R.I.P. Ennis Levi

The last of my Three Muskateers died today.

Mr. Ennis Levi was such a good rat. He had the sweetest temperment of any rat I've owned. I named Ennis after Heath Ledgers character in Brokeback Mountain. I don't really know why. I just really loved that movie. I called Ennis my little cowboy.

He was such an explorer when he was a wee rattie. At my old apartment, I would close all the doors to the bedroom and bathroom and let the ratties roam around during playtime. Ennis somehow managed to open my bedroom door on his own. One day I decided to stand on the other side of the door and see how he was doing it. That little bugger was using his teeth to grab the underside of the door and pushed it open. He looked rather shocked to see my standing on the other side. In his rattie brain I'm pretty sure he was thinking "Oh shiiiit!" He was also the first rattie to make it to the top of my bookself.

His two cage mates , Wheeza and Benecio passed away a few months ago and poor Ennis was all alone in his cage. I got some new baby rats and tried to get them to "bond" but that turned out to be a disaster, so Ennis had to lead a life of solitude until his dying day.

Everynight I tried to spend at least 2 hours with him because rats are very social creatures and I didnt want him to get depressed. In the morning he was always ready for his breakfast before I left for work (usually a banana with a little peanutbutter, he really liked that alot). He was a really good groomer, always trying to clean my fingers and under my nails. I think he thought I was a really big hairless rat.

When I got home all I had to do was call his name and he would come shooting out of his little igloo home, ready for some playtime, holding on to the cage door bars with his little paws.

To my Little man: I will miss you so much, it hurts. You didnt age well with all your crazy gray hair and blind eye, but you were always beautiful to me. You really were a bubba. And you know what I mean by that. I love you and hope this is how you made your entrance into rattie heaven:

Jon & Kate Plus 8: Why I Hate Mady

I know this may seem harsh to say about a 7 year old little girl.
But Mady is a real whiney little asshole.
She is selfish, bitchy, and cruel.

Besides, this show is obviously cultivating her already narcissitic sociopathic personality. She totally plays up to the camera. Shut up already, no one thinks you're cute or funny! Cara, your twin, is already starting to suffer because of your insistance on taking over everything. With each episode you can see her slowly turning inside herself more and more. And when you wake up one day and half your room is covered in Marilyn Manson posters and Cara is wearing fingerless fishnet gloves, you will only have yourself to blame. She is going to resent you for the rest of your life if you dont cut the bullshit!!

R.I.P. Wheeza Whizzle

Wheeza was born in July 2006.

I named Wheeza after the character in Steel Magnolias named "Wheezer" because when I first got him, he seemed to have such a weird anti-social personality. During playtime he would always go under the couch and I could never get him out. At the time it was very frustrating but I can look back on it and laugh. He was a little hellion!

I called him my rat with 9 lives. When he was about a year old, I came home late one night and found his head covered in blood.
!!
He didnt seemed to be in any pain, so I washed him up and rushed him to the vet first thing in the morning. It turned out he had an abcess leak inside of his ear where I could not see it.He had to have it surgically removed. He did SO well. The vet made him this fashionable little vest to wear so he & his cage mates wouldnt bother the healing incision.I love this pic of Wheeza. Last summer, his FAVORITE thing to do was have his evening granola snack on the screened in balcony, he LOVED to feel the warm summer breeze on his face

:)

After surgery, he was a new rat!

OMG, he was so friendly and lovable!I think it was being relieved of the abcess pain, but I’d also like to think that he understood I took care of him. He was a big baby after that and I never had trouble getting him to come to me!Then... last fall he develped an ear infection and pnemonia. This was the worst thing ever. Poor little guy was on so many antibiotics. All he could do was lay there. I nursed him back to healthy, fed him water and food through a syringe. He slowly grew stronger. He was a little wobbly at first and he would fall over and walk in circles b/c of the ear infection, but man, was he a fighter. When I wanted to protect him during playtime, he insisted on doing as much as possible "No mom, I’m gonna be a normal rat again!" I would imagine him saying...And he was! He perservance was remarkable!

Wheeza’s last battle started about a month ago with chronic respitory problems and finally, last week, an icky hematoma.

He left me on Friday, March 28th.

To my Mr. Wheeza Whizzle:You were my crazy boy with nine lives! I loved to watch you during playtime, because you had the longest legs I ever saw on a rat. It looked like you were on stilts! lolYou had real depth to your personality- for real! You were a layered, complicated rattie. I am taking good care of your brother, Ennis. But I can tell him misses you terribly. He will be getting some young cagemates soon.I can imagine you looking down on him & giggling as he gets trampled by 2 hyper rat babies.Please tell Benecio I said "Hi, Bubba! I love you!" and dont let him bully you too much in the afterlife ;)

This is how I will always remember your beautiful face, my sweet boy:

R.I.P. Benecio del Ratto

My bubba, Benecio del Ratto, passed away tonight. This is my 5th rat that has died (they have short life spans) and, I swear, it never gets any easier.

He was really, really, really special to me. Benecio was such a lovable, crazy boy. He LOVED to eat like no other rat I've ever seen. From the very beginning he established himself as the "alpha male" of the pack. He had a shining, exuberant personality. I know this may seem a bit extreme to be saying about "a rat", but you obviously never met Benecio.

My favorite memory of Bebe is "the cheese blintz incident". Last summer I made this cheese blintz that I didnt really care for, so I put it on a plate for my rats to eat. Silly me, I didn't cut the blintz up, thinking that my ratties would be gentlemen and eat the blintz like respectable rodents. Well, Mr. Benecio del Ratto grabbed one end of the blintz and started running with it- fast! Mind you, the blintz was bigger than he was! I started to chase after him but he out ran me and went into my closet behind some boxes. I swear, it was like a slow motion scene in a movie. Me: "Noooooooo! Benecioooooo! Come baaaaack!" I never did find that blintz!

Bebe, I will miss your little rat feet and your whiskers the most. I hope I made your little ratty life as happy as possible, I tried. And if there is a heaven, I hope you are up there eating from an all-you-can-eat buffet filled with avocado's and yogurt drops. I love you, bub- my sweet boy!

On Motherhood and Chasing the Fountain of Youth

I was just lying in bed, unable to sleep cuz my mind was writing this soon to be awful blog, among other things that my mind was involuntarily doing (like having that bizarre doctor fantasy that starts with a routine pap smear visit).

So, judging from the title of this blog, you may assume that I am a mother if you do not know me. I am not. If you do know me, you may be think, "Well, she's a mutherfucker." That is true.

I am not pregnant, nor do I plan on getting pregnant in the near future. I am not even sure if I am spelling pregnant correct. But tonight I was looking at some profiles of former classmates and I noticed that some of them have a plural amount of children. This is wild to me! I am not judging it as a positive or negative thing . My mother had me at 26. It is either because Jesus has listened to my late night -or early morning, or mid-afternoon- prayers or that I am a barren woman, not fit for motherhood. I do sometimes get the urge to make another human from my own flesh and blood. But the feeling usually fades after I have turned off Oprah and washed down some Tums with a swig of Peptobismol.

Sometimes I Like To Pee In The Shower

I think about posting on this little dot of a website more often.

I think about a lot of things that I don't do.

I wonder if I am happy, because sometimes I can't tell. Life has been keeping me pretty busy lately, with all the illness going down in my family. I am happy to oblige with the care taking. But when I am not busy, when I am sitting alone after everything has stopped momentarily,

I really don't know what I feel. There is this common notion about feelings: that we should all feel them. Feelings. What weird little buggers.

Diarhea Ramblings avec Marciel

Monday April 2nd 2007 8:00pm

I think about stealing great sentences from my favorite books and patchworking them together. Then taking a creative writing class and putting those sentences into a story of my own and turning them into my instructor. Would she notice? Of course I'd throw in some of my own mediocre thoughts and sentences to make it believable. I wouldn't directly quote famous authors. I think she would notice if I started out my personal essay with "They were the best of times, they were the worst of times". I would stick with more obscure writers. I would use sentences that sound familiar and natural. Like I could have written them. Like I wanted to write them. Like I was meant to write them. Like you could have, too.