Scandalous Enjoyment of Purloined Red Lentils

Thelonious ate almost all of a 3-oz. can of food yesterday, and of all things, it was Fancy Feast, which the lady at the animal hospital had indeed said many cats like, even though it doesn’t have quality ingredients. Thelonious likes fish flavors, but has hated almost all of the Fancy Feast fish flavors I’ve tried.

What she ate yesterday was “chicken.” Fancy Feast is horrible-looking stuff due to the highly unnatural color. You’d think the smell of the chemicals would outweigh the allure to the cat, if any, of the sickly pink hue, which is evidently meant to suggest fresh meat.

Come to think of it, it’s probably not meant to entice the cat but to conceal the appearance of the “meat” from the cat’s owner.

MaxCat, on the other hand, features nice solid cubes of real meat in thick gravy and smells so good that the only reason I haven’t tried it myself is that I’m (more or less) a vegan, not because I’m not a cat.

She likes MaxCat, too. She likes to slurp up the gravy most of all, but also ate some of the food over the weekend, on top of eating almost the whole can of Fancy Feast, and this morning was looking so relatively robust that instead of calling the euthanasian, I went to work.

I heard something hideous on KQED last night: that “bemused” has come to mean “amused” lately. I am bemused to hear that, and I don’t mean amused. It is just wrong that one of the best words in the English language, along with "goiter" and others that I'm forgetting, can be dragged down into the mud like that, no doubt by the kind of people who were offended by the guy saying "niggardly."

I also heard an interview with a man who found a solution for his debilitating panic attacks.

Frankly, I thought he was going to say he does the exact same thing I do, because if there was a better way, I would have thought of it. But he said, of all things, that he concluded he needed more fun in his life and took up Zydeco dancing. More fun in his life? What kind of crazy idea was that?

However, he found it extremely exciting and made 40 new friends, plus met his wife, with whom he now has two kids who enjoy Zydeco music.

Dancing to Zydeco music or even having to hear 10 seconds of it sounds horrible to me, but the point about finding something fun to do was, in fact, well taken. Maybe I should even go do some Zydeco dancing, just in case. I did hear a funny country song about a woman who works at a snake farm. Its lyrics were, in part, "Snake farm! It just sounds nasty."

I used to play the trumpet in bands, which was very fun, but I don’t have time to do the requisite practicing any more, and also practicing is not fun when it is undoubtedly tormenting a number of neighbors.

I launched my metta practice last night with the aid of the handy Invisible Clock II, which allows you to set a timer to go off after 10 minutes and then 30 minutes after that, or whatever you want, up to six different alarms, plus it can be used as an alarm clock, and you can set it either to beep or vibrate, and you can adjust the volume of the beep. I wish the quietest beep were still quieter, and more melodious—it’s a bit croaky—but on the whole, it’s a great little item.

Then I went to sleep and, just as I was falling asleep, a frisson of fear arose, which was unexpected; it usually happens after I’ve been asleep for a time. But I welcomed it heartily and assured it I was there with it and it passed very soon.

Dropping the story and feeling the feelings is working very well in regard to the impending bereavement. It doesn’t allow the mind to take one on a train to who knows where, but it also doesn’t mean ignoring what is happening. It’s just processing it in a different way, one that tends to be surprisingly easy and brings the flavor of liberation, whereas the “proliferation of thought” approach can create endless misery.

I went to Whole Foods today for tuna for Thelonious, just in case (it’s very good that she’s off it for now), and lemon olive oil and fruit and cookies and so forth. For a large number of items, the total was $21, which surprised me, because usually a small number of items is $30.

It turned out the checker hadn’t rung up the olive oil, which I brought to his attention, as I could hardly enjoy ill-gotten olive oil, though when I was leaving Rainbow on Saturday, when I was back at my bicycle, I noticed they hadn’t charged me for some red lentils, and for the first time in my life, I just let it go, as I recalled that a few weeks earlier, I’d gotten home to find they’d charged me for 13 Australian chocolate-covered toffee bars when I’d only gotten 10, so it probably came out about even in the end.

The red lentils, ill-gotten or not, were discovered today to be particularly delectable with buckwheat, fresh garlic, soy sauce, lemon olive oil and chopped, steamed broccoli.