The first night he ever slept in my bed—when he was still my neighbor’s cat—he was in the drafty hallway, barely sheltered from the freezing storm outside. I knew my neighbor wouldn’t be home from work until the early morning, so when he followed me up the stairs to my apartment and then into my bed I just went with it. He was fluffy and cuddly. He liked having his curly belly rubbed. But he never stopped moving. As soon as I’d drift off the asshole would get up, walk all over me, slap me in the face with his paw and pur so loudly it woke me up. I’m a really solid sleeper and he could wake me up with a pur.

Victory! I went into the bathroom and turned on the shower. Scraggles followed close behind me, walked into the middle of the bathroom and—looking me right in the eye the whole time—shit on the floor. That was the only time he ever emptied his bowels outside the litter box.

He only peed outside his box only once too. About a year after I broke up with the boyfriend I’d had when I adopted Scraggles, I went through a box of keepsakes from the relationship. It had been stuffed away in a closet, almost forgotten. It wasn’t until I was actually touching the stuff that I wondered: What’s that gritty gel all over my collector’s edition Calvin & Hobbes? Right, that’s really old cat urine. Dry and vengeful.

The first time I ever gave him catnip he just drooled on the encasing mouse-shaped felt toy and rubbed it against his cheeks over and over until he was hiding under the coffee table, all cracked out and glistening. With repeated exposure he learned to play with the stuff, a little. But his play looked like it was constantly interrupted by a Gollum type thought of, NO! YOU CAN’T HAVE IT. MY GOOD STUFF. MINE. He was kind of a dick when he was on cat-drugs.

First time on catnip

It didn’t take me long to realize I just couldn’t leave him behind, so I took him everywhere. It turned out he was pretty okay with being in a car. He was my favorite road trip companion. Scraggles liked to see out the windows, so he could stand his front paws on my arms to prop himself up and see out. Sore arms and driving became synonymous. I even bought him a leash, but he took one look at that thing and lay down all defiant like, oh yeah? Think you can walk me on a leash like a dog? You’ll have to fucking drag me.

He did that classic cat thing, squeezing himself into any small space he could find. In the four years I had him I found him in every nook and every box in the apartment, kitchen cupboards, a toddler carseat, in my dresser.

Every time I did yoga he’d come sprawl on my mat when I wasn’t looking and I’d screech and fall over trying not to step on him. But he never learned. He was the kind of cat you could just pick up and he would immediately start purring. He trusted everyone.

That cat was tough. As a kitten he was found in a plastic trash bag on the side of the highway along with three siblings and a mom. His mom and one of the siblings had suffocated. The three surviving kittens were given to a family with three kids. (I know, right?) He outlived all his siblings by at least six years.

He had undiagnosable digestive problems, a heart murmur, a growth, bad teeth. He kept getting really sick. But every time, after a few thousand dollars–and in one case a lot of surgery–he’d be back home, just fine, to trying to get at the fucking spider plant on the bookshelf.

He was the clumsiest cat I’ve ever met. I’d hear him, in the middle of night, playing in the hallway. *skitterskitterskitter* and then *boom* he’d slam into the hall closets. Then a few hours later I’d hear that little voice quacking for food.

Once he ate the entire pastry top off an apple pie the night before Thanksgiving.

He had freckles on his paws.

Dogs were afraid of him.

He got ringworm and had to be bathed. Multiple times. He didn’t really even struggle, he just kept looking up at me all sad and wet with his skinny little chicken legs and sunken cheeks.

Everyone lived and died by that cat’s insistent hunger. He was an overeater and couldn’t keep regular cat food down. I bought him raw, human grade meat from a specialty shop (Meat for Cats and Dogs–Hey, Heidi!) And I didn’t sleep through an entire night for three years. I bought a $70 timed feeder that gave me a few glorious months of uninterrupted nights of sleep. But then he broke it when he pried it open with his giant paws. We were back to me trying to ignore him. If I didn’t respond to the quacking I sure as hell couldn’t ignore a claw to the face. I lost the better part of a door trying to lock him out of my bedroom once. Spraying him in the face with a bottle of water just elicited a look of pure confusion and irritation like: what the hell is your problem? That’s not how we treat people.

Yep. That look.

He made traveling impossible. Even if I could find someone who was willing to adhere to his complex food needs and his unrelenting snuggle needs, he would get sick while I was away. The longest I ever left him was for a two-week stint to Peru. When I came back he leapt right up into my arms. That was the only time I ever saw him jump more than a foot.

When I had to move to New York for grad school it was no question that he would come with me. He was my cat. And as much as he made life kinda difficult I loved him. I couldn’t imagine anyone else who would bend their life around the needs of a cat the way I had for him.

But the idea of taking care of another creature alone in the city was terrifying. And then my mom said, “Well, I mean, I would take him. You know, I even kinda like him.” I realized right then they had always been soul mates. So, I drove him down to Eugene.

Mom and Scraggles

She said it took a few days before he realized he could sleep in her bed. “I think he was waiting for you to come back,” she told me. (Broke. My. Heart.) But within weeks I was hearing about his happy adaptation. She was even more dedicated to his medication and feeding schedule than I had been. She let him climb up on the dining room table (“What? I’m going to yell at him every two minutes? I’m going to retrain a geriatric cat?”) He started napping on the toilet bowl lid, so she sewed him a padded bed that fit it. On her longer car trips, she noticed that he really liked to look out the windows, so she built him a car seat. She put a litter box in the car and he used it. On my visits back he slept with me. Little spoon. Just like old times.

When my mom called me to tell me that he’d died, she said. “I only got a year and a half with him.” Only. That’s how I feel. I got a good four and a half years with him. In that time he butchered my sleep schedule, vomited on everything I owned, clawed me in the face, and bent my life around his. Only four and half years. I hate that he was around for eleven years before I even got to know him.

He was so not catlike in so many ways (no tail, no meow, no personal bubble) I used to joke that he was really from outer space, a species that had taken a look around, realized domesticated animals had the best life, and then decided to stay, but like the way newcomers to a language make small, but telling mistakes in idioms and pronunciation, Scraggles made a pretty silly rendition of “cat”. Maybe one day, I’d say, he’ll be, like, eighty years old and just get up and say in perfect English, “Well, thanks for the snuggles and the raw chicken, guys” and fly away in his spaceship.

I have a weird fondess for a good fever. The sweaty, shivering, achey, loopy state is at least interesting and definitely preferable to nausea or a plain old cold.  This one hit me out of the blue, just as my writing finals were all turned in and a couple of days before my big two-hour neuro exam.

A fever is an interesting beast in itself. The widely accepted explanation for them is simply that the body is increasing the internal temperature in order to kill of viruses or bacteria who have a more limited viable temperature range. Many animals have a wider range than those shitty, microscopic creatures that make us sneeze. Humans, for instance, can have a “normal” oral temperature anywhere from 92 to 100 degrees fahrenheit. Then again around 95 degrees is said to be the average starting point of hypothermia. Above a 100 degrees is right about when fevers set in and there’s no fear of brain-frying until about 107 degrees. Until it reaches about 104, you should just ride out the loopy fever wave. Which, I’ll readily admit, is kinda fun.

There’s also some emerging evidence that fevers increase the movement of white blood cells—the ninja warriors of the immune system—to the front lines, and because there are more troops to fight this increases the viral/bacterial ass-kicking.

Other animals have fevers too. Iguanas try to maintain a body temperature of about 98.6 (like us), but unlike us they are “cold blooded” (scientists prefer the term “ectotherm”) meaning they have to get warm from external sources. Us mammals are “warm blooded” (scientists prefer the term “endotherm”) meaning we actually generate body heat. And while iguanas have to heat up under the sun, if they’re sick they’ll allow themselves to get quite a bit warmer, up to about 104 degrees. They induce fevers. Interesting, no?

It just so happens that one of the things I’ve been studying in preparation for this big exam is homeostasis, so I was thinking about all of this and pondering why, on top of all the other symptoms, do fevers effect cognition? I’m absolutely useless in this state. Trying to study with a fever is kinda like trying to play darts with bouncy balls. Hilarious, but fruitless.

In the middle of the night as I woke up, sweaty and disgusting, and reached over for my thermometer I realized I was singing the Adele song, Rolling in the Deep. I frequently have musical dreams and hear songs playing in my head, so it wasn’t completely strange, but I was really amused when it occurred to me that I was probably singing to the fever. And it was a really astute choice on the part of my subconscious. Well done, brain.

The first time I ever pulled it up on a friend’s laptop I wasn’t sure how he’d react. He’s a gamer, so I knew it was either going to be a hit or he’d think I was a little nutty. But the next time we talked he told me that he’d shown it to three people the very next day.

If you are the only other person on the planet who hasen’t seen the Kutiman mash-up you really should. It’s pretty fly.

I love how cautious big announcements are in science. We’ve been wrong as a species so many times that now whenever there’s even the slightest possibility that we could be debunked in the future we offer up the new evidence like we’re geeky adolescent boys trying to get a date for prom. “Um, I mean, do you think that you might consider the idea that we maybe could have a new particle? I totally understand if not, in fact, it’s probably a crazy idea. I’ll just go now.”

There’s good reason for the caution, but it sure doesn’t make it any less anticlimactic. If this were depicted on a TV show, there would be a strong claim of discovery backed by triumphant music and the intensity of Sweeps Week.

Maybe I’ve just watched too many episodes of The West Wing lately. Speaking of, everyone saw Aaron Sorkin on 30 Rock, right?

And I do.

This talk, by Dan Gilbert, is one of those that I wish I could show to each and every person I meet. The tired saying that happiness “comes from within” gets a whole lot less tired and abstract in just twenty minutes. If this doesn’t have you cocking your head to the side and uttering a silent, “whoa,” every few minutes, check your pulse.

Dear Rocketship Underpants, I’ve missed you. And though I don’t have oodles of time to give you right now, I’d like to at least hang out every once and a while again. Deal? Deal.

In the flavor of all things Rocketship Underpantsy I’m gonna share a few trailers. Full confession: I love trailers. Sometimes instead of watching a movie I’ll get on Hulu and watch trailers instead. For a lot of movies they’re the best part and they give you the whole plot in two minutes. Most recently the trailer that’s tugged at me is for Super, which just came out Friday and looks promising.

Not related, but I just had to share this bumper from SXSW that puts all the drug jokes about Mario et al. that have ever been uttered into one fake trailer. That alone wouldn’t have been enough to charm, but it’s also chock full of references to the actual games. This is one of those ideas that’s so overdue I feel like I’ve already seen it—and yet I want to watch it again.

They should actually make it into a movie. It’s bound to be better than the 1993 version, which I remember really enjoying at the age of nine.

I’m hoping to kick-start this thing again and a new look was the first step. My designer whipped this up. I’ll post a link with proper credit soon.

My first year of grad school ends in a month. I cannot express to you just how ambivalent I am about that fact.

New York is wild in a way I never expected. Subway lines stop running, grocery stores rarely list prices (and never have scales), garbage is piled in the streets, poop is everywhere on the streets, smelly strangers are pushed together (sometimes literally!). And then there are the storms. I’m told this isn’t entirely normal, but in my two months here I’ve seen four really great storms. The last one was the best.

I didn’t even know it was raining.  When I’d walked through Columbia’s campus to the subway entrance the wind was pushing everyone around, but it was still warm and dry. On the long commute to Brooklyn a lot can happen. I found out that it was raining when it started sprinkling in the subway.

“This is Clark Street” said the subway voice lady and when the train doors opened, water trickled in. The one tiny lady getting off at the Clark stop hesitated before going under the water. She darted through, the doors closed, we moved on.

I don’t think I’ll ever get used to the New Yorker’s fear of rain. The sky so much as shivers and they all whip out their umbrellas. As we traveled south the water that fell when the train doors opened got increasingly more intense until it was just a wall of water and everyone still on the train huddled in the middle of the car so as not to get splashed.

At the Hoyt stop no one stepped off the train, but we all leaned forward to get a better look at the gushing geyser that had formed out of a drain in the middle of the platform.

When I got to my stop, myself and three other people dashed through the wall of water to find a new situation. Thirty people were standing in a semi-circle surrounding the opening to the subway station. They’d stepped back just far enough so that the water running down the steps pooled before it got to their feet. Every few seconds, a few of them leaned over to look out and see if it was still really coming down hard out there. It was.

I said, ”Excuse me,” and walked up the steps. The water that fell was surprisingly cold. I looked up to see the Brooklyn Museum backlit by lightening. The streets filled with water and ice from an apparent session of hail that I’d also missed. I was soaked from the head down and waded through water until it wicked up my boots to my thigh. A firetruck drove by me. I was the only person without an umbrella or a newspaper on my head. I smiled to the EMTs, they waved and hooted back. The differentiation between sidewalk and street was dissolved in ten inches of water. In trying to avoid it I soaked my calves.

I climbed the stairs to my apartment, changed, showered, and sat, wrapped in a fleece blanked as the the rain still poured down. I wondered then how long those tough New Yorkers had waited for the rain to let up.