1) My small weasel cat is quite thin, which is one of the characteristics that makes her weaselly.  Sometimes when she flops down on the carpet in a certain position, her rib cage sticks up visibly through her fur.  I know this is her rib cage, but I’ve never gotten over an irrational fear that it’s actually a huge tumor.  Whenever I see it, I get down on the floor with her and sort of feel around to see if she has a pain.  She usually purrs and gives me a look as though to ask me why I am so strange.  If she does indeed have a tumor, she has now lived successfully with it for six years.  I remain unconvinced, however. 

2) Recently I received the BBC series “I, Claudius” from Netflix.  Anyone familiar with the series, or with the manner in which Latin words are engraved on stone or rendered in tile, will know that the “u” ends up being rendered as a “v”, so in this case it looks like this: “I, CLAVDIVS.”  I noticed that on the DVD sleeve, the title was printed thusly:  “I, Claudius” aka “I, CLAVDIVS.”  This really made me wonder whether someone thought that Claudius is alternately referred to as Clavdivs.  It was just so strange.  I mean, nobody calls the series “I, Clavdivs.”  OK, well, sometimes I do, but just to be funny.  Yet I am sure that the DVD sleeve was not printed solely for my benefit. 

3) Last night I had a most horrible sleeping experience.  I went to bed with what can only be described as a fucking awful sinus headache; the kind that makes me think my teeth are all going to fall out from the unholy amount of pressure, and which convinces me that some invisible villain is driving an iron spike between my eyes.  I took enough ibuprofen to wear a hole through a cement wall, and was then so ardently desirous of unconsciousness that I took a handful of Dramamine, which reliably sends me into a coma, except for the times when it doesn’t, of which last night was one.  I had to get up fairly early this morning to go see my therapist, and I didn’t want to go on no sleep with an iron spike through my head, my teeth falling out, and a hole in my stomach. 

But I also didn’t want to call to cancel my appointment, because I was afraid she would think I was malingering, since I had to cancel twice last month due to not being able to talk from the endless cold I had.  I mean, I really couldn’t speak, but we had an uncomfortable discussion about whether my brain was sandbagging my body to keep me out of therapy.  I was like, you know, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.  But anyway, I didn’t want to cancel yet again, but I hated the thought of sitting in her office incoherent from pain and lack of sleep.  So I lay there and watched the clock.  Midnight.  One.  Two.  Three.  Oh, hell.  Hell, damn it, damn it all to hell.  The Dramamine kicked in sometime after three, and then I had the worst dream ever, all about trying to get to my therapy appointment. 

I was out in the middle of nowhere at a specialty shop with my mother, where we were looking at engraved stationery and afternoon tea paraphernalia.  Suddenly I realized I had to go, or I’d be late.  My car wouldn’t start.  I rushed back into the shop, and asked the shop owner if I could borrow her car.  For some unknown reason, she agreed.  I grabbed her keys.  Her car was actually a giant behemoth thing that I needed a ladder to get into, and which I wasn’t sure I could drive.  I got out of the driveway successfully, but the internal configuration of the car kept shifting … at one point the steering wheel was down on the floor; then the gas and brake pedal were up on the dashboard; then the seat squashed itself so that my knees were under my chin; then the dashboard became liquid and I kept losing things in it, such as my sunglasses.  The whole time, all I could think of in this dream was that I had to get to the appointment on time.  At one point during the dream, I got lost, and stopped someone on the street to show me where we were, which he did by displaying a Google Earth photo on his iPhone.  This was completely useless, and I was disgusted with him. 

I woke up in a heart-palpitating panic, with the sheets in a sweaty twisted mess and my cats much offended at what had apparently been my nightmare-tormented restlessness, but I was so relieved to be out of that dream world, and so happy at the thought of driving a car with a stationary steering wheel and a solid dashboard, and so happy to know where I was going without having to waste time with some asshat’s overpriced technogadget, that I happily went to therapy despite the hole in my stomach and the spike through my head and my teeth falling out.  I didn’t make a lot of sense once I got there, but that’s nothing new.