What in the Name of Sanity Just Happened?!

Sadly, the following is a completely true story. There is genuinely no hyperbole involved.

Quick backstory: My dog likes cats. My dog really likes cats. Like, will sit at the door and whine if he hears a cat meowing outside because he wants to bring it inside and cuddle with it. My dog, by the way, is a St. Bernard.

Proper Story:

I came home from work tonight, ran upstairs and got my dog to take him out for a walk. As we're coming back up on the entrance of my apartment building, I see a long, skinny as all get-out, pure white cat sitting outside my downstairs neighbor's window. My dog, who we'll call Lenny, because if people get fake names, he can too, runs at this cat. Cat doesn't respond at all. Lenny literally licks the cat's back. Cat doesn't respond at all. And then the most ri-goddamn-diculous thing I've ever seen happened. LENNY PICKED THIS STRANGE CAT UP IN HIS MOUTH. Like a mama cat, by the scruff of the neck. CAT DIDN'T RESPOND AT ALL. My dog has this strange cat slightly off the ground, and the cat is still just chilling, like it's still sitting undisturbed on the ground. After some sharp scolding, Lenny puts the cat down, but starts whining. Not like one sad little whimper. Like, eardrum shattering, devastated whining. If he could say words, they would have been, "But Mom! Kitty! Look at the kitty! Kitty is so skinny! He needs a home! Let's take him home! PLEASE MOM PLEASE MOM PLEASE MOM!" I unlock the door, drag my enormous dog to the door, get him halfway in, and he stops. While he's stopped, with the door propped open by his giant frame, the strange cat ran past his legs and into the building. Fucking brilliant. 

I try to catch the cat, but Lenny is going apeshit, chasing this cat up and down the halls. Need I remind you, readers, this is still a St. Bernard, crashing down the halls of an apartment building at 12:30 a.m. I decide my best option is to wrangle the dog and get him into my apartment. As I'm running up the stairs with the dog, the cat is running back and forth on the floor beneath mine. Lenny is trying to break away to go play with the cat. I get my apartment door open and shove Lenny inside, as my own cat, Banana, bolts out the door, into the common hallway. So I scream, "Nononononono!" and chase after her. Banana gets to the top of the stairs, and I hear this super loud, long, drawn out "MMMRRRRRRRRRREOOOOOOOOOW!" Banana is terrified and turns around and runs back to me. I grab her, get my apartment door open, block the dog from getting out with my own body, all but chuck Banana inside, and then a white blur streaks between my legs, and into my apartment. Lenny starts jumping up and down, again virtually screaming "Kitty! Kitty! Kitty! Kitty! Kitty!" Seriously. Jumping straight up and down. So, White Cat is terrified and makes a beeline for under my sofa. Lenny takes off after him and tries to get under the sofa with White Cat. WC is totally fine with this. Giant dog? Whatever! However, Banana is unhappy. She's growling and hissing and approaching WC. I have no idea what the deal is with the random cat and I don't want my cat anywhere near him, fearing he'll bit her and give her some horrible disease. So I jump in between them, which scares WC, who bolts from under the sofa, jumps on my end table and jumps on the back of my sofa, and runs across the back of my sofa. At this point, I grab WC from the back of my sofa, grab my keys and run out the door.

White Cat starts out totally fine with the fact that he's in my arms and being run down the stairs, but around the first landing begins to wig out and start squirming. He jumps from my arms and runs back up the goddamn stairs! Thus starts Benny Hills, Round Zillion. I run up the stairs, WC freaks out, runs across the hall, and runs down the back stair case. At this point, I'm thinking about just leaving it in the building, but figure my neighbors are already pissed. Then, Lenny starts barking. Loudly. Because, y'know, St. Bernard. Lenny is barking and jumping against the door. WC is scream-meowing in the hall. It's a lovely cacophony of BARKBARKBARKBARK SLAM! SLAM! SLAM! MRRRREOOOOW! BARKBARKBARK! SLAM! MREOW! SLAM! BARK! I recapture WC and successfully get him outside. I get back to my apartment and Lenny and Banana are just chilling on the couch, like nothing ever happened. Right now, Lenny's sleeping on the floor, dream running and Banana is chasing a bottle cap. 

The kicker is, I was on the phone with El Zacho (of elzachorocks.blogspot.com fame) the entire time. His experience through this was "Lenny. Lenny! Lenny! NO! Lenny, come on. Come on! Inside! GODDAMMIT, NO! SHITSHITSHITSHITSHIT! Come here! Come here! Get back here! LENNY! Get inside! Get inside! INSIDE! SHITSHITSHITSHITSHITSHITSHITSHIT! NONONONO! NONONONONO! Come back come back come back!" MRRRRRREOOOOOOW! "BANANA! Get in there! No! Stay in there! Fuckity fuck fuck, not you! Get out! Oh God no!" MRRRREOOOOOOW! BARK! BARKBARKBARK! Bang bang bang! HSSSSSSS! 

Stupid Jerk or Brilliant Asshole?

I have a cat. And I absolutely love my cat. She is a wonderful companion and a great source of amusement. But sometimes I wonder if she's just so dumb that she comes across as mean or so brilliant that she's mean on purpose.

When I moved out of my mother's house after college, I was living with my then-boyfriend, who is tremendously allergic to cats, so my cat (Annabelle) really couldn't live with us. So she had been living with my mother in my mother's house. My mother would let Annabelle and the other cats go outside as they wished, so when I moved to my current apartment with Annabelle a year and a half ago, she had to adjust to being an indoor cat. So for the past year and a half, every single time I have come home, I've opened the apartment door, and Annabelle has gone running into the hallway. I throw my stuff inside and chase after her. Most of the time, she just rolls around on the floor in the hallway. Normally, this is only moderately annoying. Sometimes it's even funny. However, I share joint custody of my dog. When my dog is here, the cat not only runs into the hallway and rolls on the floor, but runs straight down the stairs. So I come home from working eight hours, the poor dog needs to go outside and pee, and the jerk cat is running around the building. So I frequently let her continue to run around while I run the dog outside, bring the dog back in, then the dog and I chase the cat around the building. I can't imagine what my neighbors think when they see this spectacle.

I knit. I'm not great at it, but I like it and I do it regularly. I always have a project going. Annabelle is absolutely certain that I took up knitting to provide her more toys. Every day, I leave for work and my apartment looks pretty good. Then I come home to find a yarn maze. I'm kind of upset right now. I just dicked around in Paint to make a shitty representation of the yarn maze, and now I can't figure out how to embed it. Blarg. Oh well. Basically, I come home and find yarn dragged around the apartment. I always thought "Oh, poor kitty. She's so bored, all she has to do all day is play with yarn." Well, one night, I fell asleep on the couch. I woke up in the middle of the night and watched this furry little jerk carefully pick up a ball of yarn in her mouth and trot off down the hall. A moment later, she came walking back down the hall, perfectly calm, with the end of the yarn in her mouth. I watched her walk into the kitchen, dragging the yarn behind her. I watched her walk through the kitchen, into the dining room area. She walked around the table. She walked through the dining room chairs. She walked under the table. I watched her deliberately tie up the kitchen table and chairs with this yarn. So the yarn maze I come home to is definitely one hundred percent intentional and by the cat's design.

My cat's name is Annabelle. As crazy cat ladies do with their cats, I have given her all sorts of silly nicknames. The obvious one, of course, was Anna Banana. The has been shortened to just Banana. Annabelle was six years old and had the name "Annabelle" for all six years before I started calling her Banana. Now she will not respond to "Annabelle." If I want my cat, I have to call "Banana!" if I want any response from her. And she's very responsive to "Banana!" Sometimes I'll be sitting on the couch in the living room and a sad commercial will make me want my cat. She'll be sitting in the bedroom window. I'll call "Banana!" and she'll come running and jump into my lap. That's cool. However, she'll also come running when the boyfriend is here and I ask if he'd like a banana from the kitchen. The worst part of this is when the cat runs outside and I have to chase her. I call out "Annabelle!" and she doesn't respond. But running through the hall of my apartment building at midnight, yelling "Banana!" gets her attention and makes her stop running down the stairs. So now whenever I speak of the cat to somebody who knows me, I just say "The Banana." My aunt and my mother came to visit the other day and I asked if they'd go to the pet store with me, so I could "pick up some treats for The Banana." I've never seen anybody look as confused as my aunt did then.

When The Banana decides I'm not giving her enough attention, she chews on my hair. I've started putting my hair up most of the time when I'm home. This isn't a deterrent for her. It was my weekend with the dog this past weekend. The Banana got jealous of him and climbed up on the back of the couch and proceeded to bite my head, trying to loosen some hair to chew on.

So, I love my cat. She cracks me up. I'm just not sure what to think of her intelligence level. I'm pretty sure she's just an absolutely brilliant asshole. And on that note, I'm going to go play with my cat.

Some Awesome Words/Phrases I've Heard This Week

I've been surrounded by some hilarious people this week and their phrasing for certain things is so brilliant, I wanted to share! So this entry is just a list of some funny shit I've heard lately.

"Chick-fil-Learn-How-to-Fucking-Spell-You-Homophobes"

"Well, that's a barrel of dicks. And not in the good way." (As spoken by a heterosexual male)

"Twat-waffle" (name calling)

"Fucktwit" (also name calling)

Thank you, hilarious people in my life. Keep it up, and I may have a weekly roundup of awesome.