UbuntuCat

It was actually quite a while ago that I first installed Skype. It seemed okay, but most of the people I want to talk on the phone with I can call on my cell phone, and I don’t really talk on the phone that often, anyway.

A while ago (it feels like years), my wife and I tried chatting with a former bridesmaid from our wedding who happens to live in Europe, and we had trouble connecting. Well, she’s in New Zealand now, and my wife has a new computer, and we were able to connect to her last night—see what her place looks like, meet her fiancé, show her our apartment, and talk what seemed almost like face to face.

I realize people have been using Skype video chat for years, but for me this is a new thing, and it’s cool! I dig it. It’s good to know, too, that if I or my wife is sent away on business, we can Skype video chat cost-free. Ah, the wonders of technology…

There’s a rather famous poem by Robert Frost called “The Road Not Taken.” Most people who read it tend focus on the end and admire the fact that he went in a direction most people didn’t go. The idea is that he is a pioneer, a nonconformist, a rebel, a risk-taker. I took the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference.

Well, that’s not what I focus on. It was what I focused on when I read it in high school English class, but what I focus on now is the first bit: And sorry I could not travel both / And be one traveler

I recently saw a little-known but rather well-done movie called Seeing Other People, in which a newly engaged woman with very little sexual experience witnesses spontaneous stranger sex at her engagement party and then decides she wants a temporary open relationship with her fiancé to sow her wild oats (and allow him to re-sow his, just to be fair). In the end, you’re left wondering if the couple might have been better off not having tried the experiment, or was actually better off for having tried it.

This is how life is for me. I, like Frost, am sorry I cannot travel both roads. I chose to avoid illegal drugs. I chose to not drink until I was of legal age. I chose to do (relatively) well in school. I chose to be a smartass to my teachers. I chose to become a teacher. I made a decision to quit teaching. There are various paths I’ve taken, none of which I regret. I’ve never thought, “If only I had been a druggie drunk academic delinquent who didn’t talk back to teachers and never was employed; then, my life would be so much better.” That line of thinking, that kind of regret means you still had to choose one path but simply chose the wrong one.

What I’m sorry about is not being able to travel both roads. I know people who want to try everything and experience everything, but you can’t experience everything, because sometimes the lack of experience in something is an experience itself. George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life thinks he’s missing out on all these world travels and exciting parties and war glories his brother and others get to experience. He thinks he’s stuck in a small town not getting any experience, but he is getting an experience. He’s experiencing what it’s like to be in a small town and be a fundamental part of that community.

I’m equally fascinated by both people who have traveled all over the world and lived in many different countries, and people who have lived in one town for decades and been one of many in a long family line who have lived in that same town. I want both those experiences and everything in between. I want to know what’s it’s like to be faithful to my wife until one of us dead. But I also want to know what’s it’s like to feel the pain of one of us cheating on the other. The two are mutually exclusive. And, no, being faithful for only a decade or two and then cheating isn’t experiencing both—it’s really just the latter.

I loved going to one college all four years. But I’d have loved to have gone to another college as well for all four years. No, transferring every year for four years is not the same experience. As they say, “You have only one life to live.”

What’s even more psychologically frustrating isn’t that, like Frost, you can’t go down both roads; what’s even more frustrating is that there really isn’t a road that is not taken. If you can think of it, someone’s done it. As Eccelesiastes says, “There’s nothing new under the sun.” You think you’re a crazy sex maniac who has slept with 1000 people. Well, there are other sex maniacs out there. You think you’re a crazy chaste maniac who has slept with nobody and never will until you die. Well, there are other virgins-till-death out there, too. “New” in this life basically means new ways of doing the same thing or pushing the limits of quantity (running the same distance but more quickly; running a slightly longer distance).

So what do I do about all this road business? Well, first of all, I don’t pretend anything is new. I’m content to go down roads others have gone down before. More importantly, I find the next best thing to travelling more than one road. I don’t know if C.S. Lewis actually said this in real life or not, but in the movie Shadowlands, Lewis says “We read to know we’re not alone.” I think the implication of that is that we want to know others have shared the same experiences we have, felt the same feelings, thought the same thoughts. That can be one reason to read. I read for the opposite reason: I read to experience vicariously what I have not experienced. I read to know that we are varied and to take advantage of that fact. This is why I’m mainly drawn to non-fiction. I love hearing people’s stories.

A multitude of roads diverged in a wood, and I got friends and strangers together and said, “Hey, let’s all go down different roads and then meet back up and share our stories.” And that has made all the difference.

I’ve always considered myself a good speller. Whatever that means.

I won the spelling bee in 4th grade, and I was bummed to have been eliminated in the pre-trials in 5th grade by the word necessary. The representative from our homeroom who did get necessary correct (after everyone else had already exhausted the other logical possible spellings of that word) lost in the finals on the word hexagon. Yes, she was a smart person in other ways, and she turned out in high school to be an excellent swimmer (far better an athlete than the runner I was). Still, I was quite resentful at the time (Hexagon? Hexagon?!).

I pride myself to this day on not using spellcheck in word processors or web browsers. I don’t want a program to automatically flag words as misspelled that I should know how to spell, but I will deliberately look up the spelling of certain words I’m not sure of. Disingenuous, for example, is one I can never remember the spelling of.

Of course, despite my bravado and hubris, I’m more or less an average speller when it comes to college-educated folk (that’s university-educated, for you readers outside the US). After watching Spellbound and Akeelah and the Bee, I realized just how mediocre my spelling skills are. Those kids are spelling words I don’t know the meanings of—words I’ve never even heard of, words I would doubt are in the English language if they didn’t have dictionary entries.

But not only am I a mediocre speller for my demographic, ultimately; I am, in fact, deficient. I misspell constantly. In fact, I just wrote mispell just now and then corrected myself. That isn’t my usual kind of blunder, though. Usually, I don’t misspell the appropriate word so much as spell correctly a wholly inappropriate but vaguely similar-sounding word. For example, if I intend to write something like I like the way my cat smells after a bath, I might actually type I like the weight my cat smells after a bath.

From an English teacher’s perspective (I used to be one), this is a rather odd kind of spelling error. Most people who misspell do not substitute in correctly spelled wrong words; they use the right words and just spell them incorrectly. For example, you might see a phonetic speller spell imagine as emagen or spell segue as segway. Not being a learning specialist, I don’t know where this comes from, but in my unprofessional opinion I’d guess it stems from people not having read enough. The more you read, the more familiar you become with the way words look and are spelled, and (even if you don’t know the exact spelling of a word) you grow to recognize quite quickly if a word doesn’t look right.

In fact, if anything, people who read a lot have the opposite problem of those who do not read as much—the super-readers tend to have an extremely large vocabulary but not actually know how to pronounce all the words they know the meanings and spellings of. I had a friend in high school (one of the top-ranked students in our class who went to top Ivy League schools for undergraduate and graduate schools) who didn’t know until junior year that the word rebels is pronounced REbuls and not REEbuls. I myself have had that problem. I learned the words deny and renege from a comic book called Power Man and Iron Fist, but I thought they were pronounced DEnee (instead of deeNAI) and REnegeh (instead of reeNEG). If you watch the movie Trekkies, you’ll see one Star Trek-obsessed fan make this blunder several times during the documentary.

The acquisition and application of language is a fascinating thing, and I’ve loved writing about it. Now, let me go back and proofread this sucker…

Our cat probably has at least another decade left in him. He won’t be dying any time soon. Nevertheless, I keep thinking about what I’ll miss about him when he dies. I think I’m trying to cushion the blow as much as possible, because I know I’ll be absolutely devastated when he goes.

When I was younger and had less sentient pets (hermit crabs, for example), I couldn’t understand why people were so upset when their dogs or cats died. Well, even though he hasn’t died yet, I now know why I’ll be upset when he does finally kick the kitty litter. First of all, we have a relationship. Yes, one can imagine a relationship with one’s hermit crabs, but really how much affection is shown (Oh, it poked one claw out of the shell today—that must be an expression of love!)? Secondly, dogs and cats just live longer. Indoor cats can live up to 20 years. That’s a long time to be spending with another being.

Well, it’s entirely possible my wife and I would eventually get another kitty, but here are some things I think might never be replaced:

• He does “the monkey hug,” where he’ll wrap one front paw around my neck when I hold him.
• He lets me clip his nails holding him upside down, and he actually appears to enjoy it, sometimes purring and kneading while I do it.
• He will let out a few meows when I first put him in, but he doesn’t seem to mind baths (he just walks around the tub while I shampoo him).
• He lets us manhandle him more than any other cat I’ve ever seen. We can pick him up in pretty much any position, hold him upside down, put his paws over his face to play peek-a-boo. Yes, we are cruel, but in a playful, nice way. Not enough for people to sic the SFSPCA on us.
• He moos. Yup. Like a cow. Sure, he also meows, but most of the time he sounds like a cow mooing.

I have friends who work from the morning until midnight five days a week. I know others who are traveling every week for their jobs. When I was a teacher I felt as if I were working every waking hour of the day (except summer vacations). But now I’ve turned into a workaholic lightweight.

I usually have to be convinced to leave early, but working on weekends gets me down. I just worked part of Saturday and felt I had to use the rest of the weekend to recuperate. I probably don’t have a right to complain since I’ll have reduced hours during the summer.

I just feel a little tired. I’ll say the cat certainly got a lot of snuggling time the past two days.