(This is an S2 post, for my friends who know what that means, but I'd be really happy if you would signalboost it.)

OK, I'm trying to make this sound optimistic rather than cynical if I possibly can: We know there are people who will donate, even if it's just a little bit and whatever they can afford, out of the goodness of their heart. Those people are awesome. We're really grateful to everyone who has contributed to the fund so far. But, we also know that people are more likely to give money if they get something in exchange for it (even if I know a lot of our friends would be helping out however they could in non-financial ways if they lived anywhere near us).

So here's the deal we decided on. I do paintings, even if they're still sort of learning experiences for me and I wouldn't call myself a master artist or anything, but people have told me they would pay for the things I paint. I'll take some pictures so I can get examples up here. I'm offering paintings on commission, of cats or other animals who are special to you-- either a specific animal, or a concept of one in general. Mostly cats, but I'll try other animals too, it'll just take me a little longer.

I'm still working out the pricing system, but mostly it will depend on the size of the painting. (I'm talking like in the range of $20 USD here, not hundreds of dollars or anything-- although if you did want to pay me more money for a really large painting, I'd try my best to make it good.) And I'd try to work with you personally to figure out what kind of painting you want and take pictures of the painting in progress so you can tell me if it's coming out the way you want.

The only thing I need is pictures to work from if you want me to paint a specific cat (or other animal), and an idea of what you want your painting to be like. I do several kinds of paintings, either colorful sorta-abstract interpretations of a picture (people have told me they look kinda "psychedelic"), a type that's more cartoonish, or paintings that are more about capturing the "feel" or "energy" of a certain animal.

Oh, and I also can paint cacti and other succulents and desert landscapes, and will post examples of those too. It can be either an abstract picture, or a picture of a certain plant or species that you want a painting of.

My housemate is still working out what exactly to sell, but she's coming up with designs for cat-themed jewelry to sell at her online store, and she can do specific jewelry commissions too if you have your own idea for a design. (Also, anything you want to buy at the Etsy store, for now, will go to the fund for our cat, if you want to buy any of the things already listed.)

I also have a friend who does tarot readings and offered to do them for fundraising, and we might work out a pricing system for those too, if people are willing to pay for them. I can tell you from personal experience that he pays a lot of individual attention to clients and their questions, and his readings and explanations make a lot of sense to me. He doesn't claim to be a psychic, just to be skilled at helping people relate the archetypes of tarot to what's going on in their life right now.

I can ship to anywhere, just be aware that if you live outside the U.S., I'll charge some extra for the costs of shipping internationally, depending on how much the postal service charges me.

So would anyone be interested in this? I know you maybe can't tell until I get pictures of my paintings up so you can see my general style, but would people be willing to pay money for paintings or jewelry or card readings? I know that working on things would help to keep my mood up, and I would feel better knowing I was giving people something that would make them happy in return for their money.

Sorry we haven't been around much in the past few days.  We've had an ear infection and been spending most of our time sleeping when we're not in classes.  Anyway, thank you very much to the people who have signalboosted our post-- please signalboost the one after this if you can, too; it's the one where we don't feel so bad asking for money for our cat's treatments.

Finally, a diagnosis.

Wanted to post this earlier, but didn't have the emotional energy for it.

So my housemate brought our cat to the specialty treatment clinic for another aspiration a few days ago, and finally, FINALLY, one of the tests they ran found lymphoma cells.

My housemate said that she was actually strangely relieved, to go from "well, your cat has all the SIGNS of lymphoma but we can't find any actual cells from it" to a diagnosis with a known treatment that they can put her on right away.

She spent the night at the hospital while they got her stabilized, because she'd been having trouble breathing again (although the prednisone helped a lot with shrinking her lymph nodes). Her current planned treatment is to get a prednisolone pill every day, to keep the lymph node swelling under control, and to go into the clinic once a week for a shot of chemotherapy.

Again, to reiterate some of the things I mentioned way back in my first post: Lymphoma is one of the most treatable feline cancers.  There have been a lot of treatment advances made in recent years.  My housemate joined a support mailing list about feline lymphoma, and there are people saying their cats in treatment are doing really well, and some people with cats who have been in remission for years. Our cat is still eating well, which is a good sign, and I really like the attitude of the people at the clinic. And ironically, the treatment itself is probably going to be less expensive than all the tests they ran up till this point trying to find the cause of her illness.

But the bills for the tests have run into the thousands of dollars already, the treatment does still cost money, I've used savings account money I didn't want to have to use, and I'd really, really appreciate any money that anyone could possibly donate to us. We actually have another fundraising idea that I'll go into detail about in my next post, but the long and the short of it, for now, is that while we can afford the treatment, all the tests have put us out several thousand dollars and anything you can give to help with that, even just a little bit of money, would be really appreciated. The GoFundMe link we've set up is here, or you can use PayPal to donate money to inasha AT karitas DOT net.

(Also, I wish I didn't have to mention this, but don't anyone say one damn word about chemotherapy for cats being silly, frivolous, a waste of money, or a "rich white people thing." My housemate lived in poverty for twenty years before moving in with me and is mixed-race. And although we're no longer technically living below the poverty line, we're hardly affluent. The reason we are doing everything we can to save our cat now is because WE CAN AFFORD TO DO SO, even if doing so puts us in a precarious financial position. She has a very deep emotional bond with Meimei and I've been paying out of my own savings to see that they can keep that bond with each other for as long as possible. It's every bit as important and beneficial to her as her connections with the important humans in her life. Medical care and treatment for the animals we humans deeply love and bond with should be a right, not a privilege, and bonding with animals is not some kind of "luxury" that only very privileged people do to be trendy and feel enlightened; it's as old as humanity itself. So anyone who even makes one comment in the direction of that BS, I'm just gonna apply the ban stick to them, no questions asked.)

I really hate that it has to be this way.

I have some more news about our cat, but... Basically, I have to take a time out to vent about the something. Everything we have said about our cat's condition and about the costs of tests and treatment is completely factual, and we can scan the bills and the lists of tests and procedures and medications and the diagnostic records if anyone wants. (We'd just draw the line at disclosing legal name/address information and edit that part out of the bills and stuff. After reading various stories about people getting their addresses outed on the Internet and becoming the subject of death threats-- and we HAVE gotten death threats before-- we just can't go there, which I hope is understandable to everybody.)

What pisses me off is that in spite of all the community history we've written about, Tumblr in general still views plurality as a Spoiled Frivolous Teenage Brat thing. Because we (and our housemate&) have an identity that has been deemed anathema, we surely can't *really* have a cat who is ill and needs treatment and the bills are getting pretty bad and we need to pay rent and eat and stuff. That sort of thing only happens to Responsible Adults Who Don't Have These Stupid Newfangled Teenage Made-Up Identities That Are Just Appropriating From People With Real Mental Illnesses Anyway. (And we absolutely don't need money for medication to help keep our PTSD-based anxiety under control either, definitely not, or for the appointments with the doctor who prescribes it for us, nope.) Surely you can *only* maintain such an identity if you are living a life of such privilege that you are completely insulated from any real bad things happening to you, and have never, for instance, experienced things like the death of a parent being sort of a "crucible" for your identity, to see if all the Too Weird Stuff faded away when things got bad or became a major source of support and strength for you.

(And also, this happened when we went back to school so we can get a job that makes more money than the ones we've held in the past and are completely serious about it, but it means we aren't making any money ourselves right now. But we're told that if money had ever actually been a REAL concern for us, our Silly Frivolous Identity would have evaporated away like glowy fairyland morning dew or something. There was definitely never any time in our life when we went around our city trying to ask where the safest places to be homeless were because we feared it as a real possibility, definitely not.)

And so if you dare to say "please help us make sure we can pay the rent" while being openly plural-- hell, even if you're solidly in the DID model, we've seen this happen to people before-- you MUST be trying to get attention and scam for money, and people should punish you for being such an attention whore, who obviously can't really have any of the problems they claim, by never giving you anything. You can't REALLY be pressed for money, LOL, you probably live with your rich parents who are paying for everything. (And everyone who lives with their parents after they're legally an adult MUST have a wonderful non-abusive family who is "nice enough" to let them live there, not abusive control-freak parents who won't LET them leave. And everyone who DOES have non-abusive parents whom they voluntarily live with must be, for some inexplicable reason, a spoiled brat and swimming in money. It can't be that, you know, pooling resources could ever be a good idea, or that the whole idea of nuclear families and everyone out at 18 is not universally tenable in an economically unstable society and actually, gasp, hasn't been the norm for most of human history. And even if you do say "gee, I wish I had non-abusive parents who didn't treat me like crap and that I actually could live with them," that must be another lie for attention again, so you "lose" no matter what.)

And the thing is, even though we can scan vet bills and so on, I'm still constantly paranoid that someone will accuse us of scamming and deception *solely on the basis* that we use singular pronouns in the signalboost posts so we might actually have a chance of being taken seriously, when they find out we identify as plural,  And start running around declaring that we have a "big secret" that we were "trying to hide" and therefore we're somehow scamming for money when we say "please help us save our cat and make sure we can still pay the rent." If it was supposed to be this big elaborate secret deception, it's not exactly well hidden, because if you go to our main blog and read past more than a few posts, you'll see us talking about plurality eventually. (We still need to figure how to rig up our theme so that there's a link to our "about us" post on our sidebar.)

The only "deception" going on here is the freaking lies you people (them-you, not you-you) spread about plurality, that make it impossible for us to write a signalboost in which we're honest about our and our housemate&'s identities and preferred pronouns, and be taken seriously, in a situation where a non-plural person using standard pronouns (gendered or otherwise) would at least stand a chance of being taken seriously.