The Cat in the Apt

I just moved into a new apartment, and my roommate has a cat. Which is cool! I like animals. The problem is, animals do not like me. Even my childhood gerbils thought I was a douche. Animals can just somehow smell my fear, weakness, and total unsneakiness.  I am unsneaky in that, for example, if I want to go through a door, I will look at the door and then walk toward it. When I am sad, I look sad. When I am happy, I look exactly like this:

So animals do not see me as an authority figure. (Neither do children. Neither do adults.) And yet, just by being a human and being bigger than her and paying rent, I have some authority over my roommate’s cat. I can do things like pick her up and move her out of the bathroom when I’m showering, or close doors so she can’t go into/out of rooms. . This drives her nuts. The first night I slept in the apartment, I closed my door and the cat sat outside ALL NIGHT, not sleeping, not eating, and not liking me. Sometimes she would stick her paw under the door and hold it cat-palm up, like a little begging orphan. She would also flex her claws, like a little begging DRAGON orphan. Badum chhhh. Badum fire. I should delete that because it’s so unfunny but I can’t because it’s also suuuch an honest look inside my brain. That is all there is in there. “Badum fire” floating around in like, Comic Sans.

Anyway, I wish there was a way I could talk to the cat and just be like, “Hey, I know I don’t inspire a ton of respect. I know you saw me break my own mirror by sitting on it. But I respect you, and what you do, which is lounge around all day smelling the walls of the apartment. I know sometimes I pick you up and move you out of the bathroom, but I think if you had really comprehensive information about what goes on in there, you wouldn’t mind. Please don’t be mad at me. I think you are special!”

Cats don’t talk though, so my plan is mad foiled right now. I need a new plan. My backup plan so far is “become likeable” but I feel like it needs to be fleshed out more.

New York I love you but I don’t love the G train

I moved to New York! At least for the summer, and maybe for longer. So far, everything has worked out perfectly, and I am living in a nice apartment I found on Craigslist (where you can find everything nice, and also serial killers!). People keep hating on my living sitch, though, for two reasons:

1) It is near the worst train ever, the G train. This is the main way I have made friends so far. People talk about trains all the time here (I don’t know why… I overheard a couple arguing for so long about the relative merits of uptown routes that I thought they were going to BREAK UP and then MURDER EACH OTHER and then GO UPTOWN ON THE 1 AND 2 RESPECTIVELY but as ghosts) and so when I meet someone new I try to weave into the conversation that I take the G to work. You think no one in New York has maternal impulses, because they are coldhearted city slickers, but that is just because YOU commute on the A. I have never gotten more pity. It’s pretty deserved, though–the G is always getting rerouted so that like, instead of a bunch of stops, there is just one stop. And the one stop is like,  jail. Automatic 20-life sentence! Do not pass go! Do not collect $200! Thanks for taking the G train!

2) My immediate neighborhood is very nice. There are a lot of bodegas, where you can buy many, many different kinds of meat. In bulk! Marcy Houses is in my less immediate neighborhood, though, which makes some of my friends think I am going to die immediately. On the other hand, it makes my dad very happy. He called me after he Googled my neighborhood, and he said it looked a littttttle shady.

“Then again,” he said, “it can’t be that bad. Jay-Z is from right around there!”

This comment raises a lot of questions, the main one being: How does my dad know where Jay-Z grew up? Is he secretly young? Does he have a Twitter account that he keeps on the DL? Does he know what FUPA means? You should ask him, because I don’t want to…

Couches, parrots, and chairs. Oh my!

My friends and I are moving into an apartment next year, and we have spent the past few weeks schlepping around, looking at secondhand furniture we found on our university’s version of Craigslist.  It has taken us to two very strange people’s apartments.

The first apartment belonged to The Very Shifty Man.  He refused to make eye contact and could not stop fidgeting.  At first I thought he was being awkward because suddenly there were three ladies (me and my roomies) in his apartment. and he was like “I have never had more than a quarter of a woman in my apartment before!!!  This is twelve times more woman than that!  I’m going to sweat now!”

But then we were trying to make small talk with him, and he had an enormous parrot in an enormous cage next to his window, and one of my roommates asked him what its name was.

“Um… well… you see…” he said, shifting around and scratching his ear manically, “it’s… well… it’s… Franchesco.”

HE WAS TOTALLY LYING.  I’m sorry.  There’s “endearingly nervous,” and then there’s “after I stall for five minutes, I will tell you my parrot’s name is Franchesco.”  That’s more than nervous.  And what really blows my mind is – what is an incriminating parrot name?  Did he name it My Owner Is An Illegal Immigrant?  Or like, Penis?  I don’t get it.  Or maybe it was something really girly, like Cute ‘N’ Adorable.  Or VELOUR DREAM!  That would be awful (unless he was J.Lo, because she totally made velour what it is today).

The second guy was strange, too – not because he was secretive about his pets, but because he told us to come over and see if we liked his couch.  So we went over, and he said, “Here it is!  What do you think?”

And it was a chair.

“That’s a chair,” my roommate said.

“You know, some people might say that,” he said, “but it’s basically a couch.  Because you can sit on it.  Or… you guys are students, right?  So you can sit on it and like, read.”

I wish we had sat on him and “like, read,” just to point out that when your definition of a couch is so broad that it includes your own body it’s probably not very good.   But instead we politely said no thank you and left and pondered the big question, which is: if he thinks chairs are couches, what does he think couches are?

I really hope he thinks they are parrots.  Then we’ve kind of come full circle and this post has like… themes.  How often does that happen?