PET PROJECT Part 2

This is Sydney in case you were wondering. He’s kind of the best. Except for my other cat Pika who is also exceptional.

People are being awesome like people can be and helping me by making great things for others to buy and donating to Sydney’s dental fund.

So far we have raised about $40, it’s a good start!

Please help out if you can my either buying an item or donating to Paypal.

thanks so much from all of us here at cat central

Copy and Paste this link to see what people are selling:

https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0Auh6d8dA0rNcdHRfN1dONHhsYndTVFJ6XzZzVUZuaGc&hl=en&authkey=CL3Xq5wO#gid=0

Copy and Paste this link to Donate:

https://www.paypal.com/ca/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_flow&SESSION=o2AJLyQWPvuzPotaLbDQ5sZLwMtwdxU31C8WQZEyGCys_HDJqmWR01BaDUq&dispatch=5885d80a13c0db1f8e263663d3faee8d61ec37c409b56235bed2ddf64505aee9

Pet Project

I wrote a little diddy about the love I have for my two furry best friends. I am feeling that love even harder these days as my one little guy Sydney is in need of some very expensive dental work that I can’t afford. Is it an emergency? No. If I leave it will it become and emergency? Sadly yes. So like some things it is better to nip it in the bud before it becomes a, wait for it, CATastrophe…
I feel like being low income/poor and having animals in your life is this catch-22. I mean, when you don’t have access to much but you have these beautiful beasts to love and who love you back, for me, it makes everything so much more manageable. My only job is to love them and take care of them and keep them happy. Sometimes it is hard but it is always worth it.
But then something happens, sickness, an accident, whatever. And I am thrown face first into the guilt of being a “bad” mother because I can’t afford to keep my loves perfectly healthy all the time. A friend of mine recently told me that when her cat needed surgery, the vet said – we can do it for this price ( a lot) but if you can’t pay to have it done, you can euthinize her. WTF! Are these the options present? Either pony up the cash you don’t have or lose your love?
I am grateful to not be in that position right now but I do worry when something like this comes up what I might do.
In this moment in my life I am so lucky to have a community behind me willing to help me out. My friends are helping me make and sell things to raise money for the vet. I have been pretty humbled and amazed at the overwhelming response.
Sydney is sitting beside me, purring and tapping me on the arm which he does when he wants me to stop what I’m doing (typing) and pet him.
Oh! As if like magic Pika, my other love has woken up and come to me on the other side.
It’s cat time folks, my energy is required elsewhere.

xo

ps please check out my poem below

pet love

For letting me hold you in my arms like a child. Wrapped in a crocheted blanket you loved to hide in.

For looking into my eyes, reaching out your arm to touch my leg just so lightly when we first met.

For running, both of you from wherever you are to greet me each time I come home.

On the days when pain or anxiety or depression keep my in bed my pillow wet with tears, you’re always there.

When no one is home and I stay in bed all morning, I’m never alone. You come and press your warm and furry body next to mine and stay there as long as I do.

For keeping all my secrets. For endless conversations even though we might not always understand each other.

For helping me learn to love unconditionally even if you poop on the floor, barf down the side of my white bedspread, scratch me when you’re angry and leave soggy hairballs for me to find.

When we lived next to the train tracks and you ran away. Between sobs I’d imagine you struck and bleeding and the thought made me cry all over again.

When you came home the next morning like you’d just been out for a pack of smokes I remembered that you were fearless. I held you for too long against my damp and swollen face just to make sure it was you.

For coming to me during a panic attack to get me to pet you and use you purring as my calming rhythm.

When you start purring just when I look at you.

For keeping me company even when I think I don’t need it.

For letting me take care of you.

For taking care of me.

Brownies

I wrote this before xmas but hadn’t posted…

Already a little high from licking the spoon of my first batch of gluten free pot brownies. I have been listening to Joanna Newsom for hours and I think now I might know her personally. It’s possible that I have never understood her lyrics more than in this moment. Every morning I wake up and, depending on how my body feels, launch into one of two thought streams. If I wake up feeling rested and able bodied I want to write, craft, clean, work and everything imaginable before the pain seeps back in. Often, immobilized by anxiety I spend most of the day thinkfretstaring into space worried that I am a perpetual time waster. If I wake up and am plagued my pain and fatigue I, again, lie in bed or stare elsewhere lamenting that I don’t have a way to cope with these moments and that today is a day when nothing I want to do will get done.

It’s funny, I wake up every day with something in my head to write. But I am in such a constant state of stress (mind and body) that I can’t free myself up enough to do it. But it’s all I ever want to do. That and craft and cook. Hence: yesterday I made fimo representations of my friends and started a new quilt project; today I cleaned thoroughly and have been baking for some time. It’s like I can’t calm myself down enough to sit and start on a blank sheet of paper. My hands/body can’t be still. Rather, I have little practice at doing one task at a time. If I am going to knit or sew I have to be listening to or watching something, similarly I can’t really sit down to watch anything unless I can do something with my hands. I can’t even eat a meal without watch/read/listening. Perhaps it just takes a kind of practice that I don’t have patience for.

Steetcar, Queen.

Plays and sunny winter paper shopping indie bookstore and friends working in cafes make me remember to like where I live.

But then yelling and kicking cars and long ride home and loud phone talking and people and cars and people and cars and people and cars and I want to live in the country.

I dream of seeing sunrises on horizons instead of through cracks between building or on tiptoes as I peer over rooftops. I imagine crackling fires in winter and gardening in summer. I dream of lying in the grass without having to take a bus and a subway to get to the nearest park. I dream of quietquietquiet.

Trust Issues

Continuing my search to find a therapist. It has been over a year now since my counsellor of three years announced that she was closing down shop and that we had only one session left. I’ve (mostly) recovered from the desperation of that moment but still have not been able to find someone new. I live in a big city so one would think that finding someone to talk to wouldn’t be so hard. But finding someone affordable (or free) as well as somone working within a compatible modality/politic is not so easy. I have met about half a dozen or so counsellors, each time having to uproot and unearth the reasons for me wanting to be there.

Eventually I put myself on some waiting lists for no-fee counsellors through a couple of health organizations in the city. Both of which take months to get a call. I finally got connected with someone after waiting only about three months. I asked for really specific things: person of colour, feminist, queer positive, disability positive, there was probably more.

 

So we met.

 

First appointment I knew it wouldn’t work, but didn’t want to jump to conclusions. I called the switchboard and asked – what happens if I don’t like who you matched me with? I was told that I am required to meet with the counsellor three times before I can get someone else. How do I get someone else? I ask, thinking that I would either go back in the system or have to start from the beginning. No, the therapist I am kicking to the curb has to refer me personally to someone else on the list. And if they don’t? Tough luck. Some bureaucracy bullshit right there.

 

Ok, second appointment.

 

Filling in the intake form “for your file”, she said. Answering personal intimate questions about my life and ‘history’ and I ask if it is possible for me to get a copy of the questions and the answers I give – no. Then she looks at me and smiles knowingly saying first that this isn’t a criticism but “I’m sensing that you have some trust issues.”

 

Seriously? just because I want to have access to my OWN information makes me have an issue? Being curious about the whereabouts and access to extremely personal information that I am confessing to a virtual stranger makes ME have an issue?!?

 

The worst is that I don’t even know if its worth going back on the waiting list because I will just have to do this process all over again.

 

It is tiring and saddening it lots of ways to continually recount traumas and grievances to a stranger with no real investment in caring for those secrets. In the beginning, they just want to know all the points so that they can make decisions on treatment.

 

She kept asking about diagnoses and it made me want to scream. I explained that her constant responses to my own descriptions being “have you been formally diagnosed?” was irritating and triggering. Frustrating as well because often peoples own descriptions of their experiences with mental illness or invisible disabilities are invalidated by the lack of a diagnosis. Shouldn’t she know that? Isn’t that part of her job? She even put one of the terms I used to describe something in quotation marks because it hadn’t been confirmed by a psychiatrist. She kept saying she was wary of using terms that hadn’t been verified by a psych. I reminded her that she has the power and ability to refer me to the psychiatrist on site if she was so unsure about my terminology. But no she’d only do that in special cases when she felt that the client presented something she couldn’t handle herself. Well thanks. Just keep your quotation marks then.

 

One more appointment to go…

 

m-

germs!

hi folks i’ve been sick sorry for being absent, look for more words soon.

xo