Emotional Umbrella

My cats amuse me.  Both kitties are very attached to us, and delight in following my husband and I from place to place. …Except when it comes to the office.  You see, the office contains many delightfully tasty wires to gnaw on, and as such, is locked behind closed doors unless we’re in there.  And of course, the fact that it’s sometimes off limits makes it ever so enticing the rest of the time.  The boy-cat has picked up enough English to understand exactly when it’s time to leave the room, and consequently makes a break for the farthest corner under my desk at the earliest opportunity.  Then once I crawl under there to manhandle him out, he very consistently resorts to what we like to call the flop defense (this may be trademarked, although I haven’t actually seen him file the paperwork yet).  This is that mode in which wherever he is and whatever he’s doing, the slightest touch drops him to the floor in a floppy mass of purr.  And floppy masses of purr are infinitely endearing, but also infinitely difficult to pick up and/or manoeuvre.  He is aware of both of these things, which makes it the perfect action when he’s somewhere he wants to stay and doesn’t want to give us the option of being annoyed with him for it.  LOVES being removed from the office in an arduous and precarious manner.  Strange tastes, that cat.

Of course, he also has a habit of rolling our doormat over himself like it’s made of money.  Or tuna fish.  Or whatever it is a cat would most want to roll in.  He looks absolutely euphoric there, rubbing it all over his body.  We haven’t yet figured this one out.

The girl-cat is less interested in being in there than she is in making sure she’s living life on her own terms, I think.  She protests loudly when she’s moved somewhere that wasn’t her idea, even when it’s somewhere she’s happy to be.  This afternoon I was ready to move out of the office, so I tried to pick her up out of my husband’s office chair where she’d curled up, and she gave me the indignant saucer eyes and a repeated Silent Yell.  If you have not experienced the Silent Yell, let me just say that it looks much like a Normal Yell, except the sound emitted is in potentially too high of a register to be perceived by the human ear.   All I could get was a kind of light clicking sound.  Like when she’s tracking an insect.  Or swallowed an alien. It was like she was so shocked and appalled that I could be contemplating moving her that she was rendered speechless.  At any rate, today I randomly decided to just roll her into the hall instead.  Where she sat for the next hour or so, looking like she wasn’t quite certain whether she should be incensed or triumphant at this development.

Today was a fairly productive day for me, in which I did many productive things for productive reasons.  I wanted no part of the highest priority items on my to-do list, but I decided for once to just skip them and get some other stuff done rather than run away screaming.

Silent screaming, mind you.

Like somebody was trying to move me off a comfy office chair.

I am definitely not yet quite balanced out, but life continues to be much better in the absence of the Luvox.  It’s sort of like at the moment I’m living in a car with no brakes.  So as long as I’m cruising along the highway in the right direction and nothing unfortunate happens, I’m just as fine as all the other cars.  …But the moment something derails me, or pushes me off course, I’m in a crap load of trouble.  That’s pretty much my life right now.  Fine, fine, fine, BLARGH!!!!!!, fine, fine, fine.  At least there are more fines than blarghs these days.

I’m scheduled to see a new therapist tomorrow.  On the plus side, she came highly recommended.  On the down side, she came highly recommended by Dr. Douchepsychiatrist, so I have to take it with a grain of salt.  I love how at the last session, he was confused at why I wasn’t making faster progress this past year, since I seem to be willing and fairly motivated.  And I tried to bite my tongue and politely remind him that the past year has been a haze of unconscious/nauseous/unstable/anxious/suicidal medication hell.  …Which he seemed to brush off, since in his mind it still “wasn’t a significant problem.”  Yargh.  We’ve decided that my husband is going to come along to my appointment this Wednesday.  We figure it’s got to go in one of two extremes.  Either he’ll treat my husband like just as much of a brainless insignificant peon as he treats me, or he’ll be totally ingratiating towards him.  I’m not currently sure which one will make me more irate, but I’m sort of pulling for the second one on the chance that it helps us actually get somewhere with a treatment plan I can live with.  Maybe he’ll be more willing to acknowledge somebody “sane.”

Seriously, I’m making alien clicking sounds as we speak.