And Regrets, I've Had a Few

For the most part, I like to think I am a capable, intelligent, functional adult. And then, every once in a while, I do something so colossally stupid that I can’t shake it off. Does that ever happen to you?

I can’t tell if it’s a mom thing or a menopausal thing or just a getting older thing. Whatever the reason, I am still embarrassed, and because it involves my older daughter, I won’t be able to live it down for a while.

Let’s start at the beginning: Instagram. I have been entranced for a while by some of those ads that I scroll past, and for some bizarre reason for which I can’t forgive myself, I click on them to learn more. Sometimes it’s for one of those straightening brushes, which I still can’t believe can work on hair as curly as mine. Sometimes, it’s for a new version of Spanx-like control garment, making every lump and bump magically smooth out. And sometimes, it’s for a pet product that I can’t live without.

So that’s where I landed, on some grooming glove thing. It fits on your hand, and on the palm side, it has what is essentially plastic or rubber spiky teeth that can help remove your pet’s undercoat or loose fur. In the ads, the pets look like they’re enjoying it, this surprisingly effective grooming disguised as run-of-the-mill petting. It looked so promising, so convincing, so necessary.

Not that I needed convincing. Every spring, my two cats shed. A lot. While it’s easy enough to pick up the little black clumps of hair the tumbleweed around the baseboards, it’s the hairball puking that I am currently over. The two of them takes turns throwing up every few weeks so that I am on a constant routine of cleaning up hairballs.

Moshe, the short-haired one with the thicker coat, is partial to throwing up on my bedroom carpet. A few weeks ago, he started gagging on the hardwood floor of the upstairs hallway, but he ran as well and fast as he could to make it onto the carpet of my bedroom before he tossed his kibble. Oh, and it was four in the morning.

And it’s never just one and done. He has to heave a few more times before his digestive tract calms down. Which means I have multiple spot treatments to attempt, at least once a month. I try to give him that cat hairball remedy, but he hates it, and he will eat pretty much anything.

The other cat, Yoko, is also a puker. Her fur is longer than Moshe’s, and she doesn’t shed as much as he does. If you touch him, he loses fur like porcupine quills, but Yoko’s fur is more likely to tangle and clump in her kitty armpits or around her neck. Watching her groom herself is also disturbing because the hair gets stuck on her little tongue barbs. It makes me want to cough up a hairball, just watching her.

She is sneakier and more retaliatory with her hairball projecting. If I go out of town, she makes sure to upchuck her displeasure. Recently, she threw up on the all but abandoned treadmill in the downstairs guest room. Do you know how hard it is to clean dried cat puke off a treadmill belt? I do.

Which brings me back to the grooming glove. It seemed like a real solution to my hairball drama and possibly even worth the money I was going to spend on it. The next time I saw the ad on Instagram, I clicked on the “Shop now” link and placed my order.

I didn’t give it another thought, and a few days later, I received a confirmation email letting me know that my glove was in the mail. Five days later, I got another email from the company: the package was delivered! I rushed out the mailbox, but it was empty. I looked on the side porch, and nothing. Nothing on the front step either.

I reread the email, and that’s where I discovered my mistake, the thing I did that never should have happened. It turns out that I didn’t use the same shipping address as my billing address, as I thought I had. Instead, for some unknown reason, the address that auto-filled the online form was my daughter’s ex-boyfriend’s.

At some point in the beginning of their freshman year, when they were still together, I had sent him a package, one of those kind gestures that girlfriends’ moms sometimes do. They broke up around Thanksgiving, and I ordered the glove in late April. It wasn’t like his was the last mailing address I had used on my phone. Why it decided that his was the address to select during my glove ordering, I will never understand.

So, I did what any normal, rational, slightly frugal person would do: I texted the ex-boyfriend to ask him to bring it to me when he finished with finals and got home. I didn’t want to throw away the money, and I really wanted that glove. I needed that glove. I had to have that glove.

I started out with a little small talk, just to soften the absurdity of my request. He does live close to us, but he attends college in another state, so it wasn’t a small ask. He claimed he was happy to do it, so I said my goodbyes and let it go for another week or two until he got home.

During the course of this glove situation, my older daughter also finished her semester and came home. I must have mentioned in passing that I had texted her ex, which would be where I made my second mistake. She is never one to miss an opportunity to make a mountain out of a molehill, which only made me feel even more like an idiot for contacting him and for the first mistake of the incorrect address.

The two of them texted about my idiocy and had a few laughs at my expense, but whatever, because I knew that grooming glove was soon to be mine.

When he brought it over, he actually came to the door and hand delivered it to me instead of leaving it in my mailbox. That was a very adult move on his part; I doubt I would have had the confidence to make small talk with my ex-girlfriend’s mother while handing over a stupid package she had shipped to me, the mail-order equivalent to an unsolicited Anthony Weiner dick pic, something you wish you didn’t receive and had to deal with.

After he left (and my daughter came out of hiding), I quickly opened the mailing envelope and removed me grooming glove. There it was, with its Velcro wrist strap and textured surface, ready to put on my right hand and start the petting.

On the other hand, I am left-handed.

Petting, like writing or masturbating, is a dominant-hand activity. I tried using it with my right hand, but my old, stupid brain didn’t have the capacity to coordinate my petting skills with my right palm. It, much like me, is useless.

Looking back on the whole debacle, I realize that the grooming glove ad didn’t offer a choice of hands, and also that I need to delete all the cookies on my phone. And also, that I probably shouldn’t fall for Instagram ads, because the reality never lives up to the expectations.

Secret Santa

My cat, Moshe, is really getting in the holiday spirit. Today he left me a present on the floor of my laundry room.

He apparently had a little trouble with constipation or a clinger-on, if you will, so he decided to drag his asshole all over the floor until the turd was finally dislodged. Nothing makes you happier to have a pet than finding a shit smear across the floor, ending in a piece of crap, like a period on the most disgusting sentence ever written.

In his defense, he can’t really wipe. No thumbs. The struggle is real. He did the only thing he knew to do, the poop scoot, and the worst part is, I knew something was up when I heard him getting out of the litter box. I was downstairs, sitting on the couch for ten minutes of alleged “me” time, while upstairs there was a great ruckus going on, with the sound of the kitty litter door flap opening and closing and then some crazed running around the house, cat claw toenails scrambling against the hardwoods.

I didn’t discover the scene of the crime until a few hours later when I went up to the laundry room to transfer the clothes from the washer to the dryer. I cleaned up the mess and then disinfected the floor and the bamboo slat rug which he defiled, wondering where else he may have rested his cat ass after his largely unsuccessful bowel movement. So far it seems an isolated incident.

I am not surprised if he is feeling a bit sluggish and irregular this holiday season. He has been feasting regularly on Christmas ornaments from the day we put up the tree.

We have one of those fake that we decided looks real trees, pre-strung with white lights.  My husband adds a modern version of old-fashioned bubble lights, and then we all decorate with our eclectic assortment of ornaments while trying not to kill each other. We get new ornaments in our stockings every year, snails for me, robots and dentists for my husband, ballet related ornaments for the younger dancy teen, and owls and sharks for the older and more difficult teen. A large number of our ornaments are glass, and we make a point of hanging them up higher on the tree, ensuring each one is secure on its artificial branch. Towards the bottom of the tree are the unbreakable and handmade ornaments, since they are not as delicate. I am sentimental to a point, but some of those handmade ornaments weren’t all that swell when they first came home some ten years ago. If the cat wants to eat those, have at it.

Every year, Moshe dines on whatever he can reach. When he was a kitten, he would climb in the tree, which was really cute until it fell over. Now, at a robust 15 pounds, he realizes that flimsy tree can’t support his excess weight. He still tries, which I know because of the odd way the lower branches are mashed down, kind of like a fat cat tried to sit on them. We will lose an occasional glass ornament to those climb attempts, but only the ones we really love. After he gives up on reaching the higher branches, he concentrates his effort into snacking on whatever is close at paw.

Mostly, he likes to eat the metallic loops used to hang the ornaments on the branches. Pompoms and ribbons also make a delightful midnight treat. He enjoys chewing through cords and felt. Every morning before breakfast I do a quick check of the tree skirt for his nighttime victims. If you look at our tree, it looks like we have a toddler. All the ornaments are a good two feet from the bottom.

Two days ago, he tried to eat one of my husband’s metal robot ornaments. It was a cute ornament too, with arms and legs attached with curly springs like those inside a clickable ballpoint pen. Moshe removed the robot from the tree and chewed the spring off the top and also one of the arms. I couldn’t find the arm anywhere and immediately had a panic attack that he had actually swallowed it. I had this unshakable mental image of me taking him to the vet, where they would find the arm on X-ray, and then he would get really sick because he couldn’t shit a robot arm.

I found the arm a day before I found his feces debacle, so at least I know things are moving and he isn’t obstructed, which is a Christmas present in itself.

Not to be outdone, as I write this, Yoko decided to throw up a hair ball in one of the empty shirt boxes I have out for gift wrapping. A Merry Christmas indeed.

It's a Magic Number

They say bad things always happen in threes. I don’t know who they are, but they were right this past week. My sister, LM, would chalk it up to Mercury being in retrograde. That sounds like a bunch of astrological hokum to some people, but the fact that it’s referenced in the Farmer’s Almanac offers it a hint of legitimacy. Also, the Almanac states that when mercury does go in retrograde, it lasts about three weeks, and it happens three times a year. All these threes.

1. Last week, I took my cat Yoko to the vet. It was time for her annual exam, but she also had a lump on her side, close to her abdomen, that worried me. She isn’t getting any younger, and she isn’t a fan of the vet, so the idea of regular medical supervision is off the table. I still wanted to know what the lump was, even if I doubted doing anything about it.

Yoko demonstrated why at the vet’s office. After attacking him and refusing to leave the relative safety of her carrier, she ripped two claws out fighting the exam. She didn’t just leave a couple of broken fingernails on the table; she also left smears of blood all over, even on the old towel they threw over her head. The towel is supposed to somehow make her feel more secure, but it just pisses her off. At least it provides some protection for the vet from her angry and sharp parts.

After fighting to get her on the scale and back on the table and then of course to figure out the source of all the blood, the vet had to examine her for that lump. PSA to all of you cat owners: Cats don’t get lumps. It’s not their thing. If your cat has a lump, you should get it checked out, if you are feeling brave enough.  He palpated her and she resisted. The towel fell off and had to be repositioned. The more he felt around her, the more agitated she became, and still, he couldn’t locate the lump.

So, long story short: Yoko’s lump turned out to be a blocked mammary gland. He was able to take care of it, but I won’t go into how. I referred to it as her nipple zit, and he requested that I not tell anyone that, nor should I let anyone know he is our vet.  This is the much abbreviated version of this story. You’re welcome.

Her twenty minute vet exam took over an hour and a half. I don’t think either of us has recovered yet.

2. My young driver, the teen, had her first fender bender. I shan’t go into too much detail about this one either, as it is a long way from resolution.

I knew how she felt.  I had a minor accident the first day I drove my car to school when I was seventeen. It is a rite of passage, unfortunately.

She is fine. The car is drivable. It wasn’t her fault. I don’t think either of us has recovered yet.

3. Sunday morning, I was fussing at my husband. He was lying in bed and asked when S, our younger daughter, needed to be picked up from a slumber party. I told him he was asking the question wrong. He needed to ask what time he needed to pick up S from her slumber party. Then I walked into the chaise lounge in my bedroom and smashed my toe with such force and speed I heard a loud pop.

I knew that sensation well. I have broken almost all of my toes over the past twenty something years, some of them more than once. This time it was my right pinky toe. It may be the third time I have broken the right pinky. It has all blended together by this point, a mashup of painful, swollen, bruised toes. When am I going to learn?

I threw myself face down on the carpet and cursed a blue streak. Blue streak is also an apt description of the current state of my right pinky toe.

 

My husband said “karma” to me from the bed. I got up and hobbled down the stairs to ice my foot.

You don’t realize the importance of the pinky toe until it is out of commission. It might not do much but cry Whee! Whee! Whee! all the way home, until you try fitting it into any shoe. It’s currently the size of the big toe on the other side of the foot. Shoes are not constructed to accommodate two big toes. Taping it to its neighbor is not yet manageable, due to the swelling. I won’t be fitting this toe into a spin shoe or balancing in any yoga poses for at least a few days. This toe is not up for a brisk walk in the neighborhood or the joy of my favorite dance class. Needless to say, I have not recovered yet.

If bad things happen in threes, then what exactly is the number of good things?

Care for a Sample?

I talk to my sister LM often, and when I do, I always seem to have what she calls “the story of the day.” She’s right about that; almost every day, some little thing happens that makes for good sharing with her but not really enough of an event to write in a blog post. She has been encouraging me to write more, but also to embrace the whole less is more thing. In other words, don’t wait until I have something momentous to share, just write.  Who knows, maybe I will post more often. Maybe I won’t. Maybe you will like it. Maybe I will too.

Today’s story of the day involves the dumber of my two cats, Moshe. Today, I called to schedule his annual exam because Moshe is a bit overdue in the rabies vaccine department. I am never too eager to take him to the vet. While I love my vet, Moshe hates him and puts up a fight that he saves especially for the annual exam. The rest of the year Moshe spends lounging and sleeping and overeating and purring loudly and even allowing us to carry his fifteen pounds around like a rag doll with never even an ounce of aggression. When he has to go to the vet, he turns into a vicious cat beast, hell bent on mayhem and destruction and physical harm, all so he can return to the overeating and sleeping part at home. We both hate the annual exam.

I spoke with the receptionist to schedule the visit. After we went through the calendar and found an agreeable date and time, she asked me to try to bring in a stool sample when we came for the appointment. For the cat, obviously. She said it wasn’t a big deal, but if he used a litter box, it would be easier to harvest one than if he goes outside to do his bizness. She actually used the word “harvest.”

Me: A stool sample? That’s a new one.
Her: You’ve never brought in a stool sample? We like to check for parasites.
Me:  No, I’ve never been asked to. He is an indoor cat, though, so wouldn’t his chances of having parasites be kind of small?
Her: You never know. It’s just easier to have a sample for cats by bringing it in. Dogs don’t mind so much if we obtain a sample during the exam.
Me: I can’t really blame him for that.

We shared a laugh, politely.

Me: Well, the problem is he shares the litter box with our other cat, so I don’t really know if I could be 100% sure it’s his.

This is not entirely true. He, like many boy cats, or boys in general, produces a stink unlike any other. He also likes to leave it unburied, so the smell can really permeate our air supply. 

Her: Oh, that would be fine even if it isn’t his. Chances would be good that if one of them has a parasite, they both would.
Me: Good to know. So here’s another question. I am new to the whole stool sample thing. How, um, fresh does it need to be?

I had an image of myself skulking around the entrance of one of our litter boxes, waiting with a Ziploc sandwich bag at the ready.

Her: Oh, it doesn’t need to be that fresh. It can even have litter stuck to it. You just don’t want it to be hard and dry.
Me: No, I suppose I don’t. Okay, well, I’ll do my best. We’ll see you next week with a small bag of crap.

I told my sister this story of my cat’s appointment and the stool sample discussion.  We went on to discuss further how ironic it is that cats love to show you their anuses, but you can forget about actually touching it in the name of veterinary medicine. I pointed out that they are kind of like strippers in that way. You can look all you want, but if you touch, you are going to need traction.

So that’s how the story of the day works. Because, when you think about it, isn’t every day full of shitty little stories?

Never Gonna Give You Up

My cat may have Stockholm syndrome.

To the casual observer, he might seem well adjusted and happy living with my family. But the more I really think about it, the more I believe he is trying to survive a life of captivity, one from which he may never be free.

Granted, life is a precious gift for my dear Moshe. He was a foundling on the doorstep at the vet’s office, delivered to them in a small shoe box, holes punched in the sides, duct taped to trap him inside.  He came to live with us soon after his abandonment, and while he was understandably skittish at first, he never really outgrew that constant level of fear.  You can see that fear in his eyes, constantly bulging and darting around, like he may flee at any moment. Plus, he has some serious trust issues.

 

Moshe is now seven. He has been confined inside my house for seven years. He leaves only for check-ups at the vet’s office, which means he is even more frightened to leave the house than he is being trapped inside. Better the devil you know, I suppose.  

Sometimes we just manage his health without actually taking him for an exam, like when he threw up repeatedly last week in an effort to purge a hairball or disagreeable insect he ingested.  That episode involved me yelling at him, tossing him out of my bedroom, and eventually rubbing a thick and smelly paste on his arm, one that he was forced to remove by licking it off. It was a bitter pill for him to swallow, if he could swallow pills.

Most of the time, he is free to roam the interior of the house as he wishes. Usually, he takes advantage of that freedom to hide. He likes to hide under beds, in closets, and when he was younger and thinner, inside the furniture through a secret tunnel in the lining under the couch.  In fact, when he was a kitten and began perfecting his disappearing act, we thwarted his efforts by having the first knuckle of each toe removed. If that isn’t torture, I don’t know what is.

I am now convinced all that hiding is in an effort to get a moment’s respite from us, his captors. Usually when he hides, he sleeps. He is probably exhausted from trying to anticipate when the next random torture session will occur. He has to be ever vigilant, constantly seeking out new and more secretive hiding places.

No matter how well he hides, we can find him, and when we do, we don’t leave him alone. We pick him up. We carry him around. He force him to sit on our laps, sometimes holding him still until he gives up the fight and purrs softly and deceptively, waiting for us to loosen our grip on him so he can dash off to safety.

Our endless assaults on him happen at all hours of the day. He has no peace. Sometimes we make him play patty cake. Sometimes we hold him draped across our arms like a baby. All the while, we shove our phones in his face and snap pictures of him against his will. It is not unlike what happened in Abu Ghraib, only without the car batteries. He even has a series of humiliating outfits he must endure, a shark fin, a Halloween dinosaur head piece, a sailor’s collar, even a fake neck tie. The torment never ceases.

He is unable to read or write, so he is limited in his ability to articulate what his internment means to him. Mostly, he chews off the handles of the shopping bags. It is his form of civil disobedience. He is also partial to certain types of shoelaces. And pissing on the floor, just outside of the litter box, so that it looks like an accident. Take that, my jailers, he must think to himself. He also likes to rub his face on every available surface, marking them with a cat’s version of invisible ink. I was here, it says. My life matters.

I want to be perfectly clear: I love this cat, my Moshe. I am his number one fan.  In turn, he has either developed his own version of love for me, or he is the best damn cat actor since Morris.  We have a certain understanding. I know that whenever I feel the need for feline company, I can force him to cooperate with my snuggles. He knows that despite being fed the same bland food pellets day in and out, he can count on me providing them. He knows if he behaves, he might even get a special kind of pellet in the mornings as well as the regular ones that he has to eat out of a bowl on the floor, a bowl he shares with another abducted victim who has been trapped in the house for even longer, eleven years.

It seems that in addition to maybe loving me, he definitely loves his food.  There is never a time that the crinkling of a foil lined package fails to rouse him from the most secluded spot.  He can detect the opening of the deli meat drawer from the deepest sleep. In short, Moshe eats his feelings.

I can’t tell if I should feel badly for my victim. He is one in a series of such captives I have had over the course of my life, and chances are pretty good he won’t be the last. I doubt I’m the first abductor who feels the love I have outweighs the life of misery and fear I’ve caused.  I don’t know if this “relationship” is healthy for either one of us, but I do know that I just can’t quit him. All I have to do is look into his wide, vacant eyes, and I am a captive of his little soul, if he has one.

Don't Ask, Don't Tell

Once a year, I do the unthinkable. I take my cats to the vet.  It’s worse than it sounds.  I don’t have two carriers, so I don’t take them at the same time. Honestly, I don’t think any of us could handle it. They hardly like each other, they can’t stand the car, and they flat out hate the vet. I, on the other hand, adore my vet. He really tries to do his job, as much as the cats fight him, and there is nothing you can’t talk about with him.  And I do mean nothing.

I took Yoko first. She is the alpha cat, and the old lady of the house. At nine years old, she is so waifishly thin that she has surpassed maintaining her girlish figure and gone straight to frail. Yoko hates to get in the cat carrier, so I let her ride in my lap on the way there. I am sure we make for an interesting sight, just a woman tootling down the street in her Volvo SUV with a very angry and thin long haired black cat in her lap. Ain’t nothing dangerous about that at all.

She did fine until the vet walked in the exam room, which is when she turned into the cat from “Pet Cemetery,” all scary hunched and flat ears, fangs exposed and loud hissing. The good news is her teeth were exceptionally clean. She also gained a half a pound. He attempted to finish the exam with Yoko under a towel, but she managed to turn her head three hundred and sixty degrees before biting him. Good thing he had on oven mitts. The bad news is that when she lashed out, she got me right between the thumb and pointer finger. I was the only casualty.

After I got her home, it was time to take the other one. Moshe is younger and much more timid than Yoko. He is twice her size, a good fifteen pounds to her eight. He is also sweet and gentle, but dumb as a sack of hammers. He is the only living creature that I love despite his extreme stupidity. In fact, I love that he is an idiot. On him, it’s endearing, those big vacant eyes just staring at nothing.

Moshe was also scared of the car ride, but not because he remembered where we were going, more because he doesn’t understand what a car is. We got checked in and went back to the exam room. After Yoko’s exam, where I was the only one who got scratched, I decided to leave him in the carrier until the vet entered the room. Moshe stared at me from his carrier, meowing loudly. I, unfortunately, don’t understand meows, although I did get the tone of what he was saying.

The vet came in and checked his cat vitals, weighing him and combing through his fur and looking at his anus and whatnot. He asked me if I had any concerns, and I did. I told him that Moshe has taken to licking his genitals very frequently. I was worried he might be developing cystitis, although the litter box seemed pretty normal as did his eating and drinking.

Cystitis is not unusual in male indoor cats. When I was a kid, we had a cat that developed such severe cystitis that he required surgery. My childhood memory of the event involved the vet doing some major surgery, turning his penis into a cat vagina, or maybe just removing his penis and leaving him totally without male genitalia. I remember it with humor, because when we first got him, we thought he was a girl kitten until he/she had to get fixed, which was when we found out about the whole penis thing. And then, a few years later, no more penis.  I had a transgender cat before transgender cats were a thing.

Are transgender cats a thing?

Also, that operation had to cost a pretty penny. Looking back, I cannot believe my mother would spend any money on the care of a cat. Hell, we went through cats like they were paper plates. And she was tight with money unless she was spending it on herself, so there is no way she coughed up that kind of money to fix a very expendable cat. I have a theory. I think she slept with the vet for surgical favors.

But I digress. I told the vet I was worried about the cat’s constant junk licking. He got the veterinary technician to hold Moshe still, and then got down to table level to try to examine my cat’s penis. Moshe was appalled. He tried to resist this violation of his privacy, but he was no match for the woman holding him still and the veterinarian exposing him. All the while, the vet tried to speak calmly to him. “I know, Mosh, it’s your penis. No one should be licking your penis but you. I get it.”

I was speechless.

After he finished his exam, the vet stood up and said, “We are going to have an uncomfortable conversation now.”

“I thought we already were having one,” I said.

He ignored that and continued. “You might not know this, but some animals masturbate.”

I did know this. My mother in law’s dog used to rub one out with an old Mukluk slipper every chance she got. That damn poodle would slipper scoot across the room for hours. It was the only time she seemed happy. I can’t say I blame her.

He went on. “If a cat licks his penis frequently, we first have to make sure he doesn’t have an infection. You said the litter is normal, and upon examination, his penis looks normal too.”

He stopped talking for a moment and took out a pen and a piece of paper. He began drawing a cat penis for me.

“So a healthy cat penis would look like this, kind of like, well, it comes to a point, you see, sort of pointy. Like a cone, an ice cream cone.”

“No wonder he licks it all the time,” I said. No, I didn’t. I said it in my head.

“If you get really close to it, you will see it has these barbs. That’s perfectly normal for a cat penis.”

“I am not planning on looking closely enough to see barbs. I don’t want to look at it at all,” I said.

“So if it were inflamed or irritated, it would be rounder on the top, like a mushroom.” He drew another cat penis, this time with an inflamed tip. I wanted to knock the pen out of his hand.  “It doesn’t look inflamed though, so that’s a good sign. Which means, well, that he licks his penis because he likes to lick it. If you look on Google for, wait, let me say it differently.”

I laughed, out loud. I actually LOL’ed.

“Don’t go to Google. If you look at the Cornell website, you will see information about animal masturbation. It’s normal for some animals. Just make sure he doesn’t overdo it or it will become irritated. If it gets all swollen, or you know, bulbous on the end. Short of that, though, well, I guess he can have at it.”

Moshe and I were both embarrassed by that visit to the vet, and if you count Yoko too, we all were traumatized. It’s a good thing we only have to go once a year.

From Scratch

My daughters and I started a new holiday tradition: baking cookies in our underwear.   Why, you might be wondering? The short answer to your question is that I don’t have three aprons. Let’s go for the long answer, though, because it’s more fun that way.

All week, my daughters wanted to make sugar cookies, the kind you roll out and decorate. As far as I am concerned, decorated holiday sugar cookies are the Walmart of the cookie world. They don’t taste good, and if you aren’t Martha Stewart, they don’t look all that good either. They are really more for kids, who are not yet in possession of a sophisticated palette and are naturally drawn to bright colors and fun shapes. They are my least favorite cookie to make or to eat. We only make them once a year if that, so for a few hours, I can suck it up and make my babies happy.

After spending a good fifty bucks on cookie cutters and decorating stuff and rolls of cookie dough, we got down to business. I decided to buy dough instead of making it because sugar cookies suck and I don’t care and it’s easier. I also had to buy some new cookie cutters because I got mad at my old ones taking up too much room in my drawer and tossed them in a fit of rage. And all the toppings, well, who knows how old those are. Does colored sugar go bad? I didn't want to find out. Back home, I got out the cookie trays, the parchment paper, the flour and the rolling pin. I preheated the ovens, and called the girls over to get started.

When I was little, I too loved to make sugar cookies. My mother never made a cookie in her life, but my grandmother would bake them with my sisters and me. She had an assortment of cookie cutters, a diamond, a heart, a bell, and for some strange reason, a camel. We would use colored sugar and red hots and silver nonpareil balls which looking back probably used mercury to give them their silver hue and shouldn’t have been eaten. We covered the dough in all sorts of nasty color combinations, and she smiled sweetly and let us do what we wanted. I don’t remember her ever really eating any of the cookies we thought were so special, even though the germs no doubt baked out of the finished product.

Sugar cookies were never high on my priority list as an adult, again because they suck, but also because they make such a colossal mess. Also, they remind me of play-doh, one of my most hated children’s toys. Play-doh smells funny and leaves tiny little pills of colored dough all over any surface in which it comes in contact. I spent many a day about ten years ago picking up tiny colored balls and vowing to throw away all of that non-toxic mess, only to give in the next time the girls asked  on a rainy day if they could play with the play-doh.

While it’s easy clean up sugar cookie dough, it isn’t all that easy to clean up rainbow sprinkles and colored sugar and chocolate jimmies, which resemble hamster turds to the untrained eye. For years, I have made sure we had plenty of other cookies around the holidays so that no one noticed that we forgot to make decorated sugar cookies. It didn’t work this year.

Now that my girls are older, baking sugar cookies was more fun because they added their own quirky touches. One of them meticulously decorated a snowflake cookie with individual sprinkles, while the other one insisted we used cat shaped cookie cutters so we could make kitties, which she then embellished with candy assholes. Let me tell you,  Santa wants nothing more than a crisp cat shaped cookie with a balloon knot.

Also, one of the girls found my husband’s Star Wars cookie cutters, which meant in addition to beautiful snowflakes and cat asses, we also had an assortment of Yodas and Boba Fetts and Darth Vaders, all tricked out in red and green. Yum yum!

The other big hit was the gingerbread boy, which my daughters fought to use. each time they cut one out, it was disfigured in some way, missing a limb here or there, whether to shark attack or birth defect, no one knew. My teen found it enormously amusing to line the torn edges where a cookie limb should be in red frosting, as if fresh from the battle field or zombie apocalypse.

So why the no shirts? Well, we had just come back from their piano recital and we didn’t want to get our clothes dirty. The kitchen is downstairs, the changes of clothing upstairs, and in between was a whole lot of laziness. It does get a little toasty near the double ovens, and when you are making asterisks on your cat cookies, any sense of decorum has already been lost. Where to go from there but shirtless?

Just a mom and her two girls, all in bras, licking fingertips and eating scraps of dough, fighting over who has to sweep the floor, and making memories. 

More than Meets the Eye

Don’t you hate when you get something stuck in your eye? Not like a stick, but more like an eyelash. Honestly, I can’t imagine having something like a stick, when a thin little hair is painful enough. Part of why it bothers me so much is because I am a hard contact wearer.

Most people who wear contacts are lucky enough to wear the comfortable soft kind, the ones you can easily dispose of or replace. They are moist and comfortable, or so I hear. Me? Well, after years of being one of those people, I just couldn’t see anymore. My options were to wear glasses all the time and have mildly impaired vision or to go gas permeable and learn to live with the pain. My eye doctor at the time described wearing hard lenses as having a bottle cap stuck under your eyelid, only not that comfortable.

Honestly, hard contact lenses aren’t that painful. After a week or so of adjusting, I hardly noticed them anymore, unless my eyes were dry or I had something in my eye. The problem is, my eyes are always dry, and when they aren’t, I have something in them. I spend a portion of every day blinking like I have a tic or the creepiest wink ever. No one has ever said my eye thing is disturbing, but I have a feeling that is out of courtesy or just plain awkwardness.

What I am trying to say is, I always have something in my eye. It's not just an occasional irritant; it is part of my daily life. If I’m at the beach, it’s sand. If I am in the woods, it’s whatever the wind blew under my eyelid. And if I’m at home, it’s a hair. An eyelash, an eyebrow hair, it doesn’t matter. One time I even had a long head hair wrapped around my eye.

Think about that for a minute….it was wrapped around my eye. Do you have one of those boiled egg slicers? If so, you remember what it looks like when you stick a hard boiled egg in it and lower the slicer thingy, and right before it cuts through the egg, it has a bulgy appearance, the tension forming a meniscus on the egg's surface before it slices clean. That’s what the head hair around my eye looked like, at least to my other eye that was looking at it.

When I woke up this morning, my left eye was irritated. I walked to the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror. This examination was pre contact insertion, so I had my glasses on. I can see with my glasses, but not well. It might be legal to drive in them, but I wouldn’t swear to it. Anyway, when I looked in the mirror, lo and behold, my left eye was all swollen and puffy, and not just my normal morning eye bag puffiness. This was allergic reaction swollen, the kind that would make strangers recoil, the kind that would make children point and scream, the kind that gets you whisked into an exam room at the ophthalmologist’s office.

I took my glasses off and pressed my face up against the mirror so I could see what was going on in my eye. I tugged a little on my lower lid and saw the end of a cat hair hanging out on my eye. Bingo, I thought. No wonder it looks like I’m having an allergy attack, because I am.

Yes, I am allergic to cats. I like them; they are furry and cute and strangely affectionate and clingy, and they bury their own poo. But my body treats them like the enemy if we get too close. Cat licks on my neck produce red welts like I’ve been whupped with a leather strop. An unfortunate and absolutely accidental cat scratch results in a raised weal that rivals the Continental Divide. And a hair in the eye, well, it looks like I need a battered woman’s shelter.

I pulled down on my eyelid to try to extract the offending cat hair from my eye socket, but it turns out it wasn’t a cat hair. It was a clump of cat hair, a hair ball, if you will. I didn’t go to sleep with that fur wad in my eye, but I sure woke up with it. How does one get something like that in an eye during a fitful night of sleep? Did I sleep-groom my kitties? Did the cat plant it during my altered state of consciousness?

You know that magicians' trick where they pull a handkerchief out of their pocket and it just keeps coming out, one after another, all knotted together like one unending colorful scarf? That’s what my cat hair wad was, a never-ending third rate magic trick. I just kept pulling out hairs, all knotted together. It was about a kitten's worth of hair, not unlike the tumbleweeds of cat fur that roll across my hardwood floors.

After sleeping with the offending clump of hair under my lid for a solid six to seven hours, thank you Jesus for the night’s sleep, my eye was swollen to the size of a giant squid’s. Have you seen one of those? They’re fucking huge.

And yes, I crammed a contact on top of it.

 

Writer's Block

I want to write but it’s been so long since I’ve recorded a thought that I don’t even know where to begin.

I am starting by glancing out the window every time I hear a loud truck noise just in case it’s the UPS man. I don’t even think I am expecting a package, but I have a very Pavlovian response to the sound of a UPS truck. Maybe whatever I forgot I ordered is finally here, or maybe someone thought of me and sent me a little treat. Usually, it’s neither of those, nor is the UPS truck for me. More likely, it’s for the neighbor across the street. I’m convinced something illegal is going on over there, based on the frequency of the UPS truck stopping in front of their house. The UPS man isn’t even hot; I am really in it for what’s in the truck.

After that, I inspect the front yard for colorful birds. Today, it’s just a female cardinal, and not even male cardinals can get excited about that fugly bitch of the animal kingdom. Dukey brown boring bird. If I were a male cardinal, I’d be gay.

I also like to listen for the carpenter bees systematically dismantling my downstairs window. I am waiting for the glass to just fall out. Maybe the bee will shout “timber!” when it happens, and it is going to happen soon. It’s the worst sound, too; that bee’s chewing through wood sounds like children with loose teeth eating corn on the cob.

I next inspect my three flowering hydrangeas outside my office window. My husband planted them for me last year, and wonder of wonders, they have lived to see another season. Not only that, but they grew and have actual flowers actually blooming on them. Unfortunately, the heat of summer is making them all sad and droopy. I’m tempted to water them, but I’m also tempted to stay inside the temperature controlled house all day. I wouldn’t want to look like my hydrangeas.

In the other room, my teenager, E, is downloading music to her new iPod. Her last one died about a week ago, and in a fit of generosity, I offered to replace it. She’s especially bummed because whatever version she had contained a camera, which the new one does not. No more selfies that no one will ever see. I even spent an hour trying to find a refurbished Nano of that generation for her, but to my amazement, it must be some sort of geek collectible because it costs about fifty bucks more than a brand new one.

So I ordered her a new one. Did I mention it has an 8-pin thingy instead of a 30-pin thingy? This means about as much to you as it does to me, but the important part to understand is that it means none of the chargers, cords, cables, or speaker docks that we currently own will work with the new iPod. Brilliance on the part of Apple, as they continue to enslave all of the music and phone call making people of the world along with the Chinese child laborers who actually make their products.

She has the new iPod and is downloading music, one song at a time, which requires her shouting out the name of the band or singer, then playing it, then singing along with it, before finally downloading it to the damn thing. She is two hours into the process and is only on the D’s. Do you know how hard it is to concentrate when Teen Grandmaster Jazzy Fresh Princess is mixing her favorite one thousand songs within earshot? Maybe I should rethink the no computers in the children's bedrooms rule.

I have a cat tail on my keyboard, which also makes writing difficult. The minute I sit down to open my laptop, in walks one of my cats, who likes to sit next to me while I work. He thinks he is my  muse, but his incessant purring is very distracting, as is the way he tries to fit between the desk drawer and my lap. After he gives up on fitting his 14 pound cat body into a one inch space, he plops down on top of the desk and flicks his tail on the keys, while simultaneously getting his head stuck in the blinds and launching buckets full of unattached cat hairs in my general direction. There is a fine blanket of stray fur stuck on my monitor, enough to make a tiny sweater for, say, a chipmunk.

Writing isn’t easy.

Bye Bye Birdie

I’m so tired of the haters of the world complaining about how horrible cats are. Ooh, they’re aloof and distant. Wah, they aren’t like dogs. Sob, they’re filthy disease carriers who make everyone and their unborn babies sick.  Boo, they are killing the songbirds of America. Well, cats might be standoffish, stubborn, and germ-ridden, but they aren’t the only danger to your backyard birds.

Yesterday, while I was preparing a delicious, healthy, and organic dinner for my family, I glanced out the window to the backyard and saw a squirrel eating something that did not look like an acorn. I stopped what I was doing and walked up to the window, along with Yoko, one of my cats. She hopped on the window sill and stared at the squirrel too. I watched him intently, as did Yoko, trying to figure out what he ate so voraciously.  Turns out it was a bird, limply dangling from his jaws as he gnawed its lifeless body. He twitched a bit, the squirrel, not the bird, before scampering up the tree to a perch, where he held the bird between his little squirrel hands and chowed down on that thing like a plate of ribs.

Why do things like this always happen when I am home alone, well, with just the cats? Late afternoon, no one is home, and the zombie apocalypse has begun in my back yard, starting with squirrels. Brains, brains, he must have been thinking, as he cracked open that bird’s skull with his powerful rodent teeth.

It’s not like this is the first time it’s happened. Well, maybe the first time I witnessed a squirrel eating a bird, but I have seen a chipmunk actually drag a still living bird from the patio into the yard to finish it off. What the fuck is going on in my back yard? Squirrels and chipmunks eating birds. Are all the animals back there rabid, or do they just enjoy some tasty wings? Maybe I should put out some celery and ranch dressing.

Most people think that squirrels are annoying because they eat all the bird seed put out in feeders, but I bet you didn’t worry about them eating the actual birds. One time, my sister LM found a dead squirrel inside a tube shaped bird feeder in her back yard. She felt badly for it, stuck in there trying to eat its fill of seed before it couldn’t find its way back out of the tube, got stuck, and died. Maybe, just maybe, that conniving little fucker was trying to pass himself off as so much bird seed. His fur was roughly the same color as millet and sunflower seeds, so it was actually a pretty good disguise. Perhaps his gluttony led to his death.

You know what’s a great appetite suppressant? Watching a squirrel eat a bird in your back yard. At least, for me it was. Yoko, on the other hand, looked like a starving child outside of a fancy restaurant. Being an indoor kitty, she eats the same dry food day in and day out, with the occasional bite of turkey or scrambled egg to add a little excitement to her otherwise dull life. And outside her window was the feline equivalent of a turducken being made before her eyes. Seed and insects inside of a bird inside of a squirrel? That’s some good eating, she must have been thinking.

 

The squirrel stopped a few times to climb higher in the tree, still holding the dead bird tight in its mouth so it could eat through the feathers to the soft parts inside. His squirrel mouth had a red ring around it; think little kids and spaghetti, or zombies.  And just like that, he had his fill, and dropped the bird carcass onto my patio, where most of it landed on a lounge chair, the ground below littered with bird bits and pieces.  Who the hell was going to clean that up, I wondered, then went back to making dinner. Did I mention it was vegetarian?

Today I found out who was going to clean it up. The squirrel. It came back to finish off the job. It started with a wing, then found the rest of the head, and finally it got the nuts, er, balls, to climb atop the lounge chair and eat the torso. I sat still in front of the window to watch the horror, and I swear that squirrel looked me in the eye. You’re next, he told me telepathically.  Then he hopped back on the tree with the corpse and ate it all.

 

Of course, I had to Google that shit. Apparently, squirrels are omnivorous. Much like my husband, squirrels can eat vegetarian only so long before they have a hankering for a thick, juicy steak, um, bird. At least I can rest easy, knowing that I don’t need to get the whole family tested for rabies. What I want to see is a hawk swoop in and eat that squirrel, then whatever eats a hawk to eat it, and so on. The circle of life, right in my own backyard.  If that doesn’t make for some lovely dinner entertainment, I don’t know what does.  Please pass the salad.

Objects of Desire

Without their testicles, aren’t male cats supposed to get fat and lazy and decidedly asexual? Someone needs to explain that to my sister’s cat, Max. He was fixed years ago, but recently he has developed a new found lust for life. It’s like someone slipped a little Cialis in his Meow Mix.

Usually when you think about a horny pet, you think about getting your leg humped by a dog. When I was young, my family had one of those dogs, the kind that would hump anything. Gus was the Dog Juan of the neighborhood, and even though he was a fat dachshund with a horrible flea problem, he still scored with all the bitches. I remember seeing him trying to mount an English sheepdog once. He could have used a step ladder, but somehow, he made it work with his short, stubby legs.
  
He didn’t even care if his paramour was another dog. He would hump guests in our house, once even going so far as to mount my mother’s date’s chest when he sat down. I guess Gus was a big fan of his cologne or his looks or something. Whatever the reason, he found that man irresistible, just as my mother did, which is even more disgusting than the dog humping him if you think about it, which I would prefer not to do. Gus also used to hump our cat. Our male cat. He was the kind of dog who would find a way to meet his needs even if it went against the grain of acceptable animal lovemaking protocol.

In his defense, Gus was not neutered, so he swung those plums of his proudly, strutting up and down the street while his balls slapped from side to side. But my sister’s cat, Max, well, his little kitty ball sack is supposedly empty. Is he regenerating his testicular tissue, or did they leave him a little something something when they snipped him?

It all started when my sister received a Slanket for Christmas a few years ago. A Slanket is the upscale version of a Snuggie, and hers was the same gray color as Max’s fur. Max was instantly attracted to it, and whoever would get all comfy under it could be guaranteed that Max would soon come round and mount the Slanket, humping it until the Slanket wearer shoved him away. If Max had balls, they most certainly would have been blue-gray from all that Slanket interruptus.

Max decided to branch out, looking for more worthy recipients of his passionate attention. His newest target is my brother in law’s dirty laundry. When no one is looking, Max sneaks into the closet and selects one of the articles of clothing from the laundry basket. He drags whatever he decides to seduce into the foyer, where he sweet talks it with a stream of annoying mews. He spoons it, holding it gently between his teeth and front paws, giving it a playful kick now and again. Then, when he thinks he’s provided enough foreplay to the t-shirt or boxer briefs or sock that he has chosen, he mounts it and, as they say, goes to town.

My sister, being what most people would describe as “normal,” does much in her power to discourage this behavior. She makes a point to limit Max’s access to articles of temptation by keeping up with the laundry, or, at the very least, keeping my brother in law’s closet door closed. If Max slips by her undetected, she will get up and take away the alluring garment, leaving Max sexually frustrated and thus reduced to taking care of himself the way human men wish they could but most, due to poor flexibility or small penis size, find themselves unable to. Even though Max would lick his wounds, as it were, he still had that sheepish look on his cat face, like he got caught doing something he knew he shouldn’t have done, but he just couldn’t help himself. If he was lucky enough to complete his dance of love, Max would slink off, leaving the frock feeling used and cheap.

When my family visited my sister’s family over the holidays, we were able to witness Max’s sexual addiction to the contents of the laundry basket. My youngest daughter thought he was so cute, the way he played with her uncle’s clothes. My teen thought it was gross. I found the whole display hilariously fascinating. My husband found me gross. 

I often look at my own pets and reflect on how odd it is to have animals living in one’s house, just walking around, doing what animals do. They don’t kill each other, but given the opportunity, they will snuff the life out of a centipede. They beg for food and eat like every bite is their last. They sleep peacefully, knowing they are safe. And in the case of Max, they make love like their very species depended on it. Just because your pet is spayed or neutered doesn’t mean he or she can’t ruin the reputation of your slippers or favorite sweater and freak out your children at the same time.

Here’s what I want to know. When my cats purr  and walk across me and knead me with their tender little paws, is it because they are showing affection, they think of me as their mother, or they want to cross an unspoken interspecial barrier? When I pet my kitty, am I sending him the wrong signal? I like my cats, but I don’t like like my cats. And poor Max, are his needs not being met to such a degree that he has to abuse the dirty laundry? Is that the cat equivalent of paying a hooker to take a dump on you?

It must be nice to be an animal. You eat when you’re hungry. You crap wherever because you feel like it. You can sleep just about anywhere or with anyone. And if you’re feeling randy, anything that’s laying about can do the trick: another animal, a leg, even a dirty t-shirt. What do you care? It’s not like you have to clean up afterwards. And if you choose to, hell, you’ve got a perfectly good tongue. Your sex tape might end up on YouTube, but no one will think less of you. We should all be so lucky.

Bad Karma on Yom Kippur

I must have some things to atone for over the past year. And I did choose to not go to services last night, which I based on the amount of rain relative to the amount of exhaustion and general blah I was feeling. So it seems only fair that I experience some things out of my control this morning as a reminder of some sort, possibly of Murphy's Law, which I assume is the English equivalent of a good dose of Jewish guilt.

I skipped the gym today, so I put on some jeans and a cool shirt to take the girls to school. MJ got me this shirt, a long sleeve flowy yoga garment the color of a nice claret. And since I am solidly in my fast, I felt willowy and lithe and so I put on this shirt that normally makes me look like a red globe grape. I loved the shirt, and MJ for buying it for me. She did so because she knew I would never treat myself to something like that, since I tend to shop the clearance rack at Target for a taste of funky on a budget. And she thought it would look good on me. And I am pretty sure she also thought if it didn't fit she could keep it for herself.

When I got back from my school run, my husband K was still home, late for work even by his standards. I came inside and he was standing there with a wad of paper towels in his hand. "Did you or the girls spill something over by the back door?" he asked. "Nope, no one was over there. Why?" "I was going to check the locks and I noticed some wet spots on the floor. But it doesn't smell." Not yet, I thought. Wet doesn't just mysteriously show up on the floor. We walked over to the place where he had cleaned the floor moments before, and the cats followed us over to inspect as well. "You sure no one spilled a drink over here?" He took his wad of Kleenex to the trash can in the kitchen, and I stood there thinking, no one drinks pee for breakfast, knowing that piss is the only possible explanation for the strange puddle.

And for confirmation, Yoko sort of squatted right in front of me, mere inches from the floor vent, and strained to produce another accident while I watched. "It's pee," I called out to my husband. "I'm watching Yoko do it again." I stood there to let her finish. No point in chasing her, as then I would have a trail of pee to clean instead of a reasonably well contained leak. She sat there for a while, obviously not enjoying the process or the audience. "Do you think you can take her to the vet this afternoon if I make an appointment?" I asked K. "I guess so," he answered before rushing out the door.

I called the vet's office, hoping for an after lunch appointment. Instead, they wanted her right then, for an all day observation and potential urine collection. Good luck with that one. So I tucked Yoko under my arm and carried her to the garage, where her cat carrier is stored. She thought she was finally going to see what was behind that door we always step through, but then she spied the box, her arch enemy, and the fight was on.

Shoving her into that box was like lacing a giant squid in a straight jacket. Arms and legs I didn't know she even had shot out and blocked the opening of the carrier, and she hooked onto anything within reach with her little switchblades. We wrestled for about a good five minutes before I finally shoved her in. I am not convinced one of her limbs wasn't lost in the process, but I am sure she can regenerate at some point in the future, probably when she will have to be put back in the carrier to come home. She hissed at me but I ignored it. I put her on the front seat and backed out of the driveway before I realized she got me, that I was hit. My palm and the side of my right hand were a little shredded and bloody. We didn't speak the entire way there. Once inside the vet's office, I gave them Yoko's information and story while she tried desperately to claw her way out of her cage. I was more than happy to pass her over to the vet tech.

When I got home, I went upstairs to take a shower. That's when I saw the holes in my brand new couture yoga shirt. That bitch on wheels sliced my shirt open in three different places, and I wore it in public, looking like her crack whore owner. A series of bloody scratches peeked through the holes, adding to the overall sex-for-drugs appearance. That right there is why I shop Target and not Haute Look. Because I manage to fuck up the good stuff the first time I put it on. Somehow I have a hard time believing things like this happen for a reason. Why today? Why that shirt? Why now, when Yoko has never had a bladder infection in her life? I can only assume it is my fault, that I must deserve this because of some transgression I committed. If not, then it is further evidence that sometimes life sucks. Or that it's just a shirt, and get over it. I'll let you know if I figure that out. Right after I pay the vet bill.