The Grand Tour

When I was little, my godmother took me on an exclusive tour of the White House. I got to experience sights that people would not normally get to see on White House tours, she told me. I got to stand at the Meet the Press podium, grinning my gap-toothed smile. I got to see the entrance to the kitchen where the chef told me that Bill Clinton loved cheeseburgers more than anything.

This tour is going to be very underwhelming in comparison, I’m afraid. No former chef to former president Clinton makes an appearance in this tour – merely my kitten, Olive. Actually, Olive plays the role of tour guide; I, the role of photographer. Olive does not have the manual skill to operate a camera and lacks my steadiness of hand.

This tour is of my apartment, which is the basement of a house that is not white, but minty-green in color. A furious owl guards the property.

Our entrance is marked with a creaky screen door that blows open and closed in the wind. Beside the entrance is a smaller door which leads to a place that I have named “The Chokey.”

Olive laments her inability to turn the doorknob.

From the entrance, we have a delightful view of the mausoleum in the driveway, accompanied by its mistress the Guillotine, both of which seem to have been inching closer and closer to the door since our arrival. I hear that the landlords put on an extravagant show at Halloween.

You might notice a tiny guillotine to the  right of the mausoleum.

Inside the apartment, we have a wall of books and lots of anthropomorphic animal pictures by Michael Sowa and Louis Wain. The futon is rock-solid and the glass coffee table is a surface that Olive frequently attempts to dive through it, certain that it is a portal to another realm.

A construction worker once described this area as "groovy."

I write at a desk in the corner when Dave isn’t using the area to compose electronic music, but I couldn't take a single clear picture of it. Eventually, I intend to turn a closet in the kitchen into a writing nook where I can be a writing hermit. I also intend to install wall-to-wall Christmas lights on the ceiling pipes. Angelina the pitcher plant continues to thrive in the windowsill.

I finally have a bookcase large enough to contain my personal collection.

Olive has a cat-nook in the bookcase that she likes to think of as a treat depository. Her main goal in life is to acquire as many Greenies cat treats in her mouth as possible until her immaculate incisors fall out.

Olive sometimes sleeps here on her back with her legs straight up in the air.

I refer to this lamp as “the cocoon of the giant moth” or, alternatively, “the mummy.”

Olive has taken over many parts of the apartment, including the desk chair and the inside of the ceramic fruit bowl.

Olive territory.

Our kitchen is very utilitarian. Usually every surface is marred with borscht. Empty teacups and sticky, hollowed grapefruits are strewn across the counters. I tidied it up to give you an illusion, dear reader.

The fruit bowl, when not filled with browning bananas and granny smith apples, also serves as a container for Olive’s body. It has become her favorite cat bed, the only bed she can’t rip with her teeth. She cowers in the fruit bowl when we try to remove her from the kitchen table by the scruff.

This is our bathroom, complete with an unconventionally placed mirror-cabinet.

Sorry if I'm being invasive.

Alas, I have run out of apartment.

Communicating With Cats

I love you, but I also want to eat you.

I once read that cats have the I.Q. of a two-year-old child. That’s fine with me until they begin acting like a two-year-old child. Like many toddlers, my kitten Olive tends to think that all attention is good attention and all repetitive actions are a game. We’re trying to train Olive not to jump on the table when we are cooking and eating, not to bite, and not to claw the tiny ottoman into to a pile of glistening, red polyester fibers.

Yesterday morning when Dave got out of the shower, Olive latched onto his ankle with the force of a small, furry predator. Innocent, zealous ankle-licking quickly transformed into an impulse to devour Dave’s flesh. Claws and teeth were unleashed and Dave gave her a stern talking-to. For some reason, a freshly-showered Dave really whets her appetite. Perhaps she has the archetypical paradox of loving us, yet wanting to eat us.

Shortly after, we found ourselves huddling around my laptop asking the Google how to train cats. This led to a Wiki-How or Ask.Com page about communicating with cats, complete with a how-to video. (Not that we aren't experts in speaking cat.) Soon we were immersed in the world of translating meows with a phrasebook and deciphering meaningful feline body language.

We learned that a low, deep MRRRRooooowww is a sign of displeasure and a high Rrrrrooooowww! is an expression of terror. Subtle differences in the angles and movements of the tail may reveal anxiety, excitement, and aggression.

The subject of clawing and biting was most important to us, so we scrolled down. The article informed us that “a cat will drive his/her claws in and out of you as a sign of happiness or playfulness.” It continued to say, “Either way your cat knows and loves you.” The phrase “drives his/her claws in and out of you” brings to mind more of a stabbing motion with adamantium claws. I’m actually quite glad that my cat doesn’t know and love me that much. I considered editing the article so that it would be less stupid, but then I realized that ninety people already did.

His body language indicates that he knows and loves you.

As far as disciplining a fighting, biting kitten goes, we were advised to shake cans of pennies at her, squirt her with a spray bottle of water, and pick her up by the scruff of her neck and growl in her face like a bear. I have many spray bottles lying around but they are all full of caustic vinegar. “That’ll show her,” thought I.

The idea behind the penny can and spray bottle is that you sneak up on your criminal kitty, catch her in the act, and assault her with loud noises and a shower. We don’t have any cans to put pennies in, but we do have a huge glass fish full of spare change that is Olive's best friend. We considered turning the fish against her and shaking it in her face when she claws the desk chair.

Since the fish is always in the room, whenever she considers leaping onto the table to knock off a plate of poached eggs, she would look back and think, “I can’t do this now. The fish is watching me. The fish is always watching me…”

Today we dropped her into her cardboard carrier and brought her to the veterinarian. The entire car ride was accompanied by the seething sounds of a screaming kitten. At the office, we scooped her out onto a cold steel table. The veterinarian stuck things in her ears and poked around her eyes. He told us that our kitten has conjunctivitis and that there’s only a 95% chance of recovery. Then he said that some cats get a strain of the virus that never goes away and they walk around for fifteen years with trailing eye mucus behind them like hairy snails.

“Any tips for teaching a kitten not to bite?” I asked.

“You’re not encouraging it, are you?” he asked. “My brother used to play tug-of-war with his cat, and now the cat is insane.”

“I don’t think so,” I answered.

“I would pick her up by the scruff of her neck,” the vet said, snatching Olive up by the neck-skin. “And I would shake her and say, ‘Good kitties don’t bite' in a sterner voice than I’m speaking in now. Because that’s what a mother cat would do if Olive bit. The mother would pick her up by the neck... and throw her.”

The vet decided that today Olive would get a rabies shot. Olive panicked and looked for an emergency exit as the veterinarian produced an enormous syringe and wiped an alcohol pad across her back. She desperately moved towards the carrier, probably trying to communicate something to us through meows and body language: “Okay guys, I’ll get in the carrier! I love the carrier! Look at me! I want to get inside of the carrier now…”

The vet called in his assistant, who grabbed Olive by the scruff of her neck and, once again, began to shake her.

“The kitten might cry a little,” the veterinarian said as he plunged the syringe into her back. Once again, the kitten screamed. I quite nearly screamed myself.

When the vet and assistant released her, Olive stumbled towards Dave. He lifted her carefully into the cardboard carrier. I comforted her with my shrill female voice that cats love all the way to the apartment. “We’re almost home. Far away from that bad, bad man who kept shaking you and sticking needles into your skin. What a bad, mean-spirited person.”

Czech Word of the Day #49: Behind

The Remaining Teeth Bite Back

What did I ever do to you, Teeth? Is this your revenge for all of those years I didn’t floss you regularly?

At the follow-up appointment for my wisdom teeth procedure, the dentist dared me to challenge my teeth. “I have been challenging my teeth,” I said. “Yesterday I ate a sandwich.”

Since the procedure, I have been mainly eating oatmeal, cucumber soup, avocados, tomatoes, applesauce, pierogies, ice cream, melon, and pasta. Grapes turned out to be a no-no, but I had some just about every day to be sure. Then I chased them with an ibuprofen. The chocolate-caramel-pecan candies that have been tempting me from the coffee table were a terrible idea. A delicious, terrible idea. I wish I had one now.

I got adventurous when Dave came to visit me and had shrimp tacos. We had a feast of breakfast foods including pancakes, English muffins, eggs, and a rather out of place ice cream float. If I told you where we ate this feast, I would have to kill you.

Following the advice of the dentist, I ate a slice of pizza today. By the time I reached the crust, I felt certain that my swelling gums would burst through my cheeks. The prolonged toothache was subsequently followed by a headache, which led me to sleep for several hours in the evening.

I’m supposed to start rinsing my mouth with hydrogen peroxide. Somehow, putting hydrogen peroxide in my mouth seems counter-intuitive. My dad says you can also put it in your ear to prevent swimmer’s ear. I refuse to believe that this is safe.

Something About Octopi

This is the true account of what I actually believe happened during my wisdom teeth procedure on Thursday, during which I was administered Novocain and laughing gas. I recorded this account promptly after returning home from the oral surgeon. The results of the extraction are four shattered wisdom teeth that are improbably large for a person of my stature, as well as increased proficiency in the Czech language.

I’m sitting in the dentist chair. My head is lowered. The nurse takes my blood pressure. She puts a cup over my nose and tells me to breathe.

“I’m just going to numb the area,” the nurse says. She takes a Q-tip saturated with gel and spreads it onto my gums, behind my molars: First the top right, then the bottom right, then the top left, and the bottom left doesn’t feel like it got any, but maybe it just hasn’t kicked in yet?

The nurse tells me to breathe through my nose, but I don’t feel like I’m getting any air so I breathe through my mouth.

“It’s not going to work unless you breathe through your nose,” says the nurse. “It doesn’t have to be anything dramatic. Just breathe normally.”

I breathe as well as I can through my nose. The nurse puts my headphones into my ears and I scroll to the playlist I made to calm myself during the procedure. I press play. I set my iPod on my chest and settle into dizziness. The doctor comes into the room. “Is it enough? I can turn it up if you want.”

“No, it’s loud enough,” I say. When I realize he was talking about the laughing gas and not the music, I predictably laugh, as one on laughing gas laughs.

They put a jack between my lips and crank my mouth open until it unhinges like a snake’s.

“Just a little pinch,” says the doctor, ticking a needle of exaggerated size into my gum. Coolness washes over the area of injection. My gums feel like they are coated in shellac. The needle is inserted into the back of my palate and Novocain is injected into my brain. I become very sleepy, but I hold my eyes open.
My hands and feet fall asleep against my will and I begin to covertly rotate them. The doctor and the nurse turn their heads towards my feet, and I quickly freeze. They gaze back into my mouth and tell me how great I’m doing. I rotate my numbing feet. They see at the corners of their eyes and turn their heads, but I stop just in time.

The doctor takes out the drill.

“A lot of noise,” he warns me. He pounds it into my shellacked tissue. I feel pressure on my back molar and wonder if they have begun to drill the wrong tooth, but I cannot move or speak to tell them that they have read the x-rays wrong. I wonder what it will be like to chew with missing molars when they have all been removed by accident. The drilling is epic. I will write a story about this. An epic poem. No… a novel.

My body becomes inanimate, but my mind is lively. A sudden movement from the nurse drops my iPod to the ground, and as it hits the tiles it switches into random mode and plays all of the songs that I downloaded for free but didn’t actually enjoy. I mentally sink to my knees as the song mercilessly carries on. I think: “Noooooo…” Then I laugh, and it isn’t because of the laughing gas because I usually laugh at the absurdity of life. In fact, all of the things I have been laughing about are things that I would laugh at in normal circumstances. The doctor and nurse don’t know this and I suppose they are attributing my behavior to the gas. I’m worried that my movements will cause them to make a mistake and possibly exhume more teeth that I require for chewing. Who are these people and why don’t they know how to read a dental x-ray? Shouldn’t these professionals know the difference between an impacted wisdom tooth and a perfectly good molar?

I create a short cartoon depicting my feelings which will later be recorded in my novel as my eyes lull shut. Triceratopses are chomping on vegetables. T-rexes are sinking their teeth into mammals. A snail gets closed into another snail like a Russian nesting doll.

My body is slipping farther away from me and I am certain that I’m going to die. (I always think something is going to kill me; that’s what makes me so charming.) Of course it would be during a simple, routine procedure with a lame anesthetic like laughing gas. If I die now, as obvious as it would be, none of this will be recorded. This alarms me more than my impending doom.

But I’m not going to die after all, because they are now drilling on the other side. Time has skipped ahead with the music that I don’t enjoy.

“Halfway done,” the doctor announces.

“You’re doing great,” says the nurse.

My lips are not wide enough and the doctor puts some device that is usually used to wax automobiles between them to stretch them out forever. They ripple in every direction and my jaw cracks in half.

So I live after all, but what if I don’t remember? It could be like a vivid dream that I forget when I fall back asleep. I think of something about octopi which makes me laugh, and I tell myself to remember the octopi. Remember the octopi.

The doctor puts the drill to the fourth tooth and I begin to moan, but the doctor and nurse are conversing.

“And then he was arrested on the way to the hospital,” says the doctor. I cry out to alert them that area was not numbed properly, but I sound like a baby elephant.

“Can you feel that?” says the nurse.

“She doesn’t like that,” says the doctor.

I suddenly and reluctantly black out. I forget something about octopi. Maybe I’m dying.

But I open my eyes and they are cleaning up. My nose is released from the cup. My torso is elevated by the chair. I’m not listening to music anymore. My iPod has begun to play my Czech language tapes. I laugh, and it is not because of the laughing gas, but the Czech language tapes. To make sure this is understood, I begin to explain that my iPod fell and that random things had been playing throughout the process. My voice sounds muffled and I’m not sure he can understand me. I feel like I’m wearing a retainer.

“It’s not music. It’s Czech language tapes,” I explain. My body is still out of my control, so I rotate my wrists and ankles some more.

“Are you… going on a trip to Czechoslovakia?” he asks.

“Yes, but it isn’t called Czechoslovakia anymore. After it ceased to be a communist state it peacefully divided into the Czech Republic and Slovakia. They’re two separate countries now.”

The doctor has no idea what I’m saying.

The nurse leads me into another room and gets me some apple juice and a glorified ibuprofen.

Supposedly Dead Plant Miraculously Revives Itself After Three Weeks

I went to take the weekly photographs of my budding carnivorous plant terrarium, and was bewildered to see new growth in the plant that I supposed was wilted and decomposing. I am delighted to inform the world that this deceptive plant has resurrected overnight. I am overjoyed.

The plant which has been unquestionably alive for the past three weeks is thriving, as usual, but I find myself wondering if it was a Venus flytrap all along. I could easily see the leaves turning into hungry little mouths in the near future.

I’ve been reading up on carnivorous plants. When one of my mother’s friends learned of my endeavors she sent me a magazine article from Smithsonian magazine about endangered Venus flytraps growing in the wilds of North and South Carolina. Colonial folks exported them to Europe as a curiosity, and the English named them “tipitiwitchets.”

Charles Darwin imported some Venus flytraps from the Carolinas and devotedly fed them cheese and egg whites. Thomas Jefferson, while living in France, sent away for some flytraps to impress the Parisian ladies. Empress Josephine kept them in her garden at Chateau Malmaison. The magazine attributes the plant’s name to a British botanist called John Ellis, while other sources attribute its name to a dirty, dirty man punning on female anatomy. (Anybody seen the movie Teeth?)

There is apparently a popular misconception that the American colonists were all amateur art historians and compared the structure of the leaf to the clam shell in the Birth of Venus by Botticelli. This gives me the idea to paint a beautiful naked women emerging from the open mouth of a Venus flytrap, hiding her shame. I offer this idea to anyone who wouldn’t destroy it as I would.

Bringing the stunted plant back to life was but one miracle. I planted a bean teepee over our septic tank, and the leaves around the poles have been sprouting and sprawling for quite some time. There is nothing remarkable about this. As of this morning, a dozen other bean plants sprouted under the bean tent. I’m not sure what to make of it. I didn’t plant any seeds there.

When I was little, I went to my friend Sara’s house wile she helped her mom plant a bean teepee. Sara informed me that the teepee would grow large enough for her family to camp in and they would spend the entire night picking beans off the walls and eating them.

Unfortunately, our industrial strawberry plant was not bestowed with miracles. It looks rather sickly after a week of rain and overcast. The corporate garden gnome hasn’t responded to my e-mails or phone calls. Why can’t we just plant real strawberries like normal people? I will not provide an image to support this observation, as I do not want to sully my blog with its rotting leaves. Instead, feast your eyes on these pleasantly striated sliced red onions.

The Wisdom of Youth

While de-cluttering my living space I found a drawer of my early journals among the plush snowmen and worn out pairs of sneakers. Sitting cross-legged between a burlap sack of old shoes and a pair of lime green Rollerblades I flipped eagerly through the notebooks discovering early traces of my brilliance. I believe this journal, from 1996, to be a key moment in my personal and professional development. I share my findings here in hopes that my prodigious wisdom will progress mankind as a whole.

February 5, 1996

I ate a Banana a couple of times.

February 6, 1996

I cleaned my rome and I hid it under my bed.

February 7, 1996

I am a happy tooth because I get flost every day.

February 13, 1996

Gess wut song is stuc in my hed

Mow mow mow mow mow mow mow mow mow mow mow mow

February 16, 1996

On vacation, I am going to Mikdonalds.

February 28, 1996

I am a sad tooth because I bo not flos. I bo not brush. I bo not ete good food. I ete candey.

March 4, 1996
Over the weekend I played with Sara. I played with babby sistar Kely. I played with another babby sistar Kely.

March 14, 1996
If I were a kite I would fly the rest of my life.

March 15, 1996
I wish shamrocks were a food.

March 19, 1996
My fren Sara gets happy at me sumtimes.

Merch 21, 1996
If I were a raddit I could hop withowt falling. I could ete caris. I wont haff to ete Foods.

April 15, 1996
If I were the sun I could live in the sky.
I wuod be yellow.
I wuod get very hot.
I could turn into the moon.

April 29, 1996
I throw up.

May 2, 1996
My mother is a special person. She is special to me because she pulls my teeth out.

June 3, 1996
Saras sistr throw a big rock at me.

June 4, 1996
Were going on a feeld trip. I think I’m going to see Bears.

June 27, 1996
I’ve ben akting like a horse.

The second notebook, produced two years later in Mrs. Porter’s third grade class, was from a far less prolific period. I sketched the blueprints of an automatic flyswatter, somewhat resembling a catapult with wheels. I also expressed a desire to own a dog that is half Maltese and half macaroni and cheese.

Adventures in Carnivorous Planting

Over the past few months something in me has been craving the companionship of a carnivorous plant. Following this powerful and probably fleeting whim I purchased a Bug Biting® Plant Terrarium Set. The set included one dormant Venus Flytrap, one dormant pitcher plant, a bag of soil, a bag of moss, a smaller bag of soil, and a terrarium.

A Venus Flytrap is a leafy green mouth with sharp pointy teeth that lures insects in with a sweet fragrance and promises of sexual favors. Sometimes they sing songs that are so irresistible to a fly’s discerning tympanic membrane that the fly willingly submits to its own consumption. When the delicious insect rustles the sensitive hairs inside the mouth, the jaws snap shut like a bear trap. The fly is chewed, swallowed, and digested to produce second and third heads for this hydra-like creature.

The pitcher plant is a photosynthesizing pelican of death. It looks innocent on the outside. A passing insect cannot help but imagine it going to church and sitting in a pew full of calla lilies and daffodils (except for cobra lilies, which look something like the Loch Ness monster rearing her head from your garden.) Insects are attracted to its succulent puckering lips. Once a fly enters the mouth, the trapdoor closes and the fly whizzes down a waterslide into a pool of quicksand from which they can never escape.

The terrarium provides the plants with enough humidity to replicate the swampy conditions they have come to love, while simultaneously preventing the consumption of nearby houseplants.

Now that I had learned a bit about the plants, I felt ready to fill my terrarium with carnivorous flora. Step one of the planting process brought with it many confusion questions like Where are the plants? and Which side of the terrarium do I plant into? The directions indicated that the carnivorous plants were hibernating in the smaller bag of soil. In the smaller bag I found two clumps of dirt. Upon closer inspection, one clump of dirt had leaves and the other had roots. I could not tell which one was the pitcher and which one was the flytrap, but if I patiently wait long enough I suppose one will grow teeth. The plants looked nothing like the diagrams, nor did they resemble the familiar images provided by Crash Bandicoot.

I woke up my mother with a dormant carnivorous plant in either hand asking her which side was up. Thanks to the deterioration of her visual capacities, I was forced to make an educated guess. After filling what I thought was the base of the terrarium with a layer of soil and a layer of moss, I inserted the dormant beasts into the moss.

See the two dark clumps in the moss? Aren't they adorable?

After a long day of 90 degree weather and fierce sunshine there is little to indicate if I planted my babies upside-down.