Figuring out what I wanna be when I grow up.
Oop..I AM grown up...


Wednesday, November 23, 2016

My ALL DAY, EVERY DAY Companion

If I ever run away from home, it will be 100% because my cat is a total idiot.

Ha ha ha, that's hyperbole, right?  Isn't it?  ISN'T IT?

GEE, I DON'T KNOW, YOU TELL ME.

Incidentally, do all moms at some point say they're going to "run away?"  I remember my Mom saying it.  It was probably during some bullshit situation whereby she had just finished vacuuming the whole house, AGAIN, had some long-cook, good square meal THAT NEEDED TO BE FLIPPED EVERY HALF HOUR going in the oven, was in the midst of running up and down doing laundry, making our slovenly beds with her smoldering ashtray and an all-day-long cup of coffee for sipping parked firmly on one of our dressers, bent over at the waist (not the knees, people) picking lint off the carpet and then we rolled in from school, peeled our smelly socks off and dropped them INSIDE OUT on the tv room floor, left every juice and milk cup we ever used in some room far away from the kitchen, chowed some cakey, cookie, crumbly snack all over the couch, tossed our skid-marked underpants on the bathroom floor when we got our jammies on, and had the KID BALLS to roll our eyes when we were asked to not leave our school bags right in the middle of the room. It was probably RIGHT ABOUT THEN, that Mom would say;

"THAT'S IT.  I'M GOING TO RUN AWAY."

"NOOOO, MOM!  NOOOOOOOOOOOOO!"

Oh wait--was that my MOM'S life, or is that MY LIFE?  Oh my--blurred lines indeed.

Anyhoo, as I was saying, my cat drives me to a dark, dangerous mental place, and I'm going to make you go there for a few minutes too.

First of all, isn't the WHOLE PURPOSE of having pets to REDUCE STRESS, and be lavished upon with so much damn unconditional pet love that you won't even care when you ask your pre-teen for a hug, but they're "too busy" looking up some really inane vine on youtube, that all you have to do is turn to that pet to fill in all the holes in your life?  Isn't THAT THE IDEA???

Okay, well not here.  I'm trapped day in, day out with a completely mental, nearly 17 year old cat.  This is making you unhappy.  You're thinking I'm obviously a jerk.  Well, herewith I shall make my case.

don't be fooled. She's only sleeping because
she's finally worn herself out from being mental.


If I'm sitting down having my coffee, and reading entertaining and thought-provoking things with my laptop on my lap, she is the most loving, snuggy, ridiculous LADY LOVE BEAST ever.  Problem is, I can't sit there all day.  If I'm not sitting with her, she's following me around the house, yowling at me all day.  She won't sleep otherwise.  If I ignore the yowling, she runs into the living room to howl.  Then if that doesn't work, she comes over and starts drinking her water.  For freaking ages.  Then she puts her paw in her water.  Then she splashy splashes water onto the floor near her water bowl.  Then we humans who will NEVER LEARN, walk by and get the soak sock.  In the meantime, she's putting little wet footprints everywhere.

She's obsessed with water.  In the cold months condensation forms on the living room window; the window being behind the love seat.  With a metal vertical blind over it.  Picture yourself sitting there peacefully and suddenly CLANGCLANGCLANG!!!!! JESUS CHRIST, WHAT'S HAPPENING?!  Oh, silly me, it's the cat, clattering around behind the couch so she can get under the blind and LICK THE WINDOW.  Then she comes back out.  Then you relax.  Then five minutes later SHE'S BACK DOING IT AGAIN.  Then she comes out.  Then you relax.  CLANGCLANGCLANG SHE'S DOING IT AGAIN.  Licking that window all winter.  You can't put your water glass on the little side tables beside the couch.  She'll stick her head right in there.

Big deal, the cat likes water.  Yeah.

Yeah.

She's also food obsessed.  That's a thing.  I looked it up:  cats who are food obsessed.  For years she happily ate the healthy dry food we gave her. And then she turned 15 and said "fuck that."  So, silly moi, I thought; "what the hell--she's an old lady now.  She deserves to be SPOILED."

She get a little can of fancy feast at breakfast--but not the whole can.  If you give her the whole can, she'll get disgusted, reject it altogether and meow at you either until the Earth explodes, or you give up, scoop that rejected food out and get her something new.  So, you give her a good heaping tablespoon.  Then in an hour you give her the rest.  She gets a snack at 2 PM.  She TECHNICALLY starts to become idiotic and relentless at 1 PM, but you're TRYING TO KEEP HER TO A SCHEDULE BECAUSE SHE'S FOOD OBSESSED.  Her snack is 1/3 of a can of the cheapest water-packed tuna you can buy.  You TRIED to be nice one time and buy her a nice can of quality tuna, but she rejected it, and bugged you until your eyes bled, so you just stick to the cheap stuff.  At 5 PM, she's back again for her dinner.  I have learned that it does NOT matter if she still has some tuna left for snacking.  Dinner is more fancy feast and it goes in her CAT DISH.  Tuna goes on her SNACK PLATE.  You know--the plate that she'll come to several times in those 5 hours or so prior to snack time to LICK, even though there's nothing on it.  Finally she gets a full can of  fancy feast again at bed time.  In the meantime, there is always a very nutritious, high-quality dry food in the other side of her two-sided cat food dish.  But she won't touch it.

In the meantime, if I'm making dinner, she'll come into the kitchen and move around to sniff EVERY SPECK on the kitchen floor to see if it's something good for eating.  And she'll meow at me.  And stare at me with those ROUND, UNBLINKING EYES.  It's hella annoying.

Every day after I take the kids to school she yells at me to take her out for an eye-wateringly boring session of her walking around the back yard chewing on grass.

If I leave clean clothes in a laundry basket on the floor for too long without putting them away, she will decide occasionally that that is a delightful place to take a piss.  Once a plastic bag of vacuum cleaner parts was on the basement floor beside the dryer and she decided that was a fantastic place to take a piss.  A pile of towels that needs to be washed?  FABULOUS PLACE TO EMPTY YOUR CAT BLADDER.

She follows me every where I go.  And stares at me. And howls outside the bathroom door if I try to take a wizz.  With all due respect to my dog-loving friends, if I truly wanted that kind of attention, I'd have gotten a DOG.

We put her down the basement at 10 PM every night.  I can't tell you what a relief it is.  I give her psychotic little cat head a kiss goodnight, give her a hug, and wish her a good night.  She has a warm, cozy little cat bed on a pink fluffy blanky down there on a futon (is that where all futons go to die--the basement?).  Every day at 5 AM, she CLANGS up onto the dryer to HOWL AND YOWL in this most disgusting cat voice toward the one basement window. It's a nice, startling way to be awoken every day.

YAAAAAAY!  WHO NEEDS A ROOSTER!  ALMOST TIME TO GET UP!

So yeah, I actually have fantasies of running away from my pet.  A KITTY CAT FOR FUCK'S SAKE.  Judge that as you will.





Monday, November 14, 2016

Working On It

Pee Wee:  There's a lotta things about me you don't know anything about, Dottie. Things you wouldn't understand. Things you couldn't understand. Things you shouldn't understand.

Dottie:  I don't understand.

Pee Wee:  You don't wanna get mixed up with a guy like me. I'm a loner, Dottie. A rebel.


It's peaceful here and the only sounds are a lightly snoring old lady cat sleeping beside me, the ceaseless, quiet click and whirr of the cable tv box (reminding us that we're ALWAYS plugged into the system now--phew, this could totally go all creepy sci-fi couldn't it, she says as all those internet waves bounce around the house and try to disrupt her ENDOCRINE SYSTEM AAAAAHHHH...meh, who can be bothered), and a ticking clock.  Occasionally a car passes by.  Less frequently the house makes some mysterious clunk sound somewhere.  Have you ever noticed that?  I should say, does YOUR house DO that?  You're just sitting there, and there's some offhand kind of "crack" noise, like the house got tired of standing still with your lazy, ever-present, never-leaving-ass in it, and it stretched and its spine popped?  Or some clunk that ALWAYS comes from the basement?

Ooop...hold that thought...I have to freaking pee again.  Drink 8 glasses of water per day--pppffft.  Terrible idea....

.......


So much for deep, meandering thoughts!  The point is this:  it's extremely peaceful and quiet here and I like it.  I like it far too much.  So, I decided I'd better kick my own butt and do some writing and connect with the outside world a bit.  I have always liked writing.

Back when I started this blog, the kids were a lot younger, a lot more tiring, and much shorter than me.  Now instead of being darling little people (who wiped their own poopy bum-bums on the bathroom towels, shoved legos in their ears and put glitter glue on like eyeshadow), they're big, delightfully wonderful people who plug the damn toilet, but whom  I can actually have really good conversations with.  God I love my kids.  They drain me, they give me white hairs, they turn me into a screaming idiot at times, but I found perfect friends and I grew them myself!

Yeah, that's kind of sci-fi creepy sounding once again.

Anyway, as I was saying, when I started blogging it was because I was a stay-at-home-mom (I think I hate that title--the feeling just occurred to me) with a young son somewhere vaguely on the Autism Spectrum, who liked to scream at me all the time for my shitty abilities to read his mind and always know 100 percent what he wanted from minute to minute, and a little toddler daughter who was and is the joy of my heart, but absolutely had her trying moments as well.  I was an exhausted karen with a thyroid blown out by years of rabid snack cake and cookie abuse, stress, and loneliness that was almost palpable.

I liked connecting.  I liked the fact that there were other stay-at-home-moms, and working moms, and dads of course, out there who related to the frustration of a seemingly thankless job wherein sometimes you have to scrape vomited hard-boiled eggs out of a sink drain with a plastic fork.  I knew my life was more fucking ridiculous than a lot of other peoples', and I liked putting that out there for a laugh.  I like making people laugh.  And I could do this all from the comfort of my own couch.  I like this because I'm a massive introvert and a recluse, and now I'm quite certain I have PTSD.  I thank my Dad for that.  I literally do.  If you've had really bad things happen in your life, and you can't find a way to laugh at them, well--things are hard enough, aren't they.

I have to admit though--and please, I don't want to sound like an ungrateful bitch, or a miserable, unfriendly jerk, and this is not a judgement on anyone or the world of blogging, but it did become a bit hard.  I didn't know if it was better to try to just write the hilarious stuff, or to try to only write the heavy stuff.  I stressed when I'd see followers disappearing.  I'd try to keep up with the "tags" and the conga-line "we're all doing a post on THIS this week," and I don't know.  I'm not good at always joining in.  Nothing but respect for all the amazing writers out there who have been so diligent and prolific with their blogging that they have amassed a great following and are able to make a living from their blog.

That's not me.

I've been not busy, and busy at the same time the past couple of years since my Dad died.  He was a full stop for a while after my Mom died.  And by the way, I know that when a  grown-ass woman writes lamentfully (that's not a word.  Fuck you, dictionary. If 'addicting' can become a thing, it's open season) about her parents dying, it's not going to typically move people much.  That's cool.  I get it.  We only truly appreciate what we ourselves have already gone through.  So in the past several years, I've been busy.  The old version of karen wasn't working so hot.  She was tired all the time, and really struggled through the days.  Karen 2.0 gets so excited from her fucking lunch salad she takes pictures of it and posts it on instagram.  I know.  Contrived as hell.  Except I'm absolutely and completely excited about healthy food.  I work out all the time.  And now, I won't bore you, but I'm hell bent on balancing my hormones.  Ha haaaa, I know right?!  But the point is, I've been working on it, and I've decided this is my "house", so fuck me, Imma do what I want in it.   This is not a declaration to anyone but myself. I'll be miserable when I want to, and I'll be ridiculous when I want to.  And, I'll swear it up because I love swears, and I ain't got no parents to disapprove. I have an older brother, and I don't think there's any risk of him reading my stuff, lolz.

My own path. Cuz I'm a loner, Dottie.
A rebel.























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