Archive | October, 2013

For the Love of Books

22 Oct

By the always amazing Maria Papova at http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/08/03/book-spine-poetry-the-spark-of-love/

I can’t deal with my Kindle.

I don’t think it’s fair to call me an old-fashioned reader. I believe myself to just be a reader. Part of that love of books is the books themselves. Nothing fills me with more optimism than browsing a bookstore: all those stories, all those new things to learn, new characters to meet. In a tiny bookstore, one can find whole new worlds, universes! The covers (soft and hard), flipping through the chapters, using a special postcard to hold my place. I just love books.

Ebooks are essentially the same thing in a less attractive package.  And in my life they’ve been a life-saver. When I traveled around Japan for a week, it was a relief to only carry around my Kindle instead of four, heavy books. But recently, my Kindle and I have had a falling out from which I don’t think we’ll recover.

I had been reading a lot of hefty tomes this summer. It was also a hot, humid summer in which I got cranky when the five pound book in my bag pulled on my shoulder. So when I went to the library to pick up “The Count of Monte Cristo” and the librarian slammed that beast on the counter, I knew I couldn’t do it. I ran home and downloaded it onto my Kindle.

When I haven’t used my Kindle in a while, I’m always amazed by what a pleasure it is. So thin and light. A built in dictionary. One-handed page-turning! I was so happy in love and dreaming about all the large public domain novels I could download for free.

Then, as happens with technology, things started to go wrong. Sometimes when I would go to turn the page, it would take a couple of seconds. Not that big of a deal, but when you add up all those seconds between all those pages, that’s a lot of quality reading time down the drain. But I could forgive. I was 40% through my book, and I didn’t want to stop. Then my Kindle decided that it would randomly freeze and shut off. I would sit and wait for it to reboot, watching all that time slip through my fingers. And I began to get angry. Books don’t freeze! Books don’t need to reboot! When you pick up a book, it never tells you it needs to load first.

So my Kindle has been temporarily shelved, and I do feel that I’m getting a lot more reading in when I can turn the page as rapidly as I do.

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Roger

20 Oct

Our clinic has a client that I’ll call Mr. F. He’s a kind man who prefers to adopt Jack Russel Terriers (JRT). He became our client during a time when he owned two great dogs. The kind of JRT of myth. JRT’s tend to be hyper, aggressive, not the ideal breed. But under Mr. F’s loving care, his JRT’s were loyal, happy, and loving. After one of his JRTs passed away, he went to a shelter and adopted a new one. He named him Roger.

He has owned the dog for a year, but I hadn’t dealt with Roger until Wednesday when Mr. F brought him in for a dental and wart removal. The dog was strange. That’s the only way to describe it. A large “B.C.” was emblazoned on the record. It stands for “Be Careful” and is our clinic’s tactful way of saying the dog or cat is aggressive and for lack of a better term, bad. But Roger wasn’t your typical snarler or swipe biter or growling pet. He wouldn’t bite when placing a catheter or during restraint. The dog would stand there and turn to bite without rhyme or reason. He would do it in a slow, nonlogical way. The more I worked with the dog, the more it seemed less aggressive, more neurologically compromised. It reminded me of autism.

I’ve read a couple of books on autism and what fascinates me about the condition is how we don’t understand it. We’ve only begun to scratch the surface of the spectrum and figure out how the autistic brain works. Of course, if it is present in animals, we would understand it even less as the animal brain is even harder to interpret.

Last Spring, I spent some time volunteering with autistic children during horseback riding lessons. The variety of the conditions and their reactions to different occurrences and stimuli was fascinating. Something about the look some of them would get in their eyes made me so curious as to what they could be thinking and feeling. Roger would get a similar look. Staring at a corner of his cage or looking right at me without reaction. At home, he is difficult. He will bite people randomly, cries as soon as he goes outside and is fearful of certain toys and people. When I mentioned to Dr. L that the behavior reminded me of autism, she began to agree. But how are we to know for sure?

When Mr. F came to pick up Roger at the end of the day, I witnessed one of the most heart-wrenching acts of love. The dog meandered up to the front waiting room, looked at his owner and had no reaction. I have never seen that before. Not a tail wag, not a faster pace to the owner, nothing. Mr. F crouched on the floor, his arms directed toward the dog. “Roger, it’s daddy. C’mon, Roger, didn’t you miss me?” But the dog just stared at the walls. I felt his frustration, and I admired the love and attention this man could put into a dog that simply doesn’t respond, doesn’t return affection. It was fascinating.

Any vet techs out there seen anything similar?

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Book Roundup #2

16 Oct

Columbus Day weekend meant a lot of cat-sitting for me. This also meant a lot of extra travel time to and from my client’s apartments. It can be irksome to get out of bed earlier than usual on a Saturday morning, but the extra money is so nice to have. Plus, CATS! And one of the greatest joys I take in living in New York City is the opportunity to use travel time to read. I love popping on the subway, pulling out my book, and zoning out until I hear my stop announced. No matter how busy my life gets, I still need to get from point A to point B, and I love that I get to read whilst doing just that. I also took care of one of my favorite cats this weekend, Grayer.

Grayer

Grayer

Despite being a former feral cat and a rescue, Grayer loves people and wants nothing more than to be petted. I often like to sit and pet him with one hand and read with the other. I was lucky enough to read two great books with Grayer this weekend.

The Red Tent by Anita Diamant

4989I grew up in a Christian home and am well-versed in the Bible. Somewhere in my teenage years I began to question the faith I had been raised in. My questions were varied and complicated and eventually led me away from the church. One of my biggest problems with Christianity was the way women were treated in the Bible. I didn’t like that women were often a sidenote. Often reduced to nothing more than mothers or sinners or whores.

This book is about the wives and daughter of Jacob who is spoken about in Genesis. While it is fiction and imaginative, the writing is beautiful and captivating. She captures the relationships of mothers and daughters of sisters and of friends. I did some basic research on the book once I was done and most of the things she writes about aren’t historically accurate. But the story is moving and believable.

Zeitoun by Dave Eggers

zeitounWhen Hurricane Katrina hit, I was 19-years-old and self-centered. I remember so little about the hurricane and the after math. I remember going to a keg party to raise money for the Red Cross, and I remember this.

But I was young and didn’t pay much attention to the news of the struggles going on in my own country. “Zeitoun” is a beautiful, creative non-fiction book that depicts the experiences of a man who stayed behind, who canoed through the streets of New Orleans. I feel late to the show, but wow was that a FEMA fail. The main character Zeitoun is separated from his wife who flees the city with their children. The unfolding of the catastrophe and the injustice they exprienced was so suspenseful, so enraging. I read this in two days.

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Hiking in the Catskills

10 Oct

2013-10-06 11.46.57 Life in the city has been stressful. So to get away for awhile, my boyfriend and I planned a weekend in the Catskills. We got a room at a Bed and Breakfast in a no stoplight town called Fleishmann. We wanted to enjoy some quiet, some fresh air, take in a bit of hiking.

We almost didn’t survive.

We asked our innkeeper Ben for some advice on different trails. He pointed out his favorite one called “Giant Ledge.” Ben described it as an “aggressive” 4-5 mile hike which I found intimidating, but I ended up deciding I could take the challenge. The next morning, around 10:30, we bought water, chips, Ring pops, and Reese’s Pieces at the corner store and headed to the summit.

The weather wasn’t ideal. Crisp fall air in the 60’s with some sprinkling rain. Describing the hike as aggressive was the perfect adjective. There were some steep sections of the trail with high rocks to climb on. I’m not in shape and found myself out of breath for most of the hike. After an hour or so, we reached what looked like a Giant Ledge. The trail was self-explanatory with blue markers scattered on the trees and no other signage. So we only assumed it was the lookout point we had been promised. Because of the poor conditions, the view was underwhelming and bizarre. It was an abyss.

"View" from Giant Ledge.

“View” from Giant Ledge.

We spent some time resting, eating our snacks, and throwing Reese’s Pieces into the mist. We had no concept of how high we were. The light rain was making us chilly, so we wanted to keep going and get back to our inn to shower and rest.

We continued on the path which after a brief decline, became sharply steep with huge rocks to climb over. My legs were shaking with each climb. We assumed that the trail was taking us to a smoother descent than the rocky climb we had just done.

We seemed to reach another summit, but we were both so tired, cold, and wet that we opted to not stare into the mist but keep going. Finally the trail started to descend. It was steep and the trail seemed less defined. We walked through brush that scraped our legs as we tried to not step in mud or slip on the leaves. The path became so misty that it was difficult to see where the next blue marker was. After about an hour of descent, without seeing any other people, and not being able to see up or down the mountain, worry set in.

We began the hike just before 11, and it was well after 3. The trail was only supposed to be 4-5 miles, at that point we should have been done, we shouldn’t still be walking. We didn’t know what else to do but to keep following the blue marked trail. If we had turned around, we were worried that we wouldn’t make it back before dark. As long as we stuck to the trail, we weren’t too lost in the mountains. It was frustrating and a bit unnerving, but our only option was to keep moving forward.

At one point, I slipped on leaves and fell smack on my butt. I sat in the rain and the mud and began to cry. My boyfriend knelt down to comfort me.

“We’re going to die up here,” I told him through my tears.
“Do you want to rest a while?” he asked.
I thought about it and shook my head “no.” He helped me up, I wiped my tears, and just put one foot in front of the other.

A little while later, I heard an ESPN alert go off on my phone.

“The Seahawks must have scored,” my boyfriend said.
“Since I have service, maybe I should look up the trail.”

I googled the trail name and found a site that said in all caps, “WHEN YOU REACH GIANT LEDGE, TURN BACK. DO NOT GO STRAIGHT.”

Shit.

We called innkeeper Ben and told him our predicament. My phone was almost out of battery and the call kept cutting in and out. He said he thought he knew where we were, but that we should keep walking, and he would come meet us. We had continued on to a 15-mile trail.

We had no idea how far into this trail we were, but we had been descending for a while and decided to continue on. After about 90 minutes more, we see Ben on the trail ahead of us. A light at the end of the tunnel. He breathed a sigh of relief as well as he had been hiking for 45 minutes to find us. My legs have never felt more strained. I took to counting to keep them moving forward. As soon as I saw the road, I wanted to throw myself upon it and sleep for days. It was past 6pm.

Back at the inn, a hot shower has never felt quite that amazing. We threw out our muddy, soaked socks and headed to a fancy restaurant up the road. We feasted. Beer, onion rings, steak, fish, apple cake. As hyperbole as it may be, I was happy to be alive. I was happy to not be lost in the woods, to be a news story of hikers gone missing. I’m not going on another hike for a long time.

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