What is normal?

Eowyn broke her hand again the other day.  This would be my Eowyn action figure, picked up at Target a little over a year ago.  She sits on my writing altar, which you can find here.  I actually have a Buffy from "Once More With Feeling" now as well, as I have the coolest husband on the planet. 

But Eowyn broke her hand, and it's defying being put back on.  As I'm a symbol wonk, I'm trying not to read too much into this, but it's hard, especially as this week writing has been well beyond pulling teeth and into removing gall bladder sort of trauma.  Add to this the Trouble With Blair and I'm downright paranoid.

Blair is the alpha cat in our house.  We are insane and have five, four male.  This is no doubt part of our problem, and trust me, NOBODY is getting in now, but it's too late to turn back on the five who are here. But Blair is stressed: between moving two years ago, the disastrous Dog Experiment a year ago, and Sidney, the cat who came to dinner and never left, he was bad enough, but it was a woman who pushed him over the edge.  Cookie, a neighborhood cat who delights in tormenting our cats from our porch, the sliding glass door, and anywhere she can.

And now Blair is so stressed out and angry that he's got blood in his urine, and it burns and makes him crankier, so he pees wherever the hell he can.  Of course, to discover this we had to send him to the vet for two days and lock him alone in a very small cage with no litter box so he would pee through the grate and they could test it – I'm sure this did tons for his mental state.  When I picked him up today I felt like I was rescuing someone from Auschwitz, which is terribly unfair to our vet because she is wonderful, but Blair I think does not share this sentiment.

So I'm looking at getting two more Comfort Zones which is no small purchase, btw, but they really work.  We've already shelled out for some weird powdery stuff for his food which he of course has already refused.  (Let's see how he feels tomorrow morning after I've put up the food for the night and this is his only option.  Also good for the mental state, I'm sure.)  We're already giving up on administering the antibiotic twice daily and Dan is going back tomorrow to beg for shots, swearing he knows how to prep and administer them.  (He does, he's a pharmacist.)  We're trying to give him extra attention and keep the other cats from bugging him while not infringing on his manhood.

Why does this already feel like a losing battle?

Add to this a four year old who has launched into her most manic phase yet and what do you have?  If you said optimum conditions for getting through a slaggy spot in the writing process, you would have guessed incorrectly.  And yet through all this I prevailed and tonight I managed to rough out the new scene one to the WIP.  I sent it to my wonderful, fabulous critique partner so it even feels official.  Then I treated myself to reading one more scene of her WIP (it rocks, you should all drool) which turned into reading four because it is just that good. 

Of course, at 6:30 you could not have gotten me to believe by 9PM I'd be sitting here zen as hell, calmly swilling my lime mineral water straight from the liter bottle.  The Jameson's I had at 6:45 helped for awhile, but I think in the end it was the chaos that set me straight, weirdly enough. I mean, if it were ever actually "normal" here, I'm sure I wouldn't recognize it.  In fact, this is pretty par – several disasters at once, Voice of Doom always ready to broadcast the end of the world (which if you watch enough Buffy and Doctor Who doesn't impress you after about a season of each) – honestly, I think I'd be twitchier if it were quiet around here for a week.  Little moments of aberration are fine, but really, life is a royal mess by nature, so looking for constant zen is pretty much like asking to be dead.  The good stuff always falls in the cracks, so you've got to dig through all the weird stuff to get there.  And as we all know, it's the digging and the anticipating that is the real ride, not the getting to the stuff at the end.

Now if I can translate this to my fiction I might just be able to make a career out of my neurosis.  Now that's a crack I want to fall down into.  I think.