Oh, hello! Thanks for checking in. Everyone is doing pretty well. The kittens are cray-cray but not in a worrisome way, except that Calvin brought home lilies, which can cause catastrophic health effects in cats. Since our kittens spent most of last week sparring with a bouquet of irises, boxing them, eating the flowers and the leaves, then dragging flower parts around the house to attack later, at their leisure.

So now the lilies are in my basement lair, looking lost, but the cats are safe to spy on us, follow us from room to room (except lily room), but leap away in fear if we make eye contact during one of their hunting sessions. We do lock them out of the bedroom at night because they have no respect for us as people. They come up and stare into your face at 2 AM and expect that now you will pet them and kiss them and let them rabbit kick your arm, while during office hours they were too nuts to engage.

I looked it up on the internet and this is all apparently normal, although ours are a little blind because of their tough early days so they may be a little more skittish than the regular crazy cat.

omg stop talking about cats

That’s how lovely life is right now! I have only cats to discuss. The covid has mostly departed from my body and I am no longer doing weird sweaty naps and eating gigantic meals compulsively, so that is great. The midterms were not a disaster though we lost the House. But the dreaded red wave was not very crashy, more like a regular tide-going-in-or-out level (whatever, I know nothing about waves. Suck it, beach weirdos). Such a relief. And so nice to not have to block out all that noise and anxiety to get stuff done.

This is what I’m thinking about lately: how to decouple anger from aggression. I have a terrible anger problem. I just get angry whenever I am uncomfortable. Now, that hair-trigger reaction has totally mellowed out, especially recently, and I am super vigilant about it.

But I still get angry, and rely on anger, to tell me when things need to change and I need to do something. As I do more and more, with less agonizing and doubts, I spend a lot of time judging my own anger and trying to answer this question: am I mad because something is legit bullshit, or am I mad because I’m anxious and just reacting?

What a pain in the butt to figure this out. I imagine it must be tiring for my teammates on all of my ventures, who are constantly being asked if I’m crazy. I’m so sorry. As soon as I’m sure I’m not crazy, I’ll stop asking.

Then the trick with the anger problem is to act without looking angry. Why is this required? I mean, why can’t I stomp in and be stern and disapproving? Why is that such a problem? I know why. Other people don’t react well to angry people (and I don’t either). But I’m already working so damn hard to identify the anger as warranted or not, and then I have to expunge the affect of anger.

It’s a lot of work!

Enough with the anger—how is Maggie?

She is just fine. She has workmen in doing things and moving boxes and bags around. Her social media is all refried memories that I have already seen. That is kind of wild—there are basically no memories for her from the last fifteen years. She did mention moving somewhere else, but I can’t imagine she will move anywhere soon.

I did just forward past a cover of a Beatles song, so please don’t think we’re all back to normal. This grudge lives on.