I’d like to start this long overdue update with the pertinent fact that if you search for “fit teenage sex kittens“ on Yahoo UK and Ireland, as someone clearly did to get here from looking at my stats, this site comes up as the 13th highest hit in the world. I’m rather proud. Hopefully by the time you read this it’ll be even higher up the sex kitten charts, on the basis that I’ve just mentioned it again.
I hope my visitor wasn’t too disappointed. If my visitor does happen to return though, I can now provide him or her with what they wanted: voila, Mitsou and Frog (aka “Scout”), our new, eminently fit, definitely teenage and very sexy kittens. Click for more candid shots, and please pay at the door.
Mitsou and Frog are Maine Coon kittens, so very posh fit teenage sex kittens (I’ll keep repeating it til I get to number one). Please make them feel welcome, unlike our poor resident cat does, who isn’t very happy after months of co-habitation, which is causing me more distress than her. I don’t want to have to wave bye bye to Mitsou and Frog, but would do anything for my 15 year old best friend on three legs or more. I’m trying to convince myself I’m not tempting fate by flaunting their luscious bodies so blatantly, and have for months felt something like the co-worker in the office who is pregnant, is dying to say, but doesn’t want to yet, in case. Please also vote for them if they happen to fly by on kittenwar.com, because unaccountably they’re not top of the charts. Admittedly I didn’t spend hours gluing their paws to windows and tv remotes in cute positions to win though. They’re mostly a blur.
I may be a sex kitten too (mrroww), but I can’t feign either fit or teenage really. Or, I can act the second, and frequently do (in the bad sense) but I can’t even really pretend the first, thus my silence here, along with several reasons:
- It’s been a rollercoaster physically, and at times I’ve been quite ill.
- Mentally: same rollercoaster.
- The details of side-effects, drug variations, diet etc. would bore the pants off a stamp-collector.
- No-one wants to read about poo except James Joyce fanatics, and I don’t know any.
For those who come here via Googling for parasite information, I should add at least a brief sketch though. If it were a comic strip, frame one would show me screwing up my face on day one and swallowing pills the size of those Cake pills from Brass Eye. Frame two: me prodding my pelvis and wondering why it hurts so much, and musing why my pee is brown, then reading the side-effects list and slapping my forehead. Frame three: me looking relatively pleased after a trip to the loo (I’m sure filters in the big internet pipes coming out of the Atlantic in New York will convert that to “restroom”). Frame four: a rather too obvious sign saying “3 weeks later” and under it, myself and partner in a mad panic ordering enough pills to make it 30 days. Last frame (hilarious punchline): me on day of end of treatment minus one looking very unhappy after another trip to the loo.
I hope that gives the jist without being too graphic (no puns tolerated), but I fear I’ve strayed into the graphic anyway: scroll back up and try to think about kittens again instead maybe if severely affected. Remember someone else with bad bugs might want to know all this (and they should leave a comment/mail me if they do).
So where am I now: 3 weeks after the incredibly expensive drugs ended, I’m not feeling that hopeful (oh, be honest. I’m very black.). I took two weeks of elite troop probiotics called VSL#3, after checking a millions times that they won’t feed parasites (most will because of stuff to feed the good bugs included), and hope that by now my gut is filled with exquisitely coiffured gut flora who are helping to run the rioting bad bugs out of town in their Rolls Royces. Too expensive for long, so now I’m only on some that cost £45/month. I’m sticking absolutely to the badbugs.org diet in case, which makes it very hard for my partner and me to actually find food I can eat.
My stomach/intestinal cramps jumped back into action just before the end of treatment, unsure why, but then departed again for now which is a relief, if temporary. But other signs aren’t favourable. I can get tested again in a week or two, but it won’t be a definitive test. If positive for Blasto, I face another raft of decisions I don’t have the endurance to make about more weird imported drug choices, and months more of this – meaning that the waning of symptoms might just be a temporary reduction in population. If negative, then I have to seek a fuller gut test, probably from America, to see why I’m still so ill. I have to learn more about leaky gut syndrome, gut dysbiosis, PEG tests, candida, ketoacidosis, marasmus. Read about how to sprout seeds, and culture healthy yoghurt. Learn about glutamine and the effects of liquorice (non-sweet variety) for stomach lining repair. I can’t do any of this. And then I have to decide if I dare eat anything with sugar or starchy carbs in it again, like say, an apple or a potato (vive la pomme). Frankly, terrified: brouhaha indescriptible is the only phrase I can remember from french textbooks at school that might sum up possible results.
As for me myself I: I’m stuck in bed, and to my horror when I went to weigh myself on a himalayan trip to the mythical land of upstairs, which I haven’t been to for two months, I fully expected to have regained at least a half stone (7 pounds, 3kg), and instead had lost somewhat more than that. After prompting from just about the most helpful and knowledgable new email friend to do the obvious, count calories, it’s apparent that we can see no way to eat more than 900 calories a day on the above diet if you don’t like nuts, and 2000 or so are what you need, so further shrinkage looks inevitable. Meanwhile, trying to do some meagre muscle exercises in bed (stretch a leg, stop – hardly hiking up the Everest) has resulted in ouch-ouch cramping pain in my foot for 5 days running, and my thighs look chickenish. If one more person says to me “you lost over 90 pounds, wish I could!” I shall scream. Please remember when I do, that the screamer will be someone whose previous mission was to eat as much cake as it was possible to within a single human life, and that cake, chocolate, cocktails (at which I was a genius) are things in my deep past, mourned and constantly brushed under the carpet. Surprisingly, I yearn for simple things like a bowl of cornflakes, some milk, a pear: I actually dream of toast.
Proof positive that the Atkins Diet, should you take it very seriously, works, and that it’s not a very healthy thing to do.
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My mood (someone patronising in a white coat would call it my “emotional lability”) is currently very poor. This is the bit where I confess that none of the tone of this entry reflects how I actually feel, I took several days to write it, and I’m doing it by vividly pretending to be someone else in my head, Boadicea or someone – another reason I held back posting for so long. But someone on livejournal who is nice and kept poking me to post made me do so. I’ve been miraculously free of Wolf Dread since January (the first definable time I’ve been able to use this weblog as a diagnostic diary); but I can hear his frosty breath and padded paws in the undergrowth around me now, and I’m terrified he’s back, and when he’s back things get worse for a long time before they get better. Maybe I should go back and read that entry again, scratching in the dark for some secret spell to repel him nore quickly; or maybe there’s an inevitability about his return and the length of his sojourn. So I’ll make the same caveat I always do: that if you know me well, and haven’t received mail, or have and it’s markedly different in tone to this, that’s the real me – I’m no Boadicea and I’ve had no great harm done to me to avenge, just bad luck, and nothing like what others have had to endure. I do all the wrong things in an attempt to mock up a real social life around me: join forums full of new nice people then can’t keep up so have to hide, contact other bloggers and start reading their journals, then can’t keep up or think how to respond when I’m so down and understandably disappear from the radar, send cheery inconsequential mails to mailing lists of old friends I can’t see now as if nothing’s wrong, then can’t keep up the facade, or ache so badly that I can’t be where they are or understand the social references they’ve all developed since I disappeared from waking life: so I fall into silence. I’m just ill, tired, and wanting to stop fighting now and lie down – it’s been too long and I was never built to ride in chariots. Buses would be nice again, some time. I spend a lot of the time at the moment feeling like giving up – yes, with full knowledge of what I said in my last entry. I’m not sure what form this giving up would take.
It’s terrible to quote yourself, but in the interests of ecomomy, as I said to a friend two days ago:
I’ve noticed my whole view of life has changed in the last year –
I no longer expect any happiness, and am treating life as a balance
between pain and pointlessness and some relief and thinking more about
it as a very finite thing with an end not too far off, that will all
remain a mystery when I go. I wonder if that would last if I got well
suddenly, and the mundane normalcy that most people have, not thinking
about their bodies as they carry them through time and space, would
make these feelings go away. I suppose it’s a whole lot more eastern.
I wish I could do so much more. I wish I could spend more than 20 minutes with the kittens before begging my partner to take them away, because I’m too exhausted and tired with them chewing my toes, bless them. I wish I could go outside, because through the little porthole of my bedroom window I can tell the light’s turning autumnal, and I’ve mourned missing autumn, the only time to be alive, every year, but never dreamed I would miss it so substantially as this. I don’t care about spring and summer, but autumn is such a loss: the light somehow is gentler through the little slit of sun from the street at the top of my window, all the harsh arrogance of summer has been knocked out of it and its softer and more kind, and I want to be in it, and kick leaves in it, and smell it.
And I wish I could talk to whoever’s reading this about more than illness: I’d bored you to tears with the little I know about etymology, about the wonder of Creoles, about Tok Pisin, about how Lindley Murray in 1794 made us all believe that double negatives cancelled each other out, contrary to almost every other language out there and contrary to our Anglo-Saxon heritage (“Ic ne can noht singan“), and then I’d go on to bore you about how noht became “nowt” and how while the rest of the country was legitimately saying things like “I can’t sing nothing”, an elite group of Latinite fashionistas in London convinced us all it was uneducated. I’d tell you how, if everything falls apart, but I get some energy back, I’ll do a degree in linguistics one day, and become an idle scholar living out a life of quiet satisfaction hidden amongst minutae such as the timbre of a forgotten dialect or the origin of The Great Vowel Shift, happily losing myself in a dusty office forever.
I’d also dive back into the gender debates that I’ve had such well-thought out comments on here, and which I faithfully promised I would respond to, and still intend to. I’d insist how unfulfilled your life was until you’d heard Joanna Newsom sing “Erin”, or Roger Quigley, until you had to give in and concede defeat. I’d quote verbatim from Galaxy Craze’s “By The Shore” for hours, or Boswell’s London Journal, until you had to adore them. Like the drowned at sea in Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood trying to recapture the sensations of life above the ocean bed, all I’d ask in return is something to remind me of the taste of cheesecake or the smell of leaves underfoot.
Fifth drowned:
And who brings coconuts and shawls and parrots to my Gwen now? How’s it above?
Second drowned:
Is there rum and laverbread?
Third drowned:
Bosoms and robins?
Fourth drowned:
Concertinas?
Fifth drowned:
Ebenezer’s bell?
First drowned:
Fighting and onions?
Second drowned:
And sparrows and daisies?
Third drowned:
Tiddlers in a jamjar?
Fourth drowned:
Buttermilk and whippets?
Fifth drowned:
Rock-a-bye baby?
First drowned:
Washing on the line?
Second drowned:
And old girls in the snug?
Third drowned:
How’s the tenors in Dowlais?
Fourth drowned:
Who milks the cows in Maesgwyn?
Fifth drowned:
When she smiles, is there dimples?
First drowned:
What’s the smell of parsley?
Captain Cat:
Oh, my dead dears!