My Cats Live in an Action Movie

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What is it like to be a house cat? We will probably never know, any more than we can know what it’s like to be a bat, or a beetle, or an elephant. Yet for whatever reason, some of us allow them to live in our homes with us, as if this isn’t a disruption in the natural order of things.

Cats are not meant to live indoors. They cannot be controlled or tamed or broken. Every cat has an insatiable need to run and hunt and play and do things it can never fully experience in your living room, no matter how many dangly toys or how much catnip you keep on hand.

Every cat is a Walter Mitty in its own mind.

And my cats live in an action movie.

Let me paint a picture for you:

Every night, they go off into exile. (The cats have a habit of jumping on the bed and pawing or licking my wife’s face, which wakes her up, so … nope.) They do not like it in exile. So they wait.

They know not exactly when their keepers will return, but they know we will come just before the sun. So they bide their time and gather their strength, until that critical moment, when — through the walls — they hear my feet hit the floor.

They know my pattern. They know what I must do when I first rise. I will leave the bedroom, go to the kitchen for a glass of water, collect the clothes by the stairs, head downstairs to the bathroom, then suit up for the day. All this I will do alone. All this, I will do while groggy and disoriented.

This is their moment.

They position themselves strategically: behind furniture, around corners, under chairs.

The door opens.

And as I pass, they dart into my path, weaving around my plodding feet like rebel speeders through the legs of an imperial AT-AT. They know that if they time it just right, they can do the unthinkable: they can bring me down. (Bonus points, apparently, if they get me going down the stairs — this is their favorite place to attack.)

They didn’t get me this morning.

But the Empire cannot keep them down forever.

ATAT

So they will pretend to be my friends again until tomorrow morning, when they attack again.

attackatdawn

This post is part of Stream-of-Consciousness Saturday.

Toddler Life, Chapter 773: Disposable Income

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In case you were wondering, here’s what it takes to (in no particular order):

  • cause a truly diabolical racket when I hit the wrong light switch at 5:30 in the morning
  • cause a cardiac event in a thirty-something dad upon the aforementioned racket
  • immediately disable a newish appliance that was perfectly functional five seconds ago
  • induce stress sweats on and off throughout the day in the same dad at the thought of having to repair, rewire, and/or replace said appliance
  • cause same dad to invent previously unconceived-of words to approximate his thoughts on the matter at large

yep, to cause all that, and a fair bit of heartburn in mom besides, it takes fifty-eight cents.

20180321_170557.jpg

You probably didn’t know such a wide array of “benefits” could be had for such dirt-cheap prices. I certainly didn’t. But that’s only because as a more-or-less reasonable human, I never thought of using a garbage disposal to dispose of unwanted coin.

This is just one ignorance your young children will be only too happy to cure you of. (I know, I know. Don’t end with a preposition. What’s the old joke? “Fine … only too happy to cure you of, A-HOLE?”)

Coins actually fit rather nicely into a garbage disposal, as it turns out. The aural experience, though, is where it gets really exciting. They make a delightful little plinking sound as they slide down the drain. They make a sound like the end of the universe when you turn the disposal on. And then dad makes sounds like he’s dying as he fishes them out again, withdrawing his hands again and again crusted with gelatinous, vomit-inducing food waste.

Luckily, this problem, like so many household problems, is solved with a few minutes on Google and a willingness to get really unspeakably dirty. (I don’t even want to look at my hands, even hours later, for fear I’ll actually be able to see the microbes. Hand soap is great for the stuff that lives in the light, but for the gunk down in the drain, lurking in the pipes… antibacterial is not enough.)

So there’s that.

I found myself almost asking “who did this,” but when you’re a parent and you find yourself asking questions like “who put a handful of coins in the garbage disposal” or “who smeared cake frosting on the dog” or “who stacked every Lego in the house on my pillow”, you’ve already lost the fight. You just fix it and move on, lest you risk losing your mind listening to the denials.

Sidenote: Not sure how long I can continue to call this series “Toddler Life” with a straight face, given sprout #1 is six and sprout #2 will soon be four. But I am certain the series will continue, no matter the name.

 

Forgot.

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After a really productive, really invigorating session editing the novel today, I turned around and left my reading material at work.

Today was rough. We were up way too late (hooray SUPERCELL STORMS), long day at work. All I wanted was to kick back and read a little. I don’t even read every night. But I really wanted to read tonight.

I NEEDED IT.

TooMuch

I know exactly where I left it. I can picture it, clearly, on my desk. Perched atop a small pile of ungraded papers. Jauntily turned at a thirty degree angle, for ease of picking up and chucking in my bag.

Where it will stay.

Unread.

Blarg.

So Scientology is on TV Now.

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Remember that time yesterday when I posted about the dumb things you do that remind you how dumb you really are?

That feeling is only salved by knowing that there exist in the world, somewhere — as a result of sheer statistics — people dumber than you. Honestly, the only person who can’t say there’s somebody dumber than him out there probably died hundreds of thousands of years ago, before our species properly had its feet under it (literally) and had not yet invented the capacity for realizing how stupid one is, let alone the language to kvetch about it. (RESIST THE URGE TO MAKE A POLITICAL JOKE RESIST THE URGE TO MAKE A POLITICAL JOKE RESIST THE URGE TO MAKE A POLITICAL JOKE)

So, you know. There are dumber people than us out there; we just don’t always see them.

But sometimes.

Sometimes they explode into visibility with fireworks and press releases and white-hot glowing idiocy.

Scientology is launching its own line of streaming TV programs.

Yeah.

Their tagline? “The only thing more interesting than what you’ve heard is what you haven’t.”

HAhahahahahahahahaNO.

Nope. Nopenopenope NOPE. Negatory. The cat is out of the bag on you already, Scientology. The horses have left the barn. The bell is rung. The milk is spilled. Choose your cliche; the world at large is already wise to your particular brand of horse puckery.

My first brush with Scientology (man I feel lame for even capitalizing it but rules of English trump even my disdain for acknowledging the titles of idiotic things as things which deserve recognition — heck, rules of English trump even my searing hatred for use of the word “trump” as a verb anymore) was in high school. Way back in the days when this budding atheist still thought there might be something to religion, in the maybe-there-was-a-creator-we-just-can’t-know-but-why-would-it-care-what-we-did-on-Sundays kind of way.

But even then, in the larval stages of my skepticism and the infancy of my critical thinking, all it took was one mention of the word “Xenu” and I ran away faster than you can say Tom Cruise.

So: a network? For Scientology?

This is dumb on at least three fronts:

  1. People already watching religious TV (bless their hearts) won’t be switching over to Scientology TV. It’s not like how you got bored with The Walking Dead and stopped watching it and you’re looking for another show in your life. People like their religious illusions and cling to them fiercely, and — more bad news, I know — IF they leave their religions, most likely end up with NO religion rather than any other religion. (Actually I don’t know if that’s true, but it must be. It has to be.)
  2. People not already watching religious TV are not about to start watching religious TV. We have better things to do with our time. Also, we know better. Move along.
  3. So, the only people who will be watching Scientology TV are those who are a) already members of the “church”, or b) chemically inebriated and watching for a laugh. The B’s won’t be offering up any money to you, and the A’s, given that your “religion” has as a central paradigm the extraction of as much money as possible from its faithful, are unlikely to have MORE money to offer up to you or your advertisers.

Oh, and that’s without even mentioning the nuclear submarine in the kiddie pool: Scientology is terrible. As a religious institution, it’s worse than most. Like, astronomically worse. It abuses its members. It attacks members who leave the “faith”. And its core beliefs about the world and about people — well.

It would almost take a divine being to create something so bad.

In that way, perhaps, Scientology TV might be the evidence for a divine being that will finally settle the argument.

Or maybe it will be evidence that our evolution truly did stop eons ago.

Either way, there has to be something better on TV. I mean, surely there are some reruns of The Walking Dead on, somewhere.

Hammer Time (or: a Scientific Study in How Dumb You Can Be)

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You never fully realize quite how dumb you are as when you’re unintentionally inflicting bodily harm on yourself. Needless to say, after I hit my hand with a hammer yesterday, I’ve been spinning out inside my own head.

I mean, we’re not exactly talking about a difficult job here. I was building a set of stairs for our upcoming production, and *bam*. A straight shot to the karate-chop end of my hand right below the pinky. Didn’t glance the nail, didn’t take my eye off the target; just took a bad swing. Whammo.

And I feel *so, so dumb*. Here’s a task where you know people make mistakes all the time. Carpenters — good ones, ones good enough to build a career on it! — hit their thumbs with hammers, maybe not every day, but at least often enough that if you see one with a blackened thumbnail, you don’t have to ask them what happened. You know! Driving nails is a task where the mistake is not only possible, but given enough time and enough reps, *inescapable*. So if anything, extra care should be given to the task.

Worse still: consider the location of the injury. I wasn’t holding the nail between thumb and forefinger, the classic position for the smashing of a thumb. The nail was already partly driven; I was leaning over the lumber, my hand twisted around to keep the whole wobbling structure steady. Trying to assert leverage where leverage was not leverageable. A dangerous activity in a precarious position: that calls for over-the-top ultimate doubletime caution.

Worst of all: I was demonstrating to a student who had never attempted the task how to drive nails. (Why, at 17 years old in a drama class, a student was having his first brush with driving nails is an issue I’ll leave for another time.) The “teachable moment”, a moment where I know the pressure is on and a student is more likely to remember things that happen than usual, when I’m taking on the aforementioned delicate task. A situation which demands unyielding, double-bagged-for-your-protection caution.

In other words, I looked like an idiot (to my student) while looking like an idiot (attempting the job with, let’s just say, sub-optimal methodology) while looking like an idiot (screwing up the job in the first place).

That’s stupidity cubed. That’s dumb as the proverbial bag of hammers (a cliched simile that hurts me particularly, today, to employ) to the 3rd power.

That, in other words, is very, very dumb.

And if I can be so very dumb in a situation that calls so explicitly for care, caution and attention to detail three levels deep, then how dumb am I acting in other areas of my life, where I don’t give a second thought to the possible consequences?

It’s something to think about; something to feel seriously humble about. And it’s something I’ll be reminded of again and again in the coming days, every time I reach my hand into my pocket (ouch) or try to lift anything with my left hand (yikes) or even lightly rest my hand on a tabletop (yep that hurts too). Or, y’know, when I return to the shop to finish building the aforementioned set of stairs, cuz THAT AIN’T DONE EITHER.

So now I’m curious: what acts of stupidity have made your own idiocy fully apparent to you? What deeds of dumbness have dropped the drapes of false confidence from your eyes? (I’d say I’m doing research but mostly I just want to feel better about myself.)

Related reading: the “You Are Not So Smart” Podcast.