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“Your readers, right now — they’re bloggers. You need more regular people reading you. You need, like those women at the preschool birthday party. That’s who you need. Get more of the blog readers. Not the blog writers. That’s how you’re going to get to the Next Level.”
Periodically we have these kinds of discussions, Mr. Right-Click and I, about the hypothetical Next Level. On the Next Level, Mr. Right-Click becomes a Gentleman of Elegant Leisure while I manage my blogging empire. On the Next Level, Mr. Right-Click snaps Daguerrotypes in between rounds of golf, wears his seersucker trousers rolled, dares to eat a peach. &c.
“See, what are ‘badges’? I’ve read the whole glossary definition, and I still don’t know what badges are.” The problem with me and the Next Level, is the inside baseball problem, you see. Nobody outside of this small circle of blogging can understand what the hell I’m talking about.
“What . . . you’re, you’re not the target audience, honey,” I say. I always say this. Because, he is not the intended audience. Blogger or not.
“Wait, so are you a member of Blog With Integrity?”
“What are you fucking kidding me? Did you even read the definition? Why in fuck’s sake would you think I would be a member of that paternalistic pseudoMcCarthyism fascist –”
“Oh, OK, see, I see now, now that I read this I see how you feel about it.”
“This is what I’m talking about. How can you say what it takes to get to The Next Level if you’re not reading the whole entry?”
“I could see how maybe it would be useful for like, kids or something.”
“What? The Next Level?”
“No, this Blog With Integrity thing.”
It’s not for kids! It’s for adults!”
“No, I know.”
“It’s for women, grown women!” “By grown women — for other women!”
“Interesting that you should introduce the paternalistic metaphor, though! VERY INTERESTING.”
“Let’s see what’s on TV.”
“OK.”
Before I met Mr. Right-Click, my longest relationship lasted two years, assuming you counted from the beginning of when I met the guy to the last time I ever spoke to him. If you counted actual time spent in the relationship, it was probably more like six months.
Normal people spend their youths flitting about from relationship to relationship, trying people on like a new dress or a pair of shoes. I used to watch those people when I was younger, thinking how great it would be to just be one of those women that men just liked. The sweet, kind girls with pretty hair, or even the ones who weren’t sweet but would always pretend to be.
For many years of my life, being one half of a real, honest-to-goodness couple seemed impossible. I wasn’t sure what it would be like to be one of the people who had real relationships that didn’t end in some kind of drunken fight or power struggle over who called whom when and for what reason. I wasn’t sure that I could even exist inside that kind of relationship, but I knew I wanted it. I think there was part of me that thought if I could just find that, everything else in my life would be fine.
People like to say that they meet their life partners when they weren’t looking for a relationship — it gratifies some kind of self-help truism in the collective unconscious. There had never been a time in my life that I wasn’t looking for a relationship, and when I met Mr. Right-Click I was on the tail end of a long foray into online dating that had resulted in a tome of interesting dating stories, but also tons of bitterness. I almost didn’t go to our first date. I almost decided that I had had enough.
But I did go.
Life doesn’t always adhere to consistent narratives, but even still you might find what you were looking for, even when you are actively looking, on that one time when you most didn’t want to go. And if you can find the strength to suit up and show up, even if only on the principle of the thing, you might find that is the day that you meet your best champion. That day might be the day you finally meet not just a man, but the man who not only knew how to love you without instruction, and the friend who would help you become the best version of yourself. The you that you never knew existed.
I cannot believe it’s been four years. I love you, Mr. Right-Click. Happy Anniversary.
It will be four years ago this June that Mr. Right Click and I got married. We were living in a loft apartment in Santa Monica, and we had three cats and a dog.
We had a wedding website, and this was before everybody had wedding websites. But I didn’t get a free website, or just set up a wedding blog on Blogger. I hand-coded the wedding website site myself in DreamWeaver, and set it up on my own URL. That URL was threecatsandadog.net.
Threecatsandadog.com was already taken by some kind of Bluegrass band, and it annoyed me to have the “.net” suffix on the site — because I like to have things just so — but I thought the three cats and a dog part was the most important. Because I thought it represented us as a couple, and hinted at some of what made us so well-matched for each other.
Both me and Mr. Right-Click have always had friends in animals. Before we met, the unconditional love we got from animals was what made our respective unhappy childhoods more bearable. When we decided to get married, it was to be a union of all of us, Mr. Right-Click’s two cats, Magic and Coast, my cat, Ryan, and my dog, Sidney. When Mr. Right-Click proposed, it was not just to me, but to me and Sidney.
After we got married, time started moving really quickly. I got pregnant, we bought a house, and Mini was born. One day we found Magic lying on the ground, unable to use his back legs. Mr. Right-Click had to rush him to the emergency vet clinic, but there was nothing they could do. He had suffered a stroke, and was in a lot of pain. We had to let him go that night. After that, we were two cats, a dog, and a baby.
Mini started crawling. Somewhere along the way, Sidney had developed food aggression, and one day she nipped Mini near his eye because she felt — strongly — that he was crawling too close to her food. I love that damn dog, but I’m of the school of thought that you don’t give a dog a second chance to bite a baby. So we tearfully packed up Sidney’s dog bowl and her bed and took her to my Mom’s house. We still get to see her, but she’s not with us all of the time now. Every time we’ve had the chance to visit her, she feels like a little bit less of my dog, and a little bit more of somebody else’s. It hurts, but when I try to juggle playing with her and playing with Mini, and I see both of them getting annoyed and jealous, then I think that maybe it’s better she cannot be one of us anymore, and that she’s happier now where she is, because she is back at the top of the pack. And that makes me happy.
Still, after that, we were down to two cats and a baby.
But Mini was becoming a toddler, and the two cats, Coast and Ryan, had fallen in love. They became the best of friends in their golden years, and would spend all day outside sunbathing on the patio. I finished my dissertation and started this blog. Mini started school (?!), and one day we looked at Ryan and realized she had gone from grossly overweight to very thin, and started her on a regimen subcutaneous fluids. We called the regimen “waterboarding,” and she responded to it for a while. We got about six more months before we had to say goodbye. I held her while she was dying, and I felt like there was a hole in my heart. Mr. Right-Click told me that every day it would hurt a little bit less than the day before. We were down to one cat and a baby.
Coast was the last man standing. He was the unlikeliest of survivors, but then he had always been a fighter, even as the runt of his litter, even when he somehow miraculously recovered from a condition that should have killed him ten years ago, even during his career as the smallest of all of our animals, he was always, hands-down, the bravest of all of them. I guess he had to be. He was a courageous, gentle soul, but after he lost Ryan something broke inside of him. In those first few weeks, Coast would cry and cry for her, begging us to please just bring her back. We worried that he would die of a broken heart. But we weren’t sure that getting another cat as a companion for him was the right thing to do, given his age, which at 15 was almost like a 95 year old human.
But his cries, and mine, were unbearable, so we got another cat, Edie, to try to fill the hole that Ryan left. But anyone who has ever loved a pet knows that this is not really how it works: the hole never really gets filled, it just kind of gets grown around, or scabbed over, while the new pet burrows a nesting place of its own. And for myself, I threw myself in again, just as hard, because the love is just as strong as it is totally different. Both Coast and I stopped crying. Every day it hurt a little bit less than the day before. We were two cats and a toddler.
Coast started to decline, and he couldn’t tolerate Edie’s incessant harassment. We separated them, we distracted Edie with cat toys, we took Coast in to the vet hospital because he was down to skin and bones. We feared for the worst, but at first he was fighting. They thought that he could either have a liver condition that could respond to treatment, or that he had lymphoma. And if he had lymphoma, he was far too old and fragile to treat, but we wanted to see if we could get his liver to react. We couldn’t. I took him into the hospital again on Monday, and they said that he was close to dying from starvation, because his liver was malfunctioning so badly that any food he took in was, in effect, making him more sick, even as it nourished him.
On Wednesday night, I told Mr. Right-Click we had to put him down. We worried it wasn’t the right decision: what if he started to recover? He was still sitting out in the sun today, wasn’t he? Maybe the medicine was going to work, after all?
But he was skin and bones. And we had to force feed him food with a syringe to keep him from starving, which is no way to live. He would fight it, like he knew how to do so well. And this morning he clawed Mr. Right-Click, on purpose, for the first time in his life, because he was sick of being force-fed. And then Mr. Right-Click knew it was time, and we took him in. Mr. Right-Click held him while he was dying, and he felt like there was a hole in his heart. I told him that every day it would hurt a little bit less than the day before. Because it’s true. Even though we are going to miss you so very very much, C-Man, it’s true, because we know you are not in pain anymore and you gave us so many good years, out of the nobility of your spirit and the gentleness of your soul. We were so proud to have known you, and I will always remember the depth of your green eyes, and the beauty of your heart.
This post is to inform you that the Right-Clicks are now one kitten, a little boy, and two adults a little worse for wear, but still fighting. I should check and see if that URL is available.
Just Like The Number Where 2+2=Six. A blog about life in the family Six, party of four.
ABDPBT GLOSSARY
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ONLINE DATING CHRONICLES
Sure, I eventually met my husband, Mr. Right-Click, through online dating. But not before I had dated nearly one hundred of Los Angeles' least suitable bachelors. Laugh along in my Online Dating Chronicles.
SPY ON ME
Looking for something to read? Wondering what I'm reading? Perhaps it's time to start Spying On My Google Reader to find out about the coolest stuff I've read lately on the internet.
MUCKRAKING
Sometimes I like to muckrake. You can read about it here. Oh, and here too. Listen, if I don't do it, that muck will just keep piling up until we have to call a roto-rooter. So really, you should thank me. You're welcome.
LISTS
You know, you slave away at blog posts day after day, you try to write fiction, you try to provide interesting social commentary, but at the end of the day, they come for the lists. Check out List Mondays to see what all the hullabaloo is about, because I sure as hell cannot explain it.
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Shining a light on the big business of poop.
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Tech for mommy bloggers. Or bloggers who aren't mommies, but hang out with them. Or Dads. Whatever.
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LOS ANGELES
Los Angeles is where I was born and raised. I always thought I'd leave, but for some reason I never did. Sometimes, I like it here. Other times, I'm not so sure. But good or bad, it has made me who I am.
Sometimes I take the melodrama of my life and twist and turn it until it looks almost charming. I do this because I want you to like me:
Cigarettes & Green Felt: This is about the time I figured out that adults were mostly full of shit.
Assburger: It's not just a disorder on the autism spectrum: it's also one of your relatives!
On Truth: Sometimes somebody will say something and it hurts your feelings. And then you will write a story about it and your aunt will call it "phenomenal." Everyone else will try to pretend like it never happened.
The Sheer And Unmitigated Power of Bob Mould: Sometimes you spend your formative years obsessed by an unrequited teenage crush, and then one day you realize that person is now an orthopedic surgeon who lives in your neighborhood. It kinda sucks when that happens.
Ben From Madera: For one Halloween, Ben dressed up like a bee, like that kid in the Blind Melon video. That's how I will always remember him.
Mr. Right-Click
He is my best friend, even if he uses a PC. And the fact that sometimes he will pretend to be a "Pancake Pirate" is only part of the reason. Arrrr!
Mini
His cutie-pie percentile group is off the charts.
Spinning
If you think this is just about exercise, then you have underestimated how wildly inappropriate people can be when they undergo physical pain in a group setting.
’? I’ve read the whole glossary definition, and I still don’t know what badges 
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