A Fond Farewell...Part 1

You will be missed, MJ!

So this month I had to say goodbye to my foster cat, MJ. He came to me in October of last year and has had a tough time of it. He's 5 years old and has always been a single cat, so introducing him to Caspian was an adventure, to put it mildly. Those two fought like it was WWIII! I ended up sequestering them to two seperate rooms to prevent blood from being spilt.

Well, late in December I noticed that my allergies were coming back full force, and by early January it was really bad. I had to tell his owner that I couldn't keep him anymore and...he left last Saturday. I nearly cried! MJ was a lot of things, but first and foremost he was innocent and in need of a loving home. I really wish that I could have kept him, but he clearly needed what I couldn't provide.

First of all, let me make it clear that I loved MJ to death and spoiled him probably way too much. But, personality wise, I am a very independant person and need somewhat independant pets. MJ is a very needy cat - in fact, he can get really aggressive if he thinks he's not getting enough attention! He even went so far as to bite my friend on the ankle when she turned away to talk to someone. He also vocalizes all the time, which is partly why he had to be removed from his previous home. But what a sweetie! Despite the temper, he's really a cute cat. I'm convinced that all his quirky behavior was due primarily to the fact that he had competition in the house and was constantly being threatened by said competition.

For the longest time he shied away from me and spent most of his time around my roommate. He would stalk him day and night, howl outside his door, throw himself against his door to try to get inside his room, and guard his shoes like Cerberus guarding the gates of Hades.

I teased my roommate all the time, saying that MJ was more than just affectionate towards him. He'd keep us up half the night with his banging at the door! And he loved to curl up behing him in the armchair. I always felt like second best - he came prowling around to me only after he'd established that his first love was unavailable - but I still gave him lots of treats for looking cute and acting nice. MJ and I worked hard on his biting and scratching; by January he was doing it a lot less (he just hissed and growled instead) and he was standing up for himself a bit more. The last fight they had was terrible, though! I thought that they might have moved past the fighting, but they were more than eager to attack each other and duke it out - to the death, if I had let them be. As it was MJ almost fell off of the back of the refridgerator and would have gotten hurt if he hadn't gotten caught on a food tray I'd left up there. Caspian sure is a bully!

A New World of Me

So it is a new year, and with that comes the typical new outlooks on life. I almost never have resolutions for the new year, but this year I decided that I will do things a bit differently. In this and future years, I am vowing to myself to move towards the next phase in my life. This is not, as I see it, a resolution in the sense that I am giving up something, or adding something that is going to be dropped later on; this is an opportunity to move myself to a higher plane of being, to really re-evaluate on a daily basis what is and is not healthy – for myself and the world – and what action or nonaction can be taken to further myself on my personal path.

The major area I would like to focus on this year is finances. I must say that I have very little experience in the world of finance; as a child I was given neither allowance nor lessons on the value of saving, etc. This is not to say that I blame my upbrining or anything, but it’s a simple fact. When I wished to buy something, I usually had only to ask for the cash and it was given to me, or not, depending on the circumstance. Now, as an adult, I am forced to self-discipline, which I have never been very good at. But I can no longer use the excuse that “I’m bad at it” to keep me from gaining control. I am working on a feasible budget that will make sense and that I can stick to; I have started drafting lists of necessities and desires, with the hope that seeing them in black and white will provide better perspective.

The one thing that really concerns me is my compulsive habit of spontaneous spending. I tend to psyche myself up into justifying a buy at the moment, and usually don’t really regret it later. This brings me to another set of changes, which can be summed up as “gaining control of self”. As an Introvert Intuitive Thinking Perceiving person (as per the Myers-Briggs), I tend to bounce around a lot - figuratively speaking. My mind is constantly racing and I can’t seem to settle on any one thing for very long. Some may call this Adult ADD – I wouldn’t know if this is an accurate diagnosis, as I haven’t been tested for it. Whether it is or isn’t, I think my focus should lie entirely on overcoming the mental chaos. Somewhere along the way I have forgotten the lessons I learned through Buddhism and meditation: remain centered, acknowledge and release, transform the negative into a positive, etc. Recalling some of my poems from 2004, I can clearly see a different me, a me that was more quiet, more reflective. I have lost some of that, I think, and it must be regained if I am to create a me that is whole. There are times now when I feel that it is too hard to think, even.

So, how do I move forward to reach these goals? I could say the typical things: meditate each day, eat right, exercise, write every day, knit, record every penny spent and saved, etc, etc. These are resolutions that have a high potential of failure, so I’m not going to focus on them. Of course they’re important, but I think that what will help me the most at this time is to focus on reflection, daily reflection, whether it be written, as this is, or simply mental. Knowing myself to the extent that I currently do, I have faith that, upon reflecting for a time, however small that time is, the choices that I need to make will become abundantly clear, as will the will to go forward and bring them to action. As the great mage says, there is only do or do not. There is no try.