To a friend, recently gone:

Lulu, small Lulu
you were a container into which we poured
the creamy batter of our affections.
It was the lumpy kind, inconsistent at times
and bubbly with a mischevious temperament,
but it was truly made of the good stuff.
(All organic. Handmade. And extremely locally grown.)
And one way or another,
you always expanded flawlessly
to accept all that we could ladle.

Sadly, it was not until the end
that we knew
the eggshell thinness
of your mortal boundaries
and saw the many
cracks on the bottom
that appeared one by one.

Yet you sat, even in the final hours, like a little round queen
wreathed in a rabbit fur so thickly luxuriant that you simply reabsorbed
every drop that escaped out.

And because of this,
though you are now, as they say,
lidded, capped, forever sealed from us,

My little friend,
you will also be
forever filled to the brim.

***

On the evening of March 25, 2010, our cat Lulu was put to rest at the terminus of a staunch and brave struggle against chronic renal failure. To the last moment, she was calm, affectionate, and so soft behind the ears that, when you petted her there, it feels like you imagined there was something at your fingertips.

Lulu was, as Jess pointed out, my first real pet, the first animal I really put my heart and soul into loving and caring for. To make matters somewhat complicated, I never quite felt that she was really my pet, more that she was on loan from Jess’ dad, who couldn’t keep her because of other bullying cats in the house (he also subsidized much of her substantial medical costs). But in the end, in the short year that we’ve had her, Yang, my housemates and I all fell in love with her…

She was a middle-aged lady, as far as cats go, and had somewhat of a mysterious aura. For instance, we never quite solved the mystery of why she liked to walk around and stare at us with her tongue slightly poking out. (Jess would say this was because she was brain-damaged.) Or why she seemed to have a fear of handbags. Or even exactly how old she was.

But one thing that was clear was her growth from a shy, almost fearful kitty into a confident and comfortable little ruler of our apartment. She went from scurrying for cover whenever footsteps were heard in the stairwell to curiously peeking at visitors and even wandering out into the hallway to explore on one occasion.

It pains me a little to think that, just when life was getting good, it had to be taken away from her. But then I have to remind myself that cats don’t have any sense of time as we do, nor do they engage in retrospection or entertaining future hopes. We did give her all we had, and would have given more if her punishing disease did not render her future prospects so bleak and pain-filled.

I still cry a little bit after her, three days later. When I’m alone I think about her even though the more rational part of my brain implores me to change the topic. Of course, when daily life moves on I move with it. But no amount of cerebral reckoning can change the fact that the small reminders in and around the house of her presence still create this little tugging feeling in the center of my chest. I wonder when it will go away. If I’m anything like my boss Carol, another cat devotee, it never will.

And that’s when you know that a pet really knew love, which is all that matters.

A while ago, I blogged about the problem of organizing and remembering the vast quantities information I encounter every day on the Internet. Since then, I’ve become an assiduous user of Delicious.com and Google Notebooks, with YouNote on iPhone as a backup plan, but it doesn’t seem to help. I still feel overwhelmed. More than that, I still feel like I am reading, perusing, and admiring things but retaining none of it.

I’m starting to feel like technology is actually the culprit here. Rather than helping me index information for easy retrieval forever and ever into golden posterity and as a result making me a smarter, happier, more informed individual, it’s just making me darn lazy. I’ll admit it, I’ve developed Instapaper Syndrome. The variety of organizational technologies out there enable me to see something cool and think “Ah, I’ll note this down so I can check it out later.” Later never comes. Don’t even look at my Instapaper account; it’s embarrassing.

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“If you set your goals ridiculously high and it’s a failure, you will fail above everyone else’s success.”

- James Cameron, from The New Yorker

It’s resolution time again! This year, I’ve decided that I’ve had it with realistic resolutions. In the spirit of that crazy man quoted above, it’s time to break free of the chains of reason. Therefore, I am assigning myself 10 totally unachievable goals this New Year’s. Rather than trying to achieve them literally, I will look to them to inform my day-to-day activities, in the hope that I will become a smarter, healthier, more creative, and overall more better human person in the upcoming year.

Here goes:

• Sketch every single day for at least 1 hour
• Read a book every other week, alternating fiction and non-fiction
• Blog every other day
• Get up promptly when the alarm clock sounds and read the entire front page of nytimes.com over breakfast before going to work (this is probably the least realistic, actually.)
• Only focus on ONE interesting thing found on the Internet each day
• Cook through all the cookbooks I own
• Cut down the amount of my possessions by half
• Not yell at Yang ever
• Brush Lulu daily

And finally (hopefully this is not actually unrealistic):

• Get into the MFA in Interaction Design program at SVA

I don’t know why, but I’m just about ready to pass out. See, this is why I don’t write in my blog. This was supposed to be a long weekend. Don’t people typically relax and drink martinis on long weekends? And I was originally going to go visit my mom. Instead I danced in a parade, had dinner with folks I worked with who I haven’t seen in a long time, worked on ridiculously elaborate Halloween costumes (basically I am trying to make Yang a Daft Punk getup. Out of paper mache. I know, Daft Punk does not do paper mache, but I’m not a big fan of Bondo fumes in a small city apartment, soooo…), and, last but not least, attended a 9-hour event at MIT called Startup Bootcamp.

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So I think I’ve been too busy living life lately to blog.

We’re now past the mid-way point of summer. Every summer passes too fast, regardless of whether you are on a break from schooling or now hauling your ass through the 9-to-5 grind. It just seems to be in the nature of summers to start off hopeful, effervescently charged—then to speed by like a blinded racehorse through a field of very tall grass—and to disappear. And every year, as July wanders into August, I get very restless because now we’re in the home stretch and plans have to be made good on, duties and ideas carried out, etc. etc.

I’m also getting rather restless of late because of this whole idea of living life. This feeling started soon after I graduated and I actually started to have enough time to do things other than study and write papers. Things like to really savor the time I spend with people I love, to wonder semi-full-time about the future, to engage in activities of an indulgent and somewhat domestic nature (cook, decorate, recreationally care about what I wear gasp!), etc. Now I am well-supported with a steady job, well-loved by a steadfast significant other, and well-ensconced in a beautiful apartment in one of the trendier neighborhoods of the Metro Boston Area. I find myself thinking day after day, against all my more ambitious yearnings, Wow, I could get used to this. Screw grad school screw changing the world screw opening minds and eyes with art and design. Just passing the days in a muted golden way. I know. It makes me sound downright elderly. I’m 23. But hey, in these summer days I see the shape of lifelong “happiness,” that elusive unicorn, taking shape. It is fucking gorgeous.

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