An ultrasound showed that one of Toshi’s kidneys had atrophied and was essentially deceased. The other was enlarged, taking on the work of its dearly departed twin, and, as such, was incredibly stressed. Eventually, the vet said, it would fail. Within the year, probably. He seemed unmoved by the tears falling down my face.

I asked about kidney transplants. They were possible, said the vet, but they required a slew of tests, surgery that ran into the tens of thousands of dollars and the adoption of the feline donor who, presumably, had been raised for that very purpose.

Hello Kitty, Hello Kitty Clone, NYTimes, 5/28/05

When Mr. Cheng, who works as a technology auditor for a Wall Street investment bank, discovered that Shadow had a tumor that would soon prove fatal, he had the cat’s cells saved, cultured and frozen. Now, he is preparing for the next step: paying for Shadow’s cloned replacement. “I’m saving up some money,” he said. “It’s a lot like buying a car.”

Mr. Cheng said that he would pay whatever it cost – although he is waiting until the price drops a bit – because he misses his cat so. “Shadow had two really long, funny-looking teeth like sabers,” he said. “Everyone loved him.”

But recently, my dreams have started to come to a close. For instance, last night I was involved in a thoroughly banal murder frame-up plot and I actually got out of it by blackmailing a cop who looked like Kevin James before I got involved in some weird singing quarter / vigilante squadron headed by Billy Crystal. It was great to have that sense of closure.

I once knew a girl who claimed that she had a ranked list of the best kisses she’d ever had. I’m still not sure whether she was joking (she was not inexperienced or anything), though she was the kind of person who would do something like that. I am the same way, I have a ranked list of the best bowel movements I’ve ever had*.

There’s just something about my own excretions that I find fascinating. Especially because they’re such a private topic. I find that I want to wax on about them. For instance, that feeling you get when you’re lying on your side and the earwax starts to drip, agonizingly slow, down your ear. And the feeling is so uncomfortable that you want to root around in there and scrape it out, but it’s also strangely blissful and you feel like if you wait there long enough, there’ll be a little pop and release and it’ll all have been worth it.

Twice in my life I’ve jammed my big toe really hard and had it turn black, fall off, and regrow over a period of six months or so. Each time I’ve wanted to save the discarded toe, poke a hole in it, and wear it on a chain around my neck. Each time this dream was denied. The first time I very carefully put the toe on our bedside table and then our maid threw it away. The second time I got really drunk and when I woke up in the morning, it was gone. I sent out an email about it, but I never recovered the toe**.

I used to rub elmer’s glue all over my hands and then spent hours picking it off. I still get the urge to do that sometimes. I always wondered if I could peel it off so adroitly that I could end up with a sort of glue-print of my palm. I wondered if I could steal people’s fingerprints by making glueprints of their fingers and then putting them on my own fingertips.

Later, when I first shaved my head, one of the impetuses was to see if all the dandruff would still be there, left behind. It had been falling off my head for so long that I wondered what it would look like still stuck up there. And without the hair to break it into pieces, would I be able to lift massive portions off and head up with a dandruff bust of my skull.

I had a wart on the patch of skin between my thumb and forefinger. I had it for three years. It just sort of appeared one day and it took awhile to get used to it. I thought about getting it removed, but I didn’t really mind it. I liked to scratch my nose with it (the wart was a very precision implement). One day, during IHUM section in my freshman year, it just began to flake and fall off. I was kind of off my guard. I guess, if you’d asked me, I’d have said that I thought it was going to be there forever. I was put off guard for days by its absence. And sometimes, even today, I find it strange to think that something that was a very visible part of me, something that I interacted with for many years, just disappeared. Today I can’t even remember which hand it was on.

* My second-best was when I was in ninth-grade after a camping trip we’d taken in Northern India. I wasn’t quite comfortable defecating in a hole on the ground, so I had alot stored up when we got back. It…was glorious.

**Later I found out that they’d discovered a toenail during houseclean the next day, but decided that it was too small to be mine. Foolishness, utter foolishness. How many detached toenails can there possibly be floating around?

It’s also a word that I mostly hear women say or write. I’m not sure if the cuteness is something added by them so they can have a non-threatening word for making fun of people or if the word is cute merely because the fairer sex is speaking it.

An exchange that just happened in the newspaper offices.

Man: “Can I get some newspapers?”
My Fellow Intern: “That’ll be a dollar each.”
Man: “Okay, my wife’s obituary is in there.”

After selling him the papers:

Fellow Intern: “Have a good day.”
Man: “Yeah, if I get a girlfriend.”