[944] Puurrrson

I find my cats remarkably annoying. It’s remarkable because I’ve had pets a good portion of my life, and only ever felt compelled to describe them as annoying now. My cats growing up were in their own world and de-clawed. My dogs were intelligent and chill. It might have been annoying to clean up dog poop or cat puke, but those weren’t things you could blame them for. Brushing isn’t super fun, necessarily, but petting a soft animal tends to be.

Pets are all about a qualitative verse quantitative discernment. The joy, companionship, compliments, or sense of ownership and responsibility tend to massively outweigh the negatives. There are hidden benefits you might not even consciously realize in being able to relate what you’re thinking or doing to something alive verses the incidental face your faucet might make. One of my cats just showed up one day. The other I got from a pet store thinking it was kind of messed up for me to leave a, formerly, mostly outdoor cat alone for days at a time. This means, of course, they don’t get along or play with each other.

What makes my cats annoying is that no time spent cuddling or in my lap is enough time. The outdoor one, Scampi, has a homing beacon for shit I don’t want him to jump on. He’s always underfoot while cooking or using the bathroom. He’s tried climbing on me 3 times since I started writing this less than 10 minutes ago. He’ll dart out the door when I’m about to leave for days, leaving me wondering how he’s navigating the cold. He’s straight up hit/clawed at my face when he’s gotten annoyed that I showed the other cat, Maxi, any attention. Fuck this cat, and the endless stream of farts after he gets into the trash or opens my fucking toaster oven to lick a greasy pan dry.

Maxi likes to sleep on top of me, and both cats start shit where no shit need be started. I’ve yet to throw Scampi out to live back outside courting worms and ticks. I haven’t taken Maxi back to the store. They’re cats. I’m a human. Everything about them starts and ends with me. My cats aren’t annoying, I’m allowing myself to be confused about our relationship, my responsibility and agency.

I question how much I actually enjoy having pets verses the things about animals I didn’t have to deal with before I found myself living with my ex-girlfriend’s cat. I don’t like buying litter, food, and medicine. I don’t want to have to remember or plan on feeding every day. I’ve bought like $400 worth of things to try and automate as much as possible for as long as possible. I need a cat door that doesn’t let in the current strays I see on my camera. I like the idea of occasionally petting an animal considerably more than really any aspect of the upkeep. My neck and back cannot abide sleeping in ways that doesn’t constantly “disturb” the animals wedged around me.

How likely is it I get rid of my cats? The probability is almost zero. Animals present you with a constant reckoning. Can you really not be bothered, not afford, not care, not remember, or not try? What does it say about you, if you let your feelings, small, incidental as they are, trump your obligation and choice to care for a pet? There’s an overriding quality that pervades pet ownership that can hardly be reduced to words. At least, there must be if people are willing to put up with the kinds of animals I encounter in other households.

What else would I be doing? Hanging out with friends? It’s not either or. Looking for another housemate or girlfriend? I don’t know that I’ve ever genuinely looked for that more than rolled with the moment. Is my life so occupied and fulfilling I’m just above errant cat dealings? Hardly. I re-did the math around my rural lifestyle and each time it really sinks in how ridiculously low I’ve managed to get my bills. One paycheck pays the internet for the year, 2 the electricity, 1 more my property taxes, car registration, contacts, and if I’m really feeling frisky, 1 more knocks out car insurance. For those keeping score, that’s 2.5 months making $20 an hour. Another way to say this, that’s 400 hours on the clock to buy 95.5% of my time doing otherwise if RENT got the math right. What wouldn’t you do with 5% of your time in order to have a place to shit, shower, and sleep for a year? If anything, my major push is to condense that 5% of time into speed-renovations so I can actually focus my time verses merely have it available.

This is how I train myself to ask what is the quality of what I’m doing. It takes practice and examination. Quantitatively, I’m around $8,000 in debt. Qualitatively, I know more than half of it is what I’ll spend each year on bills, car repairs, or buying tools/toys throughout the year. I don’t feel absolutely miserable like I did when I had the same amount of debt in service to a new car. When I glance over my shoulder at my table saw, I’m filled with hope and potential, not regret. Prioritizing respect for my time and attention is how I leave functionally zero effort “free money" jobs, and persuade myself I’m not sacrificing larger conceptions of my being in taking on more “normal” soul-sucking roles.

I think I have insight into how people weaponize their feelings by being informed by this. I had to work and earn my perspective, but you don’t have to work to feel in and of itself. Whatever peace, clarity, or motivation I derive from organizing my life this way, every person has their version, healthy and productive or otherwise. And you have to ask what would happen if they didn’t have whatever feeble version they were clinging to if they’re unwilling or unable to do the same kind of work. I, of course, want to vehemently defend my decisions and place in life. I just happen to think it’s objectively better to have more time to do “whatever” with, even struggle with the potential aimlessness or wasted anger on cats, than it is to be enslaved, metaphorically or otherwise. It’s a perfectly debatable point. It may only be answerable at the level of the individual, such as there is one well-enough defined.

An individual is a type of focus. If it’s whatever a lens happened to rest on, like a cat, then you can’t expect anything more than you would of a cat. My unfocused lens is annoyed by cats. My focused lens reminds myself to not let the cat’s folly be my own. My focused individual gives myself the gift of a 5/95 split thought and reminder that small steps are still steps. That quality of my feelings needs to constantly be jostled back into the quantity of time I’ve spent trying to shape a deliberate perspective and type of work. I’m not okay otherwise. I’m not in a good place when I’m not doing the right kind of work. And if I don’t have the focus, can it really be said that I’m working more than “doing” or “killing time?” My TV shows don’t mindlessly run in the background, but it’s the wrong kind of work to memorize every character’s name.

I don’t know where to sort a recent Instagram post of former friends getting together to paint one of their houses. It’s hard to say why I follow them save the familiarity. They posted that they wouldn’t have been able to do the work without the other 2 that came over. The house appeared to be about the same size as the one I just got done painting by myself. The first shot even looked suspiciously like the same studiously-taped window. We’re all working on dramatically different things even if they look or sound the same. I can paint a house, just not with 3 friends. And I don’t want to work to maintain those kinds of friends more than paint my next house. Perhaps most people who have some relationship-ending problem with me know this as well.

Not cats, though. They don’t give a fuck what I want or where they sit with me psychologically. I can keep them fed, warm, and healthy until they die and it’s only going to have cost me money that could have been burgers. It’s a lot easier to get through life when you understand people like the pets who prioritize their coat or comfort or act confused you’d get angry when they lash out or fall to temptation at the trash can. It also feels fair to think of people like that. It feels like the underpinning Randian or New Left thought-policing fascism. “If you trust cats to vote, it’ll be law the right to eat your face!”

It feels fair to understand other people as though they are pets because the work you feel you’ve done to understand or take care of them is constantly betrayed. They want nothing to do with you anymore than your cat needs a warm cushion and scratches. Pretension is as much a self-protection mechanism as much as fascism. Both destroy the means of understanding the nature of work. It’s not to ingratiate and enrich. It’s to orient.

I’m working for the privilege of a focused series of directions that I think will most reflect my values. I understand that statement can be hijacked and co-opted by anyone. I don’t need more nights out with good-enough friends or acquaintances. I don’t need more stuff. I don’t need more attention. I need things to make sense. I need to feel like I have the tools and time to create the means by which things can make sense.

I genuinely wish I never clenched my jaw again. I wish I were never anxious. I have this remote dream of finding this level of chill and self-assuredness that just carries me through doors without having to touch them. I think I’ll get there when I have the money to put so many details of my annoying-cats aspects of my life on auto-pilot. I don’t find the zen in daily routine feeding or scooping. I’m not content in half-truth conversations about desire and shared goals. That’s what mostly constituted my college relationships. I want a counseling business as much as I’ve wanted any nondescript business. I want the freedom. I want to be able to demonstrate what my effort and personality has conjured without the self-loathing and confused bureaucratic baggage.

I don’t want to resent people anymore than I do my cats. I don’t know how to do that while considering them whole individuals who make the decisions they do. I don’t know how to do that thinking and writing about how and why they’ve clawed at me. I can accept my cats on their terms because they aren’t going to change. They’re especially not going to change for bad or nonsense reasons. Cats, at least in some cat form, desire my food, scratches, and warmth indefinitely, selfishly as any animal. I can’t pay people to take what I’m offering in time or otherwise. It’s an offer of a very particular kind of work they don’t feel they need or want or whatever. It’s dirty and chaotic, and they insist it must be lonely. My cats are terrible at pretending they aren’t lonely.