August 2013

On the Depilation of Felines

I’m the baby of the family and pretty much acted like one for a long time. (Still do, kinda?, maybe?) But when I was 22, my older sister asked if I would babysit her cat while she went on a trip. She didn’t have any kids—Willie was her baby—and I wanted to prove that I was growing up, that I was responsible, so I agreed.

Wa lived in Boston, I in New York. She brought the cat down to me, told me how to feed him and clean the litter box, and left on her trip.

I tried to snuggle him posthaste—that’s something you’re supposed to do when you’re taking care of a thing, right?—but Willie was a real scaredy-cat. He wouldn’t let me get close to him at all. So that first day, I did what I could: carefully measured his food, put out fresh water, like, five times, scooped every turd practically as soon as it hit the litter. After I while, I gave up on trying to lurve on him. I showered, waxed my legs, and got my fancy black pants on, and I went out with my friends for the night, leaving him in the apartment by himself.

I ended up staying out all night, because that’s something I did when I was 22, and when I stumbled back into the apartment the next morning, I couldn’t find Willie anywhere. He wasn’t in my room, he wasn’t in the living room, he was nowhere, and I was like, OHHHH EFFFFFFFFF.

I LOST MY SISTER’S CAT.

THE FIRST DAY.

I was panicked. I checked every closet, everywhere, and I was about to call my sister and tell her I was the worst, most irresponsible person ever, but something made me get down on my hands and knees and looked under the bed. Back in the very corner, I saw two gleaming eyes, and I was awash with relief.

I hadn’t killed or lost the cat, and—the best part—no one was the wiser. No one had to know I was the most irresponsible person ever.

Problem is, he wouldn’t come out. I tried everything. I called him. I made a trail of treats. I ignored him. He would not come out. So finally I got the broom, and I was like, this little bastard’s gonna come out and I’ma snuggle him.

I swept back with the broom, and sure enough—he shot out from under the bed. Immediately I saw that something was wrong, that he was walking funny. Like, step-step-step-shake, step-step-step-shake.

Every time I got close to him, though, he ran away so I couldn’t figure out why he jitterbugging. Eventually I trapped him in my tiny bathroom, and when I did, I saw that he must’ve jumped up onto my dresser, where in my preparations for going out, I had left one of the wax strips I was using for my legs. And now, one of those was strips was stuck to his back leg. His whole back leg.

Now, how do you get a wax strip off a cat’s leg? It occurred to me to pull it off like I pulled them off my own legs, until I realized that I would probably pull his leg at least out of the socket, if not completely off his body. That would be hard to explain to Wa.

Next, I thought about some sort of solvent but figured anything strong enough to get the wax off would probably dissolve his hair. And maybe his skin?

So I ran to the kitchen and got a pair of scissors, then sprinted back into the bathroom. Willie was trying to be everywhere but near me, but there wasn’t a whole lot of room to roam, so I managed to catch him and pin him down, squirming and caterwauling. I picked up a corner of the wax strip very gently and snipped the hair underneath, then I pulled back a tiny bit more and snipped again. And working this way for six years, or maybe it was eight minutes, whatever—Willie’s catatonic at this point—I managed to get the wax strip all the way off. I opened the bathroom door, and he bolted out.

WHEW, no harm, no foul—maybe I still didn’t even have to tell my sister what happened.

Then I looked down at my pants, which were no longer black.

They were orange. I was wearing orange cat fur pants. Willie had completely molted, except of course for the leg that I had trimmed the wax strip off, which looked like it had been groomed with an old lawn mower.

There was no way I could get around telling my sister what happened.

BUT! I must’ve done something right between then and now because I’m in my sister’s will as the guardian of her three kids, should something happen to her and her husband.

And god forbid it did, but now at least I know to keep the wax strips away from the children.

See? I’m responsible.

Wildlife

Couple years ago, I was in my house when a car alarm started going off intermittently. I was pretty steamed about it too because it was 11:00 on a school night. The alarm would ring out for a minute or so and then go quiet, and as sooooooon as I was drifting off to sleep, it would go off again. Finally, I pulled on my bathrobe and went to the back door to see if I could see where it was coming from.

And I could totally see where it was coming from because it was coming from MY CAR. Which was weird because my car didn’t have an alarm.

At least, I didn’t know it had one, but turned out, it had a panic function, which would flash the lights and sound the horn over and over if you hit the button on the fob.

But I hadn’t hit the button on the fob.

I grabbed my keychain and stabbed at the red button with the exclamation mark, but the noise wouldn’t stop. Until it did—phew—and then after a random interval (three seconds to four minutes), it would start again.

I got in and started the car. The cacophony stopped! Blessed silence! That lasted until I turned the engine off. Aaaaaaaargh!

At that point, I was worried my neighbors were going to burn my house down so I drove down to the pawn shop on the corner—my neighborhood is very classy—and called Durham P.D. and told them my car was possessed.

The dispatch was like, “Uh… this doesn’t seem like an emergency,” and I was like, “No… but yeah, can you please send somebody because I don’t know what to do k thx.”

I sat there for 20 minutes with the engine running, and then within 30 seconds of each other, four officers in three patrol cars showed up. I explained what was going on and turned off the engine, and we stood there.

A minute went by.

And I was like, “Oh fuck, it’s not gonna do it. I’m gonna look like a crazy asshole who calls 911 because she’s lonely.”

Me, tugging at collar: “Heh heh, I swear it was…”

It went off, thank god. The cops witnessed my poltergeist.

One of them popped the hood, opened the fuse box, and took out the horn fuse, which stopped the alarm. He said I wouldn’t be able to honk my horn, and I said that was A-OK. I thanked all the officers profusely and returned to my house without fear of an attack by an angry mob of my neighbors.

The next day I took my car to the mechanic, and when he looked inside the fuse box, he found pieces of acorns and cigarette butts. Turns out, the squirrels that lived in my pin oak had been wildin’ out under the hood of my Subaru. Eatin’ acorns, smokin’, and chewin’ fuse wires.

I told you my neighborhood was classy. Watch out if you come over—the squirrels around here are hoodlums.

Paso Gato

When I lived in New York right after college, I was doing a soul-sucking job, one that paid me a lot of money for a 23-year-old (more than I make now with a Master’s degree, National Board certification, and 12 years in the classroom—thank you, N.C. General Assembly!).

To deal with the spiritual discomfort of selling something I didn’t believe in, I DAHNCED. I bought an unlimited pass for ballroom and Latin dance lessons at DanceSport on Broadway and 60th, and I would go directly from work to the studio. I took salsa and swing and hustle and cha-cha, rumba, foxtrot, everything. I would take a 5:30 class, a 6:30 class, a 7:30 class, and an 8:30 class, and sometimes I would stay for the 9:30 “practice party” of mixed dances too. Every night of the week. Hours and hours.

The way the classes worked was, the leaders (usually men) would stand in an oval around the room, and the followers (usually women) would partner up with them. You’d practice a few steps, and the instructor would say, “Rotate,” at which point the followers would move clockwise one man. Repeat.

Since you were dealing with/being close to/touching a bunch of strangers, there was an etiquette to these classes. Common-sense stuff, but just in case, they had laminated pages posted in the bathroom, that said:

BE A GOOD DANCE PARTNER

1. Bathe.

2. Wear deodorant.

3. Manage your breath.

Those kinds of things.

You met all kinds of characters there:

a lot of adorably awkward white businessmen, a lot of them;
the Dominican instructor who asked me out for a drink and, while actively trying to get in my pants on this date, told me about his wife and kid at home (I left him at the bar); and
then there was this Russian guy. In his 30s maybe, like six-two, brown hair, mustache, horrible body odor—the kind that singed your nostril hairs and made your eyes water—always wore black pleated Dockers and a black rayon t-shirt, and based on the smell, I think it was the same t-shirt. At the beginning, I thought he was chewing gum loudly during every class. It was a few classes in that I realized he had a full set of dentures, which he would pop in and out of place.

So many breaches of etiquette. I was like, What is wrong with this guy?

One day, I noticed too that he had abrasions all over his forearms, like up and down, angry red marks. Next class, same thing. A month or two went by. I couldn’t figure it out, but one day, when the instructor called Rotate, I gestured toward his forearms, looked up at him, and said, “Do you have a cat?”

His eyes widened, and his fists clenched. He turned his forearms up and, with a look of abject fear, he said, “She is creissy!”

And all of a sudden, I pictured this poor man in his apartment, a prisoner to his crazy cat. The B.O. and the same outfit every day—totally forgiven because an animal that inspired that kind of terror surely guarded his bathtub and his laundry pile with an iron claw. She probably popped out his teeth in his sleep!

I learned an important lesson that day: Don’t judge people because you never know who’s being domestically abused by a pet.

The End of Retrobruxist Fridays

It’s been a terrible day. In fact, it’s been a terrible week.

So I did what anyone would do: I googled ‘Amy Scott mugshots’ and reveled for a moment in the notion that, as bad as shit is right now, at least I’m not one of those Amy Scotts.

Amy-Scott-mugshot-26907800.400x800 — Dying to know what her shirt says… If it weren’t for WHAT, then WHAT?!

I started Retrobruxist Friday a year ago, and now I’m done. This was fun, but I don’t think I have more than one good post per week in the archives, so.

This last round is all good ones though:

Three years ago, I wrote a letter to my grandma, one heck of a woman.

Two years ago, I learned in a very difficult way exactly what fight-or-flight meant.

One year ago, I got mostly naked on the internet.

What you might have missed on Fat CrossFitter: I wrote what I thought was a funny story about how I became a stark-raving-mad, premenstrual mess who made histrionic mountain insults out of perfectly reasonable, helpful, and well-intentioned molehill comments, but it got interpreted by people I care about in a whole nother way, so I took down the post.

I’ve come to the conclusion that I can’t write about people anymore—not my students because I’ll get fired, or people I know because I might hurt their feelings, or online dating prospects because I’m never putting myself through that bullshit again. So I think we all know what that means.

I should probably get another foster dog.

Comparatively (and by that I mean, at least we’re not in prison) happy Retrobruxist Friday, y’all.

The Light, the Heat

A while ago, my friends were trying to teach me how to make eye contact with people I don’t know, like at bars and parties and stuff. (IT TAKES A VILLAGE, PEOPLE).

They said:

Look around.
If you catch someone’s eye—someone you think is attractive—hold his gaze.

I said, “How long? Like one-Mississippi?”

They said a few Mississippis.

I said, “Then what?”

They launched into some complicated instructions about looking down, or away, for a few seconds and looking back.

With a half-smile. I forgot about the half-smile—the half-smile’s important, they said.

If he’s still looking when you look back, it’s a good sign.

I tried, but I kept forgetting to do step 1.

Occasionally, I’d stumble into step 2, and

Formal Sweatpants-eye contact — (I’m the coffee-thrower in this scenario, of course.)

I asked my friends how to do the whole eye contact thing, if I can’t fucking do the eye contact thing.

“Alcohol,” they all said. Blech.

That’s the problem with being a compulsive overeater. My drug doesn’t make me want to take off my pants and rub up on somebody.

My drug makes me want to take off my pants and watch Orange Is the New Black on the couch with the dogs.

Because You Come Here for the Lawn Mower Stories

Story #1:

The kids and I were talking about conflict and how it shows up in literature, Character vs. Character, or Character vs. Self, occasionally Character vs. Society, and sometimes Character vs. Nature. We’d get that last one in a lot of adventure stories, we figured out, and often it was a matter of the character’s survival.

I tossed out how most of us have conflict with nature at times, just not usually for survival, usually just because it gets in the way of what we want to do. I mentioned how I’d wanted to mow the lawn the day before but it had started raining so I was out of luck.

Boy: Wait. Why were you gonna mow the lawn?

Me: Because the grass was getting long.

Boy: But why were you gonna mow it?

Me: …Because it’s my lawn. Who else is gonna mow it?

Boy: That’s not normal.

Me: I mow my lawn every week. I’d say that’s pretty normal for me.

Girl: What he means is, you’re a girl.

Me: Well, I’m a woman, but so what? There’s no man around at my house, but even if there was, I have two arms that work and two legs that work. I own that house and that yard and that lawn mower. I like the way it looks when I finish and the smell of cut grass in the air. Why wouldn’t I mow my own lawn?

Boy: (agape)

Amy Scott, blowing up gender paradigms for kids since 2002.

Story #2:

I finally got around to taking a whack at the lawn on Sunday. A neighbor I’d never seen nor spoken to approached, stopped, and waved. I killed the engine and said hey.

Guy: I’m coming over to ask the question we all been wanting to know.

Me: Yeah, what’s that?

Guy: Why are you not married?

Me: I guess I haven’t found him yet.

Guy: Second question, do you date black boys?*

Me: If I like him enough, I’ll date anybody.

Guy: So when are we going to lunch?

So,

(a) I hate that African-American people in this day and age still feel like they need to ask *this question, and I hate even more that some people would say no;

(b) I need to take some improv classes because I had nothing. I think I said, “Psh. Let me get back to this yard”; and

You Guys, It’s My 4-Year Blogiversary (with Retrobruxist Friday 8/2/13)

I’ll be accepting your gifts of linen, silk, fruit, flowers, and/or electrical appliances. Thank you. You’re too kind.

Three years ago, as one commenter said, I was paying off some bad karma.

I learned two years ago that what I was doing had a name: the Valsalva Maneuver.

A year ago, I was having one of those ducks-but-water moments. I finally bought one of those reusable ones. Today, when I arrived back at the classroom with my mug in hand:

Student: You sure do like coffee.
Me: I sure do like being caffeinated.

What you may have missed on Fat CrossFitter: I get pretty excited about dinner too.

Happy Retrobruxist Friday, y’all.

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