Let's just pretend that the last week never happened.

I was very sick this past week. It is not a good excuse but I did absolutely nothing last week because I was ill.

We got a kitten this weekend. He is a needy little bugger and makes it a bit difficult to type as he seems jealous of the keyboard's attention, attacking the keyboard and my hands equally in his search for attention. I have named him Rorschach, fulfilling my two requirements for the naming of pets: first, the name should be a real name and second, the name should have some sort of literary significance.

He is black and white spotted like the inkblots of the famed Hermann Rorschach (thus named after a real person), but I thought of the name in reference to the character from the graphic novel The Watchmen. In that novel, Rorschach has a mask that displays an ever changing inkblot (aiding him by possibly displaying the fears of the criminals he antagonizes as well as distorting the reader's perception of him as he is seen as an insane vagrant, vigilante, masked criminal, and possibly the only true hero in the novel (and, by the way The Watchmen is an amazing novel and I recommend it to all of you, especially those who would never deign to pick up a "comic book" because it is not serious or substantial reading. This is truly a very well written novel and should be studied if only for its destruction of the preconceived ideas about the form of the novel and its defiance of that which is appropriate for the "comic" genre). Also, this cat is thoroughly insane.

He reminds me of my nephew in his pre-language infancy. When petted, he flaps his front paws in wordless enjoyment just as Orion waved his hands about while perched in his high chair being fed.

I finally started reading East of Eden. I want to devour it but I am also afraid as if it is devouring me. It scares me because it is so far beyond anything I could ever write, it scares me because I can't absorb his passion and style like I usually do with everything I read. I love the dialogue partly because it is the most obvious fictional aspect of this book. The conversations are too honest, the brothers, Adam and Charles, are too true. They speak their naked observations with too much self actualization behind their words for the conversations to actually exist outside of fiction. This, however, is also one of the reasons why I think this book is so well acclaimed. We read the words of realization and probing dialogue and want to become the speaker. The characters are, at times, sick and neurotic, twisted and driven by wholly selfish impulses but we wish that in spite of our flaws we could speak with such clarity and confidently verbalize in the romantic garb of self actualization. But then again I am only about a sixth of the way into the book so I am sure that my opinions and observations will grow as I read on.

Finally, if I lapse again into silence feel free to harangue me in any way you choose.