I've been in complete and miserable cat withdrawal since August, when the Maine coon cat next door moved away to live on a farm. This was the sweetest cat on earth; he would place his thumbed paws on my face before he shoving his nose into my hair. He'd always sit on my deck chair and meow at me through the window all night long. He had a sort of chirp that sounded like speech. Once he leapt directly into my screen, thinking it wasn't there. I'd be all for cloning if it made me another Rocky (am I even joking? Who knows?).

Anyway, I went on a run today to blow off some steam (blowing off steam is the only time I ever run) and as I re-entered this filthy rich area of Boulder from the mountain parks area, I saw a white cat running towards me from the porch of some giant house with, like, turrets and a castle balcony or something. The cat was long-haired, but it had been shaved around the midsection so it resembled a poodle. Despite this outrageous ridiculousness, it had a serene and determined look to it. I saw, when he got closer, that he had blue eyes.

For some reason, I remember, when I was a kid, reading in (of all places) a Babysitters Club book, that white cats with blue eyes tend to be deaf. This cat seemed to be so, but all he wanted was to get neck-scratches for approximately a million hours.

This was near the Mountain Parks, so of course, dogs were walking by constantly. Whenever a dog came down the street, the cat would cease blissfully rubbing against my legs and trot over to investigate it. This thoroughly unsettled most of the dogs. The dogs were used to cats running away, if not immediately, then most certainly after being barked at. Barking had no effect on this cat, of course. The closer the cat got, the more uncertain the dogs' barks became, until finally, the dogs would stop, sort of half-rear up, and shy away, dragging their owners backwards.

Sometimes a dog and the cat would get so close as to touch noses, and only then would the dog freak out. "I just touched noses with a cat!" it would appear to be screaming. "Get me out of here!"

I had to do some serious weaving to keep the cat from following me home, and a horrible, cat-stealing part of me wanted him to follow me home. I can't wait for a cat-allowing landlord - or homeownership - whichever comes first.

Boulder is not aware of the fact that it's January. I'm riding my bike like it's April, in a T-shirt, sweating, and everyone's motorcycles are out. Every time I look out my window into the canopy of bare branches and out, all the way out to the plains to the east, I hate my landlord even more. What a perfect summer place. It's basically a treehouse. The only things we're level with are squirrels and stranded cats and power lines and mountains. And our neighbors. But we can't see them, so they may as well not even be there.

All the cats that everyone else in my building is allowed to have are out in full force. Nobody could walk by and not notice this. They're sniffing the newly snowless ground and lounging around on other people's welcome mats and chasing each other through the dry creek that runs, when it runs, out front.

I've been very carefully thinking about the day to day things that make me happy, and trying to avoid the trap that most people fall into when they try to predict what will make them happy. In the book that I referenced a few entries ago there are a bunch of tests that are supposed to prove to you that your brain lies, omits real things, and plants false things when you look into the future. In many of the tests, I perform generally along the lines I'm supposed to to prove the author's point. In one, which tests a grown-up's (as opposed to a child's) ability to see a setup as though they're seeing it from another person's viewpoint, I show less understanding than normal. (Insert selfish spoiled only child explanation here.) But in a few, where the tests are trying to prove that people just make snap judgments about future events based on current feelings, I perform differently in the opposite direction, proving that I don't make snap judgments and I don't really expect to feel the same in two days as I feel now (with a few notable exceptions that I'll get to later).

Here's a very simplistic sample question. The author asks us to imagine how we will feel tomorrow when we eat a big bowl of spaghetti for dinner. Apparently, a normal person is just supposed to randomly throw together an image of some sort of spaghetti and make a prediction based on whether or not they like spaghetti, or feel like spaghetti at the moment. I never do that. I have to ask a billion questions first, such as:

What will I have eaten for breakfast and lunch? Is it Italian food? Is it oatmeal and sushi? Have I been force-fed spaghetti all day? If I've already eaten spaghetti-like things, I will probably be unhappy when eating this dinner plate of spaghetti. But if I've had a light, fruit-and-veggie filled day, or have been starved all day, I will probably be okay with the spaghetti, depending of course on:

What kind of spaghetti is it? Am I allowed to choose or is it just going to be Spaghetti-o's or have a gross olive-filled sauce? Is it that spinach and tomato infused rotini that tastes like cat food or is it a big plate of Dave's baked spaghetti with butter and garlic sauce and parmesan cheese? And also:

I might have the stomach flu. I might have a fever, in which case all I like to eat is grapes. I might have been offered the opportunity for a free dinner at Mateo and would therefore be in an extremely foul mood to have to turn it down to eat spaghetti, no matter what kind or how good. There are a billion things that could go wrong or go right that would change my opinion of spaghetti in an instant.

Apparently most people don't go through these options in their heads. I do. About every decision. Which I don't think is necessarily healthy - having too much freedom of choice is basically a proven headache - but one plus of it is that I never assume that if I buy X, X will make me unconditionally happy, forever and ever amen. I never truly believe that lavish wealth would make me happier, above a certain point (though I do have lapses). I don't feel like my life would be transformed if I bought a car, or a house. I'm still going to be myself. I'll still have waves of irrational dread and have painful problems with my teeth and every day I will have to shave my legs and talk to cashiers at stores and deal with health insurance and tax papers and getting older.

This kind of realism prevents me from making stupid snap purchases and believing that the next magic bullet will make my problems go away. It also gives me a bleak outlook. Not only do I not believe that these things will make me happy, I also begin to believe that nothing can be counted on to make me happy.

Except two things. These two things I can't run through the 'if' filter. I see them just exactly how other people must see a billion dollars, or a new Ferrari.

These things are travel and cats.

I continue to think that if I had the funds and the wherewithal to travel around the world at my leisure, volunteering and eating strange foods and experiencing strange cultures, that this would bring happiness. I also continue to think that if I had as many cats as I want, that the day-to-day experience of feeding and caring for and playing with these cats would bring happiness.

Even these are as realistic as magic bullets get - they both take into account a radical shift in day-to-day experience.

So I'm choosing to view this impending move, this move from a green, high, sweet-smelling treehouse in the mountains to an unknown possible dump, as a good thing. Because in the new possible dump I will be able to have cats.

Oddly enough, I was just having a conversation about whether we all (all of us bloggers) write as insurance against memory or because we have an audience in mind or what. And this particular entry of mine is definitely insurance against memory. So - warning! - this is not written for you all (but feel free to read it anyway, since it's on the internet and all).

It's sort of like that time I was in Indonesia and got my whole salary stolen. As I was writing, I was fully aware that I was whining and not writing in a manner that would hold anyone's interest, but I wanted to get it down so I wouldn't forget how angry I am capable of becoming. I always forget because I don't get very angry often, and I am fooled into thinking I'm not naturally a violently angry person, that I don't get so completely consumed by it that sometimes I almost pass out from the pressure inside my skull.

But I am, and I do. Although the Indonesia entry didn't reflect that. I was in such an alien environment, and so terrified of acting like a spoiled American around all the people living in poverty that I didn't dare elaborate on how angry I was - I didn't even dare FEEL how angry I was.

Yesterday Dan and I received a letter in the mail notifying us that we would not be allowed to re-lease our apartment, that we were required to move out at the end of our term. There was no reason given, but we know what the reason is, and we know why she ('she' being the owner of the property management company, who has a very distinctive idiot-style of writing where she thinks if she conjugates a verb in different ways it counts as saying something different) doesn't want to say what the reason is. It's because she would look like an idiot, saying 'The reason for our decision is that those meanies made me sign a copy of their move-in checklist so it would be on record that I received it. Also, they asked if they could get a cat when we told them they could at the lease signing and when it says clearly on the lease that cats are allowed with permission. How rude! And after that, you know what they did? They accused me of going back on my word, which is totally true! And then - this is the crowning point of it all, where I definitely knew I wouldn't want those assholes renting my property - they wrote me an email saying they disagreed with my conclusion but they were going to drop the matter and not get a cat because they loved living in this apartment so much! That's when I KNEW I wanted to kick them out. Also, they always pay their rent on time, take care of their place, and don't bother the other tenants - and we definitely can't have THAT going on in one of our properties!'

There's only one type of person that makes me spitting mad, this mad, so mad that I get an instant migraine and would, in a second, if faced with this person and a loaded gun, pull the trigger. That type of person is stupid, but conniving. This type of person will go out of their way to hurt others as badly as possible, even when it's not in the best interests of, say, their business. This type of person, when offended, never gets over it, never tries to resolve it, and thinks only of exercising power over the offender until (s)he feels better. They think only of 'winning'.

I offended our property management company's owner inadvertently at the lease signing. I'm still not sure quite how I did it. I think she was affronted by the request that she sign off on receiving a copy of our move-in checklist. She said, 'Just trust me, I received it. I'm standing here telling you I received it.' But our apartment was in terrible condition when we moved in and we had noted all of it down on the checklist and we wanted to make absolutely sure that it was ON PAPER that we had notified them of the condition within three business days, because there was a clause on the lease saying that if we didn't do that, we would be held responsible for any damage when we moved out.

I didn't want them to be able to say we hadn't turned it in, and charge us thousands of dollars upon move-out (this has happened to me before) so I asked for a signature. She was immediately enraged. Why? Because I had taken control? Because I had seen through the plan of the company to get around paying back security deposits? Who knows? After that moment, she despised me. She flat-out refused to sign the paper, and only after Dan had sweet-talked her for a while did she finally - and angrily - sign it.

When I later tried to follow through on our plan - discussed at the lease signing - of getting a cat, by calling and asking for written permission, she dismissed me right out of hand, saying that we 'had no right' to get a cat, and that she 'never said' we could.

And even though we didn't get one, and we said we would drop the subject because of how much we liked living here, she chose to terminate our lease out of spite - not for any other reason but out of spite. She terminated it because we said how much we liked living here.

Revenge out of proportion to a perceived slight, flexing of power just for the hell of it - those are the type of people - perhaps the only type of people - that can get me irrational with rage.