Tuesday, September 18, 2012

Undertakings I Have Abandoned Because of Boys

1. Training my cat to use a human toilet
2. Wearing natural deodorant
3. Most likely a bunch of other stuff that I can't remember right now

No one wants to think that they're changing their behavior to attract the opposite sex. Or maybe they do. I don't though. But there have been a few times when I've been forced to admit that that was what was happening. The natural deodorant story is pretty self-explanatory and uninteresting: It failed me and I smelled while trying to woo a guy (difficult, unsuccessful).

The cat training story is a pretty good one though, if only because it's so ridiculous. I had read on the internet that you could teach your cat to use a human toilet and I thought that would be great because I lived in a smallish apartment and it seemed that would cut down on litter smell. And, instead of cleaning the litter box, I'd only have to flush the toilet. So, I went to work on the project. Henry, my cat, was pretty good, but definitely unsure about the whole scheme. What was more convenient for me wasn't really for him. But he took to it, more or less.

He was really great at peeing into the toilet, but the stance for shitting was different and it seemed like he didn't feel totally steady. So, I made him his own toilet seat. I know that sounds like some crazy cat lady behavior, and will admit that it kind of is, but it was meant to be temporary. I took a piece of plywood, cut it into toilet seat shape, removed the lid from the toilet, and attached the plywood in its place, so the plywood sat over the real toilet seat. To attract the cat to the toilet, you have to arrange a sitz bath with kitty litter inside. You cut a hole in the sitz bath, gradually increasing the size of the hole until you just totally remove the sitz bath and the cat is going straight into the toilet. Even at the sitz bath stage, I was feeling pretty jazzed about the whole endeavor because I was already only having to flush after Henry and using almost no litter. The only hassle was having to remove the contraption when humans used the toilet. It wasn't a big issue though because hardly anyone ever came over.

Then one night I went out to a party. My friend and I had decided that we'd only make a brief appearance and have one drink because neither of us were really feeling it, and we both had stuff to do the next day (I had circus class with my ex). We arrived and walked into the kitchen to get drinks. There were two really hot guys standing at the bar/kitchen table. I should note that that almost never happens at parties I go to. I think we said hello, but that was about it. Party was pretty tame. I guess it's actually more fair to say that my friend and I were mostly just hanging out with each other and not socializing a ton. But then at some point, the really hot guy started talking to me and offering to go make me another drink. There were some brief moments of "I don't know. I have to go to circus class tomorrow morning" (Jesus, no wonder I'm single), but I did eventually relent and thus began a night of flirting and making out with this random guy. He was Latvian (I've mentioned him in at least one other post), but his English was great. He made little errors now and then that were adorable (calling the Metro the "Meetro"), but it was, for the most part, not at all difficult to communicate with him.

The night wore on. I think we left the party at about 6 am, if that gives you any indication of the level of intoxication reached.  We tried to take a cab to my house, but a neighborhood music festival was starting later that morning and the streets were closed, so we had to walk the last mile. We, or I, anyway, got to my house exhausted. He had to pee. I went in to check out the state of the bathroom. He followed me in. I noticed that Henry had pooped on the floor (something he was doing every now and then at that point in the training. A protest?). I apologized and cleaned it up and the Latvian said not to worry, he had cats and they did that occasionally as well. But then I looked at the whole toilet set up, with the plywood seat, the sitz bath, the litter and then I looked at the guy and thought, "We're wasted, he's not a native English speaker, this explanation is going to be way too long and weird, I'm so tired..." and then, drunkenly concluded to just not say anything. I actually thought that not explaining the set up at all would be less weird than accounting for the presence of some weird plastic thing in the toilet with pine pellets in it (probably not even identifiable by a Latvian as cat litter). I left him in the bathroom and went to my room and crashed.

He never said anything. I think he probably just aimed through the hole in the sitz bath? I have no idea. It was never spoken of and, a couple of hours after he left the next day (or rather, later that same day), I threw out the sitz bath and wooden seat, reattached the lid, and hauled out the litter box.

Tuesday, September 11, 2012

Feelings

I used to not really cry. I would cry out of frustration and I would cry when I would think of/try to remember my mom (who died when I was 5), but I didn't really cry out of sadness about anything that was happening in my life at that moment. I'm a little bit of an emotional robot and I was much worse back in the day. Then when I was 24 or 25, I moved to a new city where I knew no one, started grad school (which was waaaaaaaay harder than undergrad and which I hated), my boyfriend broke up with me, and my dog that I'd had since I was 8 died. This seriously all happened in about a month and the dog and boyfriend things happened on the same day.

Twenty-four or 25 years worth of closed floodgates burst open and I cried more than I'd ever had in my life. Still the most crying in a concentrated period of time I've ever done.

But now I cry all the time. I'm not a person prone to depression, so I mostly cry to stuff that just makes me feel a lot. I cry about sad stuff and I cry about happy stuff, but I think what I cry most about is people connecting with one another, people really understanding what someone needs and doing their best to provide that for them, even if whatever they're doing is relatively minor. Empathy, I guess. Especially empathy among the little guys, people that may not have a lot of power in other aspects of their lives, but do the little bit that they can because they're humans and they recognize that you have to be good to people.

I've recently read two things that made me cry a lot for the above-listed reasons. My face is still wet, nose still runny, and eyes still puffy from this one. I have no idea who this guy is—a friend just posted the link on Facebook. I guess he's a comedian or improv guy. And, like I mentioned above, I don't personally know what real, clinical depression feels like, but I've been very close to people that do and it's very clear that the author knows it well. He sounds like a busy guy and I would guess that delving back into his own depression isn't the most pleasant of tasks, but he dropped everything he was doing to help to the very best of his ability a total, anonymous stranger. Someone he may never hear from again. I can't really articulate how good that is.

This is the other tearjerker. The story about the street kids...  And it's just a great post overall. I think she sums it up nicely, "It really is those small acts of thoughtfulness and kindess that can turn your average day into a great day, restores ones faith in humanity or in extreme cases, stop someone from ending it all."

I'm a little burned out from studying all day to expound on that more, but I trust that you are all readers with brains in your head that are capable of coming up with your own conclusions.

I was going to close with a commercial I kept seeing during the Olympics that made me cry every time. I couldn't find it (don't remember what it was for), but found this one, which also made me bawl.