This should not be any surprise for anyone who reads this blog, but in the debate between dogs and cats, I come down on the side of cats.

I have three cats, who are right now in the living room — Pumpkin Spice is lounging on the back of the couch, Chuckie is helping Richard make coffee, and Chloe is lurking around. Richard is talking to Chuckie, making up all sorts of new names for him, all on the variation of “Doofus”. (A doofus is a goofball, or silly creature). I can’t imagine life without them.

Cats are lovely creatures, graceful (except for Chuckie), silly (especially Chuckie), loving (we’re not so sure about Pumpkin Spice), intelligent, and curious. They’re little creatures with their own personalities, and they like to play little games with us like “Let me into the bathroom” (Chucky), “Imma lick your face” (Chloe), and “I love you I hate you” (Pumpkin Spice). They’re like idiosyncratic little people in fur suits.

I don’t mind dogs. I pet other people’s dogs. But dogs seem so dependent. They’re loyal and attuned to their owners. Cats, on the other hand, are not owned. They coexist with us and develop friendships. Dogs seem more like a hostage situation, although I’m not entirely sure who’s holding who hostage.

Obviously, I vastly prefer cats. My cats like me at least a little. How could I do without them?

I think anxiety gets better with age. After all, once someone gets older, they’ve seen everything. They’ve survived everything. They’re no longer thrown into the unknown.

What could I give up for the sake of harmony? Arguments. These are the things that most disturb my otherwise harmonious life, yet I have trouble letting go of arguments.

In my opinion, I’m right, this is important, and you better back down. Simple, right? Real life doesn’t work that way. My husband insists he’s right, and not only is he wrong, but a disaster will ensue if we follow his direction. So we argue.

What if I gave in and said, “you’re right?” We’d probably die. I’m not kidding — there was the time with stacking the duraflame logs in the fireplace when they clearly had a carbon monoxide warning not to do that.

Not all our arguments are life-threatening, though. I suppose I could give in for some of those.

I don’t have a single favorite genre of music. As a Boomer, one of my favorites is 70s Singer-songwriter music, because it’s what I grew up with. It was soundtrack music that I remember listening to on the car radio or on the little transistor radio I got for my birthday one year. I get rather nostalgic while listening to it. 80s music followed me throughout college, and I have a fondness for that too.

Folk music became an interest to me in college, when I had a friend who got me started on that. Pirated tapes and my walkman became my companions while walking. I especially liked folk revival like Steeleye Span and Renaissance. I listened to a lot of Celtic folk as well, having gone to Milwaukee’s Irishfest one year to listen to DeDannan and Capercaillie live.

I developed a liking for Baroque music at the same time. Since then, I’ve branched out to classical music in general and modern classical/classical adjacent in particular. I have become enamored of Minimalism, such as Philip Glass and Max Richter. I listen to a lot of Olafur Arnalds and Johann Johannson.

Now and again I listen to swing music. It’s a great genre on the road; not so great for naptime. Occasionally I listen to funk music or gamelan just because. I’m an eclectic listener. Sometimes I surprise myself with what I want to hear. Apple Music has been a godsend for my musical tastes because it contains a lot of everything, and I can listen on its subscription-based model without having to buy everything.

I don’t go on long vacations often. My husband and I go yearly to Starved Rock State Park for Christmas, sometimes a couple days for a writing retreat, a couple days for a conference (which I count as vacations because I go somewhere). Long vacations don’t happen much.

Once, however, my husband and I journeyed to Chicago. We traveled by Amtrak to Chicago over a Thanksgiving break and spent a few days there. We stayed at the Allerton, a nice old Chicago hotel, roamed around the Mile, ate in the Walnut Room at what used to be Marshall Fields (this is a Chicago joke; nobody calls it Macy’s). Visited Water Tower Place, walked along the river walk, and had Thanksgiving dinner at a nice restaurant overlooking Navy Pier. We went to a Broadway show (in Chicago; it happens), visited the Museum of Science and Industry, and stopped by a BIG Apple Store. It was Chicago for tourists.

The Chicago I explored in the mid-Eighties didn’t exist by then. I once dated someone from Chicago, and we spent weekends with two weekend bus passes and $30 in pocket change. We would wander around the city, eat ethnic restaurant food, and explore, largely on foot. The places we went were long since closed, or I would have taken Richard to Meyer’s Deli for the wondrous European candies or that Persian restaurant nearby. But my Chicago trip was superlative for the Christmas atmosphere and the sights.

I have a different definition of romantic than I think most people do. For example, I don’t find common gestures such as giving a bouquet of roses romantic in and of themselves. The first quality of being romantic, to me, is thoughtfulness. Experiences that speak to the other person are romantic. At one point in my life (I was much younger) I didn’t want roses, so my boyfriend brought me purple flowers — all sorts of purple flowers. Lots of purple flowers. That was romantic. He also once filled my room with balloons like a balloon pit. That was also romantic.

Romance can be found in emotional connection. One of the most romantic stories I’ve heard was a couple’s trip to Chicago where everything went wrong. They ended up being escorted out of a bad neighborhood by the cops and watching the rain rise over Lake Michigan. The laughter is what made it romantic.

Romance is very personal. It has to do with being in that place with that person uniquely. It doesn’t need to be a big gesture, it just has to be made with the other person in mind. A notion to share, a sensitivity to the other person. A little originality. It should engage positive emotions. It shouldn’t be a big, embarassing gesture (unless the other person likes those. They probably don’t.)

So my notion of romantic is not quite the norm. It’s the thought that counts, but the thought really has to be there.

I do not feel optimistic for the future. There seem to be so many things to worry about — climate change, the degradation of our political system, the loss of social security … I’m not a pessimist, but these are pessimistic times.

I will survive — I think. That’s how uncertain I am. I live in the present, so I don’t think much about the future. But when I do, it’s bleak.

When I was younger, I had a vivid spiritual life. I would find myself occasionally immersed in an otherworldly experience — under a waterfall, on a quiet street, under turmoil. I believed in spirits, because I had encountered them. Hunches were often accentuated by feelings of dread or elation that seemed to come from outside of me. It was a time of big emotions.

This stopped when I went on the bipolar medication. No more presences, no more portents. This caused me to reevaluate my spiritual life of prior years. Did none of those things happen? They felt real to me. Were my spiritual moments just artifacts of my bipolar disorder? I have trouble believing that, but the boundary seems sharp.

Or does it? I realize that those spiritual moments did not end abruptly, but did a slow fade. Through my adult years, as a professor trained in logic, I questioned my experiences. They were artifacts of my extreme moods, of stressful moments. I distanced myself from those extraordinary occurrences.

Nowadays, I don’t know what to believe. I pray, but I don’t know if I pray to a supernatural presence. I believe that praying sharpens my ability to deal with the world, a very rational thought. I don’t feel those moments as I did when younger, but I think I’ve internalized those feelings and hunches and claim them as my intuition. Perhaps the spirits were pieces of me I hadn’t claimed yet. But I miss those days.

I have had a lot of delicious food. My favorite would have to be international food, with a special weakness for Thai and Indian. I’m going to limit this to meals that were so good that I can remember them to this day.

A friend of mine once made me a stew of curried chicken with coconut milk and young coconut meat from an Indonesian recipe. I do not have the recipe for it, for which I am heartbroken, but I think it was a kind of soto ayam. It was mildly spicy and very comforting.

At a Persian restaurant in Chicago, I had roast chicken with a pomegranate barbecue sauce. I do not know the name of the dish either, but I can remember this meal even though it was over thirty years ago. The sweet/tart glaze of pomegranate works very well with grilling. The restaurant has long since disappeared.

Curried beef brisket at Waldo Thai in Kansas City falls on this list. Anything from Waldo Thai falls on this list, to be honest, especially their curries. Perfectly balanced with plenty of aromatics from lime leaf and basil.

Banana bread and an aged sherry from a winery in upstate New York whose name I don’t remember. I had gotten there early and was sampling the sherry, which tasted of violets and leather and all sorts of flavors I had never encountered in sherry before. The banana bread was part of the man’s lunch because I got tipsy on the sip of sherry. The whole incident was almost like an enchantment.

There are good meals and then there are culinary experiences. The items on this list are definitely culinary experiences.