Today, I Feel Like An Adult

Zoe's appointment for the surgery to remove her tumor was today. I was supposed to arrive at the vet hospital between 8am-10am and planned to go around 9am but I woke up randomly at 6am and couldn't go back to sleep so I took her in early. The reason she didn't have the surgery when I took her in a week ago to get her tumor checked out was because she had a really bad respiratory infection and the vet said that her chances of surviving the anesthesia were not good since her breathing is bad. So I gave her two types of medicine for the past week, hoping she'd get better. We went in this morning to get her re-checked and hopefully have the surgery, but the vet said that she still doesn't sound great. He has a semi-british accent and his advice seemed so rehearsed, "it's kind a catch-22 [imagine all of this in a british accent], if we do the surgery today then there's a 10-20% chance she won't survive the anesthesia, but if we wait a week for her respiratory infection to hopefully get better, her tumor might get larger and more difficult to remove. So I'm going to leave the decision up to you."

Up to ME? I'm paying you $29.00 for this "check-up" to get me back to where I started? At no other time in my life did I ever feel so old and independent, like an adult. It was the first time I wasn't given an expert decision about something involving another being's life. I expected the doctor to evaluate her a little bit and then advise me one way or another, but now it was up to me and it felt really strange. With each year that I've gotten older, I haven't felt older, probably because I haven't had reason to. It always seems like as you age, you're supposed to feel like you are actually aging, but it usually doesn't work like that. Today, I realized that becoming an adult doesn't mean getting older, it means learning that your own life and well-being is second to the lives and happiness of those around you. It means making sacrifices to help ones that you love and making wise decisions to help them, or trying to.

He prescribed her another medicine and we're going back in a week to see if she'll be ready then. She has been my best friend for the past two weeks. I regret not playing with and loving her more before all of this. She truly is a wonderful pet. Thank you for helping me to realize things I've never seen before.

Zoe

I have been at my parent's house for the past few days and came back to the Tri Delta house to hang out and feed my rats. When I was feeding them, I watched them crawl around a little and noticed a lump that's the size of a large gumball on the side of my favorite rat, Zoe. I often check my rats for tumors because they're one of the most common causes of death for rats and I'm almost positive that I checked about a week ago and found nothing. I'm going to wake up at 7:30 and take her to a vet tomorrow. I hope it's benign and easily removed and that she'll be ok. She's the nicest animal ever and loves everyone so much. It makes me even more sad to see her be sweet and gentle and still running around everywhere despite the fact that there's a fairly prominent tumor on the side of her little body. I don't know why. Maybe because she's innocent and probably barely knows. I hope everything will be ok.

Picture of Zoe when she was still a baby...curious as always :)

Don't Ever Wake Up From Your Dreams. Live Them.

The past couple of days have made me feel absent from the real world. Or maybe just hoping that I was absent or a part of something different, better. It sounds silly to think about, but I think it started with seeing the movie, Avatar. The whole other world in the film was so appealing, so real, so appreciative of all forms of life, and at peace with the world. I fell in love with it immediately and as soon as the movie ended I felt like I had woken up from a vivid dream. The kind where you wake up and lie in bed for a split second thinking about it, and then another second later you open your eyes and see the old posters on your walls and faded green paint on your ceiling and remember that everything you'd just conjured up in your mind was just...a dream and in ten minutes you'd forget 90% of what you had just imagined. I think I like living in these dream worlds. You spend a third of your life sleeping and dreaming and it makes me wonder sometimes what reality really is. Is reality right now? Me typing this blog entry? Is that real? Or is it really life when we go to sleep, or when we die? I have no idea and I don't know if that's the point, or if anything is ever the point, if anything matters. Sometimes I sit and stare at myself in the mirror and wonder if I ever matter. And I don't mean if I matter sometimes to people, if they like me or if I impacted their life somehow. I wonder if the world, the universe, dreams, reality, would be different if I didn't exist. Probably not. Kind of humbling and scary to think about. This entry ended up being a lot weirder than I expected it to be.

I just finished reading The Perks of Being a Wallflower. I've read it a couple times before, but not since junior high or high school and forgot pretty much the entire premise of the story. And I just stayed up late to finish it and now I remember that it's not really about the story. Most of the book is just the main characters observations and questions about life. I felt like I really connected with him and that I often watch things and observe them like he does. And wonder why people are the way they are and if they're happy and if they're having a good day and what made it good or if nothing in particular made it good, but it's just "good" and they don't have an explanation for it and why some days are "bad" and we don't have an explanation for those either and why it's so hard for us to explain what we're feeling or that maybe all it took was the weather to make us happy, or someone to not pick up your pencil for you when it rolled off your desk to make you have a bad day. I think it's weird that we can't recognize those things about ourself and attribute them to our feelings and emotions.

I can't remember why I started writing this. I am not happy or sad, I'm just neutral and contemplative and forgot how much I love reading. It's weird to feel that a character in a book could understand you better than a lot of the people that are your friends. And then I wonder about the author and hope they're just like that character and it gives me hope that I can find other people just like me, but then I think that the author is probably just doing his job and not actually like me at all and instead just combined different people he used to know into "Charlie," his main character. And that he probably doesn't pick up pencils for people when they roll off his desk.

I feel like I sound crazy...which isn't my intention (well, I mean is it ever someone's intention to sound crazy?). I just love thinking and observing and reading and I just did all of those for like 4 hours straight and my mind is on fucking overload. It's 5:21am now and I really should go to sleep. I'll probably have dreams which sounds exciting to think about. Maybe our dreams are like that other world I wanted to live in from Avatar. Maybe we all live in them sometimes.

I just wish I could remember them.