Le Monde de Fromage de Kate

The time just flies by! In what seems like two seconds they will:

Start looking exasperated with you…
And then…

They’ll just wave and drive away.

Take a look:

Don’t Worry; I’m Double-Jointed

Muppet Detail

I donned the bling first; Ernie and Bert were serendipitous (lurking in a box that should have contained only plain bandages).

Sarah has, for a long time now, referred to me as, “My crazy aunt,” or “My Heathen Aunt,” when speaking to her friends. It has never bothered me (unless she uses that disdainful teenager tone indicating that “I’m SOO bored – NO ONE is around!” and so on while I’m standing right next to her or I’m within earshot – and as I’ve said it’s pretty impossible NOT to be in earshot of Sarah if she’s within a square mile or so – I may be a crazy heathen but I am certainly SOMEONE!). Besides, I have always maintained deep and abiding respect for certain varieties and intensities of craziness. Just recently, however, I have grasped numerous reasons that her method of addressing me must change.

It was herding the “monkey cats” these past few weeks that triggered my epiphany. I am assisting Sarah and some of her friends as they prepare for an ensemble singing competition; I’m providing vocal coaching and accompaniment for a quintet of adolescent young ladies (it was a quartet, but the mysterious “Buyo,” who I referred to as “BoBo” – for which I was endlessly mocked even though I’m far too old and tired to remember nicknames for people I’ve yet to meet, especially when they are based on Japanese anime – whose real name is Karen (?) had recovered from her illness as of today). To compete with Sarah’s…intensity (?) as a person, you do have to be spirited, to say the least. And, OH, these are spirited young ladies. I have directed Shakespeare for junior-high aged kids, I have lectured about Shakespeare’s life to several thousand ninth graders on more than one occasion, I have taught myriad private and group voice lessons, I have coached large groups of juvenile dancers in vocal technique, I have conducted all sorts of children’s music workshops and classes, I’ve coached and judged drama competitions for high school kids, I’ve taken both my Kitten Children to the Vet AT THE SAME TIME, and NEVER, I must repeat, NEVER EVER EVER have I seen so much raw energy contained in so few small bodies. Don’t get me wrong; these girls are clever, talented and lovely, but they are WHOLLY CRAZY. And even though it is the variety of craziness for which I have high esteem, it’s just that they have it so INTENSELY and SIMULTANEOUSLY THAT I CANNOT POSSIBLY USE ENOUGH CAPITAL LETTERS TO EXPLAIN THIS PHENOMENON.

Case in point, after last week at a rehearsal at the high school I had to revise my original idiom with which I’d described the experience of working with this group. I HAD been saying it was like “herding cats.” But these young women have reached such extreme vigor in their unpredictability and in the randomness of their…”oomph” – you get one of them slightly chilled out and two others are climbing the walls – I have decided it’s like herding “monkey cats.” And don’t you TELL me they don’t exist; they are competing next week with Denes Agay’s arrangement of Old Irish Blessing at the high school solo and choir ensemble contest (FYI – if anyone has a genuine published copy of the SSA version of this piece, please let me know – it is now out of print – a story unto itself). I’m beginning to think that Play that Funky Music, White Boy may have been more apropos – and I speak from EXPERIENCE (we rehearsed at the house a few weeks ago and the “monkey cats” found the karaoke machine – they thought that song and Y.M.C.A. were good warm-ups).

Ironically, I believe they will sound lovely and relatively SEDATE when the time comes. In the meanwhile, though, I’ve had to instigate a few rules (and in these situations “rules,” per se, aren’t usually necessary). One is that they are not to touch each other. I physically stood them in their own little “spaces” at some point last week to try and encourage adherence to this policy. Somehow they still managed to violate everyone else’s personal “space” with lots of extraordinarily high-pitched squealing (just below that frequency only dogs can hear). I also became VERY adamant that it is strictly forbidden, yes, VERBOTEN, I kid you not, TO JIGGLE MY BODY FAT. I was sitting in one of those stupid plastic institutional chairs at the piano last week, with all the “monkey cats” behind me. I’d come to a tacit understanding (with myself, anyway) that I’d just ignore anything they did that was quiet and did not directly impinge on someone else’s “space” while they worked on their parts, and that they should actually practice their OWN parts when I demonstrated them. One of Sarah’s friends, who shall remain nameless (especially since haven’t any clever Japanese anime nicknames for her), who was helping hold the sheet music on the dilapidated piano in the band room, began to, rather absent-mindedly, poke my gluteus MAXIMUS with a pencil (those dumb chairs have that mysterious hole in the region of one’s coccyx). Suddenly, all of the “monkey cats” were seized by uncontrollable fits of laughter. Evidently, if you tap me with a pencil on my ample bum (RESISTING – TRYING TO ABSTAIN FROM USING CERTAIN TERMS – MUST RESIST – TRYING VAGUELY TO KEEP THIS BLOG EXPURGATED AND SOMEWHAT “FAMILY FRIENDLY” – SO MUST OH I MUST REFRAIN FROM SAYING THINGS SUCH AS “GINORMOUS ASS“). Oh, forget it – if you know me well at all you know that I was secretly thinking that whether or NOT I said it. Anyhoo, if you poke my plentiful posterior it evidently causes a delightfully jiggly chain reaction running up and down from my big ol’ butt to my huge noggin. I will endure and even participate in a great deal of humiliation for the sake of comedy, but that just crosses the line. I have a whole theory about how you live to regret the things you blithely mock when you are young and you will be CURSED by the object of your mockery (but that’s a story for another time – though I should say I did share this concept with the “monkey cats”). Then again, I am not much help. I cannot always keep my big mouth shut when it might be ever-so prudent to do so. It is MY fault that the plastic trick-or-treating bucket (inextricably present in the band room in JANUARY) shall henceforth be referred to as the “wee wee pumpkin.”

But never mind that, I digress. (COME ON – I know lots and lots of actors – SOMEONE could at least feign amazement that I’ve somehow wandered off topic…) What I really wanted to address was my anonymity. It occurred to me that as Sarah’s “crazy aunt” or “Heathen Aunt” I am provided with no other name whatsoever. Sarah’s boyfriend (of at least five months or so, I believe) did not know my real name until last week. Half of the “monkey cats” do not know my name, either, and if they do they only heard it accidentally. So today, I put my foot down. “Sarah,” said I, “Call me ‘crazy aunt Kate’ or ‘Heathen Aunt Kate!!!'” She found this amusing and countered that she should call me “Aunt Cake,” but I think that I should only accept that from relatives four-years-old or younger. I repeated my plea a number of times; we’ll see if it sinks in. I guess some might find it odd that I wasn’t lobbying for more “respect” by having her drop the “crazy” or “Heathen Aunt” and just call me “Kate,” but to me that’s not the crux of the issue. I just want the generalized terms to become specifically MINE.

This might have been a productive thing to do earlier, because, as it turns out, I am now listed in the competition paperwork as “Denes Agay,” which some of the “monkey cats” think I pronounce “Denise.” So help me, if anyone PURPOSELY jiggles my body fat any time soon, SOMEONE WILL PAY. (Yes, yes, I’m too sexy for my body fat… or something like that.) It’s just SAD. I’m jiggly and ANONYMOUS or I’m all blubbery and DENES AGAY (to be pronounced “Denise,” please).

I have, in the past, PROVEN that I am not a crazy cat lady (yet), but here’s a little piece of information that implies, perhaps, that there is hidden brilliance in my CHOICE of Kitten Children:

The favorite horses of both Alexander the Great (Bucephalos) and Julius Caesar both had atavistic mutations – extra toes.

See – great conquering world leaders of ancient history had beloved MUTANT animals. And BOTH of my Kitten Children have significant genetic mutations; they are both “authentic” tri-coloured cats – BeBe is a tortoiseshell (with a brindled coat) and Fioana is a Calico (indicating that she has the “piebald spotting gene” which allows for the big white patches of fur). This means that they both inherited an X-linked gene – the “O” gene – which causes a cat to have orange or “ginger” fur. In the case of a tri-coloured cat, they do not inherit two “O” genes, which would make them a genetically “orange” or “ginger” cat. Moreover, because of a process called “X-chromosome inactivation,” some cells activate the “O” gene, causing orange/ginger colouring, and other cells randomly activate the same position as the “O” gene on the other X chromosome. Therefore you can automatically assume that most tri-coloured cats are female (since it’s the reaction in the two heterozygous X chromosomes that cause the unusual colouring). So any male tri-coloured cats are GENUINE genetic mutants, usually sterile, because it is often gender anomalies (they sometimes are XYY or XXY instead of the “normal” male configuration of XY) that allow them to have the X-linked colouring.

Thus, either I am brilliant and should capitalize on my natural head for government/leadership and I will be extraordinarily famous, or I am a narcissistic megalomaniac and will die young, yet extraordinarily famous. It all depends on how you look at it.

I was named after Catherine “the Great” (Catherine II of Russia), but it was completely arbitrary (and my Parent’s didn’t even keep the spelling – which is fine with me – I much prefer the letter “k” and think two syllables are quite enough). So you may keep any vulgar equine-related jokes to YOURSELVES.

I received this greeting card in the mail today from PetSmart® (my last name was misspelled, but I consider anything that’s only two or so letters off to be a triumph – even when I have GIVEN it to someone letter by letter):

Someone give me a tissue.

Inside the card, in addition to the cloying greeting – I’ll get to that later – was a “birthday certificate” for a free dog toy. Now, MY birthday isn’t too far off, and when I’d first skimmed the card it said something about belonging to the PetPerks® program, which I do, so I thought it was a birthday gift for ME. Not the case.

The dog accessories review is something that many dog owners have to do before they buy a dog accessory for their beloved pooch. Whether you are buying a collar, leash, harness or even a chew bone, it is important to read the dog accessories review so that you can determine if the item you are about to purchase is something that will work well for your pet. Dog accessories review can be found online like very popular Dogblogtv, and in print and sometimes even in magazines if the dog owner wants to get the inside scoop on the items that are being reviewed. Whatever the case, having the proper dog supplies will allow your pet the comfort and safety that they need while you can enjoy your own life!

Upon more careful reading, I discovered that, according to the above-pictured document, I OWN the “best dog ever.” Moreover, it’s My Dog’s BIRTHDAY AND the inside of the card is, I kid you not, addressed “To the best dog ever…” But there’s more. “Jessica,” the PetSmart® “Birthday Coordinator” evidently sent this card and gift to My Dog, “the best dog ever.” Oh – and a POEM, too (ready another tissue):

You bring so much joy
Into everyone’s day,
All the wags, walks and fun –
We just wanted to say,

Thanks for the smooches,
And the love, tried and true.
We hope that your day
Is as special as you!

I can only mange to utter THANK GOD THAT DOGS CANNOT READ. Ah yes – but therein lies the rub – I HAVE NO DOG. As I’ve mentioned before, I have two Kitten Children (whose tiny eyes I will have to cover if they come and sit on the computer desk, as they are wont to do – yes, I presume THEY are smart enough to read – they do, after all, receive mail). When I signed up for the PetPerks® program I do not recall mentioning ANY pets, and as much as I adore (probably to a vaguely depressing extent) my Kitten Children, I cannot recall their birthdays off-hand (I am a HORRIBLE Mother – HORRIBLE), so even if I’d mentioned my pets I couldn’t have supplied their birthdates. Come to think of it, that really is sad. My Kitten Children give me Mother’s Day cards and even gave me a lovely set of scented votive candles and pretty holders for Christmas (perhaps they had assistance, but they were still the gift-givers). Thank goodness I can hear them in the kitchen stealing the dog’s food (the dog who belongs to my PARENTS – the old lady dog who doesn’t even play with toys any more) and are therefore too occupied to see this. But that’s not the point (YES – I HAVE a point – I ALWAYS do, even if I meander around for two or three or sixty-seven pages before I get to it). I evidently own “the best dog ever,” and I have no idea who has My Dog! How alone this poor canine must feel, especially since it’s his or her birthday.

So if ANYONE has information about My Dog, “the best dog ever,” – sorry, that’s the only description I have, other than the fact that it is the aforementioned pooch’s birthday – please let me know immediately. The “birthday certificate” expires on February 28, 2006, so we have to work fast if My Dog, “the best dog ever,” is going to receive his/her very special birthday gift. Thank you for your assistance in this matter.

P.S. I am certifiable. Fiona just jumped up onto the desk and I actually did, momentarily, cover her tiny eyes and I said – out loud, “Fiona – don’t look! Don’t look!” Immediately I felt horribly silly. Yet THEN, when she at one point turned her sweet little face to the screen, I had to squelch the impulse to do it again. No wonder someone has taken My Dog, “the best dog ever.”

I drove Sarah to school this morning. At the same time I was trying to look (SAFELY – as I AM Kate the Safety Dog) at pictures she’d finally convinced someone to develop from her seventeenth birthday party with her friends (involving a young couple tied up in police tape and “crepe paper” – a term which she had to feed me three times because I could NOT remember it – and a good blackmail shot of that couple kissing (Alas – the teenage blackmail and HORROR) and fancy masks and VERY fancy socks on Sarah’s part), the “safe” viewing of which caused slight motion sickness what with all the looking back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. And evidently it is “Spirit Week” and today is “Hawaiian Day” at her school and we were already on our way when she told me and I was bemoaning the fact that I had not known so I could loan her my authentic Hawaiian coconut shell bra (authentic, at least, in the sense that it was carried back from Hawaii as a gift to me). She was NOT especially disappointed. Perhaps, as the week began with “Hat Day,” and she has been the only person allowed to wear a hat every day, it wasn’t that exciting. It was a surprisingly quiet ride considering that Sarah often has a cell phone attached to her ear as though it had grown there and her phone was IN ITS CASE. I should explain that Sarah, since birth, has had a natural quality to her voice (a combination of frequency and natural projection) that causes it to carry about three miles at any and most every given moment. So her phone conversations, which she may consider private (“YOU hang up first! No, YOU hang up FIRST!!!!), are not. She did regale me with a surprisingly quiet verse of, “Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star,” (?) when we hit a long stop light, but the conversation was otherwise very subdued for Sarah. AND she had disc six of Season Four of the Gilmore Girls WITH her!!! Huzzah!

On my drive back, I ended up behind this filthy wee hatchback. In his car I could have sworn he had a small stack of sad, yellowish squares of sod. This was a little baffling – it’s just not sod season, and even it were, he could only have made a very tiny yellow lawn. I had too much time to ponder this, I admit, because he was driving VERY SLOWLY. When I did pass him, what I thought was sod turned out to be a bale of hay. Yes, he had a couple of boxes and one bale of hay in his tiny, grimy hatchback. This was mysterious, too, as people who don’t farm (yes, some do – there are still ranches and farms in this valley) sometimes seek out hay bales and cornstalks and other such earthy things as decorations for autumn. But it’s winter, and if this man were a farmer or rancher, it’s quite surprising enough that he wasn’t driving a pick-up truck to accommodate sufficient feed for a little herd of animals. Perhaps he’s a one-cow farmer. And perchance it’s a very tiny little cow. I could have mulled over this further (sad, yes), but THEN I got behind a slightly banged up pick-up truck (this is NOT the weird part – banged-up pick-up trucks are fairly ubiquitous in this area). The unique thing about this vehicle was the personalized license plate which read, I kid you not, “Gunman.” I cautiously tried to observe if he had a gun rack in the truck cab (also, unfortunately, not especially abnormal in this area), but I didn’t see one. He DID have one of those big metal boxes that fit in the truck bed, so perhaps that’s where he keeps his assault rifles and his shotguns and grenades and hand-held missiles and in a stand-off he has practiced grabbing them through the tiny window in the back of the truck cab. Yes, it sounds like I am embellishing the number and fire-power of the weapons that this man may carry, but if you PAY to have a personalized license plate made that says, “Gunman,” I presume you have at least a slight fondness for weapons that shoot bullets and buckshot and such. Either that, or you have a guilty conscience and you are admitting your part in an unsolved crime and hoping that the local-yokel law enforcement will eventually figure it out.

I tried NOT to think about the firearm potential in this scenario, as I found it a tad frightening, so I started to listen more assiduously to the CD I was playing. “Behind these Hazel Eyes” came on. YES – I was listening to Kelly Clarkson’s Breakaway – and all y’all can just stop the mocking right now. Are we not all entitled to our guilty pleasures? I’d never listened all THAT closely to the lyrics – I’d liked the fact that the song concerns “hazel eyes” because I have hazel eyes. I abruptly was struck by the ridiculous nature of the phrase “the tears I cry behind these hazel eyes.” There are certainly poetic references to emotions that one “hides behind their eyes,” but that’s different. Those allude to the metaphor wherein “eyes are the windows to the soul.” So you could hide grief or despair “behind your eyes,” but tears? Look at this:

Gross Anatomy of the Eye

Tears flowing secretly BEHIND the eye around the optic nerve, down into the orbital cavity? Blech. It’s just WRONG – all wrong.

And people wonder why I go out so little.

*Pretentious, yes, but it sounds better than, “What I observed on State Street.”

Today is Sarah’s LAST chemo infusion! I would warrant, judging from the picture of her first infusion compared to today’s photo, that she really has the system down now.

I am not sure of the source of the tiara, flowers and gifts (they may well be from Mom and Grandma), but I wouldn’t be surprised if Primary Children’s had something to do with it. They really are exceptional. Like Sarah stated previously:

When I go to Primary Children’s they make everything really fun. They have everything there. If you’re gonna get cancer, that’s the place to go.

Too bad we cannot all pass for eighteen years old and under.

Next, Sarah has some lower-dose radiation in the “mantle” region. Her PCMC doctor referred her to a physician who was the head of a Nation-wide study of subjects around Sarah’s age with the “bulky” version of Hodgkin’s Lymphoma (like she has). Because she has had what they define as a “complete response” to the chemotherapy, the radiation will make the chances of recurrence extremely low. At that appointment they should us some of the comparative scans from the beginning of her treatment to the present. I think my Mom and I were glad to have NOT seen the first scan until now; the biggest tumor – larger than I really had comprehended – actually had been pressing her trachea to one side. Now it is back in line. It is amazing.

Soon the Central Broviac® Catheter can go, along with its daily and weekly maintenance (and I imagine a REAL shower will be quite the treat), the prednisone-induced puffiness will go away, and she can, in earnest, grow back her hair. Mind you, the girl has such amazing follicles that she never lost her eyebrows and eyelashes, and in between every chemo round she grows – I swear – a quarter inch of fuzz on her head. No more Sinéad O’Connor references (which had to be explained to her because she’s too young) or G.I. Jane comparisons (though I think she got a kick out of that one). Onward and upward, Super Girl!

Is it peculiar* that because I’ve decided that I really loathe my iPod “skin” that I – out of the blue – feel unwarranted prejudice against SCUBA diving? More specifically, it’s not the diving or apparatus part, per se, but I suddenly REALLY hate neoprene.

Perhaps this is a rhetorical question.

*Yup – euphemism for “completely insane” and/or “bonkers” in this scenario.

Here they are – all five of my beauteous nieces and nephews pictured together for the very first time! You’d be amazed how much coordination it took for their parents to get them together (and only Paisley lives out of state) at a time when no one was vomiting and everyone’s immunity was at an acceptable level and so on.

Leif, William, Sarah, Paisley and Anders

I especially love Leif’s four-year-old cheesy grin in contrast to William’s fourteen-year-old “I am Rico Suave” smirk. Sarah (seventeen – but I don’t want to talk about that because it makes me OLDER THAN DIRT) and Anders (who turned one a few weeks ago) managed the best natural smiles, I think, and Paisley (at a little over three months old) looks darling even though she was, understandably, pretty shell-shocked by the whole process by then.

After consistently receiving ominous warnings from my mobile phone to the effect of, “MEMORY 95% FULL,” and “SELF-DESTRUCT MODE WILL ACTIVATE” and so on, I was cleaning up my text/pict messages a little. A few messages prompted a chuckle, several were so cryptic I wouldn’t dare hazard a guess as to their context or meaning, and then I found this doozy:

How about NAKED RATS NAKED RATS – THREE FOR A BUCK!

Documentation indicates that I sent this message to Charles on September 30, 2005 at 9:01 p.m. Yes, I said it. I do know that he had sent me a picture of a naked mole rat at some point, but what prompted me to try and come up with an all-you-can-eat-restaurant-type advertising slogan for said rats is beyond me. Ten days earlier I also evidently said:

Might come in handy at a wine tasting…

This seems fairly innocuous, unless you consider that day we were discussing his animal science class – “just another day in animal science class” – to be specific, from which these quotes resulted. Come on – as if there was any doubt that Charles had given me those quotes.