seven times five they were living creatures
I MAKE THE PLANS
Front-desk people always seem amazed when I call or email or use web-based appointment portals and I don’t need an appointment NOW NOW NOW. Yes, I am making a haircut appointment a month from now. Yes, I am scheduling the next eyebrow wax 5 weeks after this one. Yeah, I want to see the eye doctor in 2 weeks, it’s not an emergency but my insurance told me I could and I want new frames. Is this so hard to believe? Am I a super-scheduler superwoman because I can plan some shit in advance? It’s not even that I’m so organized, it’s more that I have a job and I’m picky about my free time and I don’t just want to take the crappy “next available” appointment. Sorry for being weird, front-desk people. You should ALL switch to web-based appointment portals and then you might not be so freaked. Except you might, because I used one recently to make an appointment a month out and someone from the office called me (the audacity!) and said, “Did you really mean to make this for a month from now? We were worried it might be a mistake.” Arrggggh.
ANIMALS ALSO MAKE THE PLANS
I have three cats. Rocko and Lola are an elderly pair, adopted at the same time in 2008 (although I was somewhat tricked into adopting Rocko, as I’ve mentioned). Murphy, Murph, Murf Durf, Murf Durf Surf-and-Turf, joined the band last year and was our first kitten ever. Then and now:
Lola refuses to eat any canned food, to the vet’s dismay, so she gets high-quality kibble twice a day. Unfortunately she is tiny and mellow and the boy cats decided that they also get high-quality kibble twice a day, and would eat their canned food and then go muscle her out of the way and eat all her dry food. In the case of Rocko, this was especially problematic, as not only is he fat and old and not in need of extra carbs, but also has barely any teeth due to a methamphetamine and Mountain Dew addiction (we can only presume), most of those teeth pulled under anesthesia at great expense to me. His dental disability and love of dry food results in the good old scarf-and-barf, and no thank you to saliva-softened but undigested kibble vomited up on my floors. No thank you, Rocko.
We purchased this cool autofeeder robot thing that you pair with your cat’s microchip, and now kibble is for Lola’s personal use only. Some of the more negative reviews said that the whole thing was a big fail because cats were afraid of the automatic door, and there’s a very long “training program” included with the feeder that involves setting the food cover door to close at different intervals, but I am happy to report that Lola took to it right away. In fact she seems pleased, in a bit of a mean-girl way, and sometimes makes multiple trips for dainty bites of kibble just to make the door whirr open and closed while the boy cats gawk in technological ignorance.
So it works like a charm, except one morning a few weeks ago when I came downstairs and the autofeeder door was completely knocked off its hinges. I suspect Rocko, desperate for CRONCHY FOOD, pawed at it until it came apart. I suspect him because I had barf to clean up. NO NO ROCKO but surprisingly he hasn’t done that since. Maybe it was just to prove that he could.
ALL THE CRAFTING FEELS
The kid and I are enjoying the competitive reality craft show —it is gentle and low-stakes and nicely paced. However, one unexpected over-the-top moment was the gay man who talked about making his own family, since apparently his family not only stopped talking to him when he came out, but SENT A FUNERAL WREATH TO HIS OFFICE with a card about how he was dead to them now and they were in mourning. Can you imagine? Not just to think the wrongheaded, petty, terrible, heartless thing, but to actually call up the florist and do it? Dear god, straight people: you can be SO extra sometimes! It made me think of Lucille.
ALL THE “NONE OF YOUR BUSINESS” FEELS
I want to discuss a strange phenomenon of public female-parent-shaming that seems to be happening more now that my kid is older. There’s a mommy-blog stereotype of being socially shamed for not doing enough—you know, the Pinterest, I Don’t Know How She Does It cliche of birthday parties with handcrafted cupcakes and over-the-top safety rules like requiring your kid wear a bike helmet to ride the carousel. That caused a predictable and equally-cliche backlash of moms “confessing” their “sins,” which are perfectly normal things like letting your kid have juice or wear the same pants for a week or watch TV so they’ll shut up for a minute. Mothers of small children can never win; so it goes.
But hark! You can’t win when they’re older either, because you can be shamed for doing too much! Flash forward: I have a teenager. Just one, and my teenager knows how to do laundry and heat up foods and other basic life skills (as well as more esoteric things like how to use a miter saw and start a fire and catch a fish and hip-check a fool into the boards). But there’s a certain type of person who, if I ever casually mention doing anything “motherly” for the teenager in their presence, will just about openly scoff. Like, I’ll be chatting with someone about domestic life and say something about getting home to make dinner, and the response will be practically mocking, “I’m sure your husband and child could feed themselves.”
Yes? They could? But is there something wrong with making dinner for the family? If I enjoy it, and it’s a nice predictable bit of the day? It’s not like the damn Waltons or anything either, we usually sit at the kitchen island and each have a phone or Kindle in front of us, but…dinnertime is a thing?
I don’t know if these people actually do think I’m some sort of 1950s throwback who is coddling my teenager to death with my home-cooked meals, or if they grew up in a lonely and feral state of nature with family members microwaving separate plates and retreating to separate parts of the house; but I maintain that just because someone is near the age of majority doesn’t mean they can’t eat a nice casserole every once in a while.
—mimi smartypants, stir occasionally.