My cat, Patchwork, saved my life by showing up on my doorstep, starved and dying himself. I was suicidal at the time, and had just gotten ready to implement my plan when he showed up. I fed him, and figured I'd keep him warm so he wouldn't go cold and hungry. Who wants to go like that? So I promised him that he'd be warm and loved when he went. The next day, he was still there. Day after that, still there. I took him to the vet, got him a check up and shots and a round of antibiotics, and I'll be damned if that cat just didn't give up. He had seizures and holes in his skin from malnutrition, he had barely any muscle left, he had an upper respiratory infection, and he just wouldn't give up. And he lived. He lived for ten more years. He died, warm and well fed, of a heart attack at the ripe old age of 20 this past December. In the meantime, I learned to accept myself and my past, and to begin healing. Without Patch, I never would have begun to do any of that. Had he not shown up on my doorstep that afternoon, we'd both have been gone the next day.

 Every shade of blue. Calm, cool blue. The deep, nostalgic color of a childhood sky. The color of thunderstorms and midnight. The color of pure, clean water. The heart of a flame. Blue is a color I've always loved and always been drawn to. If my happiness had a color, it'd be blue. Every shade of blue.

It's like my mind is the very smart yet egotistical friend, and the body is the very stupid yet selfless friend. My mind is always telling my body what to do, but doesn't always listen when the body says it needs something. My body puts up with quite a bit, but then it always finds a way to get what it wants. It's not a very functional relationship, but I'm working on that.

High school or college? I hated high school. No questions were ever answered, we just had arbitrarily declared "facts" fired at us like bullets. College is *awesome* though. I love every second of it. It feels like my mind is limbering up, becoming quicker and more active. There are new ideas I've never encountered, new thoughts that had never occurred to me. I may not always agree with these new ideas, but I thoroughly enjoy it when I find them. That's what I love most about school- intellectual diversity.

The world will be fine. Life, in one form or another, will go on- it just may not be bipedal and sweaty. There have always been die-offs and climate change, and there will always be new creatures and new ecosystems to replace them. I'm not saying that humans have no impact, or that we don't exacerbate the process somewhat. I'm just saying that it's a peculiarly human conceit that when we go, the world ends. If the current changes don't stop or slow down, we'll just have to either move off-planet or die off ourselves. But the world itself will be just fine. People are fragile, but planets aren't.

Same thing I do every year, Pinky: try to take over the world.

By taking care of abandoned animals. Every pet I've had is a creature that has suffered abuse before I found him/her. Those creatures need honesty and love. They won't recover without it. But watching a cat who used to hide from men when I first found him walk up to a giant stranger and demand pettins, or adopt a cat who was lethargic and unwilling to eat in the shelter come home and immediately begin to eat and play- it's the most beautiful thing.

How to duck and blow raspberries at the same time. I firmly believe this to be a necessary survival skill.

Whether or not it's really "turtles all the way down."

My brother "taught" me how to plant peach trees. He was five, I was three. He got me out of my crib, dressed, and ready to go, and we went out into the backyard at dawn and began to dig. By the time Dad got up a few hours later, I was hip-deep in a pit in Dad's beloved backyard, stomping up and down on two peach pits Scotty and I had saved from our lunches yesterday. After a moment of shock, Dad stormed off. He returned with Mom and the camera.
The tree never grew, and my gardening skills have never improved...lol. But we have one heck of a photo in the album!