I slept in late again today, I’ve been doing that a lot lately, but I watched The Mummy and was delighted doing so. I still have no Internet, which means that I have my phone, but that is really no consolation as the phone is retarded even when it is functioning. Whenever I place a call with it, it tells me that the number I have dialed doesn’t exist, when I know full well that it is a completely operational number.

I then proceeded to plug my iPod into the computer to synch and charge, like I do whenever I wake up. It wasn’t connecting, which was odd, so I let it sit there for a while. I came back from my shower to see an angry flashing exclamation point on the screen. I gulped…it said that my hard drive was about to crash! All of my music and movies and photos were about to be lost forever. I quickly got the thing into recovery mode and transferred as much as I could to my backup disk. Luckily, I didn’t lose anything, but I had to reformat the entire drive and tell my computer where everything was, which was frustrating.

I read some more of that airfare book, very interesting, but then I got bored, so I left early. I sat down in the train and was immediately pushed out of my seat by a very fat man sitting down next to me…I was literally perched on three inches of faux leather, wasn’t the most comfortable trip.

I will now tell you the saddest story imaginable about being on those trains–nothing can possibly come close to the horror and gut-wrenching sickness of that scene. Let me start off by saying that I’m a cat lover. I have three back home, Tiger, Clea, and Winkler, and many more that are outdoor farm cats. I love them to pieces, and they in turn, love me…at least I think they do. I collect lucky cat figurines from Japan and China, I collect porcelain and China bowls with cats painted on them, I have cat coloring books, cat calendars, cat cards, cat pictures by the dozen, I even wrote a book about a cat! I just love them, so, it shouldn’t be hard to understand that today, on my way to school, I was prepared to commit likely suicide in order to save a frightened orange tabby cat.

I was in the Pasteur Metro station, line 12, waiting for the train to come and take me to school. As I walked along the platform, I noticed something scamper by along the tracks, on the other side of the station. Startled, I turned to see a filthy, orange cat slowly walking along next to the wall. My initial reaction was, “How precious!” quickly followed by, “Oh my GOD! GET OUT OF THERE!” I watched, horrified and glued to my spot, as the cat came to a halt, looking bedraggled and very, very unhappy. I wanted to scream at it to run away, away from the trains that would without a doubt, crush it without noticing. I didn’t know what to do. Did I press the shutdown button on the wall? No, that would only get me arrested. Did I climb down and get the cat? No, I would probably be killed by an oncoming train, electric shock, or worse. Besides, how was I supposed to know if the poor thing was tame or would appreciate me dragging it up by its neck?

I realized that there wasn’t a thing that I could do aside from stand there with a look of absolute horror on my face. That kind of look is not one that goes unnoticed, so, before long, there was a small crowd of people around me, all watching the cat, waiting to see what he would do.

A distant sound broke me from the hypnotic daze I was in–my train was approaching. I watched the little cat, willing it to find safety, praying to the heavens above that some mystical force would let my new friend, who hadn’t yet looked at me–completely unaware of my presence–live. I jumped as the train screamed past me, inches from my face as it pulled in. I had no choice but to get on, leaving the poor thing behind.

I never would know if he lived or died, after school, I made myself take an alternate route home. I didn’t want to see a bloody streak running along the wall, or a mangled corpse lying on the tracks collecting flies, like seagulls flock to a picnic alongside the beach. In my life on the farm, I have seen too many horrific accidents between cats and kittens and motorized vehicles–too many painful memories. I didn’t want to add this unknown cat to the list of Ringo, Fondu, Dominiq, Viscompt, Two-Tone, Jacques, and Emperor Fabulous, amongst too many others. No, I wouldn’t be going back to the Pasteur train station for quite awhile. Not until I can erase the glazed look and simultaneous expression of horror in the cat’s poor eyes from my own retinas, but I fear that I never will.

After that horrible incident, I was at school…I thought I saw Fatima from America’s Next Top Model on a poster for domestic abuse in Africa–could have been, you know her, well, you probably don’t, but if you had watched the show you know what I’m talking about.

It was a very dull lesson today, something with a pear cake, I was too worried about the cat to pay too much attention, so I hope I do well in my practical on Wednesday.

I bought some chocolate at the grocery store after school, not great, but not bad.

JP came over and hopefully my Internet will be functioning again without a problem this time tomorrow!