Waiting to Collide

My downstairs neighbors are having extremely loud sex at this very moment.  She’s doing vocal warm-ups at the same time.  It’s humorous and sexy at the same time.

BFF and platonic lifemate is at her parent’s house all day.  Roommate is giving a talk in North Carolina.  Girl Date is busy all day.  Man Date is most likely sleeping off two weeks of 18-hour days.  I don’t have the option of going to my family’s because I have cat duty this weekend.

There is a large scale pillow fight happening today in Boston.  For the first time in months, all I want is to not be alone; courtesy of drugs, I am well-rested and frisky.  Today is seeming to be a vacuum for social activity.

There has been a serious uptick in the insomnia in the past week.  Four of the seven past days I’ve had to take Seroquel to sleep at all, and still wake up frequently…  On the nights I don’t take anything, I really don’t sleep.  There’s this thing I call the “gator death roll” where I just roll over and over and over for hours — anyone I’ve slept with can attest that this is just about the most obnoxious habit ever.  So I roll, look at my phone, check my email, roll around some more, look at my phone again.  Completely exhausted, but unable to put out the flames or slow down the burning carousel in my head.  Debating whether or not to just go back to staying awake until I can’t stand up, sleep 3-4 hours, and have done with it.  Frustrating.

Up until this weekend, there was a ceratin duality to my social life.  I had lived in Connecticut until I was 18, then Austin for 7 years or so, then back to New England for the past year and a half.  During these periods, I put friendships in opposite places on pause.  These were people I had grown close to over the years, and felt extraordinarily comfortable with on different levels.  For some, this was the rule that any and all things in my head were open to discussion — for others, it was the rule that the unspoken could be accepted and expressed only in moments of acute emotion.  It’s the art of being known both verbally and instinctually by those closest to you.  The dichotomy of being fiercely private but needing, desperately, to be understood and accepted.  Both beautiful and complex, but confusing to even myself.

This weekend has been particularly surreal in that two of the people I consider to be in the closest friends circle have been introduced.  They’re quite different, and fall into the opposite catergories of friendship.  Awkward, yet satisfying.  Knowing that Best Friend and I will be moving back to Austin this summer is intensely pleasurable, and a moment that I look forward to.  Restarting again…  Maybe for the last time?

I am the proud owner of three very chill cats, and one very well-behaved dog.  I love them all quite a lot; taking care of them and training them is something of a hobby.  The cats have always been very good about their litter box habits.  They seldom, if ever, pull a vengeful-cat-pees-on your-stuff, move from house to house well, share one box, and tolerate changes in litter type and box location.  None of this is “normal” cat behavior.  Most people just suck at raising/socializing cats.

I’m officially sick of scooping the box.  If the Doc and I want to go away, it is limited to a few days, due to the box needing to be scooped.  The mechanized boxes tend to break down after a while with as many cats as I have.  Also, despite being an angel otherwise, Clam (my pup) tends to raid the box for kitty ganache.  I would like that to stop.

So I’ve decided to toilet train my cats.  I had purchased a City Kitty a long while ago and it had been a flimsy piece of plastic that would have scared me to sit on if I were a cat; it was discarded.    After roughly 30 seconds on Amazon, I found the Litter Kwitter (I am not responsible for kitschy misspellings).

As you can see from the pic, there are three steps: red, orange (“amber”), and green. Technically, it will be closer to five. One, replace the regular litter box with the LK tray and red pan; the cats must only have one option for eliminating. Two, after the cats have adjusted to the LK tray/pan on the floor, place it on the toilet. Three, give the animals about a week to adjust and, if there has been no house soiling, then you are ready for the orange level. Four, after another week or so, up to the green pan. When the urine and feces are being eliminated into the water rather than the pan, they are officially trained. I plan to add a fifth step of leaving the tray on the bowl for a little while longer before bumping the cats up to the toilet seat, as the tray plus pan is a bit wider than the toilet seat, and I don’t want them to be surprised and fall into the toilet, thus ruining weeks of moving the tray on and off the toilet to eliminate my urine and feces.

As you can see, we are currently at orange level:

So far, so good.  Goober has left small, solid presents were the old litter box used to be a couple of times so far, but is urinating through the magic hole.  The other two kitties seem to be doing well.

Always remember that animals are animals.  Even if they sleep on my bed, and poo on the toilet, my cats are cats.  Anthropomorphizing your pets teaches them bad habits and fuels PETA’s campaigns!