Cat pee on my shoulders…makes me stinky

Here’s a sad thing: It’s December and we have absolutely no holiday spirit in our house. It’s like we can’t feel Christmas or Yuletide or Feastmas or anything. We are numb. Is this the result of having Christmas shoved down our throats since the end of August? Are we becoming even more curmudgeonly? Are we really pod people from the planet Mars and have no actual emotions? I don’t know. All I know is that I do not have the vim or vigor required to create fabulous holiday posts, not like last year.

Instead, I’m going to talk about our cat, Evie.

So small, so precious. Such a sweet baby.
Or IS she?

Evie has a thing about peeing. It’s a fetish, really. And, apparently, I do it wrong.

Here’s what happened:

Sometime this past summer, Evie realized that as soon as I get home from work, I run upstairs to the bathroom. She’s been with us since 2008 but only just now noticed this habit of mine. Anyhow, one day, curiosity got the best of her (she is a cat, after all) and as I headed toward the tinkletorium, she raced me up the stairs and into the bathroom to see what I do in there. The moment I sat down, she scurried over, sat in front of me and watched me, watched me pee. It was weird. But it got weirder. She started rubbing against my legs and then she checked my progress, poking her nose between the seat and the bowl. Was she sniffing what I’d had for lunch? Was she making sure it was my pee coming out and I wasn’t faking it? She purred and…well, encouraged me, rubbing against and looking up at me like she was letting me know I was doing a good job.

“How’s it going in the potty? Are you doing this right? Let me see. I need to see if you are peeing the right way.”

Evie, I’ve been peeing for 41 years and 39 of those peeing years were done on toilets. Mostly. I think I’ve got this down by now.

As I finished, she hopped up on my lap and gave me nose kisses. “Good job, Mommy! You peed correctly! You are so smart!” Then she hopped back down and waited for me to clean up, stand up, and flush the toilet.

OHMYGOD, the toilet flushing. It’s so magical.

She stood, little cat hands on the seat, and watched everything swoosh down the hole with an intensity usually reserved for dogs and food or children and candy. When the flush finished, she leapt upon the seat and stuck her entire front half into the bowl where she started playing with the potty water, splishing it and splashing it and even drinking a bit. Because she is a classy lady.

This has become a ritual.  Every. Damn. Workday. And it’s not like I can just evade her or shut her out or pick her up and toss her down the stairs violently. You try catching a cat on a mission when your bladder is full-up and ready to burst.

Since she’s so fussy over peeing, you’d think she’d confine hers to the litterbox, right?

She doesn’t.

Her poop, yes. She’ll come racing in from whatever she was doing outside to run downstairs and into the bathroom where she shuts the door and poops in her box. But pee? Oh, her nasty cat pee is the ultimate weapon.

Should we forget to clean her box one day, she’ll pee on the couch.

If Gabe is too unloving throughout the morning, she’ll find his important papers and pee all over them.

This started when we got her. I took her to the vet for the very first time, it was a bad experience for us both, and that night, she squirmed her cute little kitten self up onto the bed, walked right up my legs, glared at me, squatted, and peed all over the comforter while staring straight at me. And then she took off. I was stunned.

She’s used this weapon against us ever since.

The worst, though, was the one time we angered her beyond measure. I don’t recall what it was we’d done, but I remember telling Gabe, “Oh, we’re going to pay for this!” hoping she’d get something that could be cleaned and wouldn’t have to be tossed. We were on the lookout for days but found nothing. During that time, we cleaned the house, folded the laundry, dusted, all that jazz…and no pee. I thought maybe our little girl was growing up and finding better ways to express her anger.

Evie dreams of getting us back. That’s what she does all day long.

I was wrong.

One day, maybe a few weeks after The Angering Incident, whatever it was, I got dressed for work, ran downstairs, put my jacket on and left the house. When I got to work, I removed my jacket and sat down and…smelled cat pee. I sniffed around. It wasn’t on my chair. It wasn’t on my jacket. Not my shoes. Not anything else nearby, not that anything else could have been peed upon; I was at work. But the longer I sat there, the stronger it became.

Finally, I got fed up and went to the bathroom. I took off my shirt and examined it with my nose. Guess what? Evie sprinkled little bits of pee on the back shoulder of the shirt when it was in the clean laundry basket. She did it in such a way that it dried quickly and was not smellable when we folded our clothes. It was sleeper agent pee, activated when the shirt was on the body. The more the shirt warmed up, the stronger the scent became. Of course, this wasn’t a shirt that I could go without for the day as I wasn’t wearing anything else underneath or over the top.  And I was super poor at the time so couldn’t run to Target or the thrift shop to buy another shirt. Also, I live 20 minutes from work so it’s not like running home to change was an option. And it had gotten onto my bra strap, anyhow, so I was all peed up no matter what.

I did what anyone would do in this situation. I put my shirt back on, found some Lysol, returned to the bathroom, sprayed myself down, waited for that smell to dissipate a little, returned to my desk and put on a sweater, hoping to mask the odor of urine du chat. When anyone came near me, I yelled at her to stand back and hold her breath; we’d communicate via sign language and she’d better be obvious since I don’t actually know ASL.

It was a long day. I was so angry when I got home. I lectured Evie. She smirked at me, amused at her wicked clever ways.

You know what? Now that I’m remembering all this, I think when I get home tonight, I will miss the toilet and pee on her. We’ll see how she likes it.

How can something that started out this sweet be so very evil? How??

My True Friends: a spoken-word poem in writing

Aw, crap. So, I had President’s Day off and I forgot I didn’t already have a post scheduled in the hopper and now it’s Tuesday evening and I need to have something brilliant for Wednesday (yes, I know what day of the week it is but pretend you’re feeling my panic on Tuesday evening, ok?) Sadly, there’s no brilliance to be had because everything I’m working on still needs a ton of editing.

My solution: laziness. I’m just going to stick something here, something I wrote a year or two ago after talking to a friend who does powerful spoken-word stuff. She made me realize I do not have that kind of passion or pain and that I’m rather shallow and maybe even boring. Then I started thinking about what I would do if I had to do a reading.

If I were a spoken word poet, this would be my poem:

My friends and I agree
that the process of moving from youth to aged
is strange
our bodies again mysterious, delving into the unknown,
reminding us of the gifts given and taken by puberty
We are new at this because yesterday we were fresh from college
and today, our children are fresh in college
These new things must be explored because they are yet to be
understood.

My true friends, my close friends
the friends of my soul and of long nights with stars and of whispered childhood secrets
Those friends and I agree
That our changing bodies-
these globulin masses that contain the USness of us-
give us moments of fright
but also moments of wonder
and we find new magic in an old world

By and large, the favorite change
among the True Friends
is the one that turns us once again
or maybe for the first time
into coo-ing new parents
peering into an infant’s freshmade
dirty diaper
to see what small bodies evacuate, leave behind
to see the magical residue that quickly becomes a chore but is so shining and momentous at first

Only with us, with these friends, we stare not into a
tiny cloth or synthetic holding apparatus.
We stare into a porcelain tank
typically called The Toilet.
We stare in wonder at what we have made because
once again, it is a magical thing to be able to make
poop

Remember when we didn’t think about it? Remember when it was just something that needed to be done and just we did it?
No more!
Now it is Triumph! Now there is alchemy involved
concoctions of remembering to get it just right-
correct fiber placement and
plenty of hydration
and a little oil to get things moving slickly

My own poopery
not as prevalent as it once was
has become a source of curiosity
and sometimes pain
and often of a hard little belly bump like a perfectly round stone tucked away in a large pocket weighing down the garment of my guts
but it is also a wonder and a gift
because when I can stare into the watery depths
of the toilet bowl to see my creation
and I can think to myself
Another job well done, four days in a row
I know that I have succeeded in that age-old joke of
Staying Regular
and I know
that I am getting old.

And my true friends – they agree.

Thank you, thank you. I’ll be here all week.

The mystery of the littlest poop

It’s finally time for my first of many Tales from Toiletopia! I’m so excited and I dedicate this post to Normal For Norfolk, who shares my taste for poop. Wait! No! I mean stories about poop. Dammit.

Back when I worked in another place, the greatest thing about our building was that we didn’t have to share a bathroom with the public. Yes, that is snobby and elitist but I am squeamy about sharing my toilet time and having to use a public potty just creeps me out. The one downside to not sharing the bathroom with the public, though, is you can’t blame abnormalities on “them”; you know it came from within the building, like those threatening phone calls to the babysitter. So one day, I walked into our little restroom and headed to my favorite stall. When I pushed the door open, something on the floor caught my eye. It was a little round poop. A tiny turd. A marble-sized piece-a’ feces. It was on the floor right in front of the toilet, tucked far enough back that you didn’t see it until you were in the stall.

I reacted accordingly and professionally: I exited the room to find my co-hort-worker,  quietly sidled up to her desk and whispered, “Meet me in the bathroom,” and then slithered away again. Once we reconnoitered, I showed her the offending mass of excrement that was still lying there like a lost…well, a lost poop, really. She fah-reaked and that sent us into hysterical giggles but we knew that at any moment, someone could come in and see us squatting down like children looking at a bug only we were looking at a piece of poop and laughing like crazy people. That would have been hard to explain so we had to take immediate action. Like ninjas or Charlie’s Angels or maybe like Charlie’s Ninjas, we locked the bathroom stall door from the outside (you can totally do that with a quarter if you have the right kind of door) and raced to fetch gloves and Clorox wipes. The co-hort- worker really wanted protective face gear but we didn’t have any so she had to make do with a paper towel over her nose and mouth. We donned the gloves and carefully (no HAZMAT team has ever been more cautious) using about 70 sheets of toilet paper, picked the little turd up and tossed it into the toilet to flush it all away. Then we hand-mopped the entire floor area with Clorox wipes, put those in a bag along with our gloves and her face protection, tied it all up, and crammed it down to the bottom of the trash receptacle. To be on the safe side, we Lysolled the entire stall from top to bottom. I’m a little surprised we didn’t asphyxiate ourselves. We washed our hands as  thoroughly as possible at least five times then slathered anti-bacterial goo up to our elbows. It was like we were clean-up professionals, not mere office workers.

We didn’t want to think too hard about who had left that little present but we would have liked to have known if it was intentional or not. And if not, how did it get there? We had our theories but we will never know for sure.  I can say with surety, however, that it was a long time before we could look any of our co-workers in the eye.