“I’ll tell you one thing. I really like these JetBlue flight attendants.”

“Oh yeah? Better than the ones on Southwest?”

“Yeah.”

“Nice.”

“Hey, having a thing for flight attendants is a pretty typical male fantasy. I mean, they’re usually pretty attractive, and always at your service…”

I hate to say it, but I’ve been watching a lot of “Beverly Hills 90210″ lately. It comes on - two shows back to back - on the Soap Opera Network daily and just so happens to coincide with the time I normally get home, and want to do the dishes or maybe pay some bills, but those tasks are so boring on their own that I choose to watch some reruns of that magnificent program. Recently they were airing the shows from the era just before Brenda takes off for good, when she gets in real trouble with the law for becoming involved with animal rights activists and breaking into a lab at California University. The gang had saved this poor little dog who’d been experimented on, and after he died, allegedly from experiment-induced cancer, Brenda went on a rampage. This is sort of a tangent, because the point of my admitting to watching the show is that on that same episode, Kelly was trying to console Donna, who was most upset about the loss of the dog, and told her that she’d heard losing a pet can be even more difficult than losing a person, because with people we have all these complex emotions, but with animals, it’s just love.

This episode just so happened to come on a few weeks ago when J and I were dealing with a situation with Teddy, our cat, who had been recently diagnosed with cancer. And since he was an older cat, and the cancer was very invasive, spreading from his esophagus down into his lungs, we knew he wouldn’t be around much longer.

It’s strange, because when the vet first called me to tell me the bad news, after Teddy had spent all day at NC State Veterinary College, being x-rayed and tested and whatnot, I just wanted it to be all over - immediately. I had been expecting her to call and say he had a minor heart issue that could be medicated, not that he was going to die in a matter of months or weeks, and my immediate, and very selfish reaction, was to wonder how in the name of God I was going to watch my cat get sicker and sicker and then make a very difficult decision.

It’s not that I ever thought Teddy was going to be around forever. When I took him home from the animal shelter about four years ago I knew he was old, although never knew how old exactly, because his teeth were in such bad shape. It was clear he’d had at least some sort of decent life before arriving at the shelter. He was big and very friendly, and extremely, extremely loud, meowing and purring all day. I like to think he spent a lot of his former life strutting around town, seducing the ladies, but we’ll never really know.

My friends Maggie and Zandra, who worked at the shelter with me, pretty much declared him the best cat in the land, and placed him in a cage near the front door, where everyone could check out how handsome he was. And he was handsome, no doubt, but most of the time people come to the animal shelter looking for young animals, not geriatric, if very personable, ones. So after a while I took Teddy home. I’d never intended to have a cat, but hey, I’d never intended to do a lot of the things I’d done, including move to North Carolina and marry a scientist, and that all worked out just fine.

Teddy adjusted very well with to life with me and Mina in the studio apartment. He held his own when Mina tried to run him out of the place, and eventually they formed a sort of symbiotic relationship, never making eye contact or really admitting the other existed. It was different with Cecilia, who loved Teddy unconditionally from the moment she met him.

When J and I moved in with each other we rented a very spacious, beautiful home from a woman who, for some reason, trusted us with it. For reasons I’ll never figure out, we neglected to tell her that we had a cat. We told her about the two dogs - the dogs who chew on things, and poop on things - but we figured if we told her a cat, too, the cat who did nothing but lie around and eat, and sometimes groom himself, she might not let us have the house, so for the next year or so that we lived there, whenever the very nice, understanding landlord would pay a visit, we’d scoop Teddy up and place him the master bedroom bathroom and close the door so she’d never know.

Also, at one point while living in the very nice house, J decided it might be good if Teddy became an “upstairs cat,” as he felt the cat had taken too much to lying on (and presumably damaging) the downstairs couches, which belonged to the landlord. J tried a series of tricks involving baby gates and intricate psychology to get the cat to stay in the upstairs portion of the house, lying only on our furniture, but day after day, Teddy would appear downstairs, blinking, meowing, asking for his food, dealing with yet another one of our crazy stunts patiently.

The current house has suited everyone’s needs very well for the past year and a half that we’ve lived here. The dogs have a big backyard and Teddy had the screened-in porch and the bed of pine needles just outside the carport that would get warm in the sun where he liked to lay down once I finally became alright with letting him outside every now and then. He never went anywhere. He was content to just lay in the pine needles, or in the grass in the front yard. He picked his indoor spots, as all cats do, with seemingly ridiculous logic, choosing to sit atop the DVD player, sleep in the closet on all our shoes, settle down on J’s schoolbag.

The thing that’s struck me so much in the past month is how, even never having really wanted a cat in the first place, this cat had become such a part of our lives, a part we took for granted, demanding food every morning and night with the other animals and cuddling up next to us, where it was warm, when we’d watch a movie. When he recently became sick we couldn’t take any of it for granted, and not only because we wanted to spend as much time with him as possible, knowing he didn’t have much time left, but because we had to check on him much more than usual. I couldn’t go to sleep at night without making sure he was comfortable and safe, sometimes transferring him from the couch to a cushion in our bedroom, noticing his diminishing weight each time I’d gather him up and hug him to my chest. I couldn’t leave the house without transferring a kiss from my lips to my hand to his head, or putting my face close to his to make sure he was still purring, still happy, and waiting for him to touch his nose to mine so he’d know I was checking in. We made disgusting concoctions out of baby food and kitten formula, spoon feeding the cat when he wasn’t able to reach down into the bowl. J would sit Teddy in a corner of the kitchen to give him his medicine through a plastic syringe, squirting it into his mouth and making sure every drop went down.

And even though we knew his condition would deteriorate, and watched that happen, up until the night before last, Teddy would purr and come to sit with us, or drag himself up on the bed where it was most comfortable, showing us he still had something to live for. Still, I constantly watched for signs that he wasn’t alright - that it was time to make that impossible decision, a decision I’ve never had to make before. My parents called me at college to tell me about the last days of the cat and dog I had growing up.

Thankfully, the obvious sign came very quickly. One minute Teddy was lying comfortably nearby as I worked on my computer in the office and the next he was very clearly sick and in distress, so sick that I called our vet and told him something was wrong and I had to bring him in right that minute.

When I arrived, the very compassionate doctor told me that putting Teddy to sleep was obviously the right thing to do, because he was suffering and I agreed. I couldn’t get a hold of J at the lab, but knew he wouldn’t have wanted me to wait any longer. So while she got everything ready I leaned down near his head, like I’d done so many times in the past month, so he would know I was there.

On my way out of the vet’s office, with my empty cat carrier, red eyes, dropping used tissues all over the parking lot, a man who must have seen me come in stopped his car and told me he hoped the rest of my week would be better. I thanked him - his small gesture meant the world at that moment. I said maybe I’d go home and cry for a couple hours, and then I’d be alright. He told me to give it longer than that. And I’m sure he’s right, that over the next few weeks the missing trappings of having a cat - the litter box in the corner, tufts of fur clinging to the rug, the loud vocal alarms that it was time for him to eat - will all become more obvious and finite.

Even though I only took care of Teddy in his retirement years he, like all the animals in all our lives, became such a normal part of my everyday routine, running underfoot and greeting us each day when we came home. I will miss him dearly, because as Kelly wisely pointed out, with animals it is only about love and he was a wonderful cat to love, a very good boy, which is exactly what I told him, to make sure he knew, as I leaned in close to say goodbye.

A happy Ash Wednesday to all the Catholics out there, and to everyone else, God help you.

I’m just kidding. For the most part.

Today, as many of you know, marks the official beginning of the 40 days and 40 nights of Lent, a season when pious Catholics try to be better at religion in general, and if they’re anything like me fail miserably. It is also a season when we all try to give something up in order to suffer and become better human beings because of it.

The beginning of Lent also usually falls soon after President’s Day, which doesn’t mean much for most people, but for me and my college friends and others we’ve roped in along the way, President’s Day marks our annual reunion weekend. We’ve made this happen every year since graduating in 2000, gathering in Boston, New York City and South Carolina to name a few.

This year my friends did some excellent research and decided it might be fun to rent a house near a winery in the Northern Neck of Virginia. This area of the world is not easy to describe because it’s not quite near, well…anything, and when people asked me where I was going I proudly answered “to a WINERY” and was done with it.

It just so happens though, that our house was located just miles from a myriad of historical sites, such as the birthplaces of George Washington, James Monroe and Robert E. Lee.

The result of all this was that the first two days we were there were a lovely mix of traipsing around visiting historical sites and exploring local culture, like the seafood restaurant The Happy Clam. We also saw a lot of bald eagles, which was great, because as much as I’ve resented J making me look for birds in the past, seeing those majestic creatures close up was pretty amazing (sadly J had a lot of work to do this weekend and couldn’t come with us).

Basically, we had a very presidential trip, which was a first for us and, of course, very pertinent to the holiday weekend.

At night we’d come home to our gorgeous, spacious house on the Rappahannock and Andy would make us a fire and we’d gather around having a few margaritas or some wine, playing games, and then eventually would drift off to sleep.

The first two nights that’s what happened.

On the third day we decided to visit Robert E. Lee’s birthplace. It’s called Stratford Hall Plantation, and is owned by a collective of 43 women, for some reason that no one explained to us. We may have bolstered the courage to ask (a nice older woman with a dressed in colonial garb led us on a tour) but see, on the third day we decided it was time to finally visit the winery, Ingleside. I know you probably think it’s crazy that we waited so long to visit, but honestly, we were too busy learning.

So what happened is that we were kind of antsy when we got to Stratford Hall. Really antsy. We forced Bill to tell the kindly docent that we’d have to be leaving early as “we had an appointment.” It was ok, because at that point, we’d really had our fill of historic facts - or at least I had. And the thing is, some of the facts were more like suggestions. Both at Washington’s and Lee’s birthplaces, we were told by staff members that many of the artifacts weren’t actually historic artifacts, but recreations, so by the end of all that touring, we’d wizened up and were ready to drink some actual wine.

Naturally, when we got to the winery, we were elated and opted for the more advanced tasting and were able to try some of the reserve wines, which were delicious. We stuck around after the tasting for the tour, during which we were allowed to bring our glasses of wine (that we purchased after the tasting, because you can’t just stop at a tasting) and declared it the VERY BEST TOUR we’d been on. All that they had on those other tours were fake cookies on recreations of historic dinner plates, after all.

Here’s where it gets a little hard to remember. We were drinking the wine, and having a very good, but somewhat civilized time, and then the next thing I knew we had (ok, mostly it was me, but I was backed up on this, believe me) invited a couple who worked at the winery back to the house to help us drink the roughly 12 million bottles of Ingleside wine we’d just purchased. We got back home, made our fire, ate about 10 blocks of cheese and lots of chips and salsa, our guests came over, we drank the wine and all of a sudden were in the throes of a massive dance party (you can watch a video, taken by Cathy, of a particularly awesome part of that dance party here on YouTube).

Once again, President’s Day weekend was a raucous success, and once again, the reunion has prepared me for Lent. I woke up today feeling ready for a little self-restraint as well as a little productivity - this year for Lent I’ve opted to try and check my email only a couple times a day and walk the dog frequently. It’s a good time to try and become a better human being. And if you’re into it, think about God or spirituality or even just the general idea of human connectivity, you know, all of us on this Earth together. I don’t know, maybe I’m being a bit lofty, but spending such a fantastic weekend with my friends made me think about how nice life can be, and it doesn’t hurt that the temperatures have gone up recently down here in North Carolina even though it’s only February, reminding us that spring is coming soon.

This morning I was doing a little running on the treadmill at the Y, when I noticed a group of older women chatting over by the magazine racks, having a grand time, one with Mardi Gras beads around her neck, and I couldn’t help smiling, because I’ve been in the ladies locker room and, Jesus, have I seen some breasts (and then some) so I figured she really deserved those beads, you know? Worked for them. In fact, I was surprised more of them weren’t wearing beads.

To celebrate Valentine’s Day J and I decided that, instead of getting a reservation somewhere and potentially feeling crowded and rushed, we’d stay home and make some great food, like fettuccine alfredo (from scratch, damnit) and little gooey chocolate cakes for dessert. That’s right, it was very gourmet in this house last night. Sort of.

We started the night with a cocktail J found online (if you want to make fun of us for getting cocktail recipes off the Food Network website, try one of these, and then see how you feel). Upon making our second round of drinks, J started eating the sorbet necessary in the recipe right out of the container, and exclaiming, “I love sorbet!” Somehow, as sometimes happens when you are drinking sparkling wine infused with vodka, we ended up discussing the issue further, and J, completely confused, stopped the conversation to ask, “Wait a second, what’s the difference between sorbet and sherbert? Aren’t they the same thing?” He went on to explain that he’d always thought sherbet and sorbet weren’t only the same thing, but where the same word. And that FANCY people pronounced “sherbet” like “sorbet.”

“What??” I asked. “You thought what?” I told him this very much reminded me of the time we talked about wet nurses - how he thought wet nurses are nice women who give old people baths. In any case, it was another lesson learned, and the most important thing is that everything was delicious and we had a great night together, just hanging out and laughing and making a total, complete mess of the kitchen.

Belated Happy Valentine’s Day to all my favorite blog readers!

If there’s one thing people aren’t going to pass up, it’s getting a few freshly brewed beers for free in the middle of the day. And that’s what the Carolina Brewing Company tour is all about. Well, and also learning about how their beer is made. Yeah, come to think of it, that’s what the tour is actually all about. But during the course of this tour - which everyone who lives here in North Carolina should experience by the way - the owners of the brewery serve their excellent beers to anyone who wants to try them and that just so happens to be most people on the tour. Take me and my friends who went on the tour this past Saturday. We were totally up for trying some beer:

To celebrate my friend Sherry’s birthday (the girl all the way on the right, the one who looks totally pumped to be enjoying some seasonal barleywine) we decided to head out to Holly Springs, about half an hour away, and go on the Carolina Brewing Company tour, which happens every Saturday at 1 p.m. At about 12:45 p.m. the nice guys who own the place turn on the taps and serve all the people who come to take the tour their choice of beer and I don’t mean like a sip of beer so you can “taste” it and be on your way, I mean a full pint of beer, so you can drink it, goddamnit.

At a certain point during the tour, in fact, I decided it might be a good idea to take a picture of what remained of my current pint of beer.

My friends and I have gone to this tour several times over the years we’ve all lived here and it’s never a disappointment. Never. Good beer in the middle of the day never is. Note the change in attitude in the pictures below.

From uptight microbiologists…

…to wacky kids who love life!

Here’s one of Jess with her eyes closed:

But honestly I don’t want to downplay the educational aspect of the experience. The guys who run the place are pretty much heroes of mine. They had a dream and went for it and now they own their own successful brewery and when you’re there, listening to their story, half-drunk on your second beer (because really, it doesn’t take too much at 1 p.m.) you get inspired. And then sometimes you talk to strangers. And then sometimes you get really, really hungry, so thank God there is a Taco Bell on the way home.

My great friend Karla, who is currently an exercise physiology grad student at UNC, has started a blog called Stay Moving, and it really inspires you to do just that. Move. Get some fresh air. Lay off the macaroni and cheese.

I don’t know anybody who, during these dreary winter months, couldn’t use some encouragement in the whole physical fitness realm. I certainly do. So check out her blog if you know what’s good for you. You won’t regret it. And who knows, you may be up for running a marathon in a few months. Or at the very least up for running down the street a few blocks or so.

I came home from a quick trip to the gym this morning, where I spent a little while on the exercise bike and also enjoyed a rather invigorating walk/jog around the inside track, getting fit to the tune of “In a Big Country” by Big Country, as prescribed by my physical therapist (the walk/jog, not Big Country) and upon opening the door and very noticeably NOT being greeted by the dogs, immediately looked at the kitchen floor where there were shreds of the garbage bag, a couple select pieces of garbage (licked clean, of course) and a tiny mound of poop, the kind you might expect to come out of, oh, say, this kind of dog:

It’s almost like after the millisecond or so of triumph they enjoyed when they found a crumb left over from the take-in we got last night and then realized the mess they’d made, they came up with a brilliant plan: poop on it. That way, they thought, our owners will have no idea what to get mad about first when they see all the things we’ve done wrong, and while they stand there, confused, we’ll just be lying here in the living room with our heads down and our eyes shut, and they won’t suspect we had anything to do with it.

I don’t write about music a lot because I don’t know what I’m doing. It would be like my trying to write about food in a critical or intelligent way, when all I could really muster is, “Have you tried that new restaurant IT IS DELICIOUS!” Same thing with music. It’s not that I don’t like either. Music and food are two of my favorite things. It’s just that I don’t feel I’m a qualified critic of, well, anything. Except maybe other people.

So forgive me if this post is lacking in hip jargon but I did want to mention that last night we went to see Yo La Tengo, my supposedly favorite band. I say “supposedly” not because of anything the band’s done. They’re great. I say it because I haven’t been a stellar fan. I’ve been too into NPR and old mixes I made in 2003 that turn up when I’m looking through our albums for actual good music. I listen to those CDs I made long ago, laughing at my taste in music, then secretly get really into it when I’m in my car, alone.

I first heard Yo La Tengo when I was a senior in college. They’d recently come out with the album “And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out,” and I recall the exact moment I put it on for the very first time, sitting on my bed, just listening. I’m not generally like this - the type of person who sits and puts something on the stereo and just listens. Puts something on the stereo and listens while maybe eating some cookies and playing with my dog and reading some emails? Sure. But not just sitting there like that. And that’s how I knew I loved this band and wanted to hear all their music.

I don’t know if it’s because the band was formed by a husband and wife duo (Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley, and by the way, at the concert last night Ira got so pumped that he broke a guitar and if that’s not rock n’ roll I don’t know what is) but some of their lyrics really get to me - in a good way, reminding me happily of my own relationship. In one song, for instance, they sing about “our punchline” - all the private jokes a couple shares. In another, “On Our Way to Fall,” Ira sings “I remember staring at my feet,” when recalling meeting a person he eventually falls in love with.

In fact, J and I talked about Yo La Tengo the first time we met. I’m not saying we got together because of a band, but he’d just bought “I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One,” my favorite Yo La Tengo album, and we spent of a good deal of the first night we met - at a friend’s wedding - talking about how much we both liked it, especially the song “Stockholm Syndrome,” which is kind of funny, because that’s definitely not one of those love songs I was referring to. It’s actually a pretty sad song (this musical theme, so you know, persisted in our courtship: after drunkenly voicing our feelings for one another at the World Beer Fest in Durham several months after that wedding we got into a tricky situation on the way home - the car was packed so tight with our friends that I was forced to sit on J’s lap, while “Love Bites” by Def Leppard played in the background…oh, and my boyfriend at the time happened to be driving that car, yeah, my boyfriend).

I’ve been a pretty sad example of a music lover lately. For one thing - and this actually isn’t a problem for me - but I think that in all relationships one person ends up dominating every given situation. Like J definitely is more into identifying birds and talking about art than I am. I’m way more into enjoying a good bottle of red wine and discussing American literature than he is. And in the music category, J’s kind of got me beat, I’ll admit. He knows way more about music in general and is always on top of new bands and albums and a lot of times when we get into his car he’s got one of these new albums blasting very loudly, like a true music lover tends to do. I do this too, don’t get me wrong, I just do it less often, after I’ve fully exhausted my capacity as a nerd by listening to “All Things Considered” and “The Diane Rehm Show” for about four hours a day. And because I’m not on top of the music scene like he is, I don’t know what to say when he asks me what I’d like to listen to on long road trips. This sometimes results in my telling him to pick “whatever you want to hear,” and then my response to whatever he wants to hear is to roll my head back against the seat and sigh really loudly making it clear that what he wanted to hear? Not what I wanted to hear, despite the fact that I couldn’t make up my mind.

Anyway, the point of all that is that I haven’t really been into music lately, not like I have been at other points in my life, for instance, when I was when sitting on my bed my senior year mesmerized by the new music I was hearing. But yesterday I decided, since we were going to the concert last night after all, to put in Yo La Tengo’s latest album. I’d given it a good, preliminary listen upon first purchasing it, but then had sort of let it fall to the wayside in favor of various downloaded podcasts or CDs I’d listened to three million times already. But when I put the album in, early in the morning on my way to yet another commissioner’s meeting, I was instantly reminded of why they are my favorite band. Because one minute I’d been driving along, bummed out at the prospect of another annoying Monday and the next I was listening to music that made me really happy…and sometimes sad, and thoughtful, too, but good music can do that. Even better, I realized, I was going to see my favorite band play that very night. And the concert, of course, was amazing. So I think I’m going to take a look through the many, many albums I’ve amassed over the years when I’ve got some spare time - albums I haven’t listened to in ages because I’ve simply been too lazy to find them and bring them back into rotation. I’m going to remember why I bought them in the first place. I’m going to listen to them really loudly in my car. .

You can listen to the song “Beanbag Chair” from Yo La Tengo’s latest album here. It will make you happy. I promise.

I finally bit the bullet today and actually made contact with a local temp agency and then filled out an online application. Because we’re not sure how much longer we’ll be living in North Carolina and because, well, it would be good to make more money, I decided a temporary part-time position might be just the ticket for a while.

As one must when applying with staffing agencies, I was required to list all my qualifications. I was able to pick and choose from a list of what seemed like hundreds and in what I suppose was my excitement regarding skills I’ve attained over the years, I found myself getting very, very pumped about just how awesome I am. “Editing? Shit yeah. Copying? Are you kidding me? The millions of documents I’ve copied! Faxing? I am AWESOME AT FAXING.”

Since the agency I’d chosen deals with more than just people who are superb at filing, like myself, I was confronted with the very difficult task of not getting too carried away with adding skills I don’t have, like, for instance, head and neck surgery. It was hard, because I kept imagining with sheer delight how hilarious it would be for these staffing managers to receive my application and go over my skills: “Proof reading. Ok. Database management. Great. Nephrology. Huh. This one really got around.”