Another week goes by
Kitten is doing great. His eyes can open clompletely now, and though they're still a murky greyish colour -the third lid, says The Mighty Vet- he can see... things. My hand, which is his favourite toy, and Dog's ham tongue covering his little black body with a thick and hygienic layer of sliver.
Kitten pretends that he's not happy, but when he thinks that nobody's looking he purrs and plays all around the house.
On the other hand -err... foot-
I really hurt my toe during the White Night. I hit it against something in the museum -I really hope that it wasn't one of the swords that the fencing actors were going to use for the exhibition- and since then it has been red, and swollen and strangely unflexible -my toes usually wiggle and dance when I'm not paying attention, just like the cat. Mother the Doctor thinks that I may have an infection, and she has instructed me to take double the pills that Kitten is taking for his eyes. "It's antibiotics, dear. Human ones, we adapted the dosis for Kitty-cat."
Oh my.
Until the swell receedes, I'm walking with a neat limp that makes people stare at me and granpas raise up in the bus and offer me their seats. That almost makes up for the fact that I feel like the little mermaid, with a thousand nails running through my foot whenever I walk, and a warm tenderness between footfalls.
Tomorrow I have to wake up at 6 to make a line at the local police station. Why? Because that's the only way to get a number for my ID. The new, fancy, electronic one that they can give to you in twenty minutes -but for which you may have to wait up to 4 hours in the cold concrete dawn.
On an injured toe.
On a lighter note, Boyfriend took some wicked pics of my pets playing around -well, of Doggie thinking that he's a bitch that has to nurse Kitten and of Kitten trying to look alternatively fiery, infuriated, tiger-like, miserable and finally, dead (it didn't work. He received his bath no matter how immobile he pretended to be.)
I'm also reading. A lot.
I'm done with a HORRIBLE vampire-love story which I'm not going to mention -that seems to backfire, and it only encourages people to go and buy the books to read by themselves, but trust me, it was awfully full of Mary-Sues and Gary-Stues and poorly written dialogues and cliched loved scenes (without describing the actual falling in love!) and a really stupid last-minute villain (because the author realized that she had no plot in the last five characters, so a bad-ass popped out of nowhere in an eyebat) and lots of scenes where the heroine is about to die and then the male lead rescues her in the most unlikely ways ( I was thinking "please die already" most of the time. That would have kicked the story up its lazy ass. Or something.) and incredible bits of male chauvinism poorly disguised (the heroine has no interests besides her loved one, and no activities besides mooning over said vampire AND cooking her father's dinner. So annoying.)
And I'm halfway through Stardust, by the always awesome Neil Gaiman. I almost stopped reading it because I glimpsed a gruesome death among the wonderful illustrations that Charles Vess draw, and I was scared to read it. Today I managed to go on, and it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. Though it's definitely not a book for the younger children.
On my list are Flying to Nowhere, by John Fuller, Equus (a play), by Peter Shagger and The Dwarf, by Pär Lagerkvist, which is the one that intrigued me the most. It's a fantasy flick -the best novel, actually, if you believe in critics- by a Lit. Nobel prize winner. I found it in a fifty-cent-a-book coffee shop, and it's in perfect condition, despite being 15 years old. The first paragraph left me breathless:
"I am twenty-six inches tall, shapely and well proportioned, my head perhaps a trifle too large. My hair is not black like the others', but reddish, very stiff and thick, drawn back from the temples and the broad but not especially lofty brow. My face is beardless, but otherwise just like that of other men. My eyebrows meet. My bodily strength is considerable, particularly if I am annoyed. When the wrestling match was arranged between Jehoshaphat and myself I forced him onto his back after twenty minutes and I strangled him. Since then I have been the only dwarf at this court."
It inflicts my self-imposed rules ( no first person, no complete description and no action scenes in the first page unless it's strictly necessary to get the plot rolling), and yet it's woven with such grace and poignancy that I had to take this baby home. Not to mention the beautiful yet simple cover:
Mind you, the background is more wine than red and the lines are better defined. That is not a good pic, and the book looks much better in person.
There's also Songs for the Open Road, a compilation of poems for travels. And with one of those, dedicated to someone that I won't mention -but not in the same way that I didn't mention that yucky waste of paper- I'll say nighty night for tonight:
INTO MY HEART AN AIR THAT KILLS
Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?
That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.
A.E. Housman