Walkin' the cat

"So, you can go to Bolivia and walk the jaguars.  In the jungle.  On a leash."  I was telling The Magnificent about this, but he was having none of it.

"Ok, Betsy, what's the parcel number you're looking at?"

"I'm serious about the jaguars."

"What river is that in the picture?  And that doesn't sound true, by the way."

"Middle Fork.  And it's totally true.  About walking the wild jaguars.  On a leash.  As a volunteer.  With the only relevant training you've had is watching reruns of Wild Kingdom."

"Middle Fork?  Are you sure?  And are you sure you have to watch the reruns?  You’re making this up, right?"

As soon as he said that for the third time, it suddenly did sound made up, and I wasn’t sure anymore if it was true.

I read an article in the NYT yesterday about insomnia, and how women, especially single working mothers, are prone to it.  We wake at night with lists and unfinished tasks, which probably comes as no surprise to you.

I’ve come to look forward to my wakeful hours at night as time to myself when no one expects anything of me, and I listen to podcasts.  (I know.  That’s probably not a good strategy, to reward myself with stories for doing a behavior I should try to extinguish.  Like, oh, I smoked a cigarette, have a cookie.  Just shot up, have a piece of cake!) But I love that part when I wake up and it’s only like, 1:00 am, and I have four hours to listen to stories before I have to get up.  There’s something about being exhausted, but aware of it and conscious of the fact that you don’t have to do anything that’s delicious.  If you sleep through the whole night, how would you even know how great it is to actually relax into your fatigue?  That, and the stories.

But the point is that the night has become a pleasant mix of waking and dreaming, and the stories I hear merge with my own dreams to the point where I have trouble knowing where the truth is, and many times a week I start a conversation with, “Oh, I heard this interesting thing….,” but before my sentence is complete I have that doubt, where I’m suddenly pretty sure it’s just a dream. "... yeah, never mind..."

Anyway, the jaguar thing that sounds as dreamlike as a story gets is actually true, and there's a great podcast about it here.