LiveJournal Project - December 2005

This month ended on a really miserable note. Losing your best friend is never easy, whether they be two-legged or four-legged.

Date: 2005-12-10 11:57
Subject: bending over for the crow (not the blackbird)
i've bitched about tuition increases in this little space on several occasions, but i don't think i ever really knew just how bad it was until i did some fiddling with my spring semester schedule and looked at the bill. as of right now, i'm registered for one 3-hour class that has no special fees. resident tuition for said class? $675.00. throw in the SRC fee, financial aid fee, and associated assholes of asu student government fee, and you've got just under $700 ($699 to be exact). christ! i remember when summer classes, which are always more expensive than fall/spring classes, weren't even that much. if i add back the classes that i just dropped, then i'm up to about $2300. damn, crow, now we know how the university can afford to pay you $587,394 per year.

i'm starting to get really tired of paying tuition, and i'm seriously questioning whether or not i even want to bother with classes next semester. i suppose this is one of those natural semester/year-end ponderings, where i start wondering exactly what the hell it is that i'm going to school for in the first place, whether or not the time and money could be better spent on other things, and, of course, that age-old question of "just what the fuck do i want to do with my life?"
Mood: contemplative

Date: 2005-12-12 18:50
Subject: i think the phrase "shit for brains" is appropriate.
i'm sitting here watching a show on the discovery times channel on the development of white power hate music in europe and in the US, and i noticed a couple of things here. man, this is some of the shittiest sounding music that i've ever heard, but what i find incredibly ridiculous is that all of these guys are going around shouting "sieg heil" and saluting like hitler while calling it a "victory salute." um, hello, assholes, even if you're so bloody stupid as to really believe that the holocaust never happened, even you can't deny one rather important fact: hitler lost. oh, and you british clods, um, hey, hitler almost overran your country, and now you want to be like him? that would be like the people of kuwait suddenly turning to saddam hussein as their savior.

alas, freedom of speech inherently includes the freedom to be stupid.

Date: 2005-12-13 18:50
Subject: procrastinatory rambling...
so one of the co-founders of the crips is dead, killed last night in a california prison by lethal injection. and while i can't make any claims as to whether or not the guy was actually guilty or innocent, or whether or not he was truly rehabilitated, or any of those other claims that various media pundits are tossing about, it does all make you wonder (well, it makes me wonder, anyway) about the criminal justice system in general. what is the purpose of the criminal justice system in the first place? is it to protect society? is it revenge? is it punishment? what about rehabilitation? deterrent? some combination of all of these and maybe some things that i've left out, perhaps.

what societal good is really furthered by execution to the extent that it should be employed as a preferred alternative over life imprisonment? does it protect society from recividist criminals? sure it does, but so does life imprisonment. does it serve as punishment? sure, but again, so does being locked up in a little cell for the rest of your life with no hope of ever getting out except in a body bag. does it deter crime? no, it doesn't - there are plenty of studies which suggest that the death penalty has no effect whatsoever on crime levels in this country. rehabilitation? i don't think so - there's not much hope that you'll change your ways after you're dead. what about revenge? i suppose you could say that allowing the state to step in and kill someone that's offed your family gives you a measure of revenge, but is that really a societal value that we should be encouraging? i mean, shit, once the crime is committed and the victims are dead, it doesn't matter what you do to the guy that killed them -- they're still dead. are we not all told as children that two wrongs don't make a right - but yet in our criminal justice system we answer the murder of one with the murder of another. hmm... seems a little fucked up to me. and what does it say about society and human nature if we have no problem with saying that certain people are not only not fit to be a part of our society but not even fit to continue being alive? who makes that choice? i'm not into any of that jesus shit, but really, where's the moral authority there? whatever happened to "endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights" - life being the first one among them. hey, you know, that unalienable word... if you buy into that whole declaration of independence and constitution stuff, that means that all of those bastards sitting on death row still have the right to exist.

but, of course, the minute you're arrested or found guilty and sent off to jail, in the eyes of most people you cease being a person. it's kinda like being an alcoholic, i suppose -- or at least that's how people look at it -- once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic, even if you haven't had so much as a drop of nyquil for the last 10 years.

maybe i'm the only one that thinks it's a little odd that you can run up all kinds of bills, put yourself hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt, declare bankrupcty and avoid paying a single penny of it and all it will cost you is 7 years of bad credit - but a criminal record stays with you forever no matter what the offense.

they say that a leopard can't change his spots, but you know, what happens if you give him some paint or a tattoo-removal laser instead of blathering on about the impossible? does society really care? is rehabilitation really a goal of the criminal justice system or is it just lip service paid to preserve the status quo and to keep all of the pigs employed? prisons are big business, and we all know how much a good defense attorney can make.

back to work.
Mood: bored

Date: 2005-12-16 16:36
Subject: stolen from t3knomanser
this is truly beautiful. definitely worth reading.
http://www.fuckchristmas.org

Date: 2005-12-24 07:23
Subject: saying goodbye to my best friend
r.i.p.
raven the cat
2000-2005 (december 22)

I can only hope you knew how much you were loved and how much you'll be missed.
Mood: crushed

Date: 2005-12-26 18:30
Subject: ruminations and ramblings on life, love, and death
when i wrote the last entry, i was posting from my cell phone, so writing a lot wasn't really possible, but now that we've got cable internet here in vegas, i think it's about time for me to say a little more. first, for those of you that might be wondering what happened... as far as we can tell, raven had a heart attack. the sequence of events sounds eerily similar to what happened to sol_amoun's cat a couple weeks ago. the whole plan for this christmas/new year's period was for me to come up to vegas with the cats so that i could stay a couple weeks and not have to worry about who would be feeding them or cleaning their litter boxes or any of that. i went to the vet and asked if she could give me something that would keep them calm in the car (more on that later) - and it seemed like it was going to be a smooth trip. we followed the directions the vet gave us, gave each cat 1/2 a pill, got in the car and headed out. everything was fine until we were about 10 miles from our destination - yeah, that's right, 10 miles. there was a little bit of scratching coming from raven's carrier, and then he let out one of the unholiest sounds i've ever heard, and then it was quiet. a couple minutes went by and we started to get really worried because he wasn't moving or making any noise, so i got him out of the carrier, and held him in my lap. i don't know if he was already gone at that point or not - cory doesn't think so - she says that she could still feel his heart beating. we pulled into a 7-11, they told us where a nearby animal hospital was, and we took him there, but they couldn't resuscitate him. the vet asked what we had given them, so i showed her the bottle, and she said that the dose that we gave them (mind you, we did what the phoenix vet told us to do) was about twice as strong as what they usually use. she also took a look at priss and shiznit and said that they looked really doped up, but that otherwise they appeared to be ok.

i'm not sure how the other cats are taking it - they're definitely not acting like themselves. shiznit spends most of the time sitting by himself (not even necessarily sleeping) in the bathroom cabinet, and he's started wandering around meowing at the walls like there's something there. priss just goes off by herself and does her own thing. if cory and i go out somewhere and they're here by themselves, when we get back they're almost always up on top of the kitchen cabinets. maybe that's just because it's a new place and they're afraid of being here by themselves, i don't know. i don't know if it will be worse when we get back to phoenix.

i'd like to blame the vet in phoenix for overdosing my cat, but it doesn't really make sense that he'd have survived 95% of the trip without incident or visible signs of discomfort and then suddenly die because of a sedative. i keep wondering if there was something we could have done differently so that this wouldn't have happened. who knows? the vet here said that it's possible that there could have been something wrong with him that we didn't know about - and i suppose that's true, but even when we were at home he was his typical self, no puking, no coughing, no signs of bad health. i mean, shit, he was only 5 years old, and even though he was overweight, he was still more active than the other two cats. i wonder if i'm going to have any problems on the trip home - the vet here gave me a more appropriate dose of the sedative but she said to try giving them children's benadryl instead - apparently it has less chance of side effects. my mom suggested not giving priss or shiznit anything and just trying to do it that way, but if raven was killed by stress, i'd have to think that it would be even more stressful for the cats to be in the car for 5 hours without any drugs. i dunno.

i can't remember the last time i've cried this much - all those of you that know me as a hard-ass who doesn't give a shit about anything might be surprised to hear that - but i guess it just goes to show you that given sufficient suckage in life, anything is possible. i've been thinking a lot about the transience of life, and how the things that we care about can just be taken away when we least expect it - and most of the time we don't expect it. it seems that the lesson that 2005 has been trying to teach me is all about mortality - my own and that of my loved ones - because, you know, we all talk about living our lives in the moment, not taking anyone or anything for granted, and being thankful for every minute that we have, but it seems that it takes events like these before those messages really sink in. unless we're reminded otherwise, we all think that we're going to live forever and that everyone we care about will be right there with us, and it just makes it that much harder when the universe comes along and kicks us in the balls (figuratively speaking, for those that don't have balls).

maybe some of the things i'm thinking about aren't really new to anyone except me - this is the first time that anyone close to me has ever died unexpectedly - sure, i had pets as a kid, but they were fish. it's hard to get attached to fish. my grandmother died when i was in high school, but for whatever reason that didn't have much of an effect - i think i was too busy dealing with my own teenage angst at the time to really pay much attention to anything else - also, she'd been sick for a long time so we all knew it was coming - it wasn't one of those out-of-the-blue, get-hit-by-a-bus kind of deaths. i wonder a lot about that age-old question of "why?" - as in, why did this happen? is there some kind of reason for it? did it have to happen in order for something else to happen? and those questions, for me, are a little bit strange, because in general i tend to believe that there's very little rhyme or reason to this life and sometimes there's no other answer to life's difficult questions other than "shit happens." but in this situation, i find that "shit happens" is incredibly unsatisfying.

i find myself wondering if i'll ever meet him again - raven always seemed to have a sort of otherworldliness about him that the other two cats definitely don't have - "reincatnation" is what i've been calling it - and that leads me down a whole different road of thought. people talk about the spirits of their loved ones being with them after they've died, but are they really there, or do we just need to believe that they're there in order to continue on with our lives? i mean, shit, i can't imagine death ever really being an easy thing to deal with, but it does seem like it would make it easier to believe that when they're gone, they're not entirely, 100%, gone without a trace. is it true? i don't know, but i swear that i've heard raven's tell-tale "mrow-row" a couple of times these last couple days. the night it happened, i was sitting in the kitchen, petting him, and it almost felt like he was purring. all in my head - a useful illusion to make coping a little easier -- or is there more than that? i don't know, and maybe the whole point is that it doesn't matter if it makes dealing with it easier. if you'd asked me how i felt about this sort of thing a week ago, i'd probably have given you a much different answer. it's funny, too, because i was telling cory on the drive up here that i used to believe in a lot more (in terms of spiritual stuff) than i do now - it seems like the pendulum may be swinging back the other way. is this a good thing or a bad thing, or merely a necessary thing? who knows?

the next big question, of course, is "what now?" am i now going to always associate las vegas with death and sadness? my girlfriend moved here and my favorite cat died here -- someone please remind me why it is that i thought buying a place up here was such a fantastic idea. i'm not supposed to be heading home until around the 5th of january, but i really don't want to be here any longer. i don't know if being at home will be any easier. at least cory is here - home is just a large empty house with one less cat than there should be. part of me just wants to say "fuck this place", sell the condo and ask cory to come back to phoenix, but then another part of me feels like doing that would be nothing more than "giving up" or "pussing out" and that's something that i have a hard time accepting. i think i'm going to take t3knomanser"s suggestion and enter raven post-humously in KittenWar. sure, it's a bit silly, but why not?

three last things. first, i want to say thank you to stormshadowsong for bringing raven home from the pound in the first place. i still believe that getting the cats were the single best thing that anyone's ever done for me. second, thanks to all of you that have expressed your support. and finally, they say a picture is worth 1000 words, so i'll save myself from having to type any more and just include one.