First Impressions

My beloved pet, Razzle Dazzle (a domestic rat) passed away last week – one of my saddest days in months. While mourning the loss of my obnoxiously attention-desperate rodent, a dear friend brought me a new pet: a chinchilla. Chinchillas, while being undoubtedly the softest animal in the world, lack a certain social interaction ability upon which rats thrive. Rats need attention; chinchillas, however, do not.

As a strong believer in the idea that the object of one’s affection can, in deed, shift shapes, I tried so hard to exchange the love I felt for another for this new, more interesting creature. Unfortunately, the same love was not available. I spent many days, trying desperately to pet the new animal, which only made him growl at me and hide away.

Then last night, something changed.
I arrived home at approximately 11 p.m., and upon walking into my apartment, I heard loud noises coming from “The Captain’s” cage. Not knowing what to do, I inspected the situation to find he was asking me, as best as he knew how, to hold him. I reached into his enormous cage (which, by the way, is full of nothing but places to hide) and he did not refuse my affection. So I picked up the small, soft animal, cradled him to my shoulder, and we danced in my living room to “Kings of Convenience,” for over an hour. He let me hold him while we danced and never once tried to escape.

Something changed last evening, but I don’t know what.

My therapist informed me (on more than one occasion) that whatever I was there for was unnecessary. She told me I already knew what I needed to do, and shouldn’t enlist her help.

As much as my girlfriends and I are convinced we have recently found the secret to a happy life, J1’s sentiment of “icing on the cake,” doesn’t sound half bad. There isn’t time or room for many more wonderful things in this life; but perhaps just this once, I’m ready to approach something with the appropriate offer of effort: something balanced; something whole; yet, something new

My dad and I always had such an understood amount of love for one another. We’re very different beings, he and I. He is smart, logical, mathematical and everything, to him, is black and white. For him to have four highly artistic, unendingly illogical daughters must be an interesting turn in life. Yet, somehow, regardless of the amount of misunderstanding, there was always the thread of commonality that bound us: he loves me, and I love him; and even at the peak of our greatest disagreements, there was, actually, understanding.

It occurred to me recently that both one of the best and unquestionably worst moments of 2010 happened like this: I was sitting on the floor, crying. “I’m trying to determine why it is,” a boy said as I sobbed my eyes out into my kneecaps, “that the sight of you in a robe, with wet hair and smeared mascara, crying on the floor for no apparent reason…makes me love you this much.”

I didn’t know what that boy meant, exactly. “Here’s what it is,” he said. “Once upon a time, I was sitting on my floor, with wet hair, wearing a towel and crying. And the universe said to me, ‘Boy, why are you crying?’ and I said I did not know. I asked the universe if he was going to help me and he said, ‘what? No way, I’m busy.’ But here’s what he did do: he took my brain and cut it in half and gave the rest of it to you and said, ‘here is someone who understands exactly how you feel.’ And that is why I love you.”

Understanding, particularly at one’s worst, is invaluable.

Still, is understanding - alone - enough? Perhaps it is a start; but certainly it is not a finish.

“You know,” she said at the end of our final fifty minute session, while shutting her appointment book and further iterating that we would not meet again, “you’re going to have a hard time finding a man . . . who is as perfect as your father.”