Arianna Georgi

So, the animal rescue group I volunteer with is putting out a calendar in an attempt to raise money.  I felt obligated to plug it here:

The folks here at Qualcomm have collected the best pictures of their furry friends (some of them are Rescue House kitties), and put together a calendar. These are for sale for $15, with the proceeds (after expenses) being donated to The Rescue House.  If you would like to order one of these calendars, send a check made payable to Daniel Atwood, to me at the address listed.  Please send me an email letting me know if you would like me to have one (or more) put aside for you.  They make great Christmas gifts.

Make Check Payable to Daniel Atwood and mail to:

Kandi Baxter
10437 Londonderry Avenue
San Diego, CA  92126

Want a sneak peak at what the pictures look like?Not only do you get an 11″ x 8 1/2″ calendar full of adorable pictures, but the money you spend purchasing one helps pay for food, litter, toys, and medicine for our kids at the Rescue House.

I agree, this is an ideal gift for someone that already has a lifetime subscription to Cat Fancy magazine, cat potholders, a cat teapot, or cat stationary… or if you are my mom looking buy me something for the holidays (see my Cat Stuff Post).

Tags: Cats, rescue house

Last week, feeling sort of blue, I mixed a martini, climbed into my sleeping bag and settled on the couch to wait it out.  This being the tail end of the summer, there was very little for me zone out to on TV and even MTV, which I can normally trust for some mindless show about some fat and socially inept kid being “made” into a break dancer, was showing a marathon of The Hills, pretty much the only reality TV show I refuse to watch.  Anyway, I found myself stuck with TBS, whose new motto seems to be “very funny” (I guess got TNT got the drama, so funny was all that was left). 

“Very Funny” apparently means lots of episodes of Friends, an association I did not necessarily agree with right off the bat (actually I still don’t agree with it).  The thing is, I haven’t watched Friends since college, when I had the world’s worst roommate (if anyone wants I will write about it, but the story is short on the humor and heavy on the seriously annoying).   The World’s Worst roommate had a rainman-like obsession with Friends and in addition to owning all of the seasons on VHS (or was it DVD at that point… how old am I?) talked about them almost constantly like they were real people.  “Monica is SOOOO into cleaning,” she would tell me, looking up as I walked in, interrupting her eating cheese doodle and watching Friends time (which was all the time as far as I could tell).  “Oh, okay.” I would respond.  Her complete love of Friends, combined with her pure horribleness ruined the entire show for me and automatically made me suspicious from there on out of anyone that said they liked it (which at the time was about 99% of America).  Anyway, I haven’t watched it since, and last week, when I heard the familiar Friends theme song, I suffered a small but significant shudder like former water torture victims gets when someone turns on the sink.  But before I could change the channel I was sucked into watching.  And then, something happened.  The Friends won me back over. 

In my defense, Friends is very colorful.  I mean seriously, they all wear bright colors and adorable outfits.  Also, like every single set piece is some shade of late 90s vibrant pastel, the kind of colors that call out “Hey, you on the couch, don’t be so sad!  Look at these oversized colorful mugs Monica has, and Rachel’s mesmerizing hair, and Chandler’s sweater vest.  Everything is going to be okay!”  In addition, there is something spellbinding about the laugh track to that show and how dependable the “ohhhs and ahhs” and canned laughter are.  The characters are dependable too.  Pretty much they can all be summed up in a few words.  Monica: likes to cook and is anal.  Joey: dumb, likes food.  Chandler: funny.  And so on.  Since the characters are so easy to grasp and it doesn’t take years of watching and analyzing to understand all their subtleties and nuances, you can just sort of flip it on and go with it.  For instance, the episode I watched happened to be about Thanksgiving.  In it all of these elements worked perfectly.  Joey really likes to eat, so he was excited about the turkey.  Monica was cooking the turkey and being anal.  Chandler made a bunch of funny comments.  No wonder people in other countries like to watch the Friends.  Even if my understanding of the English language was very low, as long as I got the basic elements of show and characters, the bright colors and laugh track could carry the rest. 

So when you are lying on the couch drinking alone and being incredibly depressed in a sleeping bag, Friends is an ideal show to watch.  The colors are distracting, everyone behaves predictably (for instance, when Joey walks into a room there’s a 95% chance he’ll say “how you doing” ).  The most stressful things that seem to happen to any of them is that they have silly long term crushes on each other that they keep secret for one reason or another.  I owe Jennifer Aniston and the rest of the crew a sincere apology for the years I spent making statements like “that show is tailor-made for idiots.”  I still think the show is for idiots, but I guess sometimes that’s not such a bad thing. 

Tags: friends, martinis

In certain kinds of TV Shows
there often comes a part
where the eager rookie, or spunky female cop,
or jaded, hardened veteran who swears this is his last case,
goes to talk
with someone
who wears glasses
and uses words like “database”
and looks very smart
and sits in front of a computer
and types a few things
and makes a statement
that causes me to pause every time,

“this guy is a ghost!”
they say,
and I know what they mean,
and even if I didn’t,
the smart looking person would go on to explain
“no license, no fingerprints, no record, etc.
it’s like you are chasing a ghost!”
And he does not mean a real ghost,
but it makes me think all the same,

that if I was a ghost I probably would commit crimes
having returned from the dead
to find there is no afterlife
or grand reason to be good,
just the same old world
but more transparent this time
with walls I could walk through
and children doing silly imitations of me
on Halloween.

I would think
that after wandering for a few weeks
doing typical ghost things
like spying my loved ones and
and appearing behind my enemies in mirrors to scare them
I probably would turn to a life of crime
because really
who would be able to stop me
and without fingerprints it would be easy
and anyway being a ghost would probably be
boring as hell

I would probably start small;
stealing candy bars from the drugstore
or old ladies’ handbags,
the kind of thing
I would never have done as a person
it would still be more interesting
than floating through the forest
startling hikers and squirrels
or slamming doors in old mansions
or anything else I could be doing

so I would move on to bigger things
and organize a crime ring
or drug empire
or whatever else it is the bad guy does
and run it
in the way only a ghost can
never showing up for meetings
and occasionally floating out to torment my associates
by moaning their names
if they got out of line

and after years and years
I would be rich enough to retire
and live the good life
on a yacht in Capri
and drink martinis all day
lying on the sundeck
only I’d be a ghost
and the life (good or not)
would have already been lived
and the martinis would dribble to the floor
and I wouldn’t be able to get a tan
so there would just be this
the floating around,
the moaning,
the organizing a crime empire,
and whatever else

and when the spunky female cop
or rookie,
or jaded veteran, showed up at my door
I would want to let them in
but the doorknob would slip through my ghost fingers
and they would burst down the door
to an empty room
and swear

while I stood in the corner wishing
they would handcuff me, or shoot at me
or anything else
to prove I am there.

Tags: Ghosts, poems

So of course I have to preface this entire thing by saying how much I love my mom and how well she does actually know me since we talk constantly and she’s one of the best friends I could ask for…

… and then I have to go ahead and ruin all the goodwill and niceness that was created by that statement by saying that if you looked around my house at the things she has given me you would think that she knows one thing, and one thing only: I like cats. 

In all fairness, I do like cats.  I have a cat, I spend my weekend volunteering with a cat rescue organization, and when I was about 10 I used to collect various cat paraphernalia (but let’s not talk about that).   All of this, however, just makes me more painfully aware of the thin line I walk between really liking cats (and animals in general), and becoming an insane cat lady that buys litter in bulk at Costco.  I volunteer with quite a few women that actually wear cat jewelry and sign emails “purrs and pets,” and I recently considered getting a new cat, but had to weigh very heavily the fact that it would be mean that cats would outnumber humans at my house.   Currently, I have one cat, I’m young, I’m attractive, I do talk about things other than cats, but this is how it starts I think.  I mean, crazy old cat ladies weren’t born that way I would think, once upon the time they were young and attractive and not reeking of cat urine too, right?  Then they got that second cat, and the third and the house filled with cat related goodies and it was all over.

So you can see why I am nervous, at any moment the scale could be tipped and I could head down the cat lady path towards my destiny.  And helping to tip that scale is the massive amount of cat-stuff my mom buys me. 

It’s sort of like my mom just met me, and she likes me, but she was only told one thing about my entire personality: that I like cats.  It’s similar to when you work at a job and people only really know a few things about you, like that you always eat a tuna fish sandwich for lunch and so they then comment on this almost every single day.  “Hey, tuna fish again, eh?”  They’re being friendly, but it’s also sad because they really only know one thing about you.  I once worked at a job all summer where the only thing people seemed to figure out about me was that I liked elephants, which I think I mentioned once.  When I then left the job, almost every single card I received included an elephant in some form (if those people had really asked me, they could have determined that in addition to elephants I also liked beer and (at the time) smokes).  Anyway, this is what my mom knows about me.  I like cats.  So she buys me a completely ridiculous amount of cat stuff. 

Lest you think I am exaggerating, I have selected below a few key cat items to show off.  Enjoy, and if you ever come to my house, please keep this post in mind and do not judge…

1.  The Porcelain Cat Teapot

When my mom gave this to me, my first reaction was that it would be the perfect thing to set out if I never want a boy to come in my bedroom ever, ever again.  I picture it going something like this:

Boy:  Want to go in your room?

Me: Sure.

Boy:  Wait, is that a porcelain teapot?

Me: Yes.

Boy:  With cats having tea on it?

Me: It appears so.

Boy:  Let’s just go watch TV instead.

Perhaps this was my mom’s intent, to protect my innocence, but more likely this teapot was on sale at Marshall’s.

2.  Cat Oven Mitts

At this point, the fact that my mom buys me cat stuff has become sort of a joke, so I think she was kidding with this one.  Still if you can avoid anthropomorphizing, these oven mitts are handy AND adorable!

3.  Very Large Fall Looking Cat

My mom got me this cat, also from Marshall’s I think, because it looks sort of like Rotten Ralph who was my favorite when I was a kid.  That’s pretty sweet mom, and it also shows that you know something about me other than the fact that I like cats (I also like books about cats).  Nonetheless, the fall looking cat is sort of terrifying.  And as you can see below, my actual cat is not a fan.

4.  This Thing

Um.  If you know what this is, please tell me.

5.  Cat Stationary

“Hold on a second, let me take down that crucial number on my cat stationary here…”  I say that nearly every single day.   

The cat stationary is in some ways the worst offender because I think overall it is the subtle cat lady things that really send you off the deep end, like when you start having cat pens, and cat stationary.  Anyway, another reason I posted this picture is so that everyone could see I use my cat stationary to play Scrabble and this is a game where I very obviously had a bingo and kicked ass. 

Maybe my mom wiill read this blog and see this particular part and realize I like Scrabble too.  Maybe then I could get some sweet Scrabble cufflinks or a new board…

PS: I love you mom!

Tags: cat stuff, Cats, My Mom