One guy I sometimes spar with actually admits that he’s a bully, and he laughs about it while he shoves my face into the floor. Fine. I am learning how he moves, and one day the face on the floor will be his. In sparring, we all follow certain rules of politeness, and he kind of steps over the line sometimes. When he does, I call him an asshole, and he laughs, and that’s that.

One time he told me, “I’m the guy who knocked your books out of your hands in high school.” I said, “And I’m the one who wrote poems about it.”

We understand each other, sort of. And I actually don’t mind working with him. I don’t care if he gets off on pushing me around. I learn from it, and he doesn’t go easy on me because I’m female. He may go harder on me because of it, but at least that’s refreshing. (Note I’m not saying I want to be friends with him. I do not at all mind hitting him, though.)

This morning in class, there was a new guy. Maybe mid-50s, looked in decent shape. Muscled arms but a pot belly, and he had a little trouble keeping up with some of the more grueling drills.

New Guy (and there are so many others like him) doesn’t realize he’s a dickhead. I was the only female in class this morning, and at one point, he and I and another guy were doing a drill where we took turns being “it,” while the other two tried to smack us on the shoulder. When I was it, New Guy wouldn’t try to smack me, even though I was smacking the crap out of him.

“I don’t want to hit girls,” he said.

“Keep that attitude,” I said. “I’ll just hit you instead.” I said it lightly, not making a big deal out of it.

That was fine. I get it. He’s lived 50-some years with the idea that one doesn’t hit girls. But the thing is, it’s not, it shouldn’t be, that one doesn’t hit girls. It’s that one doesn’t pick on people who are weaker. And of course “weak” and “girl” are often conflated, and they’re often true, even, since we still aren’t encouraged to be strong and the world is still run by dickheads. (Just look at the photo at the top of this article for clear evidence of that.)

In the context of krav, when New Guy is new and I’m not, when I know what’s going on and he doesn’t, when we’ve agreed that we’re there to hit each other in a controlled manner, he needs to revise his thinking. I was fine with giving him time to do that.

Then later, I had to join his group again, and when I walked over to them, he said, “Now we have someone tough over here!”

Trying to recover from implying I wasn’t tough before? Maybe. Condescending? Definitely. Intentionally condescending? Probably not.

So I contented myself with saying, “You’d better not be saying that like a smart ass.”

He said, “I’m not!” And then we did the drill.

Still later, we were practicing takedowns and sprawls (a way to keep from being taken down). I wasn’t in his group this time, but I did a few good sprawls and kept from being knocked down, and he came over and patted me on the shoulder and said, “You’re doing great!”

By this time, I had decided he was not going to be educable in the course of one class, so I just said, “I know,” and then turned back to my group. My group, made up of a very tall man and a very broad man, neither of whom treated me like I was a wittle toughie in there pwaying wit the boys.

Honestly, I think I prefer the straight out asshole who knocks me down and laughs about it. I’m eventually going to be able to beat the stupid out of him. I’m not sure about this other guy.

These classes don’t require more physical strength or stamina, but they do require a lot more accuracy and control. And I fucking suck at that. I can gut out a hard workout, and I can hold a punch shield against my chest while people punch it so hard over and over that I think my sternum might crack. But I can’t get my head around hook-cross-bob-cross-hook-bob-hook-cross-bob-cross-hook-to-infinity. I can barely even type that shit in the right order.

I feel so stupid. But the worst part is that I fuck things up for whomever is unlucky enough to be my partner in any given class. If I fuck up while I’m punching and my partner is holding the pads, no problem. If I fuck up holding the pads in the right place at the right time while my partner is punching, that’s a problem. Now my partner isn’t getting the training he or she deserves to be getting. I do not want to be the bad partner.

Even the less experienced people are more skilled than I am. I just can’t seem to pick this stuff up.

I’ve always had this problem with sports, which is why I took to running and biking so enthusiastically. Those things don’t require as much coordination as catching a ball or something. And even then, it took me a while to figure out how to put my feet right and hold my upper body right and find rhythm while I run.

I still blush when I remember “trying out” for softball when I was 11. It wasn’t tryouts really, because everybody got to be a on a team. But they had us all show up to the field and demonstrate our skills, and then coaches from three teams (small town) would meet and pick their players. It was essentially the same embarrassing thing as picking teams on the playground except I didn’t have to actually witness being picked last.

That day I tried out, they sent each of us up to bat and pitched until we each got a hit. Most girls got a hit within three or four pitches. Not me. I swung at everything, and I missed everything. And when I say everything, I mean every fucking thing. I mean that I was standing there for at least 10 minutes, wildly swinging that fucking bat, while the adult man pitching tried to throw balls I couldn’t possibly miss and every girl I ever went to school with and their parents groaned behind me. I finally hit one when he stood about six feet in front of me and virtually rolled it to me.

I still played, because everyone was playing. But they put me in right field, and they made me bat as far down the lineup as possible. I’ll be fair to myself and say that I don’t remember a single moment of coaching, of anyone actually showing me how to catch a ball or throw a ball or swing a bat. They really just went with what skills we showed up with and the coaching was mostly them shouting encouraging things at us. I learned to swing a bat later, when my little brother taught me.

But that’s just one small example among many of how my brain and my body just do not communicate. There have been times when people have patiently tried to teach me physical skills and I just don’t get them.

I love biking and running, for example, and Austin is a big triathlon town, so of course that’s the natural thing to do if you like to bike and run. I can swim, in the sense that I can move through water and not drown. But I have never been able to get all my limbs and my head and my breath to work right to actually swim efficiently any significant distance.

When I first started doing tris, I took a swimming class from a tri coach. By the end of the four-week class, even the people who’d been afraid to put their faces in the water at the beginning were out-swimming me, while I was making it about 15 meters before I’d mess up the rhythm and breathe in when I should have breathed out and then choke on water. The coach was really nice, but I could see her gradually, over the weeks, start looking at me less like a potential triathlete and more like an unfortunate and annoying burden.

I’ve done several tris now, and I did figure out the stroke and the breathing, but I still can’t sustain it for long before lose my place and suck in some water. I flop around and get passed by all the waves after me and cough up water and reassure the nice people in the lifeguard canoes that I’m fine. It’s embarrassing.

And I can’t figure out how to fix it. Practice more? Stop thinking so hard? A ton of fighting advice boils down to “don’t think, move.” I . . . don’t know how to do that.

I love krav so much. I love every minute that I’m there and every part of what I get to do there. But, man. I’m starting to feel like I’m just in everybody’s goddamn way.

I have this great teacher, the one I work with most often, who is really patient with me. When I spar with him, he will keep hitting or kicking me the same way over and over again, and I can tell that he’s waiting for me to figure out what to do. I think, “He’s done that round kick three times in a row, slowly, and with meaningful looks at me. I should know what to do. I should know what to do. What the fuck should I do?” And then I flail around and throw random punches and leave my face wide open and sometimes even fall down.

Eventually, he will break down and say, “When I kick you there, step this way and throw this punch.” And then he’ll patiently kick me again and again until I do it right.

Of course, the very next time I spar with somebody, and that’s usually exactly one minute after I just finished sparring with the teacher, I will forget that and all the other things he’s told me, and I’ll just attack with a crazy amount of punches that aren’t even punches—they’re just my gloves flapping around in the air. I’m all attack, no tactics and no defense.

That teacher and another teacher I work with a lot and several of my sparring partners keep telling me the same thing, too. “Don’t just stand there.” Because that’s what I do. I go in straight on, and I punch crappy punches and take punches that I fail to guard against and punch some more and take some more punches. I don’t move around. I don’t get in and get out. I don’t move to the side and attack that way. I don’t have the patience to wait out my opponent and see how they move and figure them out. I just barrel in and stay in using the same tactics over and over, even when they aren’t working.

I could use my sparring behavior as a metaphor for how work is going lately. There will be a problem, and I will pounce on it and beat it into submission in the most clumsy way possible. I don’t step back and assess. I don’t coolly check out what’s going on all around me and step to the side a little so I can approach the problem from another angle. No, I just go flailing in like a big dummy.

And lately at work, there are lots of problems. A reorganization, shuffling around of staff, people acting a little strange and out of character because the atmosphere is like right before a big storm—it’s heavy and with all this air of expectation and potential disaster. My approach to projects—jump in and do the work and gut out some long nights and weekends and swing at every problem that crops up—that’s not working so well when the problems are more delicate and when people are edge and when I’m on edge. I’ve got to figure out how to get more accuracy and more control and, really, just calm the fuck down.

So we packed up some food and a ton of water and Gatorade on a Saturday morning at the end of February and went to the studio for the 9:30 start of the test. We were told that there’d be a few hours of seminar before the actual test, when the testing instructor would run us through all the things we were supposed to know. That actually turned into almost 6 hours. So it was after 3 by the time we got a break, and we were all disgustingly sweaty and worn out.

It was a nice day, though, so Chris and I and our two friends went outside and had some snacks. We’d all been acting silly early in the morning–my partner and I saw the instructor’s girlfriend outside (she does krav, too), and we performed a dumb dance for her when the instructor wasn’t looking. She held up her phone and pretended to call him. But by the time we broke for a snack, we just sort of limped outside and tried not to cry.

My partner, who is a high school government teacher and a few years older than I am, had a cracked rib. And at some point during the day, I think I broke her thumb. Or rather, I put her in a headlock and her hand flew up and clonked on the side of my head; so I guess my head broke her thumb. But she kept going, anyway. She is even nuttier than I am.

We all went and changed into less sweaty clothes and started the actual test. During that part, we went again through all the things we were supposed to know, but we did them really fast and the instructor walked around making notes by our names on his clipboard. He also had us do some exhaustion drills. That’s a pretty descriptive name for those things.

There might have been some existential crises between 3:30 and 6 that day. My partner’s rib was really killing her at the end, during the ground work. Chris said he almost quit during one of the exhaustion drills, but he couldn’t face the idea of going through a day like that again.

That took another couple of hours, so it was a little after 6 before we were done

And then: “We’ll let you know within the week how you did.”

Whaaaaaa? But I . . . I . . . but . . .

They did post some pictures of us on Facebook right away, a serious one (see me doing the “aw shucks” foot thing that I do when I’m nervous) and a silly one.

The woman on my left in the picture is my partner. The tiny girl to my right was Chris’s partner, and there’s Chris standing right behind me. She whipped his ass. His chest was covered in bruises afterward, and that was what she did through a very thick pad.

I linked to those pictures on Facebook, very carefully not saying that I’d passed the test, since I didn’t know if I had. But everyone congratulated me anyway, and I felt like a fraud. But then I got an email saying I’d passed the test, so yay!

I’ve been taking a few harder classes, and I love them. In some of them, we get to actually spar, which means gloves, mouth guards, shin guards, and getting punched in the face and kicked pretty much everywhere.

I get punched in the face a lot. I just don’t see the damn punches coming.

Saturday, I went to a class that’s meant to help you learn how to spar better, and it was intimidating and fun. We learned some kicks and blocks, and then we started sparring. Then at the end of class, the instructor said we could stay around and spar more. He set up a timer that gave us two-minute rounds, and we just took turns pairing up and beating each other up.

Well, during my turns I mostly got beaten up. I did a few rounds with the instructor (the same one who’d encouraged me to test; I really like him), and he gave me some tips. He went really easy on me and moved slowly, but I still didn’t see things coming and got punched and kicked over and over.

The only good thing is apparently I am “aggressive” according to the instructor and one of the bigger guys I sparred with. I’m small and don’t have the reach of most guys, so I have to go in close to hit, and that makes their punches not as effective. Except the uppercuts. Those seemed to work pretty well.

Anyway, that was the most fun I’ve had in a long damn time, and I’m going to do that as much as possible, or until someone breaks my nose. Actually, probably even after someone breaks my nose.

I went to the Monday morning conditioning class, which consists of the instructor making us hit and kick nonstop for the whole time and usually ends with a drill wherein everyone in class attacks one person and that person has to defend for a minute or so. That time, the attackers took turns calling out combinations. I like to work on that stuff; I need to think faster or relax and let my body do the thinking. Or something.

Anyway, it’s exhausting and exhilarating. And I did well in that one this week. I think my form was better than usual, and I felt energetic and whipped the shit out of stuff.

Tuesday I did a morning and an evening class, and today I did one in the morning. This morning we did another drill where everyone was attacking one person, only this time we all ganged up and gave the attackee not much room to move and kept pushing with the pads and yelling. One attackee got my knuckle with a fingernail, and it bled everywhere. I thought it was just bleeding a little and that my glove was soaking it up, but then I saw that I was getting blood all over everyone’s shirts. Some got on the mirror and on the floor, too, though I don’t know if that was my blood or another guy’s.

(Usually there’s not bleeding. Just sometimes, shit happens. I already had a bandage on one knuckle that’s constantly cracked through a combination of dry hands and my incorrect punching style (which I’m working on). Plus a bandage on my elbow because it’s still scabby from where I broke it open last week. But man. A fingernail-sliced knuckle can bleeeeeeed. A new thing I learned!)

Then I stayed after to talk to the teacher about some stuff (which I’ll write about in another entry soon, I think), so it was well after 8 when I got to work. Which means other people were there. Often, I get in all red and sweaty from class or, in good times, from riding my bike to work, and it’s still pretty early, so only a few people are there. I can scurry to the bathroom and clean up and put on real clothes before anyone sees me.

But today I had to scurry very skillfully because my hand was pretty bloodied. The short sleeves of my workout shirt show the forearm bruises I still have from last week. And my hair, even though it was in a ponytail, was kind of a mess from when I rolled around on the floor kicking things. My face is always red for a long time after any exercise. Also, I’m sure I looked so blazingly professional in my knee-length baggy black shorts and my light-blue t-shirt with yellow armpit stains.

“Hi, everybody! Here’s my scrabbly, sweaty hair and my bloody knuckles! Oh, that sour sweat smell? No idea. Maybe there’s a leak in the bathroom or something? Please trust me to lead your project and advise you on important decisions!”

I was crazy busy all day at work. First there was a meeting of my workplace’s advisory group. I’m on a small working group trying to improve project management at Workplace whether people want it or not. One of my project management teammates and I had to facilitate an activity to get them to brainstorm some stuff and think about roles and responsibilities on projects.

That was complicated by the facts that (1) that’s a fractious bunch of people who question everything, (2) two of my other teammates are on vacation (though they did co-create the presentation for us before they went, so props), (3) another team member just quit for another job, and (4) the one who was with me today just got added to the team right before the holiday break and was thrown right into presenting to the fractious ones. But we did all right. Then we were in there for a few more hours engaging in an activity run by someone else.

Meanwhile, Chris had had a crazy shredded tire incident while driving on the highway.

Luckily he didn’t wreck, but his spare was messed up. He had tried to call me from the side of the highway right after the meeting started and of course I didn’t get his message until hours later. So many hours, in fact, that he managed to get his car to my office, come in and wait around for me, and then get enough air into his holey spare to get to a tire place and get new tires.

Then I had a webinar meeting with the people who are doing our new online learning system for us, which I am in charge of launching and ohmygod there’s so much to do to get that done. So, two meetings where the outcomes were really important, and where I had to be, like, smart and shit. And tomorrow, another meeting with some clients, the ones from the huge project that’s consumed my life for the last three springs and summers. I’m not in charge of that one anymore, but I’ll be there tomorrow to help the handoff to the lucky new manager of that work.

I’m taking on a lot more responsibility at work lately, and I like what I’m doing, but there’s so much I want to do with the projects I’m on. I’m dreaming big. And I don’t even have time to do my daily work anymore, let alone launch some of the big ideas I have.

And school is starting up again in a few weeks! I’m now officially in the School of Information master’s program, working on usability and information architecture. It’s fun, and I’m learning things that I’m applying at work right away, but again, no time no time no time.

And I’m trying really hard not to give up the personal stuff I love, like krav or yoga or biking or running or the writing I’ve been doing (now I have TWO novels in progress). I just need about four more hours in every day and I think I could do it.

I also might need an extra hour that I could spend on fretting. Actually, if I could confine the fretting to only an hour, I might not even need those extra four hours I’m asking for. Mainly my fretting has to do with Malcolm and how his diabetes is still not under control. It apparently takes a while to get the insulin dosage right, and that’s complicated by his inflammatory bowel thing, for which he’s taking a steroid, which is so not good for diabetics. So I’m spending a lot of time staring at him and hoping he’ll be okay.

I’m also fretting because Chris is starting his full-time PhD program this month, and, well, that doesn’t actually pay very well. So financially, we’re kind of walking a higher, skinnier tightrope than usual. Also, four new tires for his car (they were all about to explode) is not a cheap thing.

And I’m fretting because it’s just what I do. I could totally win a gold medal in it.

Anyway, I did make it to yoga today, and I did the two most beautiful handstands I’ve ever done. They were still against the wall, but in both cases, I got my legs to hover upright for a moment and then just gently touch the wall in a controlled manner, instead of flailing up and crashing into the wall like usual. I couldn’t do some of the other stuff today, but I’ve noticed that I’m getting way better at stuff that requires strength (handstands) and NO better at stuff that requires flexibility (like this thing that beat my ass today).

That might actually be a metaphor for my life. Especially the last year and a half or so.

About ten years ago, we noticed a krav maga studio near our house, and I really wanted to go in there, but I was afraid to. I figured it was just for people who already bad asses, and they would probably tell me I wasn’t qualified to even set foot in the door. Then that studio moved away, and I stopped thinking about it.

Until this summer. My friend Pam got a Living Social thing for a month of krav maga, and she took me to a class with her. We spent some time doing boot camp kind of warm ups, and then immediately started fighting. That day’s class focused on ground fighting, and Pam and I were tossing each other around while other people did the same all around us. It was an epiphany.

As you know, I’ve been having the worst fucking year(s) of my life, and I’ve been using physical activity to keep myself from going totally nuts. I did several months of boot camp until I got fed up with the instructor’s total lack of attention to form so that we were all always getting hurt. I run, I bike, I go to yoga. But that krav class. God. I wanted to sign up immediately.

It ended up being a few months until I was able to do that, and to my surprise, I even talked Chris into doing with me. He hates classes, and he really hates paying for stuff like that. But he went to the first class with me, and we both liked it. A week later, Zoey died unexpectedly, and I was just a broken goddamn person. I kept going to krav, and in fact looked forward to my three classes a week more than anything.

The bad shit, or just plain overwhelming shit, hasn’t stopped happening. You can read back over the last several entries and see that.

But I keep going to krav, and I keep loving every fucking second I’m in there. Now I do five or six classes a week, and I’d do more if I had more time. Tuesdays and Thursdays, I usually go in the morning and at night. It makes me forget my entire life and just focus on hitting and kicking and elbowing and pushing and throwing and twisting. I beat the motherfucking shit out of pads (and sometimes people, sort of), and hold pads while other people beat the shit out of them.

We play awesome games. Tonight, we warmed up by playing freeze tag. We practiced some punches, and then we got in groups of three. One of my partners held the pad while I punched it, and the other partner had a strap around my waist and kept pulling me backward, trying to keep me from getting to the pad. That’s one of my favorites.

I also like the one where they have half of us stand still with our eyes closed, while the others surprise us with chokes or bear hugs and we have to react. Sometimes they turn the music up and turn the lights on and off, just to make it even more disorienting. It’s brilliant.

I’m not good at krav maga. I’ve never been good at physical stuff.

It’s like my brain gives instructions, the instructions go through Babelfish, and when they get to my arms and legs, the translation is a little garbled.

But it doesn’t matter that I’m not good at it. I can still do it. It kind of reminds me of when I played roller hockey for a few years. I was never good at it, but I loved the violence of it and how I couldn’t think of anything else while I was out there on the floor.

So I’m doing it. I’m doing it all time, and I’m thinking about it all the time, and I’m just in love. Chris and I sometimes practice at home, and we compare our various wounds.

Right now, most of my knuckles are cracked. Both elbows are scabbed. The tips of my shoulders are bruised from an intro to Brazilian jiu jitsu they gave us the other day. I’ve got bruises around one wrist from a self-defense drill. A bruise on my upper arm from where a partner’s knee crushed it. Bruises on my shin from . . . I don’t even know what.

I like these wounds. The krav is keeping me sane, but barely. I’m still a depressed and anxious mess. I add in yoga and some running and biking as often as I can, but krav is the only time I can just stop fucking thinking for a minute. I can’t spend all my waking minutes doing that, but my cracking knuckles and my bruised shoulders are like little promises, reminders that I’ve got something to look forward to.

The usual now, the usual for the last . . . year and half or so, I guess, has just been one crap ass thing after another. Some things were overwhelming at the time but were ultimately just short-term, fairly expensive inconveniences, like gall bladder removal or our bathrooms shooting sewage all over the house. Some things continue to be a bit frightening, like Chris’s job loss and my mysterious brain things (I had three of them in three days a few weeks ago) and some other health shit that no one can explain.

And some things that are just fucking tragic, like losing what feels like half my heart when my cat Zoey died so suddenly and unexpectedly and way too young. He was an important part of my life, and that wound isn’t healing.

I feel like every time I shake off some of the shell shock, get back up and start moving forward a little, something else happens that knocks me on my ass. And then something even bigger happens and I just have to stay there on my ass for a while.

So it was really a giant motherfucking kick in the teeth this past week when we discovered that Malcolm (our remaining cat) has diabetes. He is also only 10. Back in the summer, we treated him for what vets said was “either irritable bowel or cancer.” And the only way to know it’s not cancer is that he’s not dead yet. But he was on steroids for a few months and now eats a special low-allergen food. So we actually took him to the vet because he started puking again, and I immediately thought, god, it actually IS cancer.

But no. It’s diabetes. Although the puking isn’t a symptom of that. They just found that out by doing a blood test, and his glucose was alarmingly high. He had to stay at the vet overnight, and then go for tests at a specialist. Now we have to give him insulin twice a day, which is stressful for all kinds of reasons (I’m afraid I’m doing it wrong; it’s expensive; it has to be done just about exactly 12 hours apart, which now dictates some parts of our schedules; there’s always a wait-and-see aspect of things like this and I am soooo not good at that; he is also still occasionally puking when he eats, and we don’t really know why; he’s also got a kidney/bladder infection; etc.). For now he seems to be doing all right, but of course I’m flinching every time he yawns.

I have lots of things I want to write about . . . just everything. I know I just come here and report: this happened. But all the stuff that’s happened over the past year and a half has caused me to rethink so many things. At first, most of the stuff that happened was “almost.” I had stroke symptoms, but they weren’t a stroke. The sewage thing happened, but we got it fixed and even have nicer bathrooms now. Zoey got seriously sick and then got better. I probably have a genetic arthritis disorder that can cause “bamboo back” (which is every bit as bad as it sounds) but my form of it is very mild. Malcolm might have cancer, but then he probably doesn’t. And so on.

All of that made me a little more anxious. But it also made me extremely determined to enjoy every day, and I really was getting pretty good at that.

Then stuff started being not “almost” anymore. Zoey went from full-recovery-scrambling-around-the-house to dead within two days. Chris’s guaranteed funding for grad school evaporated. Bad stuff happened to people I know. And then I pretty much assumed Malcolm was going to die a few days ago, and I’m still not really convinced he’s not.

I’ve gone from feeling like Rocky v. Drago, taking the hits and coming back to whip the ever-loving shit out of that motherfucker, to feeling more like I should just cower in a corner and never form attachments to people or animals or even ideas ever again.

I’m tired. I’m worried. And I’m tired of being worried. There’s even other worrying stuff going on that I don’t feel like adding to this litany of shit. I’m just tired.

I started dragging myself up out of a three-year serious depression in 2004, and sometime in 2009, I remember saying to Chris that I felt like I’d finally figured out how to be happy. I remember marveling about it to him several times for almost a year. Things weren’t perfect, but I’d figured out, I thought, how to accept that and still be all right.

No. No, apparently what I learned was how to be complacent over several years when my worst worries were getting back into shape and paying down debt. I thought I knew how to handle the bad shit, but it turns out that I just was having an extended break from bad shit. Now it’s piling on, and there are two main thoughts I keep having: (1) what else is going to happen? (I have various specific fears about the people I love most in the world), and (2) I’m not sure I’m strong enough for any more hits, or even for the hits I’ve already taken. I’m still fighting, but I might actually be Drago in this one.

When I got to work, the lights worked fine, we assumed, but the motion detector would not acknowledge that we existed, so we had to set up lamps in our cubicle cave. It was actually kind of fun.

I spent some time in meetings, as I seem to do every damn day now. I spent time after the meetings doing stuff to prepare for meetings spawned by those meetings. It’s getting ridiculous.

Eventually, to avoid the chance of more meetings, I went to work at home, where I was thwarted by a cuter beast.

And when spying on my from above the desk didn’t work, he resorted to lying against my arm, which is as close as he can ever bring himself to sitting on a person. Malcolm is cagey.

And Malcolm is awesome, but his aloofness is one reason I miss Zoey with a very physical kind of loss. He would have climbed up and sat on my shoulder, and I would have been both frustrated and charmed.

But anyway. After I got some work done, Chris and I went out to see Girl in a Coma (a band you should check out).

I had bought some cool boots on clearance last winter, but they don’t work well with any jeans I have, so I . . . well, I went and bought a skirt to wear them with. And then I WORE IT.

Which may kill anyone who knows me dead from shock.

It ended up being the second cold night we’ve had this season, and it was an outdoor show. Here’s me before the first of two opening bands went on, wondering if my choice of attire was perhaps faulty. And also recalling, oh, yeah, the rum IS making my stomach feel warm, but it’s a myth, isn’t it, that booze warms you up? Crap.

But the band was worth the wait–they’re crazy talented–and we had a neat view.

We also had a great view of people in Halloween costumes walking down the street, but all the pictures I took of them came out like crap. Too bad, because the three grown men wearing nothing but giant diapers were hilarious.

So. That was a Friday. I’m trying to be normal and happy, you see?

The rest of this weekend has been frantically busy, mostly with school work and freelance work and preparing for a house guest who may or may not arrive this week. But I did take a moment to carve a small pumpkin, and that may be the first time I’ve ever really done that. I watched my parents do it when I was a kid, I guess. Anyway, I used a template I found online and did a cat, of course.

I’m doing all right in the sense that I’m doing my job. I’m even, I might say, excelling at my job lately, taking on big projects and being decisive and energetic. And I’m doing my school work. My class this semester isn’t what I had hoped it would be; it’s about managing information organizations, and I think it’s both broader and narrower than what I wanted. But I’m turning in my assignments and interacting with my fellow students and with the professor.

I’m being extremely physically active (more on that in later posts), and I’m eating pretty damn well. (For me. I’m sure Michael Pollan would make a face.)

I’m hanging out with friends, even initiating some social occasions. I’m frequenting my same old internet haunts and interacting with people there. My writing group is about to start back up, and I’m trying to work out the plot for a YA novel I might want to write.

In all ways, I am fully engaged in the world and acting like a human.

But Zoey is still on my mind every minute. He was a part of every damn thing I did in my house, and my house still doesn’t quite feel like home, even though Malcolm seems to be trying to expand his personality to fill the empty space.

I’m getting along. I’m living. I’m so grateful to still have my favorite people in the world all safe and sound. You can’t tell it here, but I’m actually laughing a lot and being funny in my usual ways. But inside, I just don’t feel right. I’m still so angry that we had to lose my boy so soon, and I’m so fucking sad.

So we’d been taking the classes for a week. Exactly three weeks ago tonight, Zoey was in the vet hospital. He had seemed fine Wednesday morning and afternoon and then started seeming not so fine over the course of the evening. I stayed awake most of the night Wednesday night, watching him, trying to make sure he was comfortable. And as soon as my favorite vet got to work on Thursday morning, we took him in for an emergency visit.

I need to explain how brave Zoey was. Crazy brave enough that when I first started krav maga, a week before I knew anything was wrong, the first time I had to deliver a flurry of punches as hard as I could to a pad held by someone pretending to be an attacker, I thought of Zoey. I pretended to be Zoey. He always threw himself into everything with all the energy in his adorable little fluffy body.

When he played, he played hard, and he played with a joyful abandon that I tried to put into my punches. Actually, I tried to put it into a lot of my life, especially in the past year, when things have been so strange and scary with my health in various ways. I’d think of how Zoey threw himself into everything he did, lived exactly in every moment, and I’d try to do the same.

But he was scared of the vet’s office. I’m not sure why, but he was never able to be calm there. He’d growl and attack anyone who tried to touch him. For basic vet care, we had to have an at-home vet deal with him, and there was a whole list of things we had to do to make even that work.

So we dreaded taking him on that Thursday morning. First, I had to put him in the carrier and put him in the car, and he knew what that meant. He growled a little in the car, but I threaded my fingers through his cage and he rubbed his head on them all the way there. Chris met me there, because we both had things we had to do separately after the appointment.

First, the vet, whom I love, did a basic exam while I held him and he growled. As soon as she touched the area over his kidneys, he freaked out, screamed, and started climbing my shoulder. I soothed him and kissed him and he calmed down a little, but he was still growling non-stop.

Then it was time for the blood work. We knew what we’d have to do, the same thing we’d had to do back in November, when he first got sick. In order for them to get blood from him to check his kidney values, they’d need to knock him out. And since he fought, he’d have to be “boxed down,” meaning put into a clear plastic box and gassed.

Since no one else could touch him, I had to do it. I had to pick up my terrified cat, who was so brave that he was ready to take out several large adults, and so scared that he felt that was necessary. I had to pick him up, and put him in a goddamn plastic fucking box and let the vet put a lid on it and let them take him to the back and gas him. I had to do that to him.

They came back with the results. His kidney values were pretty high, but not as high as when he’d first been hospitalized back in November. So we figured, great, put him in overnight to run fluids through his kidneys, give him antibiotics in case there’s an infection, mild pain meds, fine. He’d still have to be sedated twice a day for blood work and vitals checking, but he did all right with that last time.

So Thursday I went on to work, worried about him, but more worried about how scared he’d be overnight without me than worried that the end was near. We checked in with the vet a few times that day, and he seemed to be doing fine, though he wasn’t peeing. Not a huge surprise. He never peed more than once a day or so, anyway.

They decided to wait until Friday evening to check his kidney values again. So Thursday night three weeks ago we went to krav maga, just like we did tonight, and I was glad, because it took me out of the worry, let me burn off some anxiety. Afterward, I felt so good and so hopeful that we’d have Zoey back in 24 hours or so, that we even went out for frozen yogurt and sat under the umbrella at the yogurt truck and chatted calmly. Everything would be fine.

Friday we checked in a few more times. Fine, but still not peeing. Huh. But the vet was still hopeful his values would be down when they checked them Friday evening. So Friday afternoon I felt hopeful enough to shop for some new fabric for recovering a chair and to go to a pub for a sandwich. Chris and I both felt good. Zoey would be home Friday night or Saturday at the latest, surely.

Then the vet called. His values were up. Worse, while he was sedated, she’d x-rayed him, and his bladder was empty. Meaning his one good kidney wasn’t working. It wasn’t sending liquid to his bladder. It had failed, and there would be no recovery. But the vet tried to give us hope. She said she would find someone that evening who could do a sonogram (or something, the memory is vague) and see if there was maybe a stone in the ureter. She found a place that said they could do it that night, a specialty hospital about 30 miles from where we were. She said that place was great, and that they had surgeons there who could consult if there was indeed a stone.

So we went and got him from the vet’s office. They’d had to put him in the carrier with an e-collar on, and he still had an IV set up in his leg, in case the other vet’s place would need it. I sat in the back seat with him while Chris drove us up the highway, through Friday night traffic, to this specialty clinic.

I opened his cage and pet him. He was groggy, but he knew me. He rubbed his soft head all over my hands. He tried to get up and get out of the cage, but he was sedated, and his IV set up was causing him trouble. I got the e-collar off of him and took off another plastic ID collar that was sticking to his neck fur. I petted him and talked to him and looked into his eyes and made sure he knew I was there.

We waited almost an hour to even see the vet. While we waited, Zoey’s carrier was on a low bench, so I sat on the floor and kept my hand in there, petting him. Chris petted him, too. Some of the sedation wore off, and Zoey tried to climb out of the cage, so I picked him up and held him.

I always held him, every day. He’d ride around the house on my shoulder. He loved it. I loved it. I’d hold him and rub his ears and he’d rub his face against mine.

But when I picked him up at the office that night, he growled. Chris tried to hold him, and Zoey growled then, too. We realized his kidneys hurt so bad that we were hurting him when we tried to hold him. I put him back on the bench and he went back into his carrier, while I arranged the IV set up so it wouldn’t tangle around his legs.

I put my face near his and blew some air. It was a game we’d play every night at bedtime, while he sat on my chest. He loved air—air from fans, from air conditioner vents, from people blowing on him. So I blew in his face, and he responded the way he always did, by pushing his head forward to catch more air and rub his face on mine. We did that while we waited for the vet.

He was so scared, but he was brave. He let me comfort him, and he waited while he was in so much pain, and he was sweet and loved us and just waited for us to help him.

The vet turned out to be about 25. She told us that the sonogram person couldn’t get there until midnight. And she consulted with a surgeon who said that even if a stone was there, the surgery would have a 90% chance of failure, since the ureter on a cat is so tiny and the recovery is difficult. Apparently, the ureter often breaks open during recovery because repairing it after surgery is so delicate.

So there was our choice. Wait four hours with a cat in serious pain, whose kidneys were almost 100% likely to be in failure. For a sonogram that would probably not show a stone. And even if it did, we’d probably not elect to do the surgery, because it would be so hard on him and likely kill him anyway.

I cried. I’ve never cried so much. I wailed. I sat beside my cat, who I loved more than I love most people, and I just fucking wailed. “I don’t know what to do!” I said. But I did. And Chris did. So we did.

The vet brought in two syringes, and she stuck them in his IV while we petted him, and then he was gone. That’s the third time Chris and I have had to do that, but it was the worst.

With Sly, and with Sassy, they were both older. They had both been sick for a while. We’d watched them decline and feel worse and worse, and we were prepared. With Zoey, up until about two hours before we had to watch him die, we were drinking cocktails at a pub and talking about what we were going to do for the weekend. We thought he was okay. He was 10 for fuck’s sake. That’s nothing for a cat.

And he was so alive. This is how I know I’m not a great writer. I can’t capture this. I can’t explain to you how big Zoey lived, how special he was, how he wasn’t like any other animal I’ve ever known, how he was just a magical little ball of fluff that was certain he could defeat anything. He was so certain that he convinced me. I thought we’d have more time together.

The vet offered to let us stay in the room with his body afterward, but I ran out of the room, out of the office, into the dark and empty parking lot. I fell onto the sidewalk because my legs just wouldn’t hold me up, and I howled. I screamed and I howled and I punched the sidewalk and I lay there until Chris caught up with me and made me stand up and walk to the car.

I don’t act like that. I don’t do that. I hate such drama. But there was nothing else I could do after my sweet, precious, crazy boy had just calmly waited for me to make the right decision for him, to let him go. There was nothing else I could do.

And even though all of that happened and I remember every fucking second of it and can’t get it out of my mind, I still can’t really believe that he’s gone. I knew I depended on him every day to make me remember to be alive myself, to enjoy moments, to be silly. But I didn’t realize, I guess, that losing him would make me incapable of doing those things, at least for a while.

So three weeks ago tonight, I had hope. And three weeks ago tomorrow, I felt like I’d never have hope or laugh again. I’m doing a little better now, but only in public. At home, it’s dark. I’m trying, though. I’m trying to remember how to enjoy a moment, just a little one. I’m still thinking about Zoey while I lay a flurry of punches on a pad in krav maga or grab a 6’4″ giant by the shoulder and knee him in the gut.

And I’m trying to love the cat that’s left, because Malcolm has lost his best friend, too, and he doesn’t even know why.

All three of us—me, Chris, and Malcolm—still wander the house like zombies. Chris retreats to lots of naps so he doesn’t have to think about it. Malcolm walks around meowing and examining all the places he used to be able to find Zoey. And I cry, look at pictures, write long emails to my friends, cry some more, pet Malcolm, and dread bedtime.

We all miss the little guy who made everything bright.