My Abusive Cat


Mňau

Like most people, my Facebook wall and profile is a complete and total lie. I mean, yes, I am a teacher at a university and I did attend the university of Pittsburgh. Those pictures of me are mostly accurate as well, but perhaps my sardonic mugging for the camera is hiding a little oh-man-not-again frustration with the point and click happy post-it-all generation or a great ton of get-the-fuck-out-of-my-face-with-that-motherfucking-thing if it’s my sister behind the zoom lens of the phone.

But, like most of you, I’m really dying inside. Come on, people, let’s just admit it’s one big lie. The extent of the lie is varying. We all know people whose real life is similar to their Facebook life only in regards to where they went to high school. Otherwise it’s a complete and utter sack of lies.

Most of us are just guilty of portraying their happy sides of life on Facebook. Here’s the joyous couple at the beach that bickered for a five hour flight on the way there. Here’s the gushy teary-eyed preschool teacher who makes gushy teary-eyed comments about getting hugged by a preschooler that makes everyone feel gushy and go teary-eyed. At least they do on Facebook (thank you emoticon hieroglyphs). No doubt most of them interrupt their partner (who in the most meta way is in the corner of the room looking at his/her phone and thinking or about to say the exact same thing) to say: “This girl with her sappy posts about these fucking kids. She hates that job!”

There’s the anniversary gushing of one spouse about another spouse made possible by the fact that Spouse the Former has been able to channel enough polite, pleasant, or essentially non-rancid feelings towards Spouse the Latter by not spending a full minute in the same room as them for the four months before their anniversary.

Oh and I am right there with you. Most of my Facebook musings are about my students, the Czechs, and, of course, my cat. I spend a great deal of time wrestling with my language concerning my students and the Czechs (it takes time and energy to dress up venomous hatred as witty). But we have to talk about my cat.

I play my cat off to be a weird, sometimes voluble flat dweller, the truth is, she is terribly abusive. Her psychological torture includes subtle gas lamp techniques such as creaking doors open in the middle of the night. She steals things from me, such as rings, hair ties, and sponges. She bullies me into making food and then just walks away from it, and if she pushes another book off of my bureau in the early morning hours I swear I’ll leave. The less we talk about the physical the better, but I can’t remember the last time my toe wasn’t bleeding or my calf wasn’t sporting a trio of claw marks.

But due to social pressure I have to keep up the face of a pleasant little flat buddy. I take pictures that only highlight her quirky, pestering side. Well no more! Today I break that cycle of socially acceptable abuse by telling you this: My cat’s a jerk sometimes.

I urge you to come out and say something relatively honest today too.

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