Meow House Theatre

I am not a vegetarian but sometimes I go for long periods of not eating red meat.  No real reason–although if I think about the meat industry too much it completely grosses me out–it’s just that I don’t feel like eating it.  Plus I have in the past had trouble getting a steak to cook correctly although I recently figured out how to do it right.  (Helpful cooking tip below!)
But anyway, I probably haven’t had any red meat in about 3 months or more.  On Friday, which was the start of 12 glorious days off work, I suddenly got filled with the desire for a steak and so off to the store I went.   I got a couple of rib eyes.  They’re among my favorite steaks:  a good mixture of lean and fat.  When I buy ground meat I get chuck too.  Bleah on this 97% lean sawdust.  I’d rather have nothing than something so unsatisfying.

So I broiled my steaks (first you broil, then you sear in a screaming-hot cast-iron pan, and use plenty of kosher salt:  try it, trust me on this) and ate one of them and now I reek of meat.  It’s coming out of my pores.   It is not pleasant.  There is a constant underlying broiled-meat smell and every so often I get a wave of meat up my nose.  I feel like everyone else must be able to smell it because I sure can.  Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night and see my robe hanging on the door, or some piece of clothing I took off and threw over the mirror, except I don’t remember leaving those things where I did, and I’m half asleep and somewhat disoriented in that half-awake way that makes you feel like you’re half drunk except you know you’re not and I always have to take a minute to figure out, “Is that really an axe murderer waiting to get me, or am I just imagining it?  Am I even really awake???”  I am pretty sure I’m not imagining this meat smell though.   Oh it’s there, all right.  It IS.

How do you people who are practically carnivores put up with this?  Do you just get used to it?  Because honestly you might want to ask a good friend (a non-meat-eating friend, of course) to tell you the truth.  You probably smell.  Just sayin’.

I’ve got another half of a steak to eat and then a few days to de-smellify and then I’ll be back to normal.  Phew.

I would like to know who the person is who first thought it would be fine for motorcycles to be able to zip in between lanes of car traffic, and then who the person was who proposed a bill to make this into a law, and then all the people who voted “yes” to pass this law.

And then I would like to run all those people over.

I got into an elevator today (not in my office building).  In it were me, a single man, and a man + woman couple who happened to be Chinese.  So we’re all riding the elevator and the couple happened to exchange a couple of sentences in Chinese.  When they exited, this man–thinking, I guess, that we must be compatriots since we were both white–said under his breath, “They oughta speak English.”

Me: “Pardon?”

Racist Nationalistic Guy:  “They come over here from their brown country [N.B.  Brown?  They’re Chinese; if you wanna be correctly racist, it would “their yellow country” or maybe if you’ve got a political grudge “their red country”] and don’t learn to speak the language.  Makes me mad.”

(Curiously, they had asked me upon entering which floor I wanted, which RNG should have heard although maybe his brain was too full of himself to take notice.)

Me:  “… [stunned silence] … Um … I don’t feel that way about it.  LOTS of people don’t feel that way.”  Then the doors opened and I walked fast to get away from him.

He just stared, as though I had suddenly spouted off the theory of relativity out of a clear blue sky, or asked him to say hello to my tall rabbit friend, Harvey.

Goodness it’s been a while.  I imagine this is what will happen if I should get hit by a truck.  I’d just stop posting and you’d all wonder what happened but you’d never really know, would you.  Was I kidnapped?  Did I lose interest?  Had I fallen and couldn’t get up?  Did I forget to pay my hosting bill?  Or am I down in some dry well somewhere trying to claw my way to the top, like that chick in Silence of the Lambs?

Well I’ve been extremely busy lately and have not had much time to post although I keep thinking of all this scintillating topics.    But then I forget them, sort of how when you wake up from a really fascinating dream and you think goddamn that was GREAT I’ll never forget that one!  but then a little while later it’s kind of gone.

I have two feral kittens at my house.  They’re not really feral anymore though.  I had a friend who had them show up in her driveway and so being the resident cat whisperer I went over to help get them trapped and then over to my animal shelter where I volunteer.  One was really friendly already and we just picked him up and brought him in.  The other two were more difficult.  I caught one with my bare hands while he was distracted (he did NOT like it!) and the other one had to be trapped in a humane trap, which is a cage with a weight-sensitive plate.  You put the food beyond the plate, the cat goes in to eat, steps on the plate, and WHAM the door slams shut.  So the friendly one is at my friend’s house and the other two are at mine for a week of socialization.  Then we have a tentative commitment from one of her neighbors to adopt that pair together and the friendly guy will go to my shelter.  I will put some pictures up tomorrow.

I have been working a lot on the back end of my photography site (meowhousemedia.com), trying to  get all the coding right.  I have two or three sets of pictures I have to put up there still.  Got some decent ones of Sheryl Crow last week.  I was using a Canon G9 since it was too late to get a photo pass and it did okay, considering I was about 50 rows back.   They’re going to be a bit more “artsy” pictures simply because that far back + low light + having to crop everything results in a fair amount of noise.  So it’s not a set of regular concert photo-pit pictures, but more creatively interpreted ones.  I like using Photoshop sometimes anyway so I think they’ll be fine for what they are.

I am taking 11 days off work in a few weeks and can’t bloody wait.  Not really doing anything or going anywhere but looking forward to doing things here, going to see my mum for a couple of days, doing some home repairs, staying up late, getting up late, lounging on the patio, and just generally being a lazy bum.   I have tentative plans to go to Ireland in October or November as long as my friend who lives there part time is there.  I have to start checking on flights for that.

This week I’ll be going to see Nine Inch Nails on Friday, staying overnight in Worcester, coming back to Boston on Saturday morning, then going to New York City in the afternoon and staying overnight.  I expect I will be completely exhausted by Sunday.