ASPIRING IDIOT

Seeing as New Years is, well, right now, I felt the urge to get off my ass theoretically (which requires me to be physically on my ass, since typing standing up is weird) and write some shit.  You can't expect to make a dent in "being a writer" if you don't actually write.

My recent excuse is that my life is not particularly interesting right now - which is quite true, if you ask me what I did all day.  But if I look deeper, I can find the funny.

For Christmas I got a Fitbit, which turned many of my close friends and now my mother into raging lunatics who walk in circles in the kitchen so a computer will know they took 10,000 steps a day and send them a congratulatory email or an emoji of a happy donut.  I'm hoping that it will turn me into some sort of insane person who moves more than I do, because currently my life pace is that of "sloth," and not the cute kind you see in Facebook videos.

I knew it was working when the first day I got it, the Fitbit told me I had walked about 3,000 steps and slept 10.3 hours.  At least I knew I didn't have to send it back and now believe in the scientific accuracy of its abilities, since that was exactly what I did on Christmas day.  My parents kept asking me why I slept all the time when I was home, but they didn't seem to notice that my room is about as bright as coffin and my bed is as comfy as the dead people make coffins look.

One of the myriad problems with being a single female living in a studio apartment with two cats, aside from the obvious ones, is finding someone to look after them when I go out of town. I don't get out much, as one would imagine, so the times I go out of town are exactly the same times others do.  Yes, cats are self-sufficient, but I'm more worried about them somehow setting my apartment on fire than dying of starvation while I'm gone.  Seriously, it's happened before.

This time, I had a friend who wasn't leaving until Christmas Eve, and I was returning on the 26th, so I thought that those twoish days would be no problem for my animals that sleep even more than I do, but I've been wrong before. Like the time I came home and found that Rudy (the fat one) had managed to TURN ON THE GAS STOVE, complete with flame, while I was gone TO WORK for EIGHT HOURS. My apartment was 90 degrees inside in the dead of winter when I arrived home to the "tick tick tick" of the burner lighter that had likely been on nearly the entire day.

He has also managed to cause a sequence of events that started with knocking over golf clubs and ended with my lantern being ripped from the ceiling by its cord (during a weekend away) and locking himself IN the room with the litter box while consequently locking the other cat OUT, resulting in an odd-but-explainable cat shit in the bathtub drain.

This time, after arriving 45 minutes late to LAX around 1am and watching Charlie Sheen smoke with an airport cop while waiting for my Super Shuttle, I wasn't quite prepared for what awaited me.  I walked into my apartment and it looked like someone had sprinkled the entire place with cat litter, like some sort of fucked up fairy dust, my Hello Kitty stuffed animal was across the room from where she belonged, one of the cats (Rudy, no doubt) had taken it upon himself to scrape litter out of the box and onto the floor in front of the box thereupon making a second makeshift litter box on the floor that confused the other cat into using the floor instead of the actual box, and multiple unimportant things were on the floor instead of on counters or shelves where they belonged.

This all happened in TWO DAYS.  It's like leaving a fucking teenager alone with the liquor cabinet for the weekend. I'm not sure how they punted a large stuffed animal across the room or how the coverage of cat litter was both thorough and evenly distributed across the apartment, but it took me about an hour or vacuuming to feel as though I wasn't living in a zoo cage with monkeys that throw shit at you.  And I KNOW if Rudy had opposable thumbs that bastard would throw shit at me and then want to come cuddle.

Happy New Year, me.