Chloe the Temporary Cat has wormed her way into my heart. I am so in love with this cat. She is HORRIBLE to the other cats, but I pick her up and she just starts purring away and snuggling into me, and then she looks into my eyes and licks my face with her rough little tongue. It’s ridiculously cute. And she’s just so fuzzy and soft! I am totally smitten. I’m in love with this cat. I was holding her just now and telling her how pretty she is and I turned around and there was little Leo, sitting patiently and staring up at me like “Mom. That’s how you talk to me. WTF?” Awww, poor Leo! It’s kind of funny though because he and Chloe will chase each other around the house, Leo barking and Chloe hissing, but their tails are both wagging. I think they’re having fun.

I have a very scary feeling that Riley and Chloe are going to be living here longer than a week. Sigh.

I saw Wiggles again today. I love Wiggles. We talked a lot about accepting emotions, which is what this Acceptance and Commitment Therapy thing he does is all about. But I finally started to get it. Wiggles talks a lot about the Chinese finger trap, where the harder you pull the harder it is to get your fingers out. But if you just relax they come right now. I understood it conceptually, but today I started to internalize it. I came into his office today and I was just feeling really stressed out and un-centered. I get into a lot of fear when I feel like that because I worry I’m going crazy again, that the The Buzzing will come back and my life will shut down and everything will go to hell in a hand basket. I feel myself tipping a little bit off-balance, and I’m convinced it’s just a matter of time before it all falls apart again. But Wiggles explained that if I just accepted the feeling instead of fearing it, it wouldn’t have so much power. Like a fussy child, ya know? The more you play into it, the more he gets energized. You just say “Thank you for sharing your opinion” and then move on. Eventually he’ll get tired and burn out if you’re not feeding into it. So you just accept the way you’re feeling and you move on with your life. I like that plan.

I’m also, of course, starting to get really nervous about moving. It’s next weekend! I have to get this entire house packed up and ready to move. Granted, I only have to move it down the hall, but STILL. It’s a really big change. I’ve been in this apartment for almost a year. I think it’s just now sort of hitting me that moving to a new apartment is going to be kind of a big deal for me emotionally. I wasn’t ready for that. I’m used to everything like it is right now, you know? I don’t know what the fuck I got myself into here.

I can’t wait until 2011 when I meet my husband and he can help with shit like this.

I did not talk to a psychic today. Nobody is a psychic anymore. I would like to talk to just one single psychic who doesn’t give me a spiel about how they’re not a psychic, they don’t like psychics, psychics give their practice a bad name, etc. I get it. Okay. So this woman was not a psychic. She is a “clarivoyant,” a “clairaudient” and a “spiritual healer.” I attached to the term clairaudient. She hears the spirits. I like that. I hear soft and mumbled conversations in my head at night just before I fall asleep. I don’t recognize the voices but they’re saying something. So I’m willing to embrace this idea that those voices exist and that others can make out what they’re saying.

I’m a smart girl, and I’m a logical girl, and I’m willing to go into anything with an open heart and an open mind. I try not to pre-judge a technique that might help or inform me. (My success in this varies wildly depending on my mood.) This woman was recommended by my mother — my mom saw her years ago, and she made some pretty specific predictions that my mom thought couldn’t possibly be true, mostly because they were bad things. They came true, exactly as the psychicclairaudient had said. All of them. And my mom’s a lot like me — she’s open to anything, but she calls bullshit when she sees it. If my mom recommended her, I figured it was worth a shot.

We spoke on the phone. I didn’t get the sense that she had known anything about me or seen the photos I sent her beforehand (my mom’s meeting with her was in person, and my mom brought the photos to the session, so she knows that in her case the psychic definitely did not have the photos before). She said she was going to go into my energy field and start listing names and places that came up for her. She said they’d come from all aspects of my “spirit circle,” which includes my grandparents, aunts and uncles as well as my immediate family. She said she was going to do this before she looked at the photos. I stayed quiet on the line for at least a full minute while I could hear her pen scrawling along the pad.

She then battered off a long list list of names and locations, some of which rung a bell, some of which didn’t. She said we’d come back to the names. She said she sensed I worked with computers, that there were a lot of computers around me. (True, but true of everyone.) She said she sensed a real estate change happening (I’m moving down the hall in a week, but again I guess everyone knows someone who’s moving soon). She did say that she sensed my business was expanding. That kind of caught my eye, because my business is expanding at a time when most are not. If I were making a con-science (pun not intended) out of this, I’d have guessed business shrinking. But she didn’t. And she was right. She also said someone in my life had a break in their foot or their leg. My boss and good friend Mike has been on crutches FOREVER. Now, this is really weird only IF she were telling the truth about not opening the photos yet. Because there’s a picture of Mike on crutches in there. So if she saw that, gig’s up, but my mom’s seen her in person and swears she doesn’t see the photos until the middle of the session.

Then she opened the photos and we talked a lot about the names. They were all fairly common names. She mentioned Mike, who’s my immediate supervisor at RN and also a close friend, and I told her that. She said my friendship with Mike is “good karma” and that he’s played or will play an important role in my life. (Um, yeah. He gave me my career.) But then right after that she was like, “Now I’m getting a Margaret or a Margo” and I was like, “Margaret was the boss I had before Mike!” and she was like, “Yeah, that’s probably why it came up in your energy field there.” She predicted a bunch of changes at work, so we’ll see if those materialize.

She mentioned the name Jesse, which I thought was weird, because the closest Jesse I have in my life is the guy that’s marrying Trish. I didn’t say anything for his name, but then she saw a photo of Trish and was like, “Who is this girl with the most stunning smile?” I told her it was Trish, who was getting married soon to Jesse. She was like, “Oh, good. You call your friend Trish and tell her I see great things for this marriage.” I should note here that there were other couples she did NOT see great things for, but I don’t plan on letting them know about that.

Then she did other weird things with names. She asked me if I knew a Tara, and I did not. She said it was coming from my sister’s energy, and I remembered that Tara is my sister’s best friend’s name. She asked me if I knew a Susan. I did not. She told me it was coming from my mother’s energy. My mother is currently is Boston visiting her friend Susan. She pulled out my mother’s name and my grandfather’s name. She knew a lot about my father. She knew “California, the northwest and New York,” which are three places I’ve lived (but, ya know, hasn’t everybody?)

I asked her about my career, where it would go, especially because I have such concerns about expansion in this economy. She said not to worry, everything would work out fine and would exceed my expectations. She said she saw a lot of travel in my near future, especially to NYC. And if some bets I’ve placed pay off, I will be spending a lot of the summer in NYC. I asked her about marriage and kids. She said I probably won’t have a serious relationship for the next couple of years. I will meet my husband during this same time around 2011, and he will be a very good man and it will be a lasting relationship. I will have 2 or 3 kids, but not until much later, like when I’m in my mid-to-late 30s. I should have asked her to go into more detail on that, but my mind was spinning. My sister, too, will marry and have two children. She sensed her life was more stable than mine and that most people assumed she was the older sister, not because she looks old but because she carries herself with more maturity. Um. True. (At least this psychic didn’t make me call my sister and tell her she wasn’t doing her job right, like the other one did.)

She gave me the name “Ed, or Ned or something like that.” I said, well, yeah, I know an Ed who is much older and who I adore, but we’re not really close. Then she started describing all this stuff that I really didn’t feel fit Ed. I was skeptical. But then later I realized that I have a friend named Ted that fits that description perfectly. So maybe that’s the energy she was picking up on. It’s a leap, I know. But it’s interesting.

She told me one more thing that I fully expected to hear: She said, “You are a teacher. That is who you are in this life.” The last time I sat down with a psychic who had any reliability, I was 13 years old, and she told me the same thing: “You will be a teacher.” At the time, I thought this meant I was going to teach high school, so I ignored it, but it’s stuck with me. There are many ways one can be a teacher. I hope to eventually form my life around one of those molds.

Am I skeptical? Yes, of course. For instance, I had to repeat my birthdate several times before she heard it correctly. Wouldn’t a psychic know my birthday? Or how to pronounce my last name? And there were a few names on there that I didn’t resonate with at all, but she said they may be names in the future, so we’ll have to wait and see.

I feel like I have so many questions I want to ask her! To see if they come true! I wish I’d put more forethought into our conversation instead of heading in blind. I will definitely need to make another appointment in a few months to figure this al out. I’m hooked.

My apartment is a mess. I hate it and I need to clean it. I especially need to clean it because it turns out I’m moving in a couple weeks. Well, it didn’t really just “turn out” like that. Two of my neighbors who used to rent one-bedrooms moved into a two-bedroom together last weekend, and they told me what they were paying for it, and I was like, “Holy shit, that is a LOT less than what I pay for my two-bedroom.” For a little while I was too overwhelmed with other shit to do anything about it, but today I decided to march down to the leasing office and ask them what my options were.

It was surprisingly easy. The leasing manager was all like, “Yeah, we have a two-bedroom available right down the hall from you. The door’s unlocked. Go check it out and let me know what you think.” So I went up and checked out the apartment. It’s smaller than my current apartment for sure. It has way less closet space and a smaller master bathroom, but I’ll have the same amazingly huge bathtub. It also doesn’t have a city view — it faces toward the inside courtyard, but I’m okay with that. It’s not like I spend a lot of time staring out into the city. In fact, my current apartment has a freakin’ Marriott interrupting the view of the city, so usually I have my blinds closed to avoid being a tourist attraction anyway. Mostly I’m bummed about losing my gigantic master bath and my huge walk-in closets, but everything else I’m fine with. And the price? Is 40% less than what I’m paying now. Apartments are just renting at WAY lower rates than they were last summer. They made me make a new refundable deposit and pay a $100 move fee, but they’re not even making me break my current lease!

Plus this is going to be the easiest move ever. I seriously just need to drag all my furniture down the hall and around the corner. We won’t even need the elevators! If I manage to get all my stuff packed up beforehand (I probably won’t), I expect the whole business to take no more than a couple hours. And I will FINALLY be out of this apartment in which Leo was potty-training, poorly. The carpet is covered in little Leo wee-wee stains that no one and nothing can extract. I think they will probably have to burn this apartment before they can re-rent it. Anyway. The leasing dude was so awesome and helpful and great and did I mention he’s way hot and I totally want to sleep with him? Hm. Maybe I should get to that before we sign the new lease — I could get a couple hundred more knocked off, right? I kid, I kid. I was IMing with an old roommate about it tonight. It went like this:

Me: I really want to sleep with the guy who manages my apartment complex
Her: No.
Me: I know. But he’s really hot.
Her: It’s a no.
Me: OK.
Her: I did have some recommendations for the graphics on Zelda Lily
Me: OK.
Her: [provides valuable input]
Me: But just to be clear, I shouldn’t sleep with him?
Her: You should not.
Me: Harumph.

So I’m moving. To a new apartment which may or may not feature a naked leasing manager and his engorged penis.

Meanwhile: Temporary cats still hate permanent cats. As of this writing, three integration attempts have failed. (We define feline intergration fail as such: When a clump of Cat A’s hair is discovered somewhere external to the body of Cat A, and said hair was removed from Cat A by a participant neither Cat A nor Mom, integration has failed.)

The strangest part is that it’s Riley and Chloe who are being mean. I actually think Max wants to be friends. I know Leo wants to be friends. Josie and Ashley are all curled up on my bed pumping Mary J Blige’s “No More Drama” and staying completely out of it. But it’s always Riley who hisses first, and then Chloe. The temp cats are the mean ones, not mine!

So, after integration attempt number three failed tonight, I sent Chloe and Riley back into their own room.

In general, though, I felt a lot better today than I did yesterday. I begrudgingly took some advice from friends to pray and read certain spiritual literature. At 3 am last night (this morning?), I did a complete business and personal budget. I finally have a way to track exactly how my business is doing. The good news is that the business is still in the black, although not by much. But I was able to itemize my expenses and my income and put them face-to-face and see that I come out in the black. I do. Phew. Before we all get too excited, let’s still remember I owe money to IRS still AND I have credit-card debt up the wazoo that needs to be addressed. But if the company is still making a profit after all the damn expenses it seems to accrue without my permission, then I think everything will be fine for now. Also I will need to politely tell my stock broker that I will not be investing with her any time in the near future — not because she’s not great at what she does, but because I don’t have money to invest. Humbling, humbling. And is there a greater gift from the universe than that of being softly humbled? I’ve heard not.

if he says he’s got beef /
that i’m a vegetarian /
and i ain’t fuckin’ scared of him /
she wants to touch me /
she wants to love me /
she’ll never leave me /
don’t trust a ho /
never trust a ho /
won’t trust a ho /
cause the ho won’t trust me”

3OH!3, “Don’t Trust Me”

House was so fucking brilliant tonight. Brilliant even by House standards. I’m just so consistently blown away by both the writing and the acting on that show. It’s rare that I watch a scripted show these days and think to myself, “Wow, I couldn’t write anything even close to this good.” House does that to me every week. Actually, all the scripted shows I watch do that. It’s probably why they’re the only scripted shows I watch. I love being totally blown away by a writer’s talent, just kind of sitting there in awe, like, “Woah. That was crazy smart.”

Today was all kinds of stress. I don’t know why. I know why, and I don’t know why. It’s the choices I’ve made, it’s the risks I have taken, it’s the gambles and the pressures and the ego. I do nothing half-assed. It’s not the way I operate; it’s never been. I make large, sweeping decisions on little more than instinct and then I set about the details of executing them. Strangely, this usually goes well. It does. And it’s a pattern I’ve come to rely upon. Sasha has an idea. Sasha sits with the idea for a week, a month, maybe more. Sasha does a tiny amount of research and talks to a few people whose opinions she maybe values or at least finds amusing. Most ideas have been aborted by the end of this short gestation period. The ones that survive are then live-birthed, ripped from their umbilical cord and sent marching into the world sans instructions or body armor.

And believe it or not: It usually works. Usually.

It’s something I’ve always believed to be true of good creative writing: Your characters will find themselves. They will find their own way. You set them up and you believe in their story and their value and you put them here and then you let them go. They will create a world for themselves. They will navigate and they will befriend and they will arc. They will do things far more interesting than you’d ever imagined had you been micro-managing their path through your story. They will surprise you, and they should. Your characters will find themselves.

I stayed true to that when I wrote short fiction, part from laziness and cockiness, and part because it always worked out so well. I would create a world and a scenario and lives which I believed carried value and then I would watch those lives find their way. They communicated with me, I felt, through their dialogue, and I would use that to build the text that surrounded them. I was more an instrument of their lives than they ever were of mine.

I realize only now that I have taken a very similar approach to running a business, to making business decisions. I create a world instinctively. I introduce characters on a whim into roles that I think might compliment others. And then I let them go, let them find a way. I trust that they will do just that. That the story will arc and collapse and wind and soar and create dialogue that will speak to me and I will use it as a guide to carry them forward.

Is this any way to run a business?

I feel like I’m in over my head on a lot of things here. I am moving into unmastered territory, and I feel fallible. I am fallible. It has to feel like this, I just realized. This is growth. This stress is me learning. There’s a story I heard, somewhere, someplace, about a woman who was tending to her garden, pruning her plants so that they could grow taller and stronger and broader. And she realized that God worked the same way in her life. “Prune me, Lord,” she asked, “So that I may grow.” That line has stuck with me since I first heard it, years ago. This is how we grow. We find ourselves in situations in which we are uncertain, under-informed, stuck, and without our usual cadre of tricks. We are pruned. It hurts and it’s scary. But we can’t stay stuck forever, and so we grow, taller and stronger and broader, until this terrain is familiar and we know where it’s bumpy and we know where it’s steep and we can walk around here at night wearing sunglasses and we will find our way.

Is this any way to run a business?

Jury’s still out, I suppose.

So I have five cats now. I know, I know. Let me explain.

At girls’ night last night, Alicia was talking about our friend Sarah, who’s been out of town taking care of her ill mother for several months now. Her two cats have been staying with some girl ‘D’ that neither of us know, but apparently D really didn’t want the cats anymore, and she and Sarah had been arguing. Plus D had been making the cats live outside, when they’re indoor cats and they don’t have their outdoor shots. D had started to make weird threats about money Sarah owed her (we’re talking like $50 here), and, basically, Sarah wanted her cats out of that girl’s house, stat. The only quick option was Sarah’s ex-boyfriend, with whom Sarah didn’t much want to be speaking. I totally felt for her — I would be intensely stressed out if I thought my cats were living with someone who might be neglecting them or risking their health, and I would be intensely stressed out about having to deal with an ex-boyfriend over the cats, and to have to worry about all that on top of an ill mother just seemed like too much for anyone.

“Tell Sarah I’ll take them,” I told Alicia. “But just for a week, while she looks for other boarding options.”

Alicia called this morning. “Sarah is beyond relieved that you’ll take the cats. We’re going to get them this afternoon.”

So Alicia and I drove down to Burien, where the girl had already placed all the cat items in the driveway and put the cats in the cat carriers, also outside in the driveway. It was very weird. But Sarah had a TON of stuff for these cats, so we loaded a gigantic cat tree into the car, along with piles of cat beds and litter boxes and toys and catnip and brushes and then, finally, the cats. At the suggestion of D, we placed their carriers face-to-face so that they could at least look at each other during the traumatic time in transit. Then we drove back to Seattle and brought everything up to my apartment. “I feel like I’m moving someone,” said Alicia. “I’m sweating!” Seriously it was a lot of stuff to move.

We got the cats, Chloe and Riley, all set up in the guest bedroom with their cat tree and their toys and a litter box and food. The plan was to keep them separated from the other animals for awhile, to minimize the stress. Chloe immediately curled herself up in the guest bed’s comforter and refused to come out. (”It’s a Chloe burrito,” explained Sarah later.) I decided to leave them alone in there for an hour, and Alicia headed home. Here’s a shot of Chloe in her burrito:

After about an hour, I tip-toed into the room. Riley was doing just fine, lounging around like he owned the place and jumping all over the cat tree. Chloe was still in her burrito. So I laid down in bed next to her so that we were face-to-face, and I introduced myself and told her she was a very beautiful girl who was safe here with me. Then, slowly, I reached my hand out to pet her. I expected her to hiss, like she had the last time I’d tried. But this time, she rolled over so I could get her tummy better, and she purred and purred and purred. We laid like that for a few minutes, and then I got up off the bed to give Riley a hug, and, sure enough, Chloe pulled herself out of the burrito and decided it would be okay for her to play on the cat tree. Progress!

A few hours later, I thought I’d open the guest bed door to see what happened. Chloe was having none of it — she stayed put, curled in the fortress of the cat tree. Riley, however, slowly tiptoed out to see what was beyond the doors. In this case, it was Leo and my male cat Max. (Josie and Ashley want nothing to do with this — they were watching quietly from their thrones on my bed.) At first, it seemed Max and Riley would be okay — they approached each other slowly, nose-to-nose, and I thought they might come to an arrangement. But then the hissing started, so I put Riley back in his room.

An hour after that, I opened the door again. This time, Riley skulked out and infiltrated the living room. Leo wanted so very badly to play with him, but Riley was having none of it. The good thing is that Riley never made a move to hurt Leo — he’d either just run away or sit there and cry while Leo jumped all over him. I thought it was all going marginally well, until I discovered that Riley and Max were having a full-blown cat-fight in the guest bathroom. Howls galore, fur flying. This won’t work. I put Riley back into the guest bedroom, where he’ll stay for the night, along with Chloe.

It’s interesting, because I’d expected Riley to battle with Josie. Max is the last cat I adopted. When I brought him home, Josie, my oldest girl cat and the alpha in the house, freaked out. They would hiss at each other endlessly, for weeks and weeks, before they got used to each other. I think what they decided is that Max gets to be the alpha cat, but Josie retained the right to have the best spot next to me on the bed. Josie would sleep on my stomach, and Max at my feet. (When we got Leo, this changed — Leo gets my stomach, Josie gets my feet, and Max lost his spot on the bed entirely.) But I think, all in all, Max is probably the recognized Alpha in this house right now. So he’s the one responsible for battling the invading forces of Riley. I was really, really surprised about how Josie stayed out of it entirely. There’s definitely a hierarchy among my cats, and they’re far more clued into it than I am.

Anyway. Riley and Chloe are just the most darling kitties ever, except for mine. I’m sure we will eventually work it out so that they can come and join our little world in the living room, but I think right now they’ll need to be separate.

Mostly, though, I’m humbled to have the opportunity to help a friend in need, even if it does mean I have a 6-to-1 animal/human ratio in my apartment. More animals to snuggle with just makes me happier. What are they gonna do? Shed on my furniture? Rip up my couch? Already. Been. Done. And I have plenty of snuggles to go around!