There's a Stranger in my House

The other night I sat down, opened a new blog entry page, and wrote this list in an attempt to brainstorm a new post:

Getting a new cat

Picking my nose

Public urination

Helping an assault victim 

So now, I will somehow string these things together in order to make a coherent and poignant observation about life. Because it's not like I had any other plans tonight.

Or maybe I'll just talk about some random stuff until I feel satisfied and call it a day so I can eat more 3 month old graham crackers from my nightstand drawer.

Oh who am I kidding. I already ate them all while writing this.

Totally not guilty. 

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About 4 months ago, our lovable mitten-pawed cat went missing. We've waited a proper mourning period and a week ago my Father told me it was time we go get a new one. He told me if I wanted to come help pick one out, I should be free Saturday afternoon. I had no real plans that day, so I had every intention to come along. Picking out a cat is like picking out a new family member, and somehow I have always missed almost every trek to pick up a new feline with my family in my entire life. Plus, I wanted to go be surrounded by cat fuzzy little beings of love.

We miss him quite a lot. 

…But instead, I got drunk at this party the night before and woke up with a massive hangover and missed the whole thing.

It was one hell of a hangover, although I fortunately did not get sick-sick. I was fine as long as I didn't move, which is why it took me so long to get up off the potato chip encrusted couch I passed out on and missed cat picking. Turns out the call of a greasy breakfast burrito was the only true lure. As soon as I got into a moving vehicle, however, I regretted my decision to ever be a human being.

"Remember when we were young?" I said to my friend in the backseat while I tried to close my eyes and pretend I wasn't moving, "And we could drink all we wanted and pop up in the morning like fresh daisies? What happened to that?" It was only three or four years ago, after all.

Neither of us could solve the mystery.

My ability to binge drink is only going to get worse with age. I guess the moral of that story is that I should probably stop doing that sooner rather than later, and you know, become a responsible adult. Because that morning instead of working, or training, or picking out an adorable cat like I said I was going to, I got stupid drunk and couldn't move my legs and hated myself for it. Just like two weeks earlier and two weeks before that. As I watched my friend's uber-athletic roommate eat cereal in between an early morning of intense climbing and going for a long bike ride in serious bike riding spandex, I knew that if I'm going to be a legit athlete like him, something has got to give.

According to my friend we had fun though, which is also an important experience in life or something. I'm not sure if fun is what I would call it, but I guess considering the fact that I went to giant house party where I knew no one, which is usually awful for me, it wasn't bad. It was one of those nights were I have instagram memories, meaning I have a couple of still frames and maybe a few 14 second clips in my head of what happened. I remember standing on an armchair with a girl named Sasquatch in a room that was all blue. I remember way more Svedka than I ever want to remember again. I remember peeing on a tree on the CU campus by the Koelbel building, which I like to think was my way of sticking it to Mad Greens, but truthfully I just really needed to pee, didn't want to wait, and get a weird kick out of public urination when I'm drunk.

Unable to move all Saturday for this? Worth it? I think so. 

Anyway, the night took a dramatic turn when I was suddenly standing in a foreign apartment with a girl who was crying hysterically. I mean hysterically. I had no idea how I or she had come to be there, as the last thing I remembered was tree-peeing. I was confused as to why we brought such an upset person back from the party. It was a huge buzz kill. But slowly I came to the realization, through her sobbing explanations and the conversation between the four guys with me, that this girl has evidently been sexually assaulted right outside on the street by a random man who jumped into a Jetta and drove away as soon as other people showed up. Lucky for her the people I was staying with were not quite as hazy and useless as I was, and actually ran outside when they heard her screaming for help. Unlike me. Who heard absolutely nothing in the first place. It's good to know I was with decent and responsible human beings that night.

As I finally got a grasp on the situation, I took her in my arms, stroked her hair, and tried to help everyone else calm her down by the time the police arrived. They questioned all of us and finally took her home. I felt deeply for that girl and wished I could have gotten her name so I could check in on her later, but as it was, it was just something that passed in the night and will forever remain that way.

So of course, in the somber and heavy atmosphere, we drunkenly broke out the N64 and potato chips and I did a mediocre to decent job of proving myself a worthy Super Smash Brothers player. You know, for a girl. I fell asleep cradling a piece of pizza in my hand.

I woke up feeling floaty, which is never a good sign and, as stated, it only got worse. Soon a few other of my party-goers emerged and sat on the couch with me and commiserated in our hangovers. For a few brief minutes, it was as if I had friends who were actually my age, peers who could bask in the glory of being idiotic and 21 with me. It was kind of nice. Until I stood up, of course.

Despite having gotten up at 10 AM, I got home by 2 in the afternoon. I took a long hot shower where I sat on the concrete floor and let the water make my skin all dry and gross, and then I came out of the bathroom to find a stranger meowing at my door. I opened it up and an unfamiliar orange and white cat came barging in to sniff absolutely everything in my room. I watched him make his way around, feeling very odd about the whole thing. It is not like when you get a kitten, whose personality you can shape and mold through various forms of cat torture. This cat already had a personality, and I was completely unfamiliar with it. He purred weird. He looked at me weird. He was nine years old. Who knows what kind of emotional baggage he comes with? Oh god, will he pee on things?

Ohpleasedontohpleasedont.

It felt like a very awkward first date.

If you had to worry about your date peeing on things. Which you might.

I've had lots of new cats come in to my life, but I'd never felt this strange about it before. I think it speaks for the level of discomfort I currently have with my life as a whole currently. Absolutely nothing feels right or natural. For example, I've been thinking a lot of deep thoughts about my boogers lately, because I swear I've had increased booger production and feel the need to pick my nose constantly. The same goes for earwax, actually, but that is unrelated. Boogers serve a better metaphor for my life. One might say that they have completely thrown of the balance of my existence.

Whenever people aren't looking at me, this is pretty much what I fixate on. 

I think what it comes down to is love. Maybe that is a cop out way of connecting all this random shit together, and maybe that sounds stupid or whatever, but hey, it is kind of true. Besides, I am on a roll with sounding stupid these days anyway.

We all just want to be loved. That is the endgame. Even if it means we want to be loved in a really fucked up way. I've been thinking about this in regards to my romantic life a lot lately, but seeing this cat, hanging out with normal college students/friends, and helping a screaming girl, they all amount to the same thing, which is giving and receiving love and how necessary that is in our daily lives.

This weekend has been a weird stepping stone in my life in regards to that and I am happy to say I've learned how to give and receive love at the very least to the weird stranger cat. Turns out all I had to do was give him some chicken and then he found underneath my bed, which every cat ever absolutely loves for some reason, and I swear he hasn't stopped purring and following me around for the past 24 hours in appreciation and what I like to think is adoration.

Under bed. Cat likes box. Happy cat.

I just got rejected to a pole competition for the first time ever on Sunday and the weight of every major failure from the past couple years has been raging down on me, from getting rejected to Calarts twice in row, being passed over for my dream internship with Blizzard Entertainment, to dropping out of art school. Somehow this cat makes it slightly more bearable. Even if it is just because I was kind of embarrassed to cry in front of him so I decided not to cry at all.

I mean. We're not that close yet.