I have no idea why I'm still awake

Tonight I came home from my flute lesson, and sat down to watch TV and hang out with Patrick. I wanted a banana milkshake but it was too late. So instead Patrick got us both huge bowls of watermelon that my friend Bo and his wife grew for me. Yes. They grew me a watermelon. For ME they grew a watermelon. I suspect that the whole time that watermelon was in the ground, they were going outside to look at it, whispering and pointing, going, Look at Irene's watermelon! It was pretty awesome, and I actually took a few days before I could eat it, because it seemed so personal.

It did, okay? I'm not crazy. I just felt honored and loved, a little. Shut up now, you.

Anyway, so we sat all over the couches with our chins dripping with watermelon juice, watching Real Time with Bill Maher, eating this delicious watermelon, when who comes along but Franny, the incredible eating machine. She will try anything, and I mean anything. Franny has had a bite from every plate of food I have sat down with since we got her. Perhaps this is bad behavior that we shouldn't be encouraging - but if you haven't seen her try to snag, oh, I don't know, garbanzo beans off your plate with her little paw you just haven't seen anything. I mean it's so damn cute.

So here comes Franny, cruising along on the back of the couch, wondering what all this chewing was about, and how she could get in on the action.

I held out a piece of watermelon for her to smell, and of course she licked it. Then she tried to take a tiny bite, but cats, or at least this one does, have a hard time with biting something from the air like that (except ice cream cones; she does a great job with ice cream cones), so I bit off a teeny piece and placed it in the palm of my hand (what? we share in my house). She sniffed it, ate it, and then came back for more.

I, however, did not indulge her. See? I want her to know what these things we're enjoying so much are, but I'm not gross.

Here's the transcript of the conversation during this encounter:

Me: Man! Is there anything Franny won't eat?
Patrick: No, I think she'll eat anything.
Me: Shit, you're going to come home one day and find that I've died... and there will be Franny, licking her chops.
Me (to Franny): I bet I look pretty tasty, huh Franny.
Franny: [Silence.]
Me: Yeah, there'll be tiny little mouth prints all over me. She'll be taking a bite from here, a bite from there, trying to figure out the light meat from the dark meat...

The funny thing is, she looks at me all the time like, "OK, look lady. I love you, even though you insist on picking me up and kissing me and making weird smoochy sounds at me. You're just great, don't ever change. But I do wonder... what the meat from inside your elbow would taste like. Yeah, just once in awhile, don't worry about it. Really. Don't worry about it."

















When I'm laying there on the kitchen floor, semi-conscious, and Franny suspects that the opportunity to take a little test-bite has come, this is probably the last thing I will see. It's not cannibalism if we're not of the same species, right?