Please remind me not to spend an hour reading emails from my early twenties when life was dramatic and I was poetic. It will only end with me suddenly looking up amidst the fog of memory and realizing that I haven’t written a word of the thing I was supposed to write, and it’s not as if I have very much time to work these days anyway, since the cat has trained me exquisitely well to scratch the sides of her head every time she wakes up from a nap, which is approximately fifty times a day.

Thank you.

Today was warm, wet, muddy—winter wearing its spring coat. We opened the window in the kitchen a few inches while we were cooking, and I picked Zheli up in my arms to let her sniff the breeze that stole in. She nosed it like someone meeting a friend she wasn’t sure she recognized, quiet and curious and a little bit, I don’t know how to explain it exactly, like a child. I decided to move the jars of lentils and chillies and seeds off to the right of the sill, so that she’d have room to hop up on it if she wanted, and not a moment later there she was, head so far under the edge of the window that she was on the verge of getting wedged in. For half an hour or so she sat on the sill, watching and smelling that vast March night on the other side of the gap, not tense with excitement as she so often is, but deeply calm; she could have been hypnotized. Every now and then she turned around to call softly at me, a tiny mew full of wonder and uncertainty, like Have you smelled this? When she did so I could see that there was a smudge of dirt on the tip of her nose from the dirty sill. She looked very like a stray cast member from a stage production of Oliver Twist.

The other night I had a dream that three short essays I submitted to a literary journal were summarily rejected by email; the editor, whose tone was outraged, called them “cruel and degrading.” In the dream I understood this to mean not that their content was sordid, but that they were so wretchedly badly written as to render him mortified. I have not, as it happens, submitted anything to a literary journal lately, but when I awoke I knew why I had had that dream. I am working, as ever, to fulfill some kind of promise. Some days it is hard to tell whether it is a promise I made to myself, or one that was made to me. Either way, it is taking far longer than I had anticipated, and it is easy to grow discouraged.

On the other hand, the simple act of opening a window and making a little room for a cat on the sill is far more gratifying than anyone (but me) will ever tell you.

Why does the cat continue to gaze longingly at the bag of awesome Japanese crunchy snacks from which I am eating even after I offer her a tiny crumb of it and she acts like I have just given her a bit of poison? Cats must live in a magical world, where things are very mutable. It was poison, but maybe now it is tuna. Can I have some?

Can lasagna containing three different kinds of cheese (totaling approximately a pound and a half altogether) really be bad for you if it also has spinach and mushrooms in it?

(I thought not.)

Why on earth do I spend up to half an hour a day clicking around Facebook? If pressed, I could not possibly explain what I am even doing there. Yet it must bring me pleasure, since I continue to do so despite, at any moment (if at loose ends) having the option of going and getting myself a warm lapful of kitty. This has eliminated virtually all other forms of useless Internet fuckery, yet Facebook remains enthralling. Mysterious.

Will the lemony lentil soup we have taken to making every week still be as good even if we don’t use chicken stock, but just salted water, as The Minimalist claims?

Do giraffes try to find mates matching in height because otherwise their necks would really start to cramp up when they kissed?

Is this week going to go the way I want it to?

Will the lime tree ever flower?

When will I be free?

Well, as you’ve probably already noticed if you hang out on my Flickr stream, Matt was right. The cat is staying. She is going to be expensive, the floor will never again be free of bits of litter for more than 10 minutes at a time, and our lives will be more complicated than they used to be, but she smells like powdery comfort and her belly is really warm, you guys.

And now I have to go wake her up so that she sleeps tonight. Oddly, saying that makes me feel both ridiculous and extremely adult.