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May. 19th, 2004 04:32 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
enteleinThe past couple of days I've been lounging in bed until the very late hour of 6 AM. At which point I stretch, limbs hitting the large cat randomly wherever she's parked her spherical self, and then I do a strange half-roll and leap off of the bed. You see, the mattress is ginormous, and the framing is already a significant height, so I am the pretty pretty princess, with my rumply bedhead, clambering down from on high so that I may once again (in nine minute intervals, natch) slap my hand down on the alarm clock, perhaps this time managing to switch it completely off. Then the stagger and stumble through to the kitchen, where I pour kibble into a bowl for the hyper kitten cat.
She's so insistent at being fed that it takes her several minutes to actually eat. She spends those minutes walking across the kitchen table, serpentine and purring loudly, rubbing her face happily against the kitchen chairbacks, so happy she's been fed, so grateful to the pretty pretty princess who finally turned off that damnable alarm just to give her kibble in her round metal bowl.
These past couple of mornings the stretch, stagger, and kibble portions have been a deliberate-fluid-one-motion, a choreographed swoop to get me into the bathroom to run the water hot, and then just a slight twist to the cold tap to get the right temperature for a shower. This step has also been truncated - no musings on the day ahead of me, no going over lines for Act I, no humming or pondering the state of my relationships with my family, or my girlfriend. Utilitarian shampoo and rinse and conditioner and rinse and soap and scrub and rinse and then stepping out carefully, legs angled a certain distance apart like one of Charlie's Angels in a pose because the round cat has roused herself from the bed and has taken up residence on the bath mat, and I must stand around her. Her memories of her first apartment with me stay with her, see: that apartment's bathroom had the hot water pipes running under the floor to the tub taps, and so the wintertime showers I took meant that she could get a warm tum and bum just by sitting next to the shower when Scott and I bathed.
I wonder if I still really feel at home in this apartment. More and more so, the things in it become more familiar and resilient to me, and I feel less like I am being pushed to uproot all of it again and place it in a new context. That's what years of moving (against my will, much of the time) has done to my sense of 'home,' and today I realized that in a way, these late morning starts have given me more comfort than I thought possible. This is home, with the four poster bed and the cats in their routine. The routines for me, as I check the locks before bed, stack the dishes to wash in a particular way, curse myself out for not putting the laundry away, or set aside a half hour to sit in the narcoleptic easy chair I bought from Ali a couple of years ago.
I feel less like I am rushing out the door to work, and more like I have finished that little portion of the day, and I am moving on to the next segment. I go from the sounds of water and alarm and rattle of dry food in a metal bowl to talking to hundreds of people all day, and never really looking more than half a dozen in the eye.
Tonight I'm meeting my brother at my aunt and uncle's tavern, where we'll be having dinner for his birthday, and he'll be installing a surveillance camera so that my uncle and cousins can keep an eye on my aunt, who is now out of the hospital and recuperating upstairs.
The next seven minutes are what remain in my workday. Soon I will get to shut off the lights and the phone, and I will slip my jacket on and walk the long way around and then head out into downtown Chicago, foot traffic and rush hour frenetic like a sea, like an alarm, like every other day.
She's so insistent at being fed that it takes her several minutes to actually eat. She spends those minutes walking across the kitchen table, serpentine and purring loudly, rubbing her face happily against the kitchen chairbacks, so happy she's been fed, so grateful to the pretty pretty princess who finally turned off that damnable alarm just to give her kibble in her round metal bowl.
These past couple of mornings the stretch, stagger, and kibble portions have been a deliberate-fluid-one-motion, a choreographed swoop to get me into the bathroom to run the water hot, and then just a slight twist to the cold tap to get the right temperature for a shower. This step has also been truncated - no musings on the day ahead of me, no going over lines for Act I, no humming or pondering the state of my relationships with my family, or my girlfriend. Utilitarian shampoo and rinse and conditioner and rinse and soap and scrub and rinse and then stepping out carefully, legs angled a certain distance apart like one of Charlie's Angels in a pose because the round cat has roused herself from the bed and has taken up residence on the bath mat, and I must stand around her. Her memories of her first apartment with me stay with her, see: that apartment's bathroom had the hot water pipes running under the floor to the tub taps, and so the wintertime showers I took meant that she could get a warm tum and bum just by sitting next to the shower when Scott and I bathed.
I wonder if I still really feel at home in this apartment. More and more so, the things in it become more familiar and resilient to me, and I feel less like I am being pushed to uproot all of it again and place it in a new context. That's what years of moving (against my will, much of the time) has done to my sense of 'home,' and today I realized that in a way, these late morning starts have given me more comfort than I thought possible. This is home, with the four poster bed and the cats in their routine. The routines for me, as I check the locks before bed, stack the dishes to wash in a particular way, curse myself out for not putting the laundry away, or set aside a half hour to sit in the narcoleptic easy chair I bought from Ali a couple of years ago.
I feel less like I am rushing out the door to work, and more like I have finished that little portion of the day, and I am moving on to the next segment. I go from the sounds of water and alarm and rattle of dry food in a metal bowl to talking to hundreds of people all day, and never really looking more than half a dozen in the eye.
Tonight I'm meeting my brother at my aunt and uncle's tavern, where we'll be having dinner for his birthday, and he'll be installing a surveillance camera so that my uncle and cousins can keep an eye on my aunt, who is now out of the hospital and recuperating upstairs.
The next seven minutes are what remain in my workday. Soon I will get to shut off the lights and the phone, and I will slip my jacket on and walk the long way around and then head out into downtown Chicago, foot traffic and rush hour frenetic like a sea, like an alarm, like every other day.
