I’m going to write a book and call it Doing Things the Hard Way. Chapter 1 will be about childhood, growing up, school, adulthood, career, ambition, love, growing old, dying, etc. Chapters 2-18 will be about cat care.

I think about my book as I sit outside with the cat on her leash. Last night she wriggled free of her harness and went scampering off into the bushes like an evil little wood-sprite. When I finally caught her, I breathed one sigh of relief and then immediately tried to figure out how I could punish her. But it is impossible to punish a cat. To truly punish one, that is, so that she associates the punishment with the crime. I don’t think it can be done. With a dog, you can just wave the leash in her face and scream at her, and she will get the picture in at least a dim sense. Probably there will be cringing on her part, which is always gratifying if you’re deeply pissed off. The dog may then immediately ignore whatever admonitions you’ve given her and return to disobeying you, with gusto, but at least you can be assured that you can always wring some more contrition out of her when you catch her again. With a cat, there is no contrition. There is no “meow culpa” (OMG sorry—I couldn’t resist). There is only hissing, with its implicit message of “put me down, bitch, so I can return to whatever atrocity I was committing.”  

What all of this insolence means is that you. the owner, are forced to adapt to the cat, rather than the other way around. You must strategize ways to keep the cat out of trouble, knowing that if there is trouble to be had, the cat will by-god have it. For instance, I now know that when the cat starts backing up while she’s on her leash, it’s because she understands that this way lies freedom. I must tug at her and scream the moment I sense her even thinking about doing this, otherwise she will scoot backwards out of her harness like a greased piglet.

And yes, the mere fact that I am outside with the cat on a leash in the first place is another testament to my endless adaptability to my cat’s needs. The situation is, she wants to be outside. However, she is not only missing an eye, she is also exceedingly stupid. I have no doubt that if I let her go her own way, without human supervision, she would immediately find her way to the busiest intersection on High Street, where she would wander amidst traffic, creating fender benders hither and yon. And so, in order to make her desire to be outside compatible with my interests in keeping her away from High Street, I must walk her on a leash. Constantly. Seven times a day, at least—or she makes life inside the apartment unbearable.

Walking the cat brings with it certain other conditions. Because it is mosquito season, and I apparently do not believe in bug spray (actually, that’s a lie—I just keep forgetting to buy some), I must deck myself out in long pants, a jean jacket, a hat, socks and shoes, every time I take her out in the evenings. And because standing around in the patch of grass behind the apartment can get dull fast, I often bring a book with me, to squint at in the porch light. These elements, combined with my tendency to scream and go off crashing around in the bushes, have likely cemented my status here as the new neighborhood crazy cat lady.

But really, aren’t all of us cat owners crazy, each in our own way?

The devices in my life hate me. Several months ago, my computer took to unceremoniously expurgating my word processing documents with “fatal error” screens. Then along came the MP3 player, which has been producing ominous, faintly satanic-looking lines of gibberish that scroll from right to left across its display screen.

Now my alarm clock, o fateful device, has joined in the festivities.

Rewind to this morning: I need to be at work at 8:50 am. It’s currently 8:06 am. I know this, because that’s what my alarm clock displays as its alarm goes off. Shit! I think, sitting up in bed and turning it off. I must have slept through my cell phone alarm!  Every morning, I set two alarms: the cell phone alarm (which sounds pleasant, like a doorbell, and goes off at 7:20 am), and my real alarm (which sounds like having your brains filleted and has thus been set only as a backup alarm, at 8:06 am).

Disgruntled and confused, I fling back the covers and prepare to get ready for work in approximately twenty-five minutes. This involves making coffee, showering, dressing, preparing lunch, and feeding and watering the cats. Normally, I would take ten minutes just to paw through my closet in a futile quest to find the one attractive outfit that I’d somehow overlooked on the last seventy mornings that I’ve pawed through my closet. Today, though, I must dispense with this charade and grab the first crazy, mismatched outfit I see, meaning I’ll look like normal. I also must skip taking my cats for their daily constitution in the backyard, meaning the smaller and less intelligent of the two cats fills my morning with added tranquility by pacing around the living room and howling as though she’s being beaten with a croquet mallet.

All of this, and somehow I make it into my car with plenty of time to spare. It’s 8:30. Not only will I get to work on time, I’ll be slightly early. I decide to treat myself for this show of efficiency by stopping on the way to get coffee, half of which I suck down on the drive to work. Caffeinated, unexpectedly chipper, I marvel at how the roads seem remarkably clear for a Friday morning. It’s as though all of the annoying, lollygagging drivers have decided to stay home and only the people who drive 70 mph in a 65 zone have come out. It’s nice. I breeze into work at precisely 8:50 am and notice a plethora of open parking spots. An embarrassment of parking spots. In fact, every single parking spot is open, because the parking lot is empty. No one else is here. Whereupon I glance at the clock on the dashboard and notice that it says 7:50 am…

Christ, no, I think. Surely, this just means that I never reset my car clock after daylight savings time. It is really 8:50 am, right? Right?

I get out my cell phone and check: 7:50 am.

Since I do not have access to the library until 8:30 am, and I really don’t feel like sitting in the empty parking lot fuming for the next forty minutes, I turn around and drive home. Which just goes to show that the alarm clock must be in league with the petroleum industry. We’ll make her drive to work TWICE today, the alarm clock must have schemed. I check the accursed device immediately upon arriving back home, and sure enough it informs me that it is 9:06 am, precisely one hour later than it really is. I don’t remember setting it ahead by an hour, though god knows I’ve done some crazy things in my sleep. Perhaps the cat is responsible. She certainly is happy as I type this, having earned her morning constitution after all.

Awhile back I was given some bonsai trees. Actually, I won them in a silent auction, inasmuch as you can “win” anything for $45. I’ve always vaguely wanted a bonsai (pronounced bone’s-eye, as I learned from the expert who gave them to me), and now I have two. As I type this, they are leering at me. They are saying, “Neglectful woman!”  They are saying, “Call Child and Family Services, we’d like to report a case of tree neglect!” If a bone’s-eye expert came to this house right now, he or she gasp and slap me.

It’s not so much that the bone’s-eyes are lacking for water or sunlight—no, they have so much of both of those that they are starting to look like shrubbery. And that’s the problem. Bone’s-eyes are supposed to be tiny, jewel-like works of art, yet in my hands they are transforming into potted lunatics. Overgrown, untended, liable to send bombs in the mail…I need to take some pruning scissors to these trees before somebody gets hurt.

Part of the problem with the one bone’s-eye is that I’d had it in my backyard but a week when the neighbor’s three-year-old tipped it over and replaced its expensive, rarefied potting soil with great grubby pawfuls of dirt, leaves, whatever happened to be lying around. Unfortunately, this exchange took place right where I’d dumped a pile of super-gro potting soil the year before (as part of my “gardening” experiment, which yielded many bugs), and so now that bone’s-eye is being nourished by chemicals the likes of which its organic little roots have never dreamed of. Up, up, up it grows, along with assorted tiny weeds and grasses that have taken root in their luxurious new lair.

Occasionally, squirrels and other animals will stop by to nibble on the bone’s-eyes’ leaves, but it’s a well-known fact that squirrels have little aesthetic sense in the realm of horticulture, and so the bone’s-eyes end up looking frazzled rather than pruned. It’s as though, rather than opting for a haircut in a salon, I simply laid my head down and let wandering animals gnaw at my locks instead. Which believe me, I’ve thought about. And am now thinking about again.

Banzai!   

1. Your local public library reference desk keeps a file in their drawer with a code word for your name on it, containing shortcuts for finding information on all of the goofy and esoteric things you ask for five, ten, or fifty times a day.

2. You find yourself buzzed and at the library at 11 o’clock on a Monday morning, mumbling drunken memories about your college roommate at the librarian as she attempts to get you signed onto a computer to check your email using 1. A library card number that you don’t remember 2. A PIN that you don’t remember 3. An email service that you don’t remember and 4. A username and password that you don’t remember. You find yourself shrieking ecstatically when, wonder of wonders, you do somehow managed to get signed on to your email account to find that your college roommate has emailed you the pictures he promised. Now it's time to fish around in your pocket for a fistful of lint and warm pennies to give to the librarian so she can print out all of these pictures for you, but not before you reflect upon each and every one of them, sharing with the librarian the incoherent memories that each one conjures, interjecting your reminiscences with random exclamations causing everyone around you to silently hate the librarian for not kicking you out of the library.

My new apartment gives me the heebie-jeebies. I think this is because it is, by all appearances, the perfect apartment, meaning that something must be horribly wrong with it. At some point it is going to either collapse, flood, burp raw sewage from the basement, or else present me with an ancient and malignant force to haunt my worst nightmares. Or perhaps it will do all of these at once, with a grand flourish. Such is the true price for a spacious and inexpensive apartment with central air and newly refinished hardwood floors.

I’ve just flipped through the lease and found headings for “rent payments,” “inspection and care,” “pets,” and “excessive noise,” but there is nothing for “ghostly malevolence,” “manifestations of pure evil,” or “rapid descent into madness.” I don’t think that Ohio has much in the way of legal recourse for renters in this situation, so now I’m stuck living here for the next year at least, warding off evil spirits like flies. Already my cats are barfing like Linda Blair in “The Exorcist,” but to be fair I think whatever monstrous spirits inhabit the cats were brought in from our last apartment, or possibly from the moment they were born.

About that last apartment: I spent over two years there and never did it occur to me to worry about it being haunted. I worried about such matters as the gas oven exploding or the bathtub falling through the kitchen ceiling (both fears highly founded, I might add), but not once did I worry about hearing the low chuckle of Satan echo throughout my bedroom. I think this may partially be due to the fact that whatever vocalizations Satan might have made were immediately drowned out by the din of the hillbillies fighting next door, but it’s also due to the fact that the apartment was, generally speaking, a shithole. Satan simply does not manifest in apartments where chewing gum has been irreversibly ground into the kitchen floor linoleum. It would be undignified. So, as long as I was living without dignity, I was safe.

My new apartment, however, is somewhat dignified. At least, the structure of the apartment is sound, the floors are gum-free, and none of the windows have been repaired with duct tape by the landlord. I’m doing my best to strip it of its dignity, however, by furnishing it with a flotilla of unpacked cardboard boxes like an outsized, chaotic game of “Battleship.” These I often trip over in my rush to reach the light switch so as to catch Satan or one of his ghostly minions in the cold glare of the compact fluorescent light bulb. Because I know they’re there, the spirits. They’re there, and unfortunately they will not be driven out by messiness, not even messiness on the scale that I can render. All they care about is that, for the first time in my life, I have a really nice apartment that doesn’t siphon off half my paycheck. That’s all the evil forces of the world need to spur a really flamboyant, Cronenberg-style haunting. 

What evidence do I have that my new apartment is haunted, other than cat barf and a generalized sense of unease? For starters, there are all the creepy dreams I’ve been having lately. I view my dreams as messages from the subconscious, and often consult them to help me with decision-making during my waking life. Thus, whenever I find myself puzzling over what brand of soy milk to buy, for instance, or how to bring up a particularly sensitive topic of conversation with my mother, I know to simply ask the ermine who lives in the muffler of a car I used to drive. (I always wondered what happened to that car after I wrecked it. Dreams have the answer for everything.)

And so, when I dream about Ronald McDonald chasing me around Sea World with a chain saw, I can take it as a clear indicator that the apartment I live in is haunted.  

Sometimes things happen in waking life that seem like they should be dreams. The matter of the roof cats, for instance. Every so often, I will open the curtains in the morning to find a random cat on the roof outside, struggling to squeeze into my bedroom through the slightly cracked-open window. The screens in the new apartment are the only fixtures that are in less-than ideal condition, in that they are filled with holes and tend to topple out of the window frames and crash-land onto the patio below. Thus, I have removed the screens and leave the windows open to all and sundry, including random neighborhood cats. Better than random neighborhood serial killers, I suppose, though cats are unsettling nonetheless. Clearly, they are trying to get into my apartment because they know it’s haunted.

Aside from the dreams and the cats, there’s the frightening incident from the other night. I was in the living room, doing an exercise video, when I caught a glimpse out of the corner of my eye of the basketball that is for some reason perched on the end table, looking for all the world like the head of someone sitting silently on the couch behind me. Someone with a freakishly large, orange, perfectly round head. I hope the neighbors didn’t hear my screams, or at least mistook them for screams of ecstasy. 

So, obviously: my apartment is haunted. I’d best get a special clause in my renter’s insurance to address possible property damage from ectoplasm. And also something to cover me should the back of my closet turn into a swirling portal to Hell. Sadly, not even the best insurance policy in the world will protect me against cat barf, meaning I’ll have to hire a priest for ritual exorcism.

Every apartment has its price.

That last entry was written by my cat—FYI.

Some days I find public service really rough going, and think I would be better off as a day laborer. (I can think this only because I’ve never spent time as a day laborer.) Days like yesterday, for instance, I passed wishing I could rip the phone out of the wall and go take a nap. First there was the man who couldn’t figure out how to cancel his print job. He tried canceling the print job the usual way, by selecting the job in the print queue and clicking “cancel,” but this failed to have any effect. Apparently, he’d been unsuccessfully canceling print jobs this way all week, with the result that he’d built up a long list of undesired print jobs, some of which would occasionally spontaneously print out and cause him grievous worry because he didn’t want to waste his color print cartridge. He expressed his worry by blustering semi-coherently over the phone at me, as though I were part of the problem.

“Don’t you have a technology department?” he blustered. “Send me to your technology department!”

We do have a “technology department,” but they are knee-deep in thirty kinds of effluent right now. Instead, I dutifully did a Google search for cancel print jobs Windows XP and found many helpful websites on the subject, even one created by the Microsoft empire itself, but their helpfulness was lost somewhere on the phone line between me and this guy, who would hear none of the suggestions.

Me: Have you tried rebooting your computer and printer?

Blustering Man: No, that’s not going to work.

Me: Oh, have you tried rebooted them already?

BM: It’s not going to work. Maybe if I do [muffled] instead. (Clickety-clickety click in the background.)

Me: [wearily] But have you already tried rebooting them?

BM: Now see, when I click on [muffled blustering] I get this message saying [muffled clicking].

After twenty minutes or so of my bearing witness to his efforts to fix his own problem, the caller started to warm up to my suggestions. Finally, thanks to the advice on the evil-empire website, the problem was resolved. About half-an-hour later than it should have been.  

On the heels of this call was the woman who didn’t know what she wanted, but she wanted it right now. The battery on her phone was about to die and she needed to make a call immediately, to someone, anyone. At least it seemed that way to me. First she wanted to know what the major banks in the area were. I leaned back in my chair and listed a few off the top of my head, then offered to go grab the phone book for her. While I was fetching the phone book she changed her mind and decided that she’d rather know the phone number to Acme insurance agency in Madison, Wisconsin. While I was scanning the website for Acme, trying to find some way to locate their offices, she decided she’d rather have the number to their Boise, Idaho office.

Me: Oh, but I just found the number for the Madison, Wisconsin office. Are you sure you don’t want that?

Caller: [freaking out] Nonononono, I need the Boise number! Hurry, my phone’s about to die!

Me: [freaking out] Okay, uh, according to the website, there is no Acme insurance office in Boise.

Caller: [hyperventilating] Just look it up in the phone book!

Me: [sweating] We don’t have a phone book to Boise, Idaho.

Caller: YOU DON’T HAVE A PHONE BOOK TO BOISE!?!?!?

I’d like to have heard the conversation at Luna Bar headquarters the day that LUNAbars® (Nutrition for Women™) were born.

Executive 1: There aren’t enough products on the market these days for women to buy. Let’s create a product geared specifically at women.

Executive 2: That’s a great idea! Let’s see, what could it be?

Exec 1: What do women like?

Exec 2: Well, women like infants, and flowers, and men with Australian accents…

Exec 1: Can we package and market Australians to women?

Exec 2: I don’t think so. Too many issues with naturalization and immigration services.

Exec 1: I suppose you’re right. We don’t want to have all these women suing us when their Australians get deported.

Exec 2: How about we market a line of cigarettes specifically for women?

Exec 1: That’s a fabulous idea! We could come up with a tag line linking cigarette smoking to personal independence—

Exec 2: “You’ve come a long way, baby!”

Exec 1: That’s great! What a catchy line!   

Exec 2: Except that it’s already been trademarked by Virginia Slims.

Exec 1: Oh, shit. Well, anyways, women are more concerned with health these days, or so I’ve heard.

Exec 2: Maybe we could market a line of healthy products to women.

Exec 1: Healthy products!?! What a great idea! My head is spinning with the possibilities.

Exec 2: Women love health, and they love products…

Exec 1: But what kinds of healthy products do women love more than any others? Those are the kinds of products we should make.

Exec 2: Infants…flowers…chocolate…chocolate! I know—let’s make chocolate flower infants!

Exec 1: Hmm. Hmm. I see where you’re going, but I also think that it’s a crowded market right now.

Exec 2: The chocolate flower infant market?

Exec 1: Yes. Though how about this: we market a line of chocolates to women.

Exec 2: Chocolates for women? Good god man, stop now or you’ll draw and quarter my brain! 

Exec 1: What’s more, we can market them as “healthy” chocolates. We can create a line of “healthy” candy bars, just for women.

Exec 1: Women do love their chocolate candy bars, but would they really buy a bar marketed specifically to women?

Exec 2: If they’re marketed as “healthy,” you bet they will. Women will flock to buy them.

Exec 1: Quick question: how could a candy bar be “healthy”?

Exec 2: We’ll think of something. In the meantime, we also have to figure out how to incorporate the words “green tea” and “antioxidants” into our marketing strategy.

Exec 2: As well as charge twice as much as someone would normally pay for a candy bar.

Exec 1: (cackling gleefully) Mix in some vague, Eastern-sounding concepts like “balance” and “wholeness” and we’ve got ourselves a cash cow!

Exec 2: Now what shall we call our little moneymaker?

Exec 1: How about “The Diana Bar”?

Exec 2: After the princess?  

Exec 1: I was thinking more along the lines of the mythological goddess of the hunt, but sure, why not?

Exec 2: Too bad Amazon’s already taken. How about Leia Bar? Or Oprah Bar?

Exec 1: You know, women are also associated with the moon.

Exec 2: They are?

Exec 1: Yeah. Not sure why. Something to do with their period, or something. But anyways, how about we call it the Moon Bar?

Exec 2: No. No way. Uh-uh.

Exec 1: No?

Exec 2: No man. Ever hear of Moon Pies®?

Exec 1: Why yes, they’re delicious!

Exec 2: But women also probably think of them as fattening, like Twinkies. No way do we want to market a fattening, pie-like product to women.

Exec 1: But they won’t be pies! They’ll be bars!

Exec 2: We might as well call them “Fat Bars.”

Exec 1: Okay, fine. Let’s try to dress it up a little. Like, what’s Latin for “moon”?

Exec 2: I dunno. “Lunar,” or something.

Exec 1: Lunar Bars? Whaddya think?

Exec 2: It’s okay…maybe a little Space-Agey.

Exec 1: I’ve got it! Lun-ah Bars! Luna Bars!

Exec 2: It works! You’re a genius!

Exec 1: Luna Bars®: expensive, sugar-filled nutrition for women™!

Exec 2: I can see the profits rolling in before my very eyes. I’m going to buy a mansion! What are you going to do with your profits?

Exec 1: Create more products for women. Maybe a wrap of some sort. Or a flavored diet beverage infused with "vitamins."

Exec 2: Good working with you, as always.

Exec 1: Fire up the production lines!  

I am moved.

Aside from making me beholden for life to certain segments of the population (my significant other and/or parents, who helped me heft every last cat-hair-swaddled object in my apartment onto their respective pick-up trucks, thus sparing me the expense and terror of renting a moving truck), the experience of moving revived my lifelong interest in never moving again. Hear me now: I am currently occupying the very apartment that I will inhabit for the rest of my existence on this coil. Nothing—not floods, pestilence, or lakes of fire—will rout me from this apartment. The place will get rezoned and my landlord will sell it to Goodyear blimps who will build a blimp distribution center right on this very spot, but I will live on here, mailing my rent checks every month like the faithful little dog waiting for his deceased owner at the train station.  

As you can probably infer, I dislike moving. Most people seem to, except for improbably attractive people in pseudo-quirky romantic comedies who are fleeing their tragic past, only to find true love in the most unexpected places. While I do have a tragic past, I know there’s no sense in trying to flee it, and while I don’t find love in unexpected places I do find other things. For instance, moving has a way of uncovering all of those piles of cat puke that have been ossifying behind the couch for months/years. Perhaps Tom McCarthy should make a film about me and call it The Archaeologist.

To be fair, the whole moving process would have gone a lot more smoothly if I hadn’t come down with the stomach flu in the days immediately proceeding it. There I was, driving back from a vacation in Chicago, when what had seemed like a really bad case of indigestion from all the Cheetos and coffee blossomed suddenly into a Technicolor pukefest by the side of the road. This was followed by a couple of days of detoxing the old-fashioned way, during which time I should have been packing but was too preoccupied with the master cleanse. All of which meant that the move was one of the more painful ones I’ve undertaken in some years. The ninety-degree weather and lack of A/C at my old apartment didn’t help. But my new apartment has central air.