Tag Archives: cats

Not the Momma

19 May

Photo by "pinprick". Click to go to their photostream.

Pretty much everyone I know is married, pregnant, or gearing up to become one of those.

I’m starting to feel like a fish pulling away from the school.  Even the hottest of the hot popular girls are settling down into low, protruding bellies and one-woman men (or so we hope).  I figure I’ll wait around a while.  Besides, when else in my life am I going to watch all the people who were gorgeous and skinny my entire life get all big and motherly?  The idea that somewhere right now, half the members of the prom court are wearing stretchy pants and pushing strollers is a dose of awesome I’ll drink down a few more times, thankyouverymuch.

Not because there’s anything wrong with that, but because it’s nice to know they’re human.

There is also something very strange about watching it all happen on Facebook.    As if the pressures of the mid-twenties (don’t laugh) aren’t difficult enough without the phenomenon of social networking making it possible to track every other person’s life in relation to yours.   My Facebook mini-feed is getting flooded with tales of motherhood, questions on pregnancy, complaints about pain in places I didn’t know could throb, and pictures of it all to boot.

I’m beginning to think leaving Facebook might be a good life decision right now.

You know it’s funny – I’ve always been kind of resolved to be a housewife and pop out babies and live like a little family nestled in a big, open house with a dog.  The dog is important.    But here I am at a time where everyone else is settling into homes, popping out little dependents, and swooning over their newlywed status and I’m in my apartment eating a grilled cheese at 9:00pm, playing video games and browsing the web next to my cats.

I also happen to be wearing stretchy pants but that’s neither here nor there.

Should I still choose to go the way of the baby/husband deal, I am more than happy to take my time.  After all, once you’ve got either of them, you’ve got them for life.  So what’s the hurry?   I’m not Amish and I’m not from the 50’s, so I think it’s a pretty good time for me to mess around in corporate America, enjoy my noisy apartment, and spend my time fantasizing about hiking the Appalachian Trail or going out every week to see what sort of nonsense I can get into so that I can blog about it.

The only hard part will be all my friends that are new moms telling me how incredibly rewarding it is and how I can’t really know selflessness until I’ve looked into the eyes of my child and all that business.  I’m sure it’s all lovely and true, but I’m not about to be pressured into being responsible for another human being.  I just got out of credit card debt for the first time in 5 years.  I’m not exactly gearing up to start investing in baby formula and tuition savings accounts.

And when I want to play with a baby, I can just call up either of my brothers.  Because in three months, I will be an aunt twice over.  

Aunt.  That sounds much better than mom. ♣

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The Most Important Thing I’ve Learned from Blogging

9 May

Last night was one of those epic nights.  You know, the ones where I’m laying on the couch, unshowered, staring at a YouTube video of a kitten eating with chopsticks.

The video was quite misleading – though the kitten eats with chopsticks, the chopsticks are being operated by a human.

I’d had a good day.  With Dave at his parent’s to celebrate Mother’s Day and myself at the apartment to celebrate Adventures of an Antisocial, I set out to clean the entire apartment from top to bottom.    I took down Easter decorations that were eyeing the place up like they owned it.  I cleaned the furniture, the molding, the shelves, the insides of drawers, and anything even slightly suspicious of clutter.  I attacked my carpet with a ferocity reserved for wartime, spot treating, scrubbing, and covering the area twice with the vacuum.  

I was a force to be reckoned with.

When I had finished, I looked out happily over my lair, calculating the likelihood of my messing it up within the next two days.  I wanted some chocolate for my reward but was out.  Having eaten the last two ice cream sandwiches on the same day last week so that “I would be out of them and wouldn’t eat junk anymore because it wasn’t in the house”, I was fresh out of anything delectable.

But then I remembered this post I wrote on being so ravenous for chocolate that I ate Dave’s chocolate Easter bunny.    In the comments section, I was flooded with ideas to combat cravings such as those.  And I was given advice by my faithful readers to buy a few chocolate bars and hide them around the house.

I looked up to the bread basket, wondering if I had actually taken the advice.  I couldn’t remember whether I just intended to or whether I actually did it.  Until lo and behold I pillaged the bread basket for one solid milk chocolate Dove bar, which had been quietly hibernating there for over a month.  Forget all the things I learn doing Lollipop Tuesdays – hiding chocolate has been the best thing I’ve learned from keeping this blog.  

 

Even better than kittens eating with chopsticks. ♣

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The Sexless Lives of Indoor Housecats

18 Apr

I wish my cats would get more excited when I come home.

I was gone this past weekend at my parents’ house for their birthdays, which are on the same day (freaky, I know).  Though my cats had been abandoned for exactly 52 hours with nothing but food, water, and secret catnip areas scattered around the apartment, they remained unaffected.

Don’t get me wrong; part of me is stoked that my cats aren’t needy or high-maintenance and that I can have the freedom to head out for a weekend without them needing therapy.  But once in a while, I’d like to feel appreciated.  

I mean, the first thing I did when I got home was cuddle up on the couch and try to get my cats to come take advantage of an available human.   But they just sat there, staring at me and acting all superior.

My cats give me an inferiority complex.

Maybe they were just really into the cat grass I brought home.   My parents’ cat is unamused by it (and everything else in life) so I got it as a hand-me-down.  I thought it would make a nice consolation prize for Spring, given that they can’t go outside to calm the firey lust in their loins this season.

Gross.

Come to think of it, a small patch of grass is more like a sick joke than a consolation prize.  It’s like I brought a sample of the outdoors to them so they could truly know what they’re missing.  How terrible, the life of an indoor house cat.  

There is nothing worse than hearing the weak, sad mew of my male cat as he stares longly out the window at his fading sexual prowess. 

Sometimes I feel so bad about it that I put him on a makeshift leash and take him for a walk.  Yes, I walk my cat.  We never really get very far.  I always think he wants to do out there to get busy, but he really just wants to flop belly up in the sunshine and gnaw on grass.  

Maybe I can just  situate a section of sunlight to shine into the living room and then put the container of cat grass beside it.   I can attempt to recreate his ideal environment.  Yeah – I’ll go ahead and take one more step down the steep, rocky precipice that leads to an induction to the Crazy Cat Lady Society.

Maybe then my cats will recognize my efforts and actually freaking greet me when I come back from a weekend away.  ♣

Hobbes, suffering from sexlessness.

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I’m Living with a Terrorist

17 Mar

My cat is making me doubt my ability to be a good mother.

I sometimes think about killing my cat.

I’m having a really hard time dealing with my cat’s dependency issues.

She used to just be a very loving cat who would rub up against me to see if I was interested in her affection.  If she deemed it appropriate, she would launch into an all out love fest all over my lap, legs, feet – wherever she could maneuver herself for my attention.

But now she’s a monster.

From the moment I wake up, she’s there – staring at me.  She follows me into the bathroom, follows me from the shower to my bedroom, and from the bedroom to the door.  I used to think she did it because she was hungry, but every time I rush to feed her in the morning, there is still evidence of her meal from the evening prior.

Sometimes I get so creeped out by her watching me get dressed that I put her outside the door until I’m finished.

When I come home after work she goes into full attack mode, tripping me while I walk, lurking over me while I cook, and sometimes ramming her head into my hand so forcefully that I have actually spilled things on myself.   She’s insatiable.

I thought her new attitude was a symptom of loneliness.  I thought that perhaps I wasn’t spending enough time with her.  But regardless of whether I pet her for an hour straight and follow it up with a rousing game of “chase the laser” or I ignore her all day, she cannot be tamed.  I’ve fed her treats, massaged her, pet her nicely, pet her harshly, picked her up, taken her for a walk (yes, I took my cat for a walk), and let her lie on me even when it’s incredibly inconvenient.  None of it helps.  If I want to read something, I have to do it standing up or my book will get forcefully nudged out of my hand, and she will spend her time putting her body between me and the page I am reading.

She has been known to lie down directly on top of something I have in my hand as I read it.

At night I’m so terrorized by her that even when I’m not yet asleep, I slow down my breathing and fake it so she moves on.

I’m living in fear and I can’t take it anymore.  It’s a wonder I can even do a blog a day without her putting her litter-laden paws all over the keys and foiling my attempts.

Recently, I’ve been feeling slightly maternal.  I don’t know if it’s the soon-to-be-aunt in me or the ticking of my own biological clock,  but babies are starting to kind of grow on me.    But now I’ve got this insatiable cat and I’m starting to feel like my entire life revolves around her and her ridiculous requests and I just can’t do this.

I can’t be a mom if my cat is introducing me to what I can expect from motherhood.  I fear I may become violent. ♣

She stared at me like this the entire time I wrote this post. ...help...me.....

 

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The Simple Pleasures of Indoor Housecats

4 Feb

I envy my cats.

I truly do.  I’ve long-marinaded the thought of lounging around on various plush surfaces while another member of the household is off working.  And when they come home, they could play with my hair and feed me.

I’m not sure what’s so wrong about that.

Last night, Lola crept over to the coffee table to happily confront a bowl of Cocoa Puff Milk that had been sitting there since the day before.   For those who are unaware of what “Cocoa Puff Milk” is, it’s the slightly brown, slight Cocoa-Puff-y excess milk that remains when one has eaten all the puffs from a bowl of Cocoa Puff cereal.  I went to stop her but after seeing how much joy it brought to her life – as if she had discovered something sacred and beautiful – I just couldn’t bring myself to ruin her happiness.

The thing is, Lola never eats human food.   My parents have a cat who would gnaw on the leg of a live cow if he just had the chance, but my Lola turns her nose up at anything remotely non-cat.   Many a time, Dave and I have loathed the idea of forcing our cats to eat knobby, artificial, cardboard pieces under the guise of some clever marketing title like “Seafood Sensations” or “Meat Medley” or some other stupid alliteration.  Cats don’t care about alliteration.  It takes a keen eye to sort through the B.S. lurking in the cat food aisle.  But regardless of what newfangled delicacy we bring home, they both prefer crappy cardboard bits.  

So I let her drink it.  She could have stuck her paw in it and slathered it all over her pudding-like belly and lapped it back up again – I wouldn’t have cared.   Because Cocoa Puff Milk is probably the best thing that happened to her all day.

And I so envy that.

All the blog improvement advice I read tells me to keep my posts short and sweet.  They suggest somewhere around 250 words.  250 words! I wrote 300 up there and that was with a great deal of editing.  So tell me, loyal readers – is shorter better?  I’m truly curious. 

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Kitty Cocoa Puffs

21 Jan

Those look like Cocoa Puffs. I wish my cat barfed Cocoa Puffs.

 

Of all the days to barf on my coat, why did my cat have to choose today?  It snowed, for Pete’s sake.

I suppose I brought it on myself.  I should have hung it up.  Inevitably, when my jet black peacoat is left out on any flat surface, my obese felines only have two options: 1) take up residence on it, leaving a thick fur trail as evidence of their shifting during their nap  2) barf on it.

This morning, it was the latter.

You know, for a moment I had some kind of a sick satisfaction about it.  Because about a week ago, I bought a Groupon for drycleaning services and today’s event proved it was a wise investment.  

But it’s the gatling gun effect that really gets me.  You know, the gatling gun effect: walk-stop-barf, walk-stop-barf.  The first pile of kitty krunch an owner finds is seldom alone.  It’s joined by a series of other unfortunate incidents which are scattered around the house  and must be carefully and thoroughly sought out for fear of the dreaded puke-in-the-toes.  Sometimes this is a result of a hard-to-reach hairball in the deep recesses of their kitten throats.  Sometimes, they just like to take a leisurely stroll while they puke.  Like it’s no big deal.

And so I suffered in the harsh, cold winter air of the city today.  Let it be known that when faced with the choice between barf-stained coat or no coat at all, I will take the high road.  

I just wish that my cats had a little more consideration for me.  After all I do for them, this is how they repay me.

I sound like a wounded mother.

And you know what? Maybe I am.  I can name without effort numerous occasions where my cats have shown a blatant lack of respect for me.

Like the time I came home from a weekend vacation and found that the bamboo jar on the entertainment center had been knocked over and onto our new television, sending it into a poltergeist-like flurry of unstoppable channel flipping, volume adjusting madness.  A chunk of fur was found in the vase and submitted to the court as the incriminating evidence. 

And then there are the times that they dash into the refrigerator when I’m thinking about what to eat and absolutely refuse to come out unless by brute force.

Or last night, even.  Hobbes claimed the coffee table as his own and systematically began pushing everything out of his way: magazines, coasters, cups, controls…  As a final act of defiance, he pushed the candy dish off. It fell to the ground, spilling a pool of foil-wrapped wonders all over the carpet, which my other cat, Lola, proceeded to spastically bat around the living room. They’re an unrelenting tag team of terror.

But there are little things they do on occasion that make them absolutely irresistable.  The belly-up pose in the living room, the taking-up-residence-in-the-bathroom-sink, the frequent visits to my lap and assault on my hands as I curl up to relax, and (my favorite) the adorable cat nap that inspires a human nap.   Surely, the ultimate win for my crazy cat lady antics is being able to curl up to a warm kitten, forget all my worries, and drift off to sleep.

Until I wake to the sound of its regurgitation. ♣

 

So some of you were grossed out by yesterday’s post.  And understandably so. U.U.S.S. is an unfortunate and unpleasant reality for millions of suffering Americans.  And I promised you the hope of a more pleasant post today.  …But it has just now occured to me that I posted about cat barf.  I’m deeply sorry for this oversight.  Perhaps tomorrow I’ll write about freshly laundered linens and rainbow sprinkles.

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