Look at Emily Gould. Her book comes out soon, or already has – I’m not really up to speed on these things – and love it or hate it, the remarks about it tend toward the personal. People are blaming gender (“They wouldn’t say that if she was a man!”) and maybe they’re partially right but uh… I’m guessing the comments are personal because the book is personal? To me it’s a gigantic, Duh. Sure, the writing may not actually be any good, but I have no firsthand knowledge of that. Anyway, I remember when she had some big article come out a year or so ago (in NY Times Magazine, I think), an article about, among other things, oversharing on a personal blog. Now, Ms. Gould had been off my radar for a very long time by then but that article – its mere existence – bothered the hell out of me. You’re going to have to dig way back to childhood for this one, but remember what it feels like to chew on a foil gum wrapper, especially if you have fillings? Her article was tin foil in my mouth.

Years ago, after I wrote my own New York Times piece, Emily Gould launched a full out internet assault. Something about writing about my personal failings absolutely incensed her (personal blogging in general was so distasteful to her – but talk about dating and you were Offender Number One) and when she got bored leaving nasty comments about me on my own blog, launched one of her own, dedicated to making fun of me. It was something like, shutupandmarrymealready.blogspot.com and it was a succession of derisive posts, many of which were ripped right from my own blog. Naturally, they were taken out of context and then peppered with multiple exclamation points (we know how much I cherish the double punctuation. Shudder) to make me look like a drooling idiot. To say she was unkind would be an understatement. She was cruel. And horribly personal about it. I was a kid still in many respects and it haunted me. I didn’t have enough experience to know that those who claimed her motivation was jealousy were mostly right and so I ate up every word they wrote about me and cried. They – because if the posts she wrote weren’t enough, the comments on that blog were saturated with hate – and interestingly enough, precisely the same kind I saw following her five-years-later article about her own blogging experience. 

A lot of the vitriol appeared to be girl-on-girl hate. Comments like that are bad for all of us women writers. Period. But there was this part of me that thought she deserved every horrible thing people had to say about her. In my mind, she practically invented girl-on-girl internet crime. Every criticism aimed, not at her writing but at her person, every crude, slanderous thing – I felt she’d earned all of it. Truth: I still feel that way.

I also feel that there may be a legitimate reason why lady blogger memoirs like Gould’s are treated as less-than-serious work, and I don’t think it has as much to do with gender as it does with the kinds of behavior that we bloggers have engaged in on the Internet – because we can. The sniping and the gossip and the hateful commenting. If there’s a valid reason as to why her writing will be seen as trite, it’s because the author herself behaved pettily on a very public stage. It’s only a theory. But I can’t see that the opinion of bloggers as serious writers ascending until we stop using the Internet to lower ourselves beyond the point where the credibility of being published will not be enough to bring dignity to the undignified.

Yesterday, the vet was pretty thoroughly convinced that Hal had Feline AIDS (FIV, if you will). Tests proved that not to be the case. Which is a wonderful relief to me because, although I know that it doesn’t have to mean gloom and doom (my nephew cat is living quite purringly with it), my powers of worry are quite well developed. It’s my super power.

Hal came home last night without the vast majority of his lateral teeth and with, the vet says, countless sutures. He actually stopped counting. “An hour’s worth, that’s all I know.” He also sent me home with syringes of painkillers that I squeeze into him (the cat, not the vet) every few hours. The drugs, he said, were hard to come by but Hal’s pain level wasn’t even on the 1 to 10 scale, so he was parting with some of his treasured supply. When he asked if I’d be able to do it, I said yes, emphatically, but what I meant was, “Yesnowbringmemycat.” I’d figure out drug administration later.

All I wanted to do was hold him, but once we were home, all he wanted to do was hide. Which, sure, I get. But in this house we cuddle, dammit. He did finally come out several hours later, on his own terms, for some painkiller and an episode of Man Men. He probably curled up on my lap thinking he was going to see boobs. Ah, silly cat. It’s only implied sexy time at AMC.

For some reason, Hal wants nothing to do with our upstairs. He’ll visit the litter box up there and then haul kitty ass right back down. So, last night, I made a bed on the living room sofa, so as to provide oversight and PRN pain killing. The moment I laid down, Hal climbed in next to me, lay his head on my arm and that’s how we both woke up six hours later. I winced when I saw the small puddle of crimson colored drool, knowing the reality of tooth extraction. My own once kept me off my feet for days, dizzy and yarfing, because of an exposed nerve. Pretending only to be interested in rubbing his belly, in went the painkiller (oddly, he obliged) and wouldn’t you know, minutes later, he was up on the counter licking at some food. We haven’t progressed to actual bites, but if he’s hurting as much as the vet says, I’m gonna take this as a victory.

Thank you for all your sweet words. They are deeply appreciated. Even by His Excellency who is normally way too cool for appreciation. 

See, Hal is one of those low, low, low maintenance pets. I let him do his thing and he lets me know when he wants something. Like, when his food bowl is empty, I simply fill it to the top and then he lets me know when my filling skills are again required. He’ll walk over, make physical contact (usually a headbutt) and then lure me to his dish. Sometimes he’ll headbutt the bag for added impact. Then he likes me to pet his head for a bit while he eats. But only for a bit, because too much affection can spoil a meal.

Saturday night, we came home from a party and I followed the beast upstairs to attend to some midnight cat snackin’. Hal’s bowl was full. As full as it had been when I filled it… a week before. Panic at the disco. I watched as Hal picked up a pieced of food in his mouth and let it fall right back into the bowl. A million worries started to go through my mind. I spun around to check the litter box (let’s just get this out of the way, hmm? I clean that thing once a week. I am not a vigilant scooper. Go on, judge me!) and it was empty. His excellency had not eaten in a week. Turning back, I saw him pick up another piece of food, maneuver it in his mouth and begin to cry. My cat was crying. Like an infant. I thought about dying right there on the spot because that would have been easier than seeing him go through that.

I immediately scooped him up and took him downstairs where I opened a can of tuna and watched him gingerly eat it. When he was finished, I tried to have a looksee into his mouth, but he was having none of it. Well, this morning, the vet took his turn and sure enough, Hal required surgery. And tests. More than a few tests. I’m fuzzy on the details – waiting for the nurse to call me with an update – but the vet said Hal was in excruciating pain. And hearing that filled me with the most potent feeling of remorse and guilt I’ve ever experienced.

“I had no idea,” I said, lump in my throat and tears burning at the corners of my eyes.

“What do you do for a living?”

“I, uh..”

“Cat dentist?” He shook his head. “Obviously not. You couldn’t have known.”

I don’t care. Because Hal doesn’t know that I’m not a cat dentist. He’s hurt and scared and I am the one who’s supposed to be looking out for him. Work is dragging most uncomfortably because all I want to do is take him home and put a stop to all the being frightened and in pain.

I called horse puckey even before I saw the waiting room.

As of yesterday, I was about, oh, three years and six days late in getting a valid Texas driver’s license and I knew there was no way I was getting off as easy as a twenty eight minute wait. And oh, I sure didn’t.

I settled into the only empty, blue plastic chair, back by the Exit Only door, outside of which impatients clustered, sucking down nicotine and sighing into cellphones. Every time that door opened, I was washed over with a thick cloud of cigarette smoke and I thought this, THIS is my punishment for being such a scofflaw. And then the guy a couple chairs down opened a bucket of fried chicken, and my god, it smelled so strongly of three-day-old grease that I felt my mouth go a little bit sweaty and realized, no, THAT was my punishment. Then the woman behind me started smacking her gum and  “Unh huh, yeah”ing her half of a phone conversation; the mulleted fella down the row began watching an episode of South Park on his iPhone, sans headphones, because yes, caring IS sharing; and the girl next to me starting rocking back and forth, arms folded across her chest, like she was *this* close to a mental breakdown of some kind and as much as I could identify with that feeling, I was pretty sure that somewhere, I was being filmed. This is the kind of shit that TV sitcoms are made of.

“You are ALL my punishment,” I thought, looking around.

Some time later, when the chair in front of me vacated and a nice looking Asian dude sad down wearing the softest looking sweater I’d ever seen, I thought, Would it be weird if I petted him? I won’t lie; I thought about smelling him, too. And that’s when I realized that the DMV had won. I was broken and crazy. Just like the rest of them.

Two hours and forty minutes later, another expressionless lady took my completed form, scanned my thumb prints and snapped a photo of me looking much, much less like a crystal meth addict than my previous driver’s license photo and sent me on my way. The four week wait for the hard copy, laminated license she promised didn’t sound any more believable than the twenty eight minute one, but whatever. I’m hopeful. I get to wait for it at home.

Also, this photo has nothing to do with anything other than it totally makes my day.

Junior High is supposed to be awkward, and when you’re the new kid, and really, really introverted (during school dances, I got special permission to stay in the library and read), Junior High is an exquisite torture. Not the school part – my teachers loved me. I was so eager! Not so much with the other kids, though, who only liked me when we were assigned to the same project. Because I loved homework. Most other times, they ignored me, or stole my purse or barked at me in the hall. Really, actually barked because I wore a Dalmatian themed shirt my grandmother had gotten me for my birthday the summer before. They all wore those iconic Gap sweaters, the kind that you see and immediately just know is from the Gap, and me, I had never even been in a Gap. My shoes were from Payless. I thought they looked just like the LA Gear high tops everyone was wearing. I was wrong. In French class, I sat next to a girl named Natalie who once complimented me on my fingernails and that I still remember that tells you just how much it meant. Then she laughed and laughed about Mary Christensen’s fat ankles and I know I nodded and laughed too, even though Mary’s ankles didn’t look out of the ordinary to me at all.

By my second year there, things weren’t nearly so rough. I had friends. Four of them who rode the same bus and lived in the same neighborhood and we shared flavored lip gloss and wrote notes and on the weekends, laid out on trampolines with sprinklers underneath. Even gym class was better. I had this lovely teacher – Ms. Hamilton, I think – who gave us Noxema samples and would eventually be genuinely sorry when I moved to Texas. I learned to serve a volleyball and double dutch jump rope. But the highlight came when this girl, Jessie, who, I will admit I was just the tiniest bit afraid of, picked me for her flag football team. Me. Picked. And not last.

Jessie was one of those girls, who, before anyone bothered with any sort of diversity, was just a little bit different. More… masculine. And more confident. Which, I guess, is why I was afraid of her. But when she picked me for flag football – I was fast – and since we had two other classes together, I imagined some kind of friendship was a-bloomin’. I was sure excited.

My brother and I went to the same school, a good year before we started getting put in the same classes, but our circles still overlapped. Jessie was in my brother’s orchestra class. This was also before my brother and I loved each other like we do now. Back then, we were almost constantly at odds. Which is a nice way of saying we HATED each other’s rotten guts. This particular time, I wish I could remember what we were arguing about, or why I brought up oddly scary Jessie, but my brother’s response, I remember very, very well.

“Jessie doesn’t even like you. She said NOBODY likes you.”

Did she actually say that to my brother? I don’t know. I doubt it (I just IMed him to ask – he’s sorry it happened, but doesn’t really remember). But it hardly mattered, because oh, the humiliation. I fell apart at the seams. I “forgot” my gym clothes every day thereafter. I don’t think I spoke a word in that class that I didn’t absolutely have to. And a few weeks later, I was called into the front office and asked if I’d like a very special assignment. I spent the rest of the term tidying up the teacher’s lounge during PE. I can only assume that was Ms. Hamilton’s doing. I love her for it today.

The saddest thing about it all is that twenty years later, I still feel a bit embarrassed by it. I still cringe sometimes, like it happened just the other day.