ULTIMATE CAT FIGHTING CHAMPIONSHIP 2013
(At this point, I should probably start charging admission. Or at the very least put this on pay-per-view.)
Our girl kitten plays with my jewelry, while the boy is totally not interested. Way to reinforce heteronormative gender stereotypes, Nico.
Exactly one month ago today, I woke up to a phone call. “Your brother is in the hospital. We don’t know what’s wrong. When can you come to Virginia?”
Nothing has been the same since then.
I spent those first few hours panicked, genuinely scared. There wasn’t any anger or resentment or stress. That came later. All I knew was that he was sick, and he needed to get better. He became my baby brother again, during those first hours, as I packed a bag and rushed to Penn Station. I imagined him with an IV in his arm and tubes in his nose. I saw him as a little boy, whimpering to the nurses and just needing to be held. My poor brother, I thought. I’m coming to help.
And then I found out the truth. That he wasn’t my little baby brother anymore. Instead, he was a junkie. A worthless drug addict who did so much Oxycontin in a three day period that his body literally started shutting down. It wasn’t an overdose per se, but it might as well have been. His stomach was no longer digesting his food. His organs were giving up.
This was nothing new, of course. His drug problems started in middle school, and have ebbed and flowed out of our lives ever since. But the hospitalization, the tubes literally sucking his own shit out through his nose, this was all different. I thought it would change him, or at the very least humble him into seeking out a different life.
Instead, he acted arrogant. He didn’t need surgery, he didn’t need more than one night in the hospital. So he won. He beat the drug. It was time to start all over.
Since then, everything has seemed surreal. People don’t call rehab facilities in real life, do they? No, this must be a movie. Interventions happen on A&E, not in my mother’s apartment. Fathers support their families in the real world, and don’t leave their 30 year old daughters with potentially tens of thousands of dollars of inpatient treatment bills. Only in the movies could this many terrible things happen, especially to a family that is already so fragmented and shattered that it’s barely hanging on.
To a person who is already so fragmented and shattered that she’s barely hanging on.
On Sunday, I am going to visit my brother. He is halfway through his rehab, and from the letters he’s sending, he seems to be improving. Maybe this will work, and maybe he will actually get better.
That would be a Hollywood ending, at least.
I’m not listening to any of you paleo diet motherfuckers until I see one of you kill a cow with a spear.
Apparently I’m not the only girl in this apartment who loves UVA.
I figured out how to add my own text to gifs today, you guys.
Photos from my law school reunion. Oh, what a difference a few hours makes.
And yes, I am drinking bourbon out of a trophy. Obviously.
Mother’s Day is hard this year.
I feel badly even complaining, since my mother is alive and able to answer the phone when I called her this morning. So many people in the world don’t have that luxury.
But it’s still hard this year. It’s hard for me, and harder for her.
Our little dysfunctional family is more fragmented today, even though we are geographically closer than we’ve been in years. I am in central Virginia, only 90 miles away from her, at my law school reunion, where I spent 48 hours pretending everything was fine. She is in northern Virginia, spending time with friends, dealing as best she can with the trauma that has unfolded in our lives over the last few weeks. And my brother is in Maryland, almost exactly the same distance from our mom to the north as I am to the south. Except, really, he is much farther away. And he will stay that far away for the next three weeks, save for our Sunday morning phone calls, while his nurses stand over him, hurrying, asking him to let the next patient have a turn.
We are, despite everything that has happened to us over the years, a close family. We are all dependent on each other, often to a fault. So even though I spent years avoiding my brother and his problems, his absence today is like a knife in my heart.
We will be together soon enough, I know. Twenty eight days is not forever, but hopefully it’s long enough to heal.
I only wish Mother’s Day didn’t fall on day number six.
Going on an unsupervised trip to Charlottesville this weekend, since The Dude is stuck in the city with work. Here are some pictures taken of me during my last few solo trips back there.
My liver has already gone on strike.
Welcome to our kittens’ new playground. It also serves as a recreational center, steam room, race track, and ultimate cat fighting cage match venue.
By the way, the sound of two wrestling kittens thumping against the side of a bathtub at 3 am sounds exactly like a burglar trying to break into your apartment. Which adds an additional level of fun to the game.
EXCLUSIVE MET BALL PHOTO
It’s really an uncanny resemblance, don’t you think?
- Creating a gallery wall in your apartment is an ideal form of procrastination. Those frames never hang straight.
- My life is basically one long search for a skinny mirror.
- My Bar Method studio is having teacher try outs to staff their forthcoming midtown location. I seriously thought about auditioning for exactly 0.32 seconds before nearly having an aneurysm from laughing so hard.
- Microsoft Excel is the spawn of Satan himself.
- My new Warby Parkers came this week. I can actually see things now. Everyone on TV is a lot uglier.
- I am currently on week three of four consecutive weekends out of town. I need a lazy weekend night in, complete with soft clothes, wine, and kittens. May 18, I’m looking at you.
