marbles the cat!

Thursday, sep. 26, 2002 | 0 comments

A lot of you have written in (OK, none of you have … but I did feel something tingle while I was in the shower this morning, and I’m pretty sure it was one of you putting me in your prayers) about your concern over my recent lonely flu battle combined with my (perceived!) borderline-conversion-to-an-organized-religion-level of depression, but I’m here to tell you: don’t worry about it.

For one thing, I’m not depressed! Lying motionless on the couch for hours on end and sobbing along to emotionally transparent and manipulative movies may scream “suicide watch” to some of you, but it is no cause for alarm in Evanyland. For me, crying over low-grade movies is like eating an entire frozen Sara Lee banana cake, or smelling a self-cleaned kitten. Couch movie crying gives me a kind of heart-warming nostalgia that resonates on like three, deeply satisfying levels, and it leaves me feeling all warm and sighy and blanketed down. See? It’s good.

On the second hand, I may be sick, but I’m not totally alone. No. I have a roommate! Yes, she howls randomly in the night, and yes she bites my legs and arms, but she loves me. And she never breaks the skin.

And she’s mine, all mine, a fact I remind her of daily: “I OWN you!” I say, my hand outstretched at her like a wizard wizarding up a spell. She always stares back, pupils dilated and intense, pretending she doesn’t even know me. But she’s listening. And she understands me. We understand each other. We’re roommates!

Plus she has a great sense of humor. She loves to turn mundane things — a small shoe box, a grocery bag, a roll of toilet paper — into big slices of fun, just like Martha Stewart!