Tired.

I feel tired and wonky. After the rabies ordeal, I only slept 4 or 5 hours and not soundly. So yesterday I was in a fog. I slept hard last night for 9 hours. J. and I went to see Lives of Others this afternoon. I loved it; J. didn't.

Tonight I may go out to the Chain Drive for a beer or two. I haven't been there in a couple months, since before I met Z, and I miss it. I miss being stoned and beer-buzzed in a dark bar full of horny men listening to loud music and trying to pick each other up. Why does it feel like cheating? On the other hand, maybe I want to go out to prove to myself that just because I've been seeing one man for several weeks doesn't mean I am attached.

Rabies.

Z. picked me up at about 7. He had invited me over to his place to ignore a movie. We decided to go for a walk on the hike and bike trail first since it was such a warm evening. It was getting to be dusk, but there was enough light left for a quick walk around the lake.

We got around to the south side of the lake, near the pedestrian bridge, but instead of going over the bridge, we thought we'd go under and around a different way. We both spotted what we thought was a cat sort of strolling several yards in front of us, but when we got closer we realized it was a small raccoon. A baby raccoon.

It turned around and saw us and stayed where it was. We stopped about 20 feet away from it. I guess we stopped because we wanted to look at it without scaring it away, but it was not at all afraid of us; in fact, it walked toward us. I got a little scared. Something felt wrong. It walked right up to our feet, poked around at our shoes. I was backing away from it, but Z. stayed put. The raccoon climbed up onto Z.'s leg with front paws, sniffed a bit, then bit Z.'s calf.

Z. shooed him away, and he backed off, but not much. He kept trying to come back to our legs. By this time I was freaked out. As we tried to back away, the raccoon followed us. We decided to take the bridge after all, and he pursued us all the way to the stairs but didn't follow us up. We stopped on the bridge to look at Z.'s leg. It was a very minor bite, but the skin was broken in a little curved row of teeth marks.

I knew from the moment I saw the raccoon take a bite that we'd be headed to the hospital soon. Z. was less sure. We went to his place, looked up some info about rabies on the internet. "Immediate medical attention" was the phrase that kept coming up. We did pause to make out for a few minutes, which was pretty funny to recall later.

So instead of a movie, our evening's entertainment was the emergency room waiting room. We arrived there at 9:30. We remarked on the way that it was a good thing this had happened not too late on a weekday, that the emergency room would probably not be too crowded. At about 1:30, Z. saw the triage nurse. At about 3:30, he saw the doctor, and at 5:30 they were giving him three big shots, one in either hip and another one all around the wound (which involved sticking the needle in and moving it around to get what looked like about half a cup of liquid into the muscle). I had to stop looking at that one because I started to feel woozy.

We left at 6 a.m. and had breakfast on the way home. Neither one of us had had dinner, so we were famished. After breakfast, Z. called in sick to work. I think the ordeal was worth it for him for the amusement he got from telling his boss that he wouldn't be coming in today because he'd been "up all night with rabies."

Today.

J. deposits the rent in our landlord's bank account, so I usually transfer my portion of the rent into J.'s account at the beginning of the month. We keep receipts for anything we share (groceries, household stuff), put them on the bulletin board, and at the end of the month we add them up to see who owes who money. I always owe J. This month it's a lot.

Our utility bill was huge, because we used our heaters on lots of days in January and February. And we spend way too much on groceries. I hope we can get into a CSA farm before too long to ease that expense a bit. The produce from our garden will help too, but that won't be till summertime.

Z. invited me over to his place tonight to "ignore a movie." We haven't seen each other yet since I got home from the drug study.

A Prairie Home Companion.

Did anyone else think the movie, A Prairie Home Companion was not very good? (I greencined it and watched yesterday. I was in Utah when it came out, hours from the nearest movie theater.) I'm a big Robert Altman fan, and a big Garrison Keillor fan (well, I like his stories -- the PHC show itself can be pretty tedious), and I loved watching Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin doing their thing, but there were many times throughout the movie when all I was thinking was, "this isn't working at all." The angel of death? Maybe it was too dry for me. I don't know. It felt fake, which was particularly jarring because what Altman was always really good at was creating a convincing world, whatever the world of the film was.

Home, sweet home.

Oh, it's good to be home!

I survived the study with no detectable side-effects. J picked me up at the facility at 10:30 and took me right to Los Altos, a great little Mexican restaurant near our house that serves cheap, delicious breakfast, and I had my first cup of coffee in two weeks. And migas. Rapture.

It's about 85 degrees, sunny and dry, gorgeous spring weather. I have my door and windows open, and I'm sitting here with a big iced coffee, sucking on a square of dark chocolate, and printing out the materials I need to deliver by Thursday to U.T. to accompany my application (resume, C.V., reviews of my film).

What is better than my life right now?