4/13/00
A long-ass list of more random facts, bio-stuff, etc. about Abbycat:
1. Abbycat is a guy. Yes, a guy. Many people have been confused about this, but I don't know why; I mean, aren't plenty of cats male? And more than a few men are named Abby too (Abby Mann, creator of Miami Vice, is the only one I can think of, but anyone named Abraham could… oh, never mind.) A lot of confusion has been eliminated since I've started using Mistercat as an alternate alias.
2. My mother has no idea who Abbycat is. She calls me by my real name, which is descended from that of an emperor who was beloved of the people.
3. Gemini, born in 1960, Anglo-German ancestry. Married in 1989, divorced in 1992. I don't talk much about my divorce.
4. There really was a cat named Abby, a loving and lovable little furball who got wasted crossing the street in 1993. I still miss her. (check back later for a link to Abby's picture.)
5. Vital stats: 6" tall. Weight hovers a little above 200 lbs. Blonde/green (or light brown and blue-green depending on the light). (check back later for a link to my own picture.)
6. I live in Oakland, California. I've been here since 1988. Every now and then I think about living somewhere outside the Bay Area but I think I'd miss the Vietnamese food too much.
7. I have a long torso, which makes it difficult to keep my shirt tucked in. My legs are relatively short and way powerful. How they got so heavily muscled I don't know; I just looked down one day and noticed they were like that.
8. My favorite exercise is swimming. I go swimming 3-4 times a week, for * hour. Maybe that has something to do with how my legs got so big.
9. I go to Burning Man . "Radical self-reliance"? Goddamn, I've been doing that for almost 40 years.
10. Sexual preference: historically, straight and monogamous. Am I getting bored with this? Yes, I think I am. I've recently been looking into polyamory as a viable lifestyle. I kissed a guy last summer and I'm sure I'll do it again and it probably won't stop there. Life is verrry interesting these days.
11. My family never moved while I was growing up, but I changed elementary schools three times.
12. This made it kind of hard to keep friends, especially since my house was pretty far out in the country (it's getting swallowed by the Philadelphia suburbs now). The closest I had to a neighborhood pal was when Richie lived across the road in third-grade and we raised hell for a year. Richie's family had a lot of guys that worked with engines and Richie had his own go-kart, which I thought was pretty cool even though my parents wouldn't let me play with it.
13. I'm the youngest of five children (4 boys, 1 girl), an apparent accident at the end of the line.
14. My siblings are all older enough than me that my childhood effectively resembled that of an only child. Which is often how I think of myself.
15. None of us have our own children.
16. Education: undergrad degree in music from Bard College (a fun but largely useless education); grad degree in Non-Profit Administration from the University of San Francisco.
17. A few months after getting my MNA from USF, I went to work in the software industry and blew off my intended career in the non-profit sector. Go figure.
18. I wrote a few stories when I was growing up, but I don't remember what they were about. And I don't remember showing them to anybody except my parents, usually very timidly. Self-expression wasn't a big thing in our house.
19. My parents never divorced, though my father died of lymphatic cancer in 1976, which kind of made that year, and the ones immediately following it, a bummer.
20. My favorite thing about spring was declaring the first day. I'd be riding home from school with my mother and we'd turn to each other and say, "Let's celebrate spring!" and stop at the Dairy Queen on Rt. 1 and get big sloppy sundaes. Some years we'd celebrate spring several times.
21. After Richie (see #12) moved away I played with Doug, who lived 2 miles down the road and was the nearest kid my age around. Doug grew up to become a State Trooper and I wouldn't want to ever let him catch me speeding because even at 10 he had a mean streak a yard wide.
22. I have strong political convictions about certain subjects - I'm passionately pro-choice, pro-feminist, anti-corporate greed, etc. The whole leftie agenda, in other words.
23. I'm very private about these convictions. I don't like to argue about politics.
24. I don't like to argue, period.
25. I believe that, in this society, it's almost impossible to walk your talk effectively and consistently. We're all hypocrites of one sort or another. For instance: when I worked for the Formerly Prominent Environmental Activist Organization, we used to go out to canvass neighborhoods, trying to persuade people to support the FPEAO in saving the planet. How did we get to those neighborhoods? We drove in cars. Using gasoline, contributing to air pollution. Concerned citizens more concerned with the end than the means, or hypocrites? You decide.
26. I'm not so good with details about political/economic/environmental issues. I feel my convictions with my heart, not with my head. This makes it difficult to articulate my convictions sometimes.
27. It's pretty common for people who keep online journals to talk freely about their personality disorders, whether it's overeating or agoraphobia or whatever. Mine is drug abuse; I've been a chronic marijuana smoker since I was 18. I phase in and out of periods of sobriety, usually lasting for months at a time.
28. I find that I just don't take the enjoyment in drugs - of any sort - that I used to. The day after, I always look in the mirror and say "I'm too old for this shit."
29. I cracked my head ice-skating when I was 7 and spent two weeks in the hospital. I couldn't read because I had double-vision and I hated that as much as I hated not being able to run around and play.
30. That was the only time in my life I've ever been in a hospital as an inpatient. I've been lucky.
31. I work in a hospital now. It's a good job. I've been lucky.
32. I've been outside the US exactly four times in my life: to England, where I went to school for 2 months before my father died and I had to come back home (had to, my ass, I hated it there); to Canada, or rather through Canada on the way to Alaska, in 1996; to Nepal for five weeks, with stops in Thailand coming and going, in the fall of 1998; and to Baja Mexico for a long weekend in February 1999. The Nepal trip was similar to the England trip in that I just decided that I wanted to go, without a clear idea of why - only I enjoyed being in Nepal a hell of a lot more than in England.
33. Put my religious beliefs down as "undetermined." I was raised a Quaker and went through my teens and twenties as a conscious atheist and practicing cynic. I know one thing now: having no faith sucks.
34. Our back yard had a big sandbox and I spent much of my time there, playing with my ever-increasing army of little plastic soldiers. My favorite battle to recreate was the Cowpens from the Revolutionary War, with Cannae a close second. Didn't I just say that I was raised a Quaker? Boy, was I a confused kid.
35. When I wasn't in the sandbox I'd be out walking in the woods or down by the Brandywine Creek, leading imaginary army patrols that always ended with almost every member of the patrol but me dead. I wasn't allowed to have toy guns but instead had favorite sticks: one was a tommy gun, another a BAR, etc. When you grow up by yourself you learn to use your imagination, and amuse yourself easily.
36. I'd get really excited when I was out walking and I flushed a deer. There were lots of deer then but I never got tired of seeing them bound away among the trees. I always hoped one would stop and turn around and come back and nuzzle my hand but that never happened.
37. About those toy guns: my parents did allow me the occasional water pistol. My mother tells the story of how she took away everything resembling a firearm out of the house when I was two, intending to raise me in the best non-violent Quaker tradition. She gave it up a few days later when she saw me in the backyard running after my brother carrying a turkey baster and yelling "Bang-bang!" Some things are just hard-coded, I guess.
38. At least as a Quaker kid I didn't get beaten up much. Other kids would pick on me but I wouldn't fight back and they usually gave up after awhile. Then again, maybe I was just lucky. It would've probably been real different if I'd grown up in the city.
39. One thing I know as an adult that I didn't know as a kid: violence sucks.
40. Family isn't a prominent part of my life. My friend Sheena once told me, "I've known you for 10 years and I don't know anything about your family!" I see my sister the most - largely because she lives in Oakland too - but I don't keep in steady contact with my other siblings. I've been out of contact with my mother - by my own choice - for the last year too. Ours was not a close family. I read other people's accounts of how big a part their family played, and continues to play, in their lives, and wonder what it's like to have that connection, for better or for worse. But most of the time I just don't think about it.
41. You can't choose your family, but you can choose your friends. I've got some really good ones. Again, I've been lucky.
42. My unofficial credo for life has been, "Let tomorrow take care of itself." This is why my savings account is usually empty.
43. I'm about to turn 40. 40! Fuck. How'd that happen? I'm kinda freaked out about it, in truth.
44. Someday I'll do a proper bio - in 19XX I did this, that happened in 19XX, kinda like this bio on Joyce Maynard's site - and maybe then I'll have a much better idea how I got to be 40 years old. (40. Fuck!)
45. Someday I'll make a list of my past relationships/lovers too, similar to Sara Astruc's. (Hers was the first online journal I ever read. I was led there by media brouhaha about The List, which I think has been taken down now.) I started one a few years ago but found it too depressing to get beyond the first 3 or 4.
46. I'm a lot happier with my relationships - romantic or otherwise - now. I've learned how to communicate better with age. Maybe being 40 isn't such a bad thing after all.
47. For that matter, someday I'll make a list of what's in my CD collection. As anyone who's read High Fidelity knows, you can tell almost everything you need to know about a guy by what he listens to, and how he chooses to arrange his collection.
48. Presuming he hasn't already tried to tell you everything about himself with long-ass journal entries and Random Facts pages.
