Ghost Kitties: The Hypoallergenic Pet

It's Halloween all month long, and you know what that means: it's time to get SPOOKY SPOoky spooky spooky ("Cha-Cha Slide" beat plays in the distance)...

Cha-cha real smooth. (Source)

Alright, let's go to work. 

As I've probably mentioned in previous blatherings, I live in a house once owned by my great grandparents with my wife (Kelsey) and my best friend (Cade). That's three semi-rational adults living together under one roof (to say nothing of the cat, two dogs, a bearded dragon, and about a hundred billion house centipedes for some unholy reason). So it's pretty peculiar that, within a month of moving into the house, we all reported the same experience.

We were all seeing cats that weren't there.

For me, it started when we were first moving in. I was unpacking art supplies in the study when, out of the corner of my eye, I saw a black and white cat, much like the actual black and white cat we have (Jasper). Except we hadn't moved Jasper in yet. 

In the blink of an eye, the not-quite-Jasper was gone. 

This sort of thing kept happening, both before and after we moved Jasper in. I'd glimpse a smaller black and white cat slinking around a corner or dashing across the hall, always at the very edge of my vision. I mentioned it to Kelsey and Cade, who said they'd seen something similar, down to the coloration. 

It wasn't long after we'd moved in that I had the dream.

I'd only experienced sleep paralysis once before. I was a freshman in college, sharing a room with Cade in an old funeral-home-turned-student-housing-unit. Our beds were both bunked, and our desks fit neatly beneath the raised mattresses. Because I'm the human equivalent of a brown bat (they sleep 19.9 hours a day, which is #goals), I was snoozing in my bunk with the lights on while Cade studied at her desk below.

I had been asleep for a bit, and then suddenly, I was awake. Or, I thought I was. It was difficult to tell, because I could see the edge of my pillow and the wall beyond it, but when I tried to turn my head to check on Cade, my neck didn't respond to my instructions. My instinct was to ball up like a frightened armadillo (they sleep 18 hours a day, by the way), but my limbs didn't so much as twitch. It was as though a lead blanket had settled over me, trapping me against the mattress, smothering me. 

My heart began to race. I tried to call for Cade, but my voice was locked somewhere deep in my chest. By now, I was sure I was awake, and that something terrible had happened to me. This was all because of how often I cracked my neck, I was sure of it. I must have done permanent damage to my spine. Oh, what a fool I'd been!

But then my hand clenched. In a matter of seconds, control returned to my body. I'd been spared. 

(You would think that would have taught me not to crack my neck so often, even if that wasn't the cause of the temporary paralysis. You would think that, but you'd be super heckin' wrong about my capacity to learn things or to correct problematic behavior.)

Eight years (dear gawd, eight years) later, sleep paralysis came for me again, but in a much weirder way. I was sleeping on the edge of the bed with my back turned to my wife, because human contact is for chumps, and somehow... I split. One part of me remained in bed, paralyzed. The other part sat up.

You know those waking dreams you have, where reality warps in your not-awake, not-asleep mind? For a brief moment, you're part of the waking world and the sleeping one at the same time, and those worlds haze together, like water and oil might when they're whisked together, straining for inevitable separation. That's where I was: aware that I was asleep, but aware that I was awake as well.

And I was very aware that my body was immobile in the bed, and my dreaming self was heading out the door to go to the bathroom. And I was very concerned that my dreaming self was trying to pee, which might cause my physical self to wet the bed as a 25 year old woman.

Look, my brain and my body have historically maintained a terrible relationship, so this was a real possibility.

Fortunately, my pee-destined dream self never reached the bathroom.

As I (meaning my consciousness for the sake of this encounter) entered the hall, I saw something move at the opposite end. Now, there's a mirror at the far end of the hall, which is great for scaring the crap out of yourself at O dark thirty when you think some ugly little goblin-person broke into your house just to stink-eye you and then it turns out to be your own reflection.

But I didn't see myself in the mirror, and the thing that was moving was in front of it.

A huge ginger tomcat was crossing from the living room, headed toward the study, where most of the cat sightings had occurred. He was bulky and had a stub-tail, giving him a lynx-like appearance. 

He saw me an instant after I saw him, and he immediately arched up. His eyes were bright disks reflecting some light that I couldn't see, and I was transfixed by them. My heart - the real one beating in the adjacent room - began to pick up its pace, and I felt the tickle of adrenaline in my chest. It was as though I were staring down a real, living intruder, not merely a figment, or even a simple animal that had wandered in through a window or unlatched door.

Then, I was no longer in the hall. I was back in my body, but I was frozen, just like I'd been back in college. My eyes were open and my heart was thumping and I knew I'd been dreaming but it had been such a touchable, unsettling dream. It took me a few minutes to shake off the invisible shackles. I woke up Kelsey with my panting, and told her I'd had a nightmare.

After that, we all started seeing the ginger cat around. Or, maybe we'd been seeing him before. But that's the thing about memory... It can be just as fleeting as a spirit.

I don't know what we're seeing in this old, old house. Most likely, we keep expecting to see the real cat that lives here, and so our brains conjure up the image of a real cat, even if it's not quite the right cat. So much of our perception is dependent on expectation. 

That said, I like to think that on the other side of the veil, there's a ginger cat who tells a story about seeing a ghost human in his hallway one night. I bet his cat buddies think he's crazy.

Certified Financial Panic

It always happens at the end of the month. I look at my bills, and I look at the number in my checking account, and I run through a series of mental acrobatics.

If this bill has a grace period of five days but this one is a firm deadline, maybe I can pay the other one on payday and delay the first bill until the others have cleared and then pay it with my credit card, but only if the credit card bill clears in the first place... 

Then, because I just can't help myself, I throw in some emotional nuance. 

Of course, I wouldn't be in this position if I hadn't bought that one coffee last week, like some kind of Uncle Moneybags. And if I was really serious about saving, I would have dumped Netflix ages ago, but I'm a lazy, terrible, addle-brained consumer. This is my just desserts for being so confident and buying new glasses. What a fool I am. A fool with vastly improved vision and really nifty glasses.

Yeah, a lot of it is self-pitying and exaggerated. It wasn't just the one coffee. It was several coffees, and several weekends of going out to eat, and taking the puppies to get their vaccinations somewhere other than the specifically low-cost clinic (because I'm a little scared of that clinic, but maybe for the sake of paying bills on time, I need to buck up). Little budgeting things that I should keep an eye out for, and yet, feel somehow indignant that I have to watch out for them.

And that's because I've never had to worry about my spending before.

I'm privileged as heck, and while I try to be aware of it, I'm often straight up oblivious. Take last night's dinner, for instance. I'd baked some frozen fish sticks, and Kelsey asked for ketchup for them. I teased her for it, and we did a bit about me being unfamiliar with the condiments of peasant food. I hadn't grown up on frozen fish sticks, after all. I'd had grilled salmon with quinoa and fresh roasted vegetables, not ketchupy Kroger-brand fried pollock.

It's a silly example, but there was a ring of truth when Kelsey commented on how I hadn't grown up playing jump rope with the poverty line. My childhood needs were always met, with room to spare. Sure, money was discussed, and in the Scottish tradition of thriftiness, I was taught to carefully police my spending from an early age. But the stakes were low. An over-expenditure once in a while would never result in coming up short on the electric bill.

My parents paid for my college. My scholarships were the equivalent of a part-time job in terms of funding, but I never had to work that job, and I never had debt. After graduation, I didn't have loans lunging for my throat. I immediately got a good paying job, and began to save money, and sock away retirement funds, and never once felt like cash was tight. 

I never blinked at the end of the month as my automatic payments pulled. I knew they'd clear, and I'd be fine, and I'd not have to regret the beer I had with friends the week before, or the new sweater I'd purchased that month to beef up my winter wardrobe.

But I can't live like that now. Which leads me to the other invasive thought that hits me in the tail end of each month:

Things wouldn't be like this if I had just sucked it up and stayed at my old job. 

With that thought comes a tsunami of guilt. Guilt about my depression and anxiety, guilt about not being the pillar of financial security I thought I could be for my wife and my roommate, guilt about not being strong enough to survive a simple office job.

Except it wasn't a simple office job, and if I had stayed, I know for a fact I would have died. For once, I'm not exaggerating. 

That understanding is all well and good, but it's not enough to chase away the guilt, because part of the guilt comes from my new job, in which I'm studying to be a Certified Financial Planner.

Which sounds hilarious, considering I've gone from "If I maintain this level of contribution, I'm ahead of schedule for my basic retirement needs!" to "My retirement plan is to work until I can no longer physically manage it, then wander into the woods to perish, like they did in the old days." 

I'm neck-deep in these CFP classes, and it's no secret that I'm terrified of them. I want to be good at this. I want to help people plan their futures and find security. But I feel lost... I didn't study business, and standard education skimps on important practical subjects like taxes and finance. Not only that, but I can't shake a sense of bitterness about the whole thing. It feels like the world is collapsing... what's the point of portfolio management when the apocalypse is on the doorstep?

Again, an exaggeration... I hope. But the feeling remains. Not just for me, I imagine, but for many Millennials, particularly the 63% with more than $10,000 of student debt. We're supposed to be in our accumulation stage - that is, slowly paying off debt, but also contributing to retirement plans, and developing savings. But on top of the greater debt load, we're earning 20% less than our parents at the same stage of life. That 20% would look great in a savings account or an IRA, or as down payment on a house, or as a loan payment.

But it's not there. With 20% less to work with, it's hard to justify putting cash toward a future that looks increasingly, uh, nuclear. Small wonder ours is the most depressed generation on record. Even our humor is tainted by a virulent nihilism. 

For more oh no, webcomicname.com is a treasure chest.

I have to remind myself, though, that everything changes. I won't always be doing mathnastics (like gymnastics, but mathematical) at the end of the month. I'm capable of generating change, and so are you. I got myself out of a personal deathtrap job, and things got psychologically and physically better for me. I made a change, and made an improvement, even if it wasn't an immediate one, or a financial one (at least for now). 

Despite the odds stacked against us (I say us as in Millennials, but it's applicable to us as in humans, too), we do have power, and we do have a future, as uncertain as it may seem. For now, it's a matter of finding wealth in a non-financial sense. Reach out to your friends and your family. Pursue your passions. Protect your mental health. Change things for the better, even if they're little itty bitty things about yourself.

I'm going to do my best to overcome my financial panic, and to learn to be a planner. And if I'm not in the right place to be a planner right now, I'll take other steps to get there, or find another way to contribute to the wealth management firm I work at. 

It's all about doing your best, because most of the time, that's all you've got. And that's OK. And that's enough.

Bad at Faces

My college roomie (Cade) and I bonded during our freshman year by playing Kingdom Hearts, alternating our mental breakdowns, and watching lots of shows and movies. I'd never been all that into TV, especially the not-cartoons kind, so Cade gave me a visual media baptism, for which I was deeply grateful. It turns out that I like TV.

One show we watched was about a butt-kicking special agent-type woman. The structure of the show alternated between the past and the present, showing the adult woman on modern missions, and then her younger self (I assumed from the context) training in what was basically spy school. I was having trouble following the plot, but things really got messy when present protagonist busted into past protagonist's school.

"What kind of convoluted time travel twist is this?" I exclaimed in disbelief.

Cade was understandably confused. "What do you mean? Character A is rescuing Character B. Where did you get time travel from that?"

And that's when Cade had to explain to me that everything I thought was happening in the story was a total lie. There were no past/present shenanigans, and the people who I thought were the same person (slender build, light skin, long dark hair) were actually entirely separate characters.

"They're different races," Cade told me, baffled by just how lost I'd been. 

And they were. When I saw them side by side, I realized one person was taller and had a different eye shape. As soon as they were apart, even though I knew their eyes were different, I couldn't envision either face. Their actresses could be replaced, and I'd never know the difference.

Soon after this (and several other) incidents, I heard neurologist Oliver Sacks (my idol and potential name inspiration for a future child; may he rest in peace) talking on a podcast about a neurological condition that inhibited facial recognition, and suddenly, things started making sense to me. My years of shyness, of describing my first friend as "the girl with the hair," of my mistaking teachers for each other, of losing the names of people I saw every week at church... All this time, I'd assumed I wasn't paying enough attention, or was rude without even trying to be. 

I had a name for what one of the most frustrating aspects of myself: face-blindness (AKA prosopagnosia, but prosopamnesia may better describe my particular struggle).

When I tell people that I'm face-blind, it tends to cause confusion. The most common question goes kind of like this: "So, you can't see faces? It's just blank skin?" To which I answer something like: "No, it's less like Figure A..."

Figure A

"... and more like Figure B."

Figure B

Except, maybe not as creepy. I can see eyes and noses and mouths. The problem is, once I look away, they are gone from my memory. I cannot picture the person I just saw, and I definitely can't imagine their head at a new angle. I compensate by describing their features in my mind as I look at them (like, "She has a mole above her lip and her eyebrows look like check marks"), but that's a weak fix.

The problem with poor facial recognition is that humans have evolved to rely on that ability to the extent that faces are used as a memory tool for keeping track of the other humans you know. Let's think of your mind like an office:

Source

Yes, exactly. There's a section of your brain office that keeps track of the people you encounter. In this analogy, when you see a face, your little office workers open their filing cabinets, find the file with the matching face on the tab, and grant you access to things like that person's name, biographical information, and shared memories. This doesn't happen for other features, like the voice. You get a slight delay with voices as your workers search their cabinets. No, faces act as a special memory shortcut, and seem to be uniquely tied to recognition and recall. [Source]

Well... for most folks. For people with face-blindness (and there's a spectrum, by the way), the files are missing that useful face tab feature. In fact, there may be no stored information about faces at all. This makes for a messy office environment. When a face-blind person sees a face, their brain office might look a little like this as the workers paw haplessly through unmarked files and try to gain identity clues from much less efficient details, like voice, hair, and stature:

Source

Couple that with anxiety and the following scene may occur:

Source

Luckily, my face-blindness isn't too severe. I usually recognize friends, family, and myself, if I'm expecting to see them/me (though I did recently startle myself by glimpsing my reflection and thinking it was a stranger stink-eyeing me in a McDonald's). People with exaggerated or unusual facial features stick in my mind a bit better as well. Exposure helps, but I require quite a bit of it before anything stays.

Unfortunately, even with fairly mild face-blindness, I'm in a job that often necessitates quick facial recognition, and that's part of why face-blindness has been on my mind so much lately. Assigned seating at school and working in a call center worked in my favor in the past, but now I'm sitting at the front desk of a small business that has a number of clients in a similar age range who could drop in at any time. I've had panic attacks during networking events because I'm so terrified of accidentally reintroducing myself to someone I already know and offending them. Not only that, but because of the intrinsic relationship between facial recognition and semantic memory, I have a harder time coming up with information about the people that I should know. [Source]

I'm nervous about the repercussions this may have for my future as a writer as well. Because I've self-published, I need to handle most/all of my marketing, which, to be honest, involves a lot of schmoozing. I can't afford to let my face-blindness make me shy in settings where I must promote myself or be lost in the crowd. I also can't afford to insult important connections because I can't tell the potential agent I've been chatting with apart from a complete stranger wearing the same blouse.

I could certainly have it worse. There are even celebrities I recognize pretty consistently, though I wonder if that has to do with their celebrity status in the first place (do certain facial traits correlate with fame, either because they're more attractive or more memorable than most?). I question whether I even have this admittedly self-diagnosed condition sometimes.

Until, of course, I lose sight of my wife in the grocery store and wonder if I'll ever see her again.

The solution for now is to work on my other memory tools and, as uncomfortable as this makes me, to be forthright with my acquaintances. My boss has encouraged me to note my face-blindness to people who I may meet again. The risk here is that I'll be taken advantage of (fat chance I'll pick an assailant out of a lineup, for example!), but in my business circles, it's a risk I need to take. 

All this to say: next time I try to introduce myself to you for the eighth time, please know I'm trying my best, even though my best is a cartoon office fire in my brain-pan.

Bad at Time Management

If I learned anything from seeing the Chicago production of Hamilton this weekend, it's that I should be writing like I'm running out of time. Also, that I should look into bringing back colonial-era fashion. We own two tricornes in our house. Two. My wife and I would rock the heck out of the Winter's Ball.

THE BEAN. AKA, Cloud Gate. Which is a baller name. For Chicago's giant bean mirror.

OK, first, yes, my whole family spent the weekend in Chicago, trotting up and down the Magnificent Mile and eventually seeing a Sunday matinee of that revolutionary musical, Hamilton. I could rave about that for hours. In fact, I already have, mostly in the car ride back. It's a show I want to see over and over again, hunting for the nuances, charting the perfect usage of light and timing, melting at every spectacular segment of sound. It's the best kind of overwhelming.

I'm haunted by the character of Alexander Hamilton, and by his modern day vessel, Lin-Manuel Miranda. There is a dogged, ferocious ambition about them both. I'm jealous of their genius. I can't help but reflect on my own ambitions, and I question whether I have the smarts or the personality to exact the kind of change I'd like to bring to the world. Who will tell my story? More significantly, will I even leave a story worth telling?

"Why do you write like you're running out of time?" Aaron Burr asks of the bulldoggish postwar Hamilton, who churned out essays at a breakneck pace. The answer is obvious: Hamilton is running out of time. We all are. 

OK, I'll take my foot off the gas of the Existential Express. Still, the thought lingers. Am I doing enough? Is the quantity and quality of my writing sufficient? What about my other creative endeavors, like art and music? I could be doing so much more. Right?

It all comes down to time management. As you may have guessed from the title of this entry, it's not my forte. I can't seem to concentrate on one thing at a time, so my way of getting things done is this chaotic, round-robin method of jumping from one project to another, minutes, sometimes even seconds apart.

Here's how my system of time management tends to shake out:

• Read a paragraph of an article about women in the financial sector
• Leap over to my blog entry (on a completely unrelated topic) to insert a photo
• Back to the article for three minutes, the first minute of which is spent rereading the paragraph from my first attempt
• Switch to reading a section of CFP homework
• Read the same page of homework three times in a row without absorbing a single concept
• Get distracted by Pokemon Go, dump inventory of pinap berries
• Google "pokemon go what the hell do pinaps do"
• Realize I've just thrown away gold in digital fruit form
• Comfort myself with a snack (but not fruit, because the wound is too fresh)
• Gaze vacantly at the article I started reading an hour ago
• Abruptly hyperfixate on designing a cover for my next novel
• Stare at a list of stock photos until my contacts dry out and begin to fuse with my corneas
• Fail to complete any of the tasks I've started because my eyes are too blurry to see the screen anymore
• Somehow manage to play Breath of the Wild for two hours anyway

All that nincompoopery, and I didn't even accomplish anything. Yeah, a lot of the bouncing around has to do with my super-intense-focus-on-one-thing or inability-to-focus-on-anything duality. But it also has to do with my anxiety (it always comes back to anxiety, doesn't it?).

I have so much I want and need to do that I find myself overwhelmed at the prospect of prioritizing my actions. There's the matter of keeping the house in order, fixing the little quirks that pop up in it, preparing dinner, etc. Then there's classwork, which is partially scheduled, partially on my own. Then there's writing, both fiction and this blog, and all the marketing that goes with it (that I know I'm not devoting enough resources to as it is!). There's painting commissions, and my interest in writing/producing music with Kelsey, and maybe putting together a podcast. There's networking events for my job. There's exercising. There's puppies. Oh gawd, are there puppies.

I've decided there are two things that I need: a schedule and a kick in the pants. 

In terms of a schedule, I'll have to go against my wacky-inflatable-arm-flailing-tubeman nature and box out my hours. A few things I have in mind for weekdays:

• Use my lunch break at work for reading homework
• Get in my daily PoGo on my way home from work (of course I'm still playing, even after the pinap mishap)
• Either walk the pups or spend some more time reading once I'm home
• Attend my online class when it's scheduled. When it's not, use that time to study or write
• Prepare dinner. If someone else prepares dinner, do some writing or housework

After dinner, it's pretty much a crapshoot. It's generally either bedtime or watch-some-shows-as-a-family time, both of which I'm down for. 

Or...

I could write like I'm running out of time. 

Maybe the Hamiltonian kick-in-the-pants is too much for me to feasibly maintain. Still, I'd like to try. I want to make a mark. I want to produce stories about people who don't get to see themselves in stories very often. I want to bring sunshine to the lives of my family, friends, and readers. I want to give animals good lives. I want to take action against social and political evil. I want to succeed as a financial planner so I can make the future a little safer, a little less scary for other families. 

I want to be good.

Also, I want to hear your suggestions. Organized people: how do you schedule your days? Do you have any tips? I'M IN NEED OF ASSISTANCE.

Alrighty, my scheduled writing time is running out. Until next time!

(P.S.: If you need a kick in the pants, I challenge you to participate in the July Camp NaNoWriMo! Let's get writing!)

Happy Birthday, You Potatoes with Eyes

A simple fact of life: when you get pets, you get weird. Sometimes, you get sharing-licks-of-candy weird, or dress-the-dog-in-a-sailor-suit weird, or talk-in-a-specific-voice-to-denote-you're-speaking-on-behalf-of-your-animal weird. Often, it's all those variations of weird and more.

It's no surprise, then, that Kelsey and I threw a party for our puppies, Billie and Binx, on their first birthday last Sunday, complete with hand-decorated doggy cookies.

They are obviously having a wonderful time and Binx is definitely not crying in my arms.

Look, I never expected to be this kind of pet owner. I love animals, of course. Anyone who knew me growing up can attest to that. But the birthday-cookie-decorating, the puppy-sized "I heart my mummy" Halloween shirts, the way we pack our girls a "diaper bag" for every outing? Yup, we're in deep.

Kelsey and I aren't the only ones guilty of babying our two chihuahua-maltese mixes (malchis, if you're in the know). It all started with Kelsey's mother, Laura. That's right, folks, I'm blaming the mother-in-law, who shares her birthday with the dogs, and for whom I did NOT make birthday cookies. 

Billie and Binx are the only two pups from a litter belonging to Laura's dogs. Around the time of their birth, Kelsey and I had been not-too-seriously looking at shelter pups. In true lesbian fashion, we had our eyes on a sweet pitbull girl named Tulip (if you're out there, Tulip, we still love you and hope you're doing well). But two pups in the hand are worth one in the pound, right? So we agreed we'd take the puppies once they'd been weaned.

And so began the messages, sent on behalf of the puppies to their "parents." Little "good morning, Mommies!" texts with pictures of the hairy potatoes cupped in Laura's hands, that kind of thing. We took it one step further and essentially did a pregnancy-reveal photo shoot with our dogs-to-be's tiny, girlish collars.   

The gay agenda.

My parents aren't absolved either. I've caught both Mom and Dad holding Binx to their shoulders like an infant, bobbing in that soothing, parental way, and stroking her mess of wiry fur. A couple weekends back, my parents, our newly-wed friends Luke and Alé, Kelsey, and I were hanging out at the lake, having a gay old time. We four millennials lounged on the docked deckboat, not quite ready for the chill of the early summer water. On the deck of the cabin up the hill from us, my mother paced with Binxie cradled in her arms.

"She needs grandbabies," Alé observed.

Grandbabies are going to have to wait. In fact, I wonder if the degree of our dog-doting is related to how long we're going to wait for actual babies. When I say "we," I'm also sweeping in the rest of our age bracket, who have a lower birthrate than any previous generation. 

The thing is, I can't see financial stability or affordable healthcare in my future. A huge chunk of my peers are staring toward the same grim horizon of high debt, low wages, and a hostile political climate. Young people who can naturally have children could incur financial ruin with a surprise pregnancy. Queer couples and folks facing fertility-related obstacles can't afford to try for kids even if they could maybe afford to raise them. 

Besides that, I wonder if it's even ethical to bring other human beings onto a planet that's hurtling toward an environmental meltdown. 

But I could be wrong. Maybe it's too early to assume we'll never afford a family. Maybe things on the world stage will turn back around. Before I get too gloom-and-doomy, I have to remind myself that Kelsey and I are just getting started. Even if finances and biology weren't considerations, I don't think we're emotionally prepared for actual baby-rearing. Right now, we have the freedom to work on our own creative projects, to wander off on weekend adventures without weeks of preparation, and to simply waste time on the couch playing video games. 

This is a special window of time in our lives, and my professional-grade fretting about the future isn't doing us any good. I hope someday we'll have the resources, health, and all-around stability for the mostly hairless kind of kiddo, but for now, I'm satisfied with coddling our doggos. 

Happy birthday to the ambulatory cheese curds.