Lest anyone (employers past, present and yet to come, this means you) get the wrong idea, let me begin by saying that late last night as I waited for the beta cat to finish her dinner so I could let the alpha cat out of the bathroom and go to bed -- they have to be fed separately, as alpha-cat bolts but beta-cat eats hers in instalments, three or four dainty snacks stretched over half an hour; if they are fed together, alpha-cat simply eats her own and then bumps beta-cat away from the bowl and eats that as well -- as I waited, I flicked through the current Women's Weekly's massive survey on women's lives deciding what my answers would be if I had the energy to get up off the sofa and get a pen.
There are pages and pages of multiple choice in this quiz and my answer to every other question was NONE OF THE ABOVE, but then I found a question with an answer option that exactly fitted my case:
Q. If you are currently employed, which of the following statements most accurately describe your feelings about work?
A. I love my job; it gives me great personal satisfaction.
It's not exactly a job qua job, since I'm self-employed and much of my work involves regular or one-off tasks of various magnitude. But there is an unprecendented number of said tasks on concurrently at the moment, a situation it's possible to survive only if you work on each one in strict rotation for an hour or two at a time, thereby not getting irretrievably behind with any of them. ('If it's 1 am, this must be the proofreading.')
Which means that blogwise I am resorting to the very last, erm, resort of bloggers (and, before them, columnists) everywhere: write a blog post about why you're not writing any blog posts.
I'd blog about the garden but at the moment I'm not spending any time in it and thinking about two major problems out there gives me panic attacks but there's no time to do anything about it.
I'd blog about politics but I don't have time to read or watch the news.
I'd blog about music or theatre, but I don't have time to go to any.
I'd blog about work, but I'm too busy working.
12 comments:
>they have to be fed separately, as alpha-cat bolts but beta-cat eats hers in instalments, three or four dainty snacks stretched over half an hour; if they are fed together, alpha-cat simply eats her own and then bumps beta-cat away from the bowl and eats that as well -- as I waited, I flicked through the current Women's Weekly's massive survey on women's lives deciding what my answers would be if I had the energy to get up off the sofa and get a pen.<
This seems even more complex than my arrangements, in which one cat has to eat behind the sofa, and the other two upstairs, in two instalments, one at 4.30 pm and then a night cap at 8.30 pm (to stop them waking me in the morning).
And I thought kids were fussy...
Actually, two of mine are. And two aren't. Guess which two came later, and which I'm still struggling to accommodate.
"We are having schnitzel tonight - if you're home..." Translation:if you're not home, you'll miss one of your four favourite meals, which bore us more adventurous types to tears as we cannot bear to look at them four times EVERY week.
Imagine, though, the sibling issues that would arise if the fussy eaters were the eldest, and the youngers could win approval simply by hoovering the plate. No... I can't even begin to go there. I'm just grateful we don't have genuine eating issues, I suppose, a rather large mercy really. But not when you are an Elizabeth Jolley kind of worker, who needs to have dinner planned before the rest of the day falls into place.
I feel a blog post coming on, PC - thanks for the seed. How are the cats on variety of diet, anyhow?
I hope you are still finding to time to walk along that glorious beach of yours.
Also, do you know what I really like? That you talked about the AWW without first explaining why it was in your hand. Would write more, but need to save it for a blog post which I probably won't get around to writing.
Yah for the dot point. A girl's best friend.
(doorbitch says pihlfilt. and so say all of us.)
Ahem. Thaat was mean to be 'Go for' the dot point. My brain's wired diferently to my fingers, keyboard-wise.
See? I don't make these mistakes in metal, I tells ya. Well, not often, anyway.
Elsewhere, yes, I can imagine very clearly how your cat-feeding arrangements might have evolved. Genevieve, I would have been a terrible mother, I think -- just plonked it down and said Take it or leave it (possibly in reaction to being from a generation whose eating habits were universally regarded as a direct barometer of their mothers' mothering skills). 3C, re the WW: never apologise, never explain. &D, heh. Beautiful metal -- I remember reading V. Woolf's diaries (while I was supposed to be writing my thesis) and being entranced by her description of setting type in the basement.
I'd try using "You will eat it, and what's more, you will *like* it" (my parents' constant refrain at dinnertime when we were younger - worked too, strangely) on my cat, but she can't be bribed with food. If it's not the one variety of dried food she'll eat, then she's not interested.
Even when her cousin came to live with us for a few months, she stood by and watched alpha-cousin-cat eat her food for days. It was very traumatic - there was no getting her to be more assertive. I, too, resorted to the bathroom.
And PC: once, the first thing I said upon opening my eyes after grace was "Ohhhh yucccckkk, I haaaaate this, why did you cook thiiiiiis?" My mother's response, very calm, very memorable: "One of these days, Kathleen, I will throw the dinner in your face."
Everyone must have their moments, right?
I bet she never did, though.
I knew a very large family whose mother was apparently such a dreadful cook that the youngest children were sometimes in tears when they saw their dinner - "mummy, I can't eat this".
The oldest daughters were great satirists and plain-speaking competition winners, and thought it was very amusing. (Mind, I never saw these dinners myself - this is hearsay.) My sister (their friend) was somewhat appalled, but laughed along. (They are pretty funny people. Funny ha-ha.)
I don't know what my thing about food is really. We ate pretty boring stuff as kids, so I just loved cooking for my own - that is, when I had kids that ate it. I can now understand why my mother's enthusiasm waned somewhat in the face of my father's pickiness though. It puts off the most enthusiastic of us all.
I'm a cheerfully terrible mother in the many areas where I am easily daunted, though. Our garden probably makes the kids cry on the inside.
It's true, PC - she didn't. When we once asked her about such drama queenery, she said executing it would simply have made more mess to clean up.
At least you've managed to get out a post about not posting.
Just for completeness' sake, the three cats here will only eat the very most expensive type of cat food and it's no good trying to starve them into moderating their expectations. They only leave it for the ants to swarm all over. I have managed however to break the most nervy cat of his need to be patted while he eats his dinner.
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