Vindictive Mastication

   I promised to write a post about my freshman, John, today, but, well, I have to admit that I'm not entirely sure what to write about him. Honestly, he's highly amusing in his own right, when he's not abusing me for saying "Macbeth" or not-so-subtly hinting that I need to hurry up and finish The Summoner (by Gail Z. Martin) so I can start the next Patrick Rothfuss book. The problem I'm having is clearly remembering anything that's happened this year, let alone putting anything amusing into words.

   Now that the sun's back, it feels like it's still September, and I'm still about a week off from first introducing myself as "a senior in denial," because, as we all know, I really, really didn't want graduate back then. Seriously, this is impossible. You know what John? No. I quit. This is asking to much of my Saturday afternoon brain.

   Instead, I'll opt to beat a dead horse to death, and tell a story about my cat. Eventually I'll run out of stories to tell about her. I expect this will occur in about twenty years when she's too dead to give me anything new to talk about.

   So, go watch an episode of Recess. Chances are, TJ tried to convince Miss Grotke that, "My dog ate my homework," after tearing it up something that looks suspiciously like unfinished homework with his own mouth. Anyone smart knows that no teacher in their right mind will accept that excuse for late or mysteriously absent homework, and yet TJ tries anyway. Really, TJ, it's just better to convince your parents that if you don't do this paper, you really will fail this time, you're not lying, you promise, and you're too sick to go to school anyway *cough cough* and maybe, just maybe, you could stay home and work on your paper in front of the TV all day? You can't get away with claiming to have a dog that just so happens to have a hankering for paper with graphite seasoning, boy. Kids who claim to have a homework devouring feline? Well, they're just stupid. They should probably get held back for being that stupid, I mean, seriously? So, congrats, TJ, you're not me.

   The problem, of course, is when your cat actually does 'eat' your homework. Meet, once again Squeaker. She likes hip-hop, metal, and the sound of food being dropped on the floor. Oh, did I mention she likes to tear pieces of paper into a billion smaller pieces, just because she can?

   When I was in fifth grade, my math homework almost fell victim to her vindictive mastication. She chewed the corner off before I realized what she was doing and just spat it out on the table. I was forced into the tedious task of copying my homework onto a new set of papers out of shame. I mean, submitting a piece of homework that fell victim to a splatter from a drink or a minor spill is one thing - it shows dedication, you know? Like, "I'm going to fucking do this homework while I drink my pepsi, because I'm that damn dedicated to finishing it before Angry Beavers comes on." But a paper that has been inside your cat's mouth? That's just. That's like going over to a strangers house and cleaning up everything, including the dirty drawers* in the corner.

   It's like waking up with a cat's butt-fluffly making physical contact with your face - something that I have, unfortunately, also experienced (Damn you, Squeaker, you adorable cretin!). When you realize what's happened, you feel dirty, and there's no soap in the world that will wash that feeling away. The best you can hope for is soap strong enough to burn your flesh off, and even that won't work.

*You can decide for yourself what I mean by drawers.

The Table

   It really isn't that often that even a single individual chooses to attempt to disrupt the delicate balance of the lunch room by sitting in a place that, frankly, they do not belong. At least, not by sitting at the table that I've been sitting at during lunch since I was a freshman - except for a brief stint in sophomore year when I had second lunch and didn't want to disrupt the balance of the already unbalanced second lunch environment. Frankly, I am both passionately territorial about this table and unabashedly apathetic about it. Most of the time, it's not that someone is using my table, it's that I do not like to be displaced and further deviate from normalcy.

   Depending on the size of the group of lost individuals at my table, I will either back off (large groups) or I will unceremoniously sit down at the table, regardless of who or what these individuals are. Generally speaking, most of these instances happen on days like today - days in which freshman have the same lunch as upperclassmen. This would totally explain why it happened today, except the individuals in question weren't freshmen, not one of them.

   So, I get released at exactly 10:44 by Mr. Wong's sub, and I stroll on out to the commons, like usual, only to see a pair of girls - one of whom used to be quite affable (in fifth grade) - sit down at my table about thirty seconds before I could get to it. Initially I decide to say screw it and sit at an unoccupied table nearby. It's okay guys, sit at my table. But wait. No, actually it isn't okay. I only have a month left in this hell hole, and I'll be damned if I'm going to move for a single pair of misplaced girls.

   Dropping my bag on the table, I sit down. I still feel strange because, frankly, they're occupying the seat I normally sit in. I'm unashamed and the situation itself bothers me about as much as having a cat on my lap. Out of all of the feelings I could have regarding the situation (including a sense of foreboding), I can only feel proud of myself for standing up for myself and allowing myself to continue to be a creature of habit.

   My buddy, Crystal, sits down next to me and we start talking. Everything seems perfectly fine. The other girls - damn, I'm not even paying attention to them, but they didn't seem to be angry or anything. And then Kayren sits down, and suddenly it's like we've offended their religion and their favorite book right before sleeping with their boyfriends.

   I'm vaguely confused by all of this. We never once made it seem like we wanted them to leave, and, in fact, after one of them stormed off to the next table over, Crystal actually invited them to sit with us. Because we're not petty like that, and we're actually quite friendly. It's not like there wasn't room for them. We haven't had a full table since Alex stopped bringing his (now ex-) girlfriend around. There are eight seats. There are five of us that sit there normally. Holy shit, there's room for two more girls.

   But no, they're not having any of our niceties. Mason sets his bag down and goes to get his lunch right before these girls return with a swarm friends and occupy all five of the remaining places. By this point I'm starting to get the feeling that I've become involved in the most ridiculous game of chicken ever. And, dammit, I'm going to win if it kills them.

   Mason returns to find his seat taken, a fact he finds fairly distressing. It's at this point that the girls launch into berating us because they were sitting there first, and tables aren't assigned, and blah blah. Honestly, by the time they got thirty seconds into their bitching, I wanted to smack them. Or, better yet, conk their heads together in an attempt to abuse some sense into them. We weren't being confrontational at all. Even after the girls started attacking us over it, we weren't doing much more than attempting, rather badly, to defend ourselves.

   At one point, the girl I don't know points out that what we did was very awkward. We don't even know them, and we just sit down are their table? Like, WTF man? I'm sorry- oh. Wait. "Uh, I do know her. I've known her since fifth grade." Unfortunately, this doesn't stop what has become a flood of stupid pettiness. What did they hope to accomplish by prolonging the conflict? I mean, seriously? We weren't going to move. In fact, the only thing we did was put off getting ice cream until we were damn sure our table wasn't going to be completely full when we returned. Even then, I elected to forgo Crystal's generous offer of free ice cream  mostly because I didn't want to feel sick all weekend, but also partly because I felt it was a good precaution to have someone hold down the fort.

   So, in response to accusations of being complete strangers (which we weren't as evidenced by my knowing the one girl since fifth grade) Crystal introduces herself and is promptly ignored. Shortly after this, they apparently get tired of the confrontation and leave, moving straight past the conspiratorial whispering stage of the "You dun wronged me, betch," cycle to the gossip gal stage.  I couldn't blame them, I wanted to tell everyone I knew about the two stupid girls who sat at my table and then picked a fight when I sat there too, too. The difference being, I was highly amused by the entire event by this time.  It wasn't a source of anxiety at all, no, it was humorous, more humorous than an entire week's worth of failblog. In fact, I'm pretty sure I grinned when I was passing the one girl in the hall. And I'm pretty sure she pointedly ignored me. Even now, I'm highly tempted to add her on Facebook and mention how much fun I had at lunch in my request, not because I want to be friends, but because it seems funny to me.

   I half expected to hear about myself during class. "Did you hear about those girls at lunch?" "Yeah, I heard they sat down at a table with people they didn't know! How scandalous!" At which point I'd promptly stand, because none of my classes were doing anything and say, "Yes, the rumors are true, I disrupted the tranquility of my corner of the commons to combat the greater threat of a complete upset of the delicate balance on the room's environment by passive-aggressively confronting two girls who were attempting to bring the building down around our ears." Or something epic to that effect. At least, I like to think I would have done that, but, well, it seems entirely uncharacteristic of me in the presence on anyone who isn't one of the people I consider to be a friend.

   And, yet, I still grinned at that girl. Maybe, just maybe, my comfort zone is expanding to include non-essential personnel? A better question, is: "Why does this annoy me?"

An Observation of Utmost Triviality

   Not long ago, I discovered what happens when tape is applied to the bottom of a cat's foot. The effect varies from cat to cat, and varies in individuals depending on a number of factors I've yet to explore, but, in general, it is always amusing and always involves the shaking of a foot. Merlin, for example, will shake the afflicted foot vigorously for a few moments before screwing my amusement over by ripping the tape off with his teeth. This is amusing enough, but I hate to torment him, given that he's my favorite, though I am not his. Instead, as always, I prefer to direct my mischief in the direction of Squeaker.
   Squeaker's reaction to this is far less violent than one might expect, knowing her past and her temperament. For as long as I've known her - since I found that mewling three-month-old cat bawling under our Oldsmobile - she has been the bravest creature ever. Oh, wait, did I say brave? I meant flighty. Honestly, looking back, I'm not entirely sure how I managed to charm her out from under that car. It was as though she was given to me by the gods. A ridiculous notion by any standard, seeing as I do not put much stock in such beliefs and, indeed, am an atheist. Still, those superstitiously inclined might say she and I were fated to assume the roles given to us - Mistress and Victim (two guesses who's the victim here). To make matter more disconcerting, she and I are of like mind - "Does the pet resemble the owner,or vice versa?"
   I digress.
   Now, once upon a time, there was a brief period where Squeaker played in plastic bags.  It was adorable and, frankly, quite normal behavior coming from the halfway neurotic cat.  We thought little of it until she managed to traumatize herself further. I can see it clearly...

   It was a normal day in late fall, though, calling the hour 'day' was a stretch so late in the year. Still, that did not stop Squeaker from playing; the strange lights of the humans only served to make her feel all the safer in their home, and there was a bag on the floor, taunting her, testing her, practically begging to be pounced upon. And she gave in to temptation, drawn to the activity of rolling and kicking at the thin plastic like a moth to flame.
   But wait, she thought, panic stabbing through her heart. What was this? It was-. It had her. It was wrapped around her neck like a nack, ready to squeeze the life out of her. Instinct and adrenaline kicked in, and she tore off, hoping to dislodge her attacker. She hadn't known the bags could fight back. Oh lord, they could fight back! Lamentations of the damned.

   It wasn't long before she somehow managed to lodge herself behind my dresser and we were able to rescue her. The merest hint of a plastic sack was enough to send her sprinting for safety for several months, if not a year. Even now she bears them ill-will and regards them with disdain.  Judging by that, and the incident several years back where Dad pushed his luck and threw a shoe at her when she rewarded his attentions with a swift claw in the nose, after which she avoided him like the plague, logic would dictate that me wrapping tape around her foot would cause her to fear me, or, at least, tape.
   This is, however, far from the truth. It seems the more I treat her like a dog, which amounts to more like a dog than I treat most dogs on average, the more she likes me. And, apparently, applying tape to her feet is not going to reverse the effect. It does, however, provide for amusement.
   When given the tape treatment, Squeaker has, in the past*, vigorously shaken her foot in short bursts in between attempting to walk away with dignity and failing to walk away with dignity.  Eventually she'll give up the ghost and tear the tape off with her feet.
   In all honesty, I never stopped to think about what I was doing. Personal experience tells me having anything stuck too or under your foot is damn annoying. Simply having wet feet is something I loathe when I'm not fresh from a shower. And yet it didn't occur to me that I was being dreadfully obnoxious to two of my five favorite creatures in the world.
   Indeed, I never gave it a thought, not while I was walking into the kitchen, not while I was foraging for snackage in the fridge and not until after I started shaking my foot vigorously in an attempt to dislodge some undesirable bit off the floor that had stuck to my foot. It was with a chuckle and a grin that I eventually reached down and rescued my own foot.  Owners really do resemble their pets.

*I haven't tormented her since the week after I discovered the effects of tape on felines

Drunk Driving

    Dare I attempt to find humor in such an intrinsically humorless topic? Of course not. Drunk driving, and particularly people getting killed by drunk drivers, is a serious matter and should not be spoken of lightly. Therefore, this post will be little more than a rant and me showing off my ability to use a calculator.
    According to the statistics fed to us every fifteen minutes from 7:45 until 10:00 this morning, an average of one person dies every fifteen minutes due to drunk driving. To exemplify this, they chose to pull a single student from class every fifteen minutes. This was to show us the impact losing a student every fifteen minutes has, and I'm assuming they were following the methods of Every 15 Minutes, because, seriously, they did exactly what the first two parts of their method are, excepting, maybe, the 'obituaries.'
    Now, I can understand the idea behind this - they show us what it's like when one of our peers 'dies' every fifteen minutes.  What I don't understand is why the math doesn't work out at all according to any statistics involving alcohol related car accidents of the deadly variety that aren't blatantly shoving propaganda for the program in our face. Their own website says, "The National Highway Transportation Safety Administration recently reported that 12,998 people were killed in drunk driving crashes in 2007." Okay, let's take their numbers to work with - we'll round up to 13,000 for easier maths. Divide 13,000 by 365 to get alcohol-related car fatalities per day: 35 dead people per day, approximately. Divide the dividend by 24; you get about 1.5 dead people an hour. If it isn't obvious by now, that's less than four people an hour, meaning when you divide by four again to get the number of victims every you'll get about 0.4 dead people. That is a lot less than one, guys. Seriously, learn your maths, Every 15 Minutes. 
    However, I did manage to find a statistic that does agree with their 1:15 dead people to minutes ratio.  According to an MSNBC article, "...40,933 died from car crashes and other mishaps caused by excessive alcohol use." The math for that one does, in fact, come down to about one person every fifteen minutes, and I can assume that MSNBC is reputable enough for the average American - it's not for me, but that's just because I know everything they said is riddled with lies. So, if you add all those other alcohol related deaths, you wind up with eight dead people after two hours! Amazing. 
    So, really, using bad maths was the first mistake - though, I will admit, it was not my school's mistake. The second mistake they made was in their choice of the eight dead people. I can understand wanting to make sure everybody knows the victims, but, really, wouldn't it have had a better impact if they'd chosen students at random? It was really predictable once we started to see the pattern - "Oh, look, they chose one of the popular kids, again." 
    At this point, seriousness was thrown out the window. None of us took any of it seriously, because we figured out that we weren't going to be hauled out of class screaming, "They're taking me to the furnace! Run while you still can! You'll be next!" Instead, we listened and tended to be amused when someone we didn't like was 'killed.' It was horrible of us, but we did it anyway.
    Of course, I have a great way to make the entire thing more effective - instead of raising awareness for car wrecks, let's teach our students about the Holocaust by pulling them out at random - "The Lottery" - and having them go through a line where they're relieved of their jackets and shoes and given clothes to wear in lieu of the clothes they will soon be liberated of. Then we'll march them into a single small room until they're packed in tighter than Sardines and close the door. Two hours later, we'll let them out and have an informational assembly about this most tragic of tragedies. 
    Or, you know, we can stop wasting my time and do something constructive, like box up food for Japan or the poor people around town or whatever.  Yeah, I know, it's a horrible idea. I mean, really, who boxes up food for the less fortunate? Fucking jerks, that's who. 

Cat Trolling

    You know how some days you wake up and say, "Fuck, it's morning again!" and then you go about your day feeling like jumping off a cliff would be vastly preferable to whatever you're currently doing? That's me, every day. Whether it's because I don't get enough sleep - a problem I've been trying to remedy - or because I feel like the majority of my day is wasted going through the motions so I can get that damned piece of paper and be done with high school forever, every day (except Friday, Saturday, and Sunday) basically just pisses me off, right up until to moment where, for the eighth time that day, I say, "I don't want to be here," and realize that I'm on my bike and I'm already halfway home.
    Normally, I come home to a house filled with two people, two cats, and three fish in one fish tank. Mom feeds me, as per tradition,  and I dominate a computer in short order. Often at this point, I will grow gradually drowsier until I decide that I need to give up the ghost and go take a nap. This has varied results, most of them being me feeling like crap because I took a nap, and then my night proceeds in a relatively uneventful manner.
    Sometimes, however, I come home to a house that is short two people. So I have to feed myself, which always results in me using the microwave. The microwave and I generally do not agree on how food should taste.  Now, I'm not saying that this is what makes me troll my cat, but I doubt it improves her chances of going un-trolled.
    Usually my trolling stops at tickling her feet, an offense that is rewarded with scratches, bite marks, and a pissed off cat. Maybe, if she's being obnoxious, I'll put her outside and walk away as she panics and dances around on the door trying to convince some poor soul to let her in. I might even go so far as to scratch hers ears in just the right way so as to make them itchy, which causes her to scratch them or shake her head repeatedly. Today, I was worse.
    So, I come home from school, hating my life because it's only Tuesday - fucking Tuesday, man - and I see that Moose (the 2998 Mercury we bought so I could learn to drive) is not in the driveway. This, of course, tells me that, for the time being, I'm going to be the only English speaker in the house - the cats speak Catonese, and the fish speak Blubblubberman. I'm unsurprised to find the door locked, and as I'm digging my key - yes, I have exactly one - out, Merlin comes up and starts being all adorable and lovable and stuff. This is completely out of character for him, as far as I'm concerned, but instead of asking him why he's acting weird, I take advantage of the opportunity like Goldman Sach's takes money from the government.

Merlin being adorable.

    I finally tear myself away from the ultimate cuteness that is Merlin when he's being nice, and go inside. I completely ignore the fish - because, seriously, they're not even interesting - and I go for the kitchen, where I hope to find easily prepared foodstuffs. I get halfway through microwave my edibles, when I hear this noise near the sliding glass door.
    Looking over, I see Squeaker, who is, of course, sitting in front of the door in a way that says, "Let me out, you dumb broad," without actually intending to go out, at all. She does this often enough, and I tend to ignore her most days. But today, I'm still bummed because it's fucking Tuesday, man. So, instead of moving on, I walk over to her and catch her and throw her outside. As per usual, she starts yowling, as though she wasn't just sitting in front of the door telling me to do exactly this. I stand back and have a laugh, but instead of walking away, I open the door about an inch. Her yowls are louder, being that the double-paned glass between us is no longer muffling her voice, and she paws at the door. So I move the door open about an inch more.
    This is when she starts to get pissed, because she knows I'm doing this for the sheer joy of being an ass to something. Her ears swivel around in a clear indication of, "I'm going to claw your face off tonight," and I get the feeling that I should lock her out of my room for the next week or so, a feeling I will no doubt ignore. Instead of quitting while I'm ahead, I open the door a bit further, just enough for her to almost, almost get through. She can shove her head through just fine, it's the rest of her - namely her fat ass - that has issues. Squeaky backs off and gives me a glare that promises violence, but I'm immune to that for the time being, and I just stand there laughing at her because, really, I'm a horrible person, and I find her distress so amusing sometimes.
    For all that she's neurotic, she's not a dumb cat, however, and she eventually realizes that this door moves and if she just pushes hard enough it'll totally give way to let her inside. So I'm treated to a few seconds of watching her do this, before it's back to boring old every day life and the time of napping, that inescapable period of two to four hours where sleep tries (and succeeds, most of the time) to ruin my night by first wasting several hours of my time and then making me feel ill after doing so. But still, at least I'll know I've done something to further neuroticize* that cat. If I keep going, she might start to generate an electrical charge - I could power the house off of her. Talk about environmentally friendly.

*Not a word, you say? It is now.