Well, interesting things.

Firstly, my two thousand dollar cat is missing. He ran off maybe two weeks ago, still no sign of him, but my sister suspects a homosexual love affair with the stray next door, who is also m.i.a.

Secondly, the cat we got when I was in first grade died today. Looks like it was a stroke as she tried to climb the stairs, which paralyzed her. My mom made her a bed and she went in her sleep. She was a good cat, maybe the best cat, but she had a good run of things, held on to the end of the end. My sister is opposed to my mother's wanting to bury her in the back yard. Questions of legality aside, I think this is a perfectly natural thing to do. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust and all that, but my sister takes issue with our fruit trees' habit of nitrogen reuptake. I for one, though, would rather eat my cat as an apple than a fist-sized ball of petrol, which is our other nitrogen option.

Thirdly, the author of The House of Sand and Fog, whose name my brain has no intention of remembering. Andre something or other the third. Was on City Arts and Lectures tonight.

Sometimes I am around facts and sometimes I am around art, and I'm not sure which is more real to me. Friday at Kyle's proposition party, there was a boy who is a blogger and editor of the California Majority Report, and he seemed to have all the answers. Not in a snooty way, he could just explain the key facts and illustrate his reasoning for just about anything thrown his way. He knew all the numbers and background of everything, a very good guy to have around at a proposition party. You see someone like that and politics and truth and facts seem so tangible and romantic. Romantic in that you want to throw yourself into all of it.

And on the other hand there's someone or other on City Arts and Lectures. Talking about how he teaches adults, older adults in their 80s just getting to writing for the first time and being good at it. And he asks them why they took so long to come to writing, they say because their parents weren't keen on the idea of being a Writer because it wasn't a Real Profession. And, he says, he is lucky because his father was a writer so he could feel good about taking only blue collar jobs cleaning and constructing things so that he could always be a writer himself in the first instance. And to respect that.

Or my banjo teacher who, it turns out, was on some fancy radio show yesterday and has had people calling up the Fifth String wanting to record him and is In Demand for all these punk-bluegrass bands. Now, I am skeptical of his use of the word 'punk,' but he seems flattered and overwhelmed by having achieved this highly specialized skill. Lots of hot shot musicians want him in their band (and he's my banjo teacher). I guess I feel lucky to have him to myself for an hour a week, but what I really feel is kind of jealously awestruck. That music clicks for him and that he's been able to hunker down on that One Thing that makes him tick, the One Thing that matters.

I want to know that I was meant to be a writer or a musician, but I think what I know is that I'm a master of spinning plates. And that I need each of these little counterweights maybe like Alexander Calder's mobiles. I am very conscious of the ballet of adding and subtracting.