{"id":3371,"date":"2016-07-11T12:00:07","date_gmt":"2016-07-11T10:00:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/?p=3371"},"modified":"2024-07-23T09:30:15","modified_gmt":"2024-07-23T07:30:15","slug":"bad-role-model","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/?p=3371","title":{"rendered":"Bad Role Model"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"My<\/a>

My Cat the Lush<\/p><\/div>\n

While I have met probably 5% of my friends\u2019 kids, I have seen thousands of pictures of them. For I have Facebook, and Facebook is child land. It\u2019s summer time, so the pictures are of kids eating, swimming, posing with their Little League teams.<\/p>\n

This is not a complaint, just an observation.<\/p>\n

Some of those pictures make me smile, some make me wax nostalgic for childhood. And some make me so mind-bogglingly happy to be childless that I can\u2019t even see straight.<\/p>\n

There are so many benefits of not having kids. Travel. Sleep. Sex. Social life. Impromptu naps. Money. To list more would only make me unpopular. And, by the way, I am very well aware of the fact that there\u2019s a huge huge<\/em> list of benefits and rewards of having kids, so don\u2019t think I\u2019m ignorant of that fact. It\u2019s all about personal choices.<\/p>\n

One of the benefits of not having kids is that I am nobody\u2019s immediate live-in role model. I know that an enormous aspect of kid\u2019s developmental behavior is watching what their parents do. What they eat, smoke, drink, how they talk, react to stress, everything. And since I can be an idiot at times, I am glad nobody is watching me and mimicking me.<\/p>\n

Nobody is watching me scratch my body in two spots at once. Nobody is listening to the knitted Afghan of vulgarities that my mouth creates when the internet drops off. Nobody is watching me sip a late night whiskey or chew tobacco, or pick my nose.<\/p>\n

Nobody.<\/p>\n

Except my cat.<\/p>\n

I have long known that my cat acts like me. I wake up from a nap to see that she\u2019s sleeping in the same position. She is grumpy until she gets fed. She hates Bjork.<\/p>\n

But it has recently come to my attention that she is taking after my bad habits as well.<\/p>\n

Yesterday morning, while walking from my kitchen to my office, I spilled a little coffee on the hallway floor. Before I could get back to it, the cat was licking it up with enthusiasm. I wondered what would happen. A cat + coffee has to = something epic. Like googling \u201cGoogle\u201d or finding a severed rabbit\u2019s foot holding a four-leaf clover at the end of a rainbow.<\/p>\n

At the very least, I thought the result would make the internet explode. A cat and coffee? These are two of the most often commented on and discussed items on internet land.<\/p>\n

But no.<\/p>\n

Nothing.<\/p>\n

Well, nothing abnormal anyway.<\/p>\n

The cat stood on the window sill and thumped her tail while watching the neighbor feed her bird. And then I realized that I leave half-finished mugs of coffee lying around and then recalled having come home to mysterious coffee puddles on the counter and on the table. My mind worked until it found the only logical answer:<\/p>\n

The cat has been a coffee drinker for a long time.<\/p>\n

There is no way it\u2019s not my fault. I show an obsessive dedication to coffee that borders on ritualistic worship. She must have been watching and finally decided to try it out.<\/p>\n

This does explain a lot.<\/p>\n

It doesn\u2019t end with coffee, either. Last Christmas, she drank wine from the rim of a glass and then used her paw to get the last little puddle of wine from the bottom. She licked her paw until it was dry. Then she went to her chair and lazily dropped into a fourteen hour nap. She can smell bologna from a dead sleep under a quilt thirty feet away.<\/p>\n

Chip off the old block, this one.<\/p>\n

I feel slightly guilty and slightly proud. Sort of like a dad who catches his son drinking the same beer he does.<\/p>\n

Still, I better keep my eyes open. She may start letting out a few curses. And if I have to give the sex talk to a cat, I am going to check myself into a hospital.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

While I have met probably 5% of my friends\u2019 kids, I have seen thousands of pictures of them. For I have Facebook, and Facebook is child land. It\u2019s summer time, so the pictures are of kids eating, swimming, posing with their Little League teams. This is not a complaint, just an observation. Some of those […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3372,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3371","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/damiengaleone.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/07\/cat-drinking.jpg?fit=960%2C720&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1EvEu-Sn","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3371","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3371"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3371\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3374,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3371\/revisions\/3374"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/3372"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3371"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3371"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3371"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}