OMG WAT
OMG WAT 1:
No, literally. Herpes in her eyes.
She's always had a runny nose and I just chalked it up to her being a chronic snuffler like the cats one of my professors in undergrad had. Because cats don't just have runny noses, they're snufflers. When I first got her, the vet said she had a herpes infection in her eyes--which is apparently just essentially a cold in cats--and gave her some lysine treats. It eventually went away, so I figured it was just one of those shelter illnesses and forgot about it. I'd noticed her squinting her left eye a little now and then, but I just assumed she had an eyelash in her eye or something, since it always went away as soon as I started to worry about it.
Monday night I noticed her left eye was really runny. I came home from class Tuesday afternoon and she couldn't open it. And she's always clingy, but there's a difference between her usual YOU'VE BEEN GONE FOR FIFTEEN MINUTES I THOUGHT YOU'D DIED AND I WAS GOING TO DIE clinging and whining and the MOMMY HELP FIX IT HUG ME clinging and whining she was doing. I'd been up since ten Monday morning, so I just wanted to assume it was nothing and go to bed, but it didn't seem right to be like "bah, you don't need two eyes, you're fine. Leave me alone, I'm tired." So I got a vet appointment for about an hour later. And of course she was fine by the time I woke up, but I still had the appointment so I punished her for making me get up after only an hour by taking her to the vet. She only went for all her shots and things a few weeks ago, so she was very soundly chastened. And by "chastened" I mean "whiny" and by "soundly" I mean "loud." Even when we were sitting in the examining room with nothing going on. I don't know, I guess she took a shine to how a slight echo and a cabinet door she can bang open and closed really improve the tragicness of the whole WORST THING WORST THING SADDEST KITTY HATE WORST THING! message.
So I guess that the first herpes never really went away in the first place and she's just having a flareup. The "do you have any questions" question always catches me off guard, so I just go "nope." So until I looked "cat eye herpes" up on Google, I was really flinchy about touching her. Because I'm little bit of a hypochondriac and had visions of accidentally getting embarrassing personal herpes by not washing my hands between petting her and wiping after I went to the bathroom. Even though I'm not sure even people herpes spreads like that. But that would be the most awkward conversation ever. "Hey, before we go too far, you should know... Oh no no, not like that. I got it from my cat."
Now she has lysine goop that I have to pump on her food twice a day and eyedrops I have to give her twice a day. I think she probably preferred when I was all like AGGHH NO DON'T TOUCH ME WITH YOUR HERPES FACE. (one of the reasons I could never be a parent is that "You're sick? Gross, get away! Don't touch me! I don't want your germs. Just... just go sit over there. God." probably wouldn't fly with a kid.) Because she doesn't believe me when I tell her that they've put the Lysine Contingency into effect and unless she eats her goopfood, she'll go into a coma and die. She's already really picky about her food; she won't anything that isn't kibble. I think she ate it with her medicine condiment once, but now it just sort of conglomerates into these big nasty clumps of gooey kibble because I think she's eating around the medicine and leaving it to congeal. And people who think pilling cats is hard? It has nothing on eyedropping cats. It's like pilling five cats. I think I've managed to get like three drops into her eyes. I have to drop a blanket on her and flop her over on her back, and even then she still has the strongest eyelids in the world. I can't get them open once she shuts them. I worry about her becoming afraid of me because she thinks I've gone rogue and started to abuse her like her last people did, so I'm also flinchy about trying too hard to restrain her or force her eye open. So I sort of sidle up to her while she's on the bed since hey, maybe I'll be able to just bloop one in while she's resting. And she goes OMG WTF LET GO OF MY HEAD and we end up flopping around on the bed for a few minutes and by the time we're done, her face is just as wet and gooey as when her faceherpes is flaring up. I feel sort of bad for since I can't explain that I'm not doing it to be mean and it won't be forever. But then if she did speak English, I would have to explain to her why I think it's kind of hilariously absurd that my cat has eye herpes and all the stupid juvenile jokes I would make about it ("wow, honey, you're doing eye fucking completely wrong!"). So maybe it's just as well.
OMG WAT 2: Speaking of snufflers? I wrote it as "hairy snuffler" the first time without even thinking of it.
There was this book I remember adoring as early as second grade, Grandpa's Ghost Stories. I don't even remember where it came from; I've always had it. I was a really, really timid kid. "Labyrinth" scared me. "Gremlins" scared me. Hearing about Freddy Kreuger scared me. This random shady section of sidewalk near our house and a shack in the field across the road scared me, because I thought there were ghosts there. But I guess Grandpa's Ghost Stories is tame enough and silly enough that it wasn't exactly scary. Or maybe the first story was; I remember the Bag of Bones being my least favorite. A kid ends up alone in a cabin empty except for a bag of bones, which he reassembles with the guidance of a creepy voice from inside the bag. It turns out to be a giant skeleton that wants to eat him. It's legit kind of scary for timid little kids.
Actually, I generally don't remember the first one until something reminds me of it. The second two are sillier--the kid escapes the skeleton by fleeing into the cave where a witch who turns children into spiders lives, and she turns him into a spider by way of a magic wishbone. He's made to be her scullery servant, and he tries to steal her wishbone to turn himself back while she and the other spiders are sleeping. They wake up, and he escapes the cave only to be saved by a giant floating hand. It turns out to belong to a banshee type ghost that wants to keep him as a pet or something, I think; all I really remember is them watching TV until the ghost's pet werewolf gobbles him up. And then he's in the werewolf's stomach, and maybe gets out of that? I don't quite remember. I know it ends with him using the wishbone to wish that he was "at home with my grandson rocking on me knee," which takes him back to the framing story where Grandpa was telling these stories to his grandson. Then he gives the wishbone to his grandson, and it blew my six year old mind, because this was some "Inception"-type stuff at that age. I remember taking the book to school and having the teacher read the Ghastly Ghost story at Halloween when I was in second grade because this book oh man! And then I was sort of disappointed when the rest of the class was just kind of like "yeah, okay" instead of being as excited by it as I was.
I think it may have been the art as much as anything; I'll be thirty-five this summer and I haven't read the book in decades, but I can still picture most of the illustrations from the second two stories pretty clearly. I didn't know it until I went to the Internets just now, but James Flora was better known for the frenetic, bright jazz album covers he painted through the '40s and '50s. The witch and ghost stories have a lot of that same style of artwork. the tones are mostly blue and grey, but the pictures are crammed with all these unique characters all doing some kind of little business, and some of them scared me but others were funny and others I just didn't quite get; there's so much going on in each scene. I didn't remember the Hairy Snuffler Comedy Hour from Ghost TV on Channel 1 1/2 ("one snuffler in particular got all the laughs by asking 'who's got the ketchup?' over and over. The grand finale was when they put whipped cream on the teacher and ate her.") until I looked for a picture of them, but I did as soon as I saw the picture. I mean, I'm quoting the text from memory. The first story... it's a skeleton in an empty cabin. There's not that much you can do with that.
And I discovered when I went googling for an image of the hairy snufflers that it has a sequel. A sequel I'll never see because it starts at $119 on Amazon, but still OMG WAT how did I never know this was a thing?
OMG WAT 3: Also? I sort of vaguely remembered a children's album we had on vinyl when we lived in Wisconsin, which I still get in my head occasionally. Or at least there are a set of children's songs that earworm me every so often; I'm not sure I even associated them as being on the same album. The main one and the one I remember most completely is if I only knew/If I only had a clue/about the wow wow/wibble woggle/wozzie woodle woo!/ What does he look like?/How does he smell?/If I ever saw one/How would I tell? And I remember a voice cutting in at some point to say, "Hi! I'm the Wow Wow Wibble Woggle Wozzie Woodle Woo. Would you ask your mom if you can come out and play?", but I don't remember where in the song it falls. Then there a couple about being picked on by a bully and raising a family of monkeys that I mostly only remember the chorus or title phrase of. But they were cute and I very vaguely remember loving the Wow Wow Wibble Woggle Wozzie Woodle Woo album. There was a song that scared me, and a very haunting, pretty one, but mostly I remember bouncy, fairly clever songs for '80s children's music (though I'm not sure there isn't some crossover with Sharon, Lois, and Braham in my memory; I might be remembering some of their songs as part of the album or attributing some of the ones from this album to them).
I went to a party last weekend that was supposed to be a drunken game night, but was actually more a drunken play one game of Apples to Apples that lasts the whole evening and watch this weird movie that the lady hosting the party loves night.
Weird movie in question being In Search of the Wow Wow Wibble Wobble Wozzie Woodle Woo, which really must be seen to believed. It's one of those "hooray power of imagination!" movies from the '80s, and it's... I don't remember who it was now, but something I read on the Internets trying to find out more about it described it as "like Peewee's Playhouse at the Guggenheim, without the excitement or Lawrence Fishburne." And... yeah. Pretty much. It's a thirty-something guy in a completely white set (with props that are obviously paper and all out of proportion to anyone larger than a Barbie doll), playing a little kid who makes all sorts of strange things happen with the power of his Imagination, or possibly drops some mushrooms and hallucinates them. With no explanation of who this kid is or why he has to stay in his sterile clean room all day. Also there are giant creepy puppets. That's the meat of it, but words just don't do justice to the sheer magnificent what-the-fuckery of the whole thing.
Because yeah.
But I remembered every single song from it, and a few scenes I very vaguely remember--
those shoes and that hat, I know I saw those shoes and hat!--so maybe I did see it in reruns or something. I saw parts of it that definitely would have scared the life out of me when I was little, and I remembered being scared of that song. I sort of reflexively sang along to the movie, and the host was so delighted that I remembered all the songs, or knew about it at all.
I don't know how we ended up with the soundtrack to a special my sister and I never would have seen since Mom and Dad wouldn't get us premium cable (I was so jealous of my friends who got the Disney Channel. So jealous), but I guess it makes as much sense as having like all the albums from a Canadian children's/folk band. I guess it isn't any weirder than In Search of the Wawawhatever being an actual thing. But I was so amazed not only that this was a thing I never knew about, but that I found someone else who actually remembered it.
OMG WAT 4: The cousin who was born the year I was a junior in high school just sent me an invitation to her high school graduation. OMG what the hell.
OMG WAT 5: If I hadn't decided to go through next fall, I'd be finishing my degree next week. Next week.
No, literally. Herpes in her eyes.
She's always had a runny nose and I just chalked it up to her being a chronic snuffler like the cats one of my professors in undergrad had. Because cats don't just have runny noses, they're snufflers. When I first got her, the vet said she had a herpes infection in her eyes--which is apparently just essentially a cold in cats--and gave her some lysine treats. It eventually went away, so I figured it was just one of those shelter illnesses and forgot about it. I'd noticed her squinting her left eye a little now and then, but I just assumed she had an eyelash in her eye or something, since it always went away as soon as I started to worry about it.
Monday night I noticed her left eye was really runny. I came home from class Tuesday afternoon and she couldn't open it. And she's always clingy, but there's a difference between her usual YOU'VE BEEN GONE FOR FIFTEEN MINUTES I THOUGHT YOU'D DIED AND I WAS GOING TO DIE clinging and whining and the MOMMY HELP FIX IT HUG ME clinging and whining she was doing. I'd been up since ten Monday morning, so I just wanted to assume it was nothing and go to bed, but it didn't seem right to be like "bah, you don't need two eyes, you're fine. Leave me alone, I'm tired." So I got a vet appointment for about an hour later. And of course she was fine by the time I woke up, but I still had the appointment so I punished her for making me get up after only an hour by taking her to the vet. She only went for all her shots and things a few weeks ago, so she was very soundly chastened. And by "chastened" I mean "whiny" and by "soundly" I mean "loud." Even when we were sitting in the examining room with nothing going on. I don't know, I guess she took a shine to how a slight echo and a cabinet door she can bang open and closed really improve the tragicness of the whole WORST THING WORST THING SADDEST KITTY HATE WORST THING! message.
So I guess that the first herpes never really went away in the first place and she's just having a flareup. The "do you have any questions" question always catches me off guard, so I just go "nope." So until I looked "cat eye herpes" up on Google, I was really flinchy about touching her. Because I'm little bit of a hypochondriac and had visions of accidentally getting embarrassing personal herpes by not washing my hands between petting her and wiping after I went to the bathroom. Even though I'm not sure even people herpes spreads like that. But that would be the most awkward conversation ever. "Hey, before we go too far, you should know... Oh no no, not like that. I got it from my cat."
Now she has lysine goop that I have to pump on her food twice a day and eyedrops I have to give her twice a day. I think she probably preferred when I was all like AGGHH NO DON'T TOUCH ME WITH YOUR HERPES FACE. (one of the reasons I could never be a parent is that "You're sick? Gross, get away! Don't touch me! I don't want your germs. Just... just go sit over there. God." probably wouldn't fly with a kid.) Because she doesn't believe me when I tell her that they've put the Lysine Contingency into effect and unless she eats her goopfood, she'll go into a coma and die. She's already really picky about her food; she won't anything that isn't kibble. I think she ate it with her medicine condiment once, but now it just sort of conglomerates into these big nasty clumps of gooey kibble because I think she's eating around the medicine and leaving it to congeal. And people who think pilling cats is hard? It has nothing on eyedropping cats. It's like pilling five cats. I think I've managed to get like three drops into her eyes. I have to drop a blanket on her and flop her over on her back, and even then she still has the strongest eyelids in the world. I can't get them open once she shuts them. I worry about her becoming afraid of me because she thinks I've gone rogue and started to abuse her like her last people did, so I'm also flinchy about trying too hard to restrain her or force her eye open. So I sort of sidle up to her while she's on the bed since hey, maybe I'll be able to just bloop one in while she's resting. And she goes OMG WTF LET GO OF MY HEAD and we end up flopping around on the bed for a few minutes and by the time we're done, her face is just as wet and gooey as when her faceherpes is flaring up. I feel sort of bad for since I can't explain that I'm not doing it to be mean and it won't be forever. But then if she did speak English, I would have to explain to her why I think it's kind of hilariously absurd that my cat has eye herpes and all the stupid juvenile jokes I would make about it ("wow, honey, you're doing eye fucking completely wrong!"). So maybe it's just as well.
OMG WAT 2: Speaking of snufflers? I wrote it as "hairy snuffler" the first time without even thinking of it.
There was this book I remember adoring as early as second grade, Grandpa's Ghost Stories. I don't even remember where it came from; I've always had it. I was a really, really timid kid. "Labyrinth" scared me. "Gremlins" scared me. Hearing about Freddy Kreuger scared me. This random shady section of sidewalk near our house and a shack in the field across the road scared me, because I thought there were ghosts there. But I guess Grandpa's Ghost Stories is tame enough and silly enough that it wasn't exactly scary. Or maybe the first story was; I remember the Bag of Bones being my least favorite. A kid ends up alone in a cabin empty except for a bag of bones, which he reassembles with the guidance of a creepy voice from inside the bag. It turns out to be a giant skeleton that wants to eat him. It's legit kind of scary for timid little kids.
Actually, I generally don't remember the first one until something reminds me of it. The second two are sillier--the kid escapes the skeleton by fleeing into the cave where a witch who turns children into spiders lives, and she turns him into a spider by way of a magic wishbone. He's made to be her scullery servant, and he tries to steal her wishbone to turn himself back while she and the other spiders are sleeping. They wake up, and he escapes the cave only to be saved by a giant floating hand. It turns out to belong to a banshee type ghost that wants to keep him as a pet or something, I think; all I really remember is them watching TV until the ghost's pet werewolf gobbles him up. And then he's in the werewolf's stomach, and maybe gets out of that? I don't quite remember. I know it ends with him using the wishbone to wish that he was "at home with my grandson rocking on me knee," which takes him back to the framing story where Grandpa was telling these stories to his grandson. Then he gives the wishbone to his grandson, and it blew my six year old mind, because this was some "Inception"-type stuff at that age. I remember taking the book to school and having the teacher read the Ghastly Ghost story at Halloween when I was in second grade because this book oh man! And then I was sort of disappointed when the rest of the class was just kind of like "yeah, okay" instead of being as excited by it as I was.
I think it may have been the art as much as anything; I'll be thirty-five this summer and I haven't read the book in decades, but I can still picture most of the illustrations from the second two stories pretty clearly. I didn't know it until I went to the Internets just now, but James Flora was better known for the frenetic, bright jazz album covers he painted through the '40s and '50s. The witch and ghost stories have a lot of that same style of artwork. the tones are mostly blue and grey, but the pictures are crammed with all these unique characters all doing some kind of little business, and some of them scared me but others were funny and others I just didn't quite get; there's so much going on in each scene. I didn't remember the Hairy Snuffler Comedy Hour from Ghost TV on Channel 1 1/2 ("one snuffler in particular got all the laughs by asking 'who's got the ketchup?' over and over. The grand finale was when they put whipped cream on the teacher and ate her.") until I looked for a picture of them, but I did as soon as I saw the picture. I mean, I'm quoting the text from memory. The first story... it's a skeleton in an empty cabin. There's not that much you can do with that.
And I discovered when I went googling for an image of the hairy snufflers that it has a sequel. A sequel I'll never see because it starts at $119 on Amazon, but still OMG WAT how did I never know this was a thing?
OMG WAT 3: Also? I sort of vaguely remembered a children's album we had on vinyl when we lived in Wisconsin, which I still get in my head occasionally. Or at least there are a set of children's songs that earworm me every so often; I'm not sure I even associated them as being on the same album. The main one and the one I remember most completely is if I only knew/If I only had a clue/about the wow wow/wibble woggle/wozzie woodle woo!/ What does he look like?/How does he smell?/If I ever saw one/How would I tell? And I remember a voice cutting in at some point to say, "Hi! I'm the Wow Wow Wibble Woggle Wozzie Woodle Woo. Would you ask your mom if you can come out and play?", but I don't remember where in the song it falls. Then there a couple about being picked on by a bully and raising a family of monkeys that I mostly only remember the chorus or title phrase of. But they were cute and I very vaguely remember loving the Wow Wow Wibble Woggle Wozzie Woodle Woo album. There was a song that scared me, and a very haunting, pretty one, but mostly I remember bouncy, fairly clever songs for '80s children's music (though I'm not sure there isn't some crossover with Sharon, Lois, and Braham in my memory; I might be remembering some of their songs as part of the album or attributing some of the ones from this album to them).
I went to a party last weekend that was supposed to be a drunken game night, but was actually more a drunken play one game of Apples to Apples that lasts the whole evening and watch this weird movie that the lady hosting the party loves night.
Weird movie in question being In Search of the Wow Wow Wibble Wobble Wozzie Woodle Woo, which really must be seen to believed. It's one of those "hooray power of imagination!" movies from the '80s, and it's... I don't remember who it was now, but something I read on the Internets trying to find out more about it described it as "like Peewee's Playhouse at the Guggenheim, without the excitement or Lawrence Fishburne." And... yeah. Pretty much. It's a thirty-something guy in a completely white set (with props that are obviously paper and all out of proportion to anyone larger than a Barbie doll), playing a little kid who makes all sorts of strange things happen with the power of his Imagination, or possibly drops some mushrooms and hallucinates them. With no explanation of who this kid is or why he has to stay in his sterile clean room all day. Also there are giant creepy puppets. That's the meat of it, but words just don't do justice to the sheer magnificent what-the-fuckery of the whole thing.
Because yeah.
But I remembered every single song from it, and a few scenes I very vaguely remember--
those shoes and that hat, I know I saw those shoes and hat!--so maybe I did see it in reruns or something. I saw parts of it that definitely would have scared the life out of me when I was little, and I remembered being scared of that song. I sort of reflexively sang along to the movie, and the host was so delighted that I remembered all the songs, or knew about it at all.
I don't know how we ended up with the soundtrack to a special my sister and I never would have seen since Mom and Dad wouldn't get us premium cable (I was so jealous of my friends who got the Disney Channel. So jealous), but I guess it makes as much sense as having like all the albums from a Canadian children's/folk band. I guess it isn't any weirder than In Search of the Wawawhatever being an actual thing. But I was so amazed not only that this was a thing I never knew about, but that I found someone else who actually remembered it.
OMG WAT 4: The cousin who was born the year I was a junior in high school just sent me an invitation to her high school graduation. OMG what the hell.
OMG WAT 5: If I hadn't decided to go through next fall, I'd be finishing my degree next week. Next week.