The Creature

There is a creature that lives somewhere on my floor. Close to my apartment, if my aural depth perception does not deceive me.

All I know about the creature is that it has the shriek of a squeaky dog toy being stepped on. Not very intimidating, you might say. Yeah, you're right. But it is annoying. This thing shrieks constantly. Not normal baby cries, just squeaky toy wails. Normally this isn't a problem, but if I'm trying to study in quiet, this quickly drives me insane. I have yet to lay eyes on this being, but if voice is any indication it has no mouth, only a small vent that causes air to squeal as it rushes in or out. The very thought of this malformed maw horrifies me.

Yes, I know it's probably a child. I think I woke it up one night when I slammed lettuce onto my counter to break its lettuce-neck and make a salad. And I don't care.

Having said that, it's probably some kid with a chromosome abnormality that results in this hideous vocal permutation whose parents struggle daily with the difficulty of raising an atypical child in such a cruel, unforgiving world.

Either way, it' s damn annoying.

The One-Blog Summary of Five Months Two Days Sixteen Hours Nine Minutes and Thirty Seconds

I know, I know.

Kim and Denise came to visit, and then I cat-whispered Sasha into shutting the hell up. I bet Kim and Denise wish those events were switched around.

I attended supernumerary orientations, class started, and my head began to fill with trisomies, monosomies and the exquisitely worthless study of epidemiology.

I did laundry for the first time only to have some bastard steal my peach-scented dryer sheets when left alone for thirty seconds. Thirty effing seconds. So I left an angry post-it note in the hall where they were stolen (childish, yes, but it made me feel better) which I later found stuck to a single non-peach smelling (yeah, I smelled it to check) dryer sheet. Smartasses. I spent the next few days surreptitiously sniffing fellow elevator passengers for any scent of thieving bastardism - to no avail.

We started medical communications, a class where we hold fake exam sessions with fake patients. Hilarity ensued when we were encouraged to make up solutions to their problems. Heh. I miss that class for many, many reasons.

My car was cruelly and viciously and okay FINE superficially violated while innocently parked on Lake Shore Drive. Grrr.

My mom sent me new peach dryer sheets.

Classes continued: PS continued to be worthless, epi still sucked, genetic lecture series and journal club continued to be easy stretches of no work on my part, intro to genetic counseling was still ruining my otherwise free Fridays. Oh and all the while, I was doing four hours of work study a week in the neuro department, conveniently located across the street from the icebox that is Lurie.

I got a sweet parking spot in the garage. The precious is safe.

Thanksgiving. Kara had the Iraq war explained to her and her only question was about how different countries communicate with each other. Her suggestion was calling cards. Ate food, was thankful.

More classes.

Finals... ugh. Then my bus pass betrayed me briefly before deciding we could be BFF for twelve more hours - then it was entirely dead to me. I hung its carcass on my bulletin board.

After that day of mind-bending tiredness, Jenna the sister came to visit for a few days. We did some shopping, saw Wicked, did some more shopping and nearly froze to death. This last occurred on more than one occassion, one of which involved a zoo, Christmas (sorry, holiday) lights and animals that stayed out of view in their shelters and were therefore smarter than the two of us.

Christmas break. Laura had her foot removed, or a bone removed, or something, and couldn't walk all through break. We watched a lot of DVDs, so I got completely caught up on Grey's Anatomy just in time to have no new episodes thanks to the writer's strike. Dominated numerous games of Xbox 360 SceneIt. Went out to eat, hot-tubbed, slept, and generally had a great, relaxing break.

Then it was back to school, thankfully now with a puffy and furry and long new coat in an acceptable color.

More classes, blah blah blah.

Bad weather consistently being built up to epic blizzard proportions only to have the green radar masses miss me entirely, much to my eternal disappointment. We did get a preemptive snow day in anticipation of a storm that never came. Pretty great to have a mid-week day off, though.

Happy hour was reinstated, and the peasants rejoiced.

Mrs. Kim flew in for a visit instead of going to some dumb tropical destination. Good choice.

And then - rotations began, and in this time of no sleep and no free time, I was inspired to resurrect and update this blog. So that's a quick recap of my grad school experience thus far. Of course there's more, but in the interest of time and privacy (which is a DAMN shame, because I could spin some fantastic tales about certain... things) we'll have to leave it at that.

Anyway, I'm really going to try hard to update regularly, and by all means send some abuse my way if I'm slacking off. Nice abuse. Encouraging abuse. In the form of flowery prose and flowers. I've got enough stress already.

MEOW! MEOW! MEOW! MEOW! MEOW!

Isn't it so great how vocal Siamese cats are? It's like they're having a conversation with you! They think they're people, and that's adorable. Well let me tell you: not at four in the morning, it's not adorable.

Sasha has begun a campaign of terror, and is unable or unwilling to communicate what her demands are. If she even has demands. She has food. She has water. She has me. What the hell else could a cat want? Whatever it is, she wants it at four in the morning and in her mind, the only way to get it is to walk around yowling.

I have to commend her, she was clever enough to discover that by going into the bathroom, she can treble the volume of her voice thanks to the tiled walls. Fortunately I was clever enough to begin shutting the bathroom door when I went to bed. However, my opposable thumbs will only get me so far in this war. I need to sleep at night, while she has all day to laze about, recovering from her nightly sonatas.

I've tried to think like a cat to figure out what she wants. The only thing I can figure is that she's looking for Tasha, her sister. They've never been apart for more than a week in the ten years that we've had them, and maybe she doesn't like being an only-cat. And before you start feeling sorry for her, know that to all outward appearances, they don't even like each other. Sasha beats the crap out of Tasha for sleeping on anything she has deemed as her own. For Tasha's part, the only time I see her interacting with Sasha is when she chases her around the basement, paw extended to scoop in and then gnaw on Sasha's back leg. Maybe I'm misinterpreting that, but I know my sisters and I don't bond like that. Well, not literally anyway.

I don't know what to do here. I've tried everything. That's a lie. I've tried two things: throwing pillows at where her voice is in the darkness, and scritching my fingers on the bed to entice her to jump up, curl up and (most importantly) shut up. I implore anyone with any understanding of cat psychology to help me out here... not only are classes starting soon, but I have friends coming at the end of this week and I certainly don't need her waking everyone up all night long. I'm open to any suggestions except for drugging her, but if your suggestion is really well-worded or asking my address to send me said drugs free of charge, I will totally take it under consideration. Help!

Sasha's Big Move

As it turns out, when you live in a new city and don't have a job and classes haven't started yet, you have a lot of time on your hands. So judging by the torrent of academic doom-bringing emails I have been receiving from the second years, I seized what is apparently one of my last opportunities for spontaneity and went home for the weekend. Daring, I know. Laura and her cast were home so the three of us got to spend some quality time together. The whole fam also road-tripped down to Bloomington for the day to see Jenna and go to an IU game. Those who know me know my stance on football, and can approximate my feelings towards live football where the distractions that make televised games bearable are frowned upon. Highlights of the game include seeing and then trying to take a picture of my face with a Northwestern flag I saw on the top of the stadium (I know, I know, Big 10 or whatever. I'm still making all the connections) and getting a inverse-raccoon style sunburn thanks to my sunglasses.

One of the reasons I had come home was to transplant one of our cats to Chicago. I had decided to bring Sasha, because even though she has a crippling fear of the unknown, her life consists mainly of laying on the floor and watching me do stuff. It's hard for her to do that when there's 200 miles between us. My car was filled with stuff I forgot and one cat in a crate in a larger crate. I thought that'd be nice for her and me, because I wouldn't have a car filled with impossible to remove cat hair and she'd have a little freedom to move around but be unable to crawl under my seat and root herself permanently to the floorboards. I learned that lesson the hard way. However, freedom was not what Sasha wanted for this trip. As I was paying attention to the road as all good drivers do, my estimate is that she spent 98.7% of the trip like this...

... out of her bag, but wedged beneath it in a pathetic bid for some security. I'd have felt sorrier for her if she hadn't punctuated the trip with bouts of loud, plaintive meowing. I figured out that after the initial twenty minutes of meowing, she only spoke up when I did. This meant no talking on the phone and no singing, two of my favorite things to do in the car. I was down to podcasts, which I don't mind, really. I've got to keep replenishing the font of random knowledge in my head somehow and podcasts provide a easy way to do this. This trip did remind me of a joke, though. What do you call it when someone throws a cat out the window while driving on a highway? Kitty litter. Heh. Animal abuse is bad, kids. Don't throw cats out windows.

Once we made it to my apartment, I brought Catface in first and put her bag on the bed. She made no move to leave or even extract her face from the blanket to see that this wasn't, in fact, the vet's office, which is the only other place she ever goes. I made four more trips back to my car, and with each load I brought in, I checked to see what she was up to. Each time, it was this...

... with no variation. She moved a bit if I petted her, so I knew that the trip hadn't completely broken her brain. I proceeded to watch some tv and put my new stuff away so Sasha could come out when she felt comfortable. For the record, it takes over four hours for my cat to get comfortable enough to skulk out from her bag, look around furtively and then scurry under the bed. She stayed there for the next few hours, looking entirely annoyed with her new surroundings, as evinced below:

I eventually lured her out with the promise of brushing, but as soon as my attention was diverted for even a second she was back under the bed. I went about my business, making sure her necessities were out in plain sight should she choose to leave the bed. She didn't. Oh, well. Cats are resilient little things, aren't they? If they can survive falls off of buildings and trek hundreds of miles to reunite with lost families, they can adjust to moving to a rather nicely decorated and furnished apartment with a person they already know and like, right? Right?

It begins...

That's right - new city, new blog. I was sick of trying to explain the old address too. Bygone in-jokes with a limited scope of recognition do not good web addresses make. Lesson learned. Incidently, anyone who recognizes where my new address comes from will get the satisfaction of knowing we have the same taste in... well, something. No hints. But a quick Google search has revealed a similarity to a certain South Park episode title and I can only assure you that's not what I'm referencing. Ugh. Move your minds along, people.

Anyway, I've moved to Chicago, because the commute to Northwestern from Indy would have been a bitch. I'm sure this will result in hijinks aplenty, and this will be a good a place as any to record them. Classes haven't started yet and I've only been here two days, and so far my adventures have consisted mainly of unpacking and putting stuff away all while watching some deliciously angsty episodes of Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman on DVD. (Shut up - it was a great show when I was 13 and it's a great show now. I am so excited for the Lex Luthor body-switch/amnesia/evil heart-stealing doctor plotline that words fail me.) Moving in was epic thanks to one way streets, non-existent instructions from management and an elevator controlled by what must be some severely disgruntled and possibly mentally impaired monkeys. My dad deserves the gold medal in Cirque du Soleil-style parking garage Uhaul maneuvers. And silver and bronze, too. The last time I parked my car, I headed back towards my building, and this is a rough approximation of my internal monologue after a while of walking: "Okay, the lake is this way, so my apartment is this way. This isn't that hard. Those flowers are nice. Hey, this street looks familiar... Well look at that, a silver 'Rolla with Indiana pla... oh. Crap. Let's rethink this... where the hell is Lake Michigan?" I haven't had to drive anywhere since, but I am 98% sure I will be able to find my car again when I want to go somewhere. I'll put up some pictures when there aren't boxes and unhung pictures and unshelved books everywhere. I gotta get going now, though. Lois and Clark are undercover in a marriage counseling camp, and I have a feeling the leader is cryogenically freezing couples to repopulate the earth after some cataclysmic event. I don't want to miss it.