curtisfarr:

Franklin Delano Roosevelt at age 2 wearing traditional, American, gender-neutral clothing, shoes, and hairstyle of not-all-that-long-ago.

This post brought to you with love in response to Pastor Sean “beat the gay out of your kids, I mean, um, marriage is for a man and a woman” Harris.

[Click through the picture for a Smithsonian article on a brief history of gender identifiers in the U.S.]

“What have you done with my water source??”

Kitten shenanigans.

Okay, I may have been a little out of line in taunting Kona, but this is still ridiculous.

*This title comes from a novel by Lillian Jackson Braun.

If you speak to me or Nick regularly, you know about our two 11-month old cats, Java and Kona. When I tell other cat owners about the shenanigans our kittens get into regularly, they say something along the lines of “That’s weird.” Now, most of the things our cats do, when taken individually, are entirely normal cat behaviors. Unfortunately, although each of these aberrant behaviors wouldn’t be a red flag if it were the only one, when you pile up a heap of them into two kittens, it gets a little out of hand. The list that follows is by no means exhaustive. 

Our most common complaint is that Java and Kona are food terrorists. We feed them just the right amount for their age and size (maybe a little extra food here and there), but these cats are constantly hungry. 85% of the time when Nick or I move—or even shift positions on the couch—both cats spring into the kitchen and start crying. Once they realize we aren’t getting ready to feed them, they hop through the kitchen pass-through into the living room, nudge us plaintively, and then give up after a few minutes. They also eat whatever the hell they can find, be it leaves, cardboard, paper, string, or (when they’re really lucky) food that Nick and I forgot to put away properly. 

If we’re watching TV, they usually nap on a chair. But as soon as we pick up a book, computer, or cell phone, they’re all over us and whatever we’re paying attention to. Especially if it’s a laptop—Kona loves to crawl under my laptop when I’m sitting cross-legged, and to either claw at it from below or stretch out and try to push it off the couch. Java just likes strolling back and forth across my keyboard. Strolling is not an exaggeration. He walks across one way with an “Oh, I have that thing to do” air, looks over his shoulder, and walks back smugly, thinking “Oops, I left something on that side of the couch and this is obviously the easiest way to get there.”

We have to keep the bathroom door shut now because Kona likes to sleep in the sink Java likes to scratch around in the damp bathtub, and they each have a weird oral fixation on the bathroom rugs. (Kona also eats toilet paper, which is an entirely different level of disgusting). Sometimes I’ll let them into the bathroom when I’m in the shower, because I know they’ll be so transfixed by the water that they won’t get into anything else. Even then, Java occasionally climbs into the back of the tub and stands on the inside of the inner curtain liner, just millimeters away from where the water is falling.

One of the cats’  most recent quirks is their creepy ability to open our bedroom door. Though Java is pretty good at sleeping through the night, presumably because he’s an overweight slob, Kona usually wakes me up at 3:00 in the morning by climbing back and forth across the top of my pillow and licking each of my arms.

After a month of trying to get them to calm down, I decided to start shutting them out of the bedroom after that mid-sleep wake-up call. But as of about a month ago, they developed the ability to open our bedroom door. It’s one of those ‘wave-style’ handles that swoops over to the side, rather than a round knob. One of them throws himself up at the handle, grabs it, and pushes forward. I like to think that they work together to break into our room, because that makes it less creepy and more endearing. Someone from the seminary used this extremely appropriate analogy when I told her about this: “They sound like the velociraptors in Jurassic Park!” Now I’m terrified again.

We’ve been locking our door ever since they figured it out, but guess what the little beautiful demons did then? They reached under the door, and smacked the doorstop until the irritating noise forced us out of bed. I had to unscrew the doorstop, and I literally have to lock our cats out of our bedroom every night sometime between 2:00 and 5:00 am.

Okay, so you should have a pretty good sense of how persistent our cats are by this point in the post. All of the behaviors I’ve listed so far are annoying, but in no way dangerous. Let me tell you about the really creepy stuff our kittens do.

Java likes to push small objects—our phones, the TV remote, sticky note pads—off of the couch and desk. It’s adorable. What isn’t so cute is his obsession with scissors and our letter opener. He loves pushing the letter opener off of Nick’s desk either onto the floor or into Nick’s chair. He grabs this mini pair of scissors by hooking the handle with one paw, and then flings the scissors around (we have to be really careful with the kitchen shears, because his eyes light up when he sees those).

Now, overall, we love our cats. They’re funny and beautiful and intelligent and weird. Normally, we just get frustrated with them. But today, Nick and I were extremely angry with them, and maybe a tiny bit scared. Nick got home from class just a few minutes before me, and found that not only had they broken a glass on the kitchen floor, they TURNED ON THE GAS ON OUR STOVE. I think Java was the arsonist—he’s so chubby he has to use the oven handle to climb up onto the kitchen counter. The cup probably fell when one or both of them were climbing into the sink sticking their paws into the garbage disposal (which is terrifying in itself). 

I know that our cats love us, but I can’t help but think their creepy violent tendencies will get the better of us one day.

I’ve seen some of the best license plates while we’ve lived in Alexandria. My coworker noticed this one on our drive home and exclaimed “I need a ‘SUPR YT’ license plate!”

You know that saying, “Choose your battles wisely”? Whenever Nick and I got engaged in 2009, my dad said something along the lines of, “It’s okay to choose sides, just remember that you’re on the same team.” (I just butchered that in paraphrase, but you get my drift).

Being married graduate students, one of whom also works full time, we’ve found that most of our battles really are us against the world—fighting for more time together, and less outside obligations. However, there are two battles we’re still squarely on opposite sides of. Laundry, and dishes.

How is laundry a battle, you may ask? It’s a fight to see who can go longer without clean clothes. Who will break down first and make time to do a load of laundry. It’s the exact same situation with dishes.

To be fair, I think the catalyst for this war—our Archduke Franz Ferdinand, if you will—is our lack of time. Both of us are currently winning. Since ‘winning’ here means having no clean clothes and very few clean dishes, we’re actually completely losing.

The feet of my black tights smell kind of funny, I’m running out of underwear, and I’m wearing a dress today that doesn’t fit me very well because everything else is in the laundry basket. But I’ll be damned if I let Nick get the best of me. This is far from over.

betterbooktitles:

Mark Z. Danielewski: House of Leaves

I don’t know that this is entirely accurate, but I like it.

This is real life. I was trying to snap a picture of Java while he napped, and Kona came out of nowhere. Fantastic. When I write that book of awkward anecdotes I keep talking about writing (to be titled “That’s Unfortunate”), I’m going to use this as my author photo on the dust jacket.

Dear CVS: If you’re trying to drum up business for Halloween, inviting people to come in costume on OCTOBER 23 is probably not a good idea. If they already have a costume and are willing to wear it to your store for a free gift, they probably don’t need whatever you’re trying to sell. On the other hand, the little bumblebee princess in the bottom left corner appears to be a boy. Now I’m intrigued, and will consider going to CVS in costume tomorrow.