves in it and stood blinking out at me, not quite knowing what to do next, whether to take the plunge or come back to the blanket. I watched the trees flutter beyond him, heard the German families laugh. The air smelled of cooked flesh and river-water.

In the woods, we gathered little half-wet branches and rested them on the coals we'd brought. Nader lit a fire, fanning and blowing it into submission. When the sticks had burnt down enough, we rested our wiry oily little metal grate on top of them, pried the Aldi Nackensteak out of its casing and let it sizzle as we drank the beers and stared at the sky.

It wasn't as blue as a September 11th sky should be. We'd started out a bit too late and now it was touched with evening, grazed with clouds. It was a German sky and we were an American and an Iranian beneath it, drinking German steaks and German beers (though the potato salad was thoroughly American - I'd found mayonnaise and mustard and celery and made a whole big Ikea bowl of it, which we demolished throughout the night, food poisoning be damned).

"How do you even celebrate this holiday?" I wondered. "What exactly are we supposed to be doing?"

"Maybe this," Nader said. "Another steak?" and so we sat, and ate, and drank. A child wandered over and we let him feed too-big sticks to our dying fire.

Later, a storm would come. Navy-blue clouds would loom in like Luftwaffe forces and would unleash an ominous bombing that started slowly: first a few drops, then rain. Being reasonable, the German family in our spot would pack it in, dashing for civilization, but we would remain on the stones, let our fire sizzle out, let ourselves sit together under his rain-jacket on the earthy cut-bank by the tree-roots. What I remember best is how, beneath that imperfect shield of soaked cotton, we would smoke cigarettes and laugh as the ice-pellets dashed our heads and wrought the day into something rough, imperfectly beautiful and stubbornly alive.

Adventures in Democracy

Yesterday we spent six hours waiting for Obama. We started off sitting on the curb next to a woman with curiously stubby arms and eyelinered eyes. She was friendly and polite, but told the volunteers who came around every four minutes with registration slips that she couldn't vote because she was on parole – I had to stop myself from asking what she was in for, or out for, or disenfranchised for. She was accompanied by her son, a skinny teenager with a moptop who was constantly a mixture of pensive and searching for food.“I got strawberries, grapes, two donuts, some trail mix, and a sandwich,” he boasted. “Iowans are great.”

“We got here at 9:45,” his mom said. “I thought it started at 10. Turns out we’re early.”

Jorge had also been there since 10. When I arrived, he had a neat little sit-upon going, a tidy area of curb, delineated by his plastic baggie full of fruits, the novel he’d been reading, the Naked juice he would later chug in a single gulp when the line actually started to move. He seemed much better prepared than the woman and her son, who’d shown up with nothing but the clothes on their backs and an umbrella, which, as Jorge told them, wasn’t allowed inside the grassy area where Obama would be speaking…

“Oh,” the woman said. “Well, this is a three-dollar umbrella! I’m not going to just throw it away!”

“I can take it back to my apartment!” Jorge said. “It’s right here.” So she handed it over happily and Jorge ran it back to his house, then returned to sit in his area and munch strawberries and collect stickers from the constant stream of volunteers. (None of us considered the fact that we would inevitably be separated in the crowd, and that nobody had exchanged phone numbers - up in Jorge’s apartment that three-dollar umbrella will likely sit until the end of time, or until someone needs it, anyway.)

Once we were eventually let inside the barriers, I was surprised by the fact that, in twenty-first century America, people were this willing to sit in line, then literally stand on a grassy knoll for five hours. Mal and her girlfriend wound up being shoved to the tightest-packed corner of the area in which Obama would be speaking. The arrangement wasn't quite fair. They’d been there similarly early, and had also been one of the first groups let into the area by security, only to be told, when they clustered around the stage, that “You’ve got to MOVE TO THE CORNER." This from someone’s dad in a fishing hat, a glassy look on his mustached face. “You gotta MOVE. People are going to come in here and we’ve gotta FILL UP THE SPACE.”

People stared at him, their faces a strange combination of liberal Democrat and stubborn as hell.

“You gotta MOVE,” he said again, making bulldozerish movements with his palms at us, as if he could use the Force to shift us from our hard-won positions to much, much crappier spots. “You can move now, or security’s gonna come in and move you later, but either way you gotta MOVE.”

Mal and her girlfriend, being polite, did move, and ended up having zero room in that corner. They literally stood, one behind the other, for four hours – there was no sitting or squatting for them. We were more fortunate – we had the good luck to be standing directly behind a tough-looking little woman who looked back at us, her green eyes enraged like a horse being mounted, and said, “No WAY. I been in line since 8:30. If security wants to come in and move me, sure, but I am not taking this from some volunteer.”

“Yeah, it’s totally unfair!” I said righteously, and so Jorge and I disregarded the imperious dad’s warnings and stayed put, and security did not show up to herd us like cattle to a shittier spot. For some reason, German phrases like “So eine Frechheit” and “total unverschaemt” and “Es macht doch gar keinen Sinn” kept creeping into my head – I put it down to the fact that Germans wouldn’t have moved either, but as it turns out it was a simple case of overhearing rather than thinking: we’d somehow collided with the two German tourists who’d wound up at this rally, two blonde young men who stood, out of their element, in rain slickers. In conversation over the next four hours, I put much energy in trying not to mention “You know, when I lived in Germany” or “Well, in German…”, so I wouldn’t have to make German small talk while stuck in a crowd all afternoon. 

In this and in many ways, it was like being on a plane, except worse. Going to the bathroom was an awkward affair, full of “Oh god excuse me” and “Could I please get by? We’re coming back…”, and the bathroom itself, when encountered, was a sticky Porta Potti with nowhere to put your purse and strange crap on the seat. We were dehydrated, but luckily there was Liz, a second-year Workshop student, who moved in the front of the crowd behind the barricade like a patient stewardess, passing out topless bottles to the masses. We keened, “Liz!!!” and she sent some our way, though drinking the stuff was torture because you knew it’d just go directly to your bladder.

Although we stood in denial for a good hour at the beginning of it, eventually our legs gave out, it began to rain, and the three of us sat under jackets, bemoaning our fate. God bless Nana, who’d somehow made her way into the stadium and as the crowd began to form had just casually walked up to us, like, “Oh hey guys! Cool to see you here!”, no planning, nothing. Moreover, she had brought in not just a giant purse – which we’d been told we weren’t allowed  – but a bag with food, little gingersnaps, and an umbrella, and reading materials. I felt like she was my mother. “Mom, can I read your Hemingway? Can I have a cookie?” God bless her.

Finally, at around 4, things started to happen. It got a lot lighter – the clouds hadn't rolled away, but spotlights had rolled in, big white beams of light that illuminated the crowd. Rising from our seated, cookie-induced stupor, we noticed that the media was lined up behind us on a stage, looking a familiar combination of bored and excited. People began to point to rooftops – look, a sniper! Look, a lady sniper! There they'd appeared, these black foreign figures with binoculars and no fear of falling. Something was happening. 

And then, and then, a man and a woman in suits came on and began uncovering The Podium. It was here that I realized how close I actually would be to The President, and I shrieked a little bit when they painstakingly, with much tape, put up a blue “Forward” sign on the front of the Podium. One man came out and set a cup of water on a shelf beneath; another acolyte set a binder of speech upon it.

After that, things happened in a blur. People took the Podium: a reverend, a large black man with a booming voice, delivered the opening address – a boy choir (man choir, okay) sang the national anthem  – a blonde corn-fed Iowa student spoke, since apparently she was in charge of this sort of thing - 

And then all of a sudden there was Joe Biden, who I’d never previously been excited about, but who, in person, was quite sandy-haired and handsome. He spoke - we freaked out - and then he waved a hand towards the left and who should come out but Obama. 

Seeing him in person was swoon-inducing. I jumped up and down shamelessly, in either a parody or real echo of a teenage girl meeting the Beatles, and then noticed that around me people were doing the exact same thing. It was unreal: for so long his features had been mere images to me, but now they were three-dimensional. 

From thirty feet away, though, I could feel the exhaustion radiating from him. His voice was gravelly and he didn’t speak about Hope anymore, or Change, but rather tax cuts for the middle class, no dependence on foreign oil, hooray. I'd gone from bored to jubilant to a bit sad; it was as if four years in the world’s most interesting job had made him, by turn, much more boring. 

But then:

“Four more years! Four more years!” started in one corner and spread across the crowd into a pumping chant that rang through the city. Slowly, too, you could see real genuine happy start to bloom on Obama’s face. instead of just exhaustion – as the crowd pumped its fists, he smiled out at us.

“You, in Iowa City, you did it,” he said. “I wasn’t the change – you did it.” It seemed true, at that moment – as if we’d sapped him of his life-force and drawn it into ourselves, and now here we were, a campus full of young people, ready to do something anything to hope. Because we were seeing the president, in person, and so we knew that anything was possible – and so we chanted, and we forgave him the boringness and the negativity of his speech, because he was our Obama and we wanted him to be happy, goddamnit. 

At the end, Michelle Obama walked out for just a second, waved to us, and he put his hand on her back – and strangely, just that action made me hope so much more than anything he’d said. It was like after all this would be over it would be just them again, and it would be okay, whether it was four more years or none at all.