Tuesday, October 15, 2013

A Beginner's Guide to Cats

In about three weeks' time, my wonderful roommate Lisa and I are adopting a kitten.

I am ridiculously excited about this, which I know makes my parents roll their eyes a lot. (Sorry, parents.)

But Lisa, wonderful though she is, has spent all her life as a Dog Person. Which means that it is now up to me, a lifelong Cat Person, to instruct her in the ways of cat behavior.

Fortunately, the internet loves few things better than cats. Well, perhaps comparing Benedict Cumberbatch to otters, but that's about it.  So I have compiled a handy list of the strange things that cats do to better prepare Lisa for this kitten.

1. They are strangely fond of sleeping in sinks.







2. Similarly, they are incredibly good at being in places where they do not belong.

3. Boxes are basically cat heaven.





4. For animals that are so graceful, they are really quite skilled at being massive derps. For example:


5. Cat hair will get everywhere. I mean everywhere.


6. They are really, really insistent.


(And half the time, for instance when you are eating a salad or something else very unappealing to cats, they will harass you until they are absolutely, 100% certain they didn't actually want it in the first place.)

7. They tend to think that you've died if you close a door on them.

8. This and other cat idiosyncrasies sometimes make daily tasks rather difficult.

 

9. I don't know how they do it, but cat paws on top of you almost always feel like elephant feet. Especially when they are unexpected.

10. But let's be real here. They are just.



So.






Damn.






CUTE.






I, for one, am super excited to have cat hair on everything and enjoy the company of a little fuzzy creature again. I think it's going to be pretty awesome.

And don't worry, dear readers. This is the internet. There will be cat pics. ;)

Tuesday, October 1, 2013

Thoughts from Places: The Post Market

I'm feeling a little bit lame of late, dear readers. Pretty much all I do is go to work, come home, fiddle with edits or try desperately to catch up on How I Met Your Mother, go to sleep, and do it all over again. Not exactly the stuff of enticing blog posts, I'm afraid.

But I do have a pretty nice job, so I thought I'd tell you some interesting observations from working in a mail room.

1. A huge percentage of people are violently averse to licking envelopes.

2. The sound system plays a Pandora station that is essentially the same twelve songs on a loop, which has led to me making up some weird harmonies to Philip Philips' "Home" to pass the time. It has also led me to be way too amused at the way Pandora censors songs. It doesn't bleep things or add a different word; the sound just cuts out. So, the line in "Some Nights" sounds like "Who the      wants to die alone?" and "I Write Sins Not Tragedies" has two: First, "oh yes, but what a shame the poor groomsbride is a     " and "I chime in haven't you people ever heard of closing the      damned door" (so you can say damned but not goddamned? Okay...).

This clearly amuses me way too much.

3. There is such a thing as an international Forever stamp. And they're ROUND. (They're globe shaped. It's cool.)

4. There are a LOT of international students at this college. From all over! As someone who's more than a little sad that she is not currently zipping around London, it's really great to talk to people sending packages to Korea and postcards to Paris.

5. I really like this job. It's not what I want to be doing for the rest of my life, of course, but I like doing it a lot, and this is why: when I finish off someone's express mail right before the postman comes to pick everything up for the day, when I tell someone that another customer has left their tape behind and so there's free tape today, when someone finds out that sending a gift is going to be less expensive than they thought, even when I just give someone a booklet of stamps, they really, really mean it when they tell me thank you.