hell is full of folding chairs

today i was compelled to leave the house at the atrocious hour of seven-fifteen in order to ride in my coworker's scooty little black car all the way to milpitas. which is in the south bay, which is a short distance beyond nowhere worth going. all the ground is the same color brown, and all the buildings are huge and square and empty and seem to be made entirely of glass.

the reason for this disaster of a saturday was regional employee orientation (known colloquially as arr-eeh-oh), followed by a short meat-and-cheese meal break, followed by three hours of diversity training. i do not know whether i am any more culturally aware than i was when i left the house at seven-fifteen this morning and began this absurd journey. i do know i am spent. plumb tuckered out. i should be at a celebratory bat mitzvah dinner for my SFL's (remember that? spouse for life?) drash mentee. i should be eating high-end kosher goodness, and instead i'm flat out with grandma moses, eating leftover hummus with my index finger.

grandma moses, by the way, is the loudest cat in the world. our most recent theory is that she ended up at animal control because her person companion, also presumably quite aged, shook loose this mortal coil. and perhaps in that companion's later years the old ears weren't working quite as well, so grandma moses had to shout to make herself understood. she doesn't seem to comprehend - in spite of my careful and logical explanations - that my hearing is in fact quite acute. i will wake up to lift her onto the bed (she can't jump that high, we're assembling a stepladder, i don't want to talk about it) at the sound of a mere squeak; none of this yowling business is really called for.

having dispatched the hummus, and full to the brim on a day's worth of lettuce sandwiches and snickerdoodles and therefore convinced i will never eat again, i was at a bit of a loss. my usual favored distraction was not turning up any winners, either. it was too early for decent folks to go to bed, at least if they want to stay asleep past two in the morning. so i made some art. embroidered cardboard, to be exact. i credit my sudden loss of performance anxiety with our attendance at a talk (plus slides!) given by one hilary price, the mind behind rhymes with orange. she pointed out (and everyone has said this to me before also but never so succintly) that the good work doesn't happen right away, that you gotta mess around for a while. specifically, she said, "it's impossible to turn out something perfectly formed and beautiful on the first try. unless you're a cat, and that's a hairball."

grandma moses does not have hairballs. thank gourd for small favors.