Rant - Parasitic Infestation

What personal blog is complete without a long rant about something that bothers the writer to the point of... well, blogging about it? So upon many requests, I'll be talking about the cats we have at this house. Unfortunately, this isn't exactly the most pleasant of my posts, despite the topic. You may not want to read on if you have a particularly carefree view of cats, and wish to maintain ignorance of what troubles they cause to people in favor of their cuteness. This post also contains strong language, so for those that are easily offended, I'm sorry to let you down with this post. As for the title, the TL;DR version is fleas. Of course, that's far from the only problem I have with cats, but enjoy your ignorance for those who wish it.

Also, here are the results for the latest poll.

How do you prefer playing FPS games?
Keyboard + Mouse: 3 votes
Controller / Gamepad: 0 votes
Motion Controls: 0 votes
Other: 0 votes
No preference: 0 votes

Feels like maybe my blog is geared towards a certain group of people to have everyone voting on the same response. Then again, 3 votes is hardly a wide sample. Are people not seeing the polls on the side?

So, the cat situation. Long story short, we've got a colony of stray cats around the neighborhood. Vicki decided to keep one. Turns out he's a daddy and fathered 5 kittens. Vicki decided to KEEP THEM ALL. D= Vet bills through the roof, the house reeks of constantly filled (with poop) litter box, and worst of all, the lack of responsibilities being upheld for maintaining the house. Not completely, since the cats are getting fed, but the rest of the house is an inhabitable, health-hazard zone to me. Sadly, it appears I'm the only one that feels this way, because no one else seems to be bothered as much as I am for the problems I face every day from living in this house.

The first thing is obvious. I have to look out for Firion's well being. I wanted Firion to be able to live with us as a family in this house, by being near the life of the house, the family room, and maybe get some attention from someone other than just myself. But no, despite my objections to having even the first cat in the house, somehow we ended up with multiple cats in the house. I obviously don't trust the cats at all. In fact, the first one was so stupid, I just didn't trust it PERIOD, and stupid is far from any exaggeration*. Therefore, I had no other choice but to keep Firion close to me at all times, by being far away from the family room where the cats roam freely.

* - I don't do exaggerations. I define exaggerations as stretching the truth to the point of warped, inaccurate view. I don't consider skewed facts as the Truth.

To prove how stupid the first cat is, here are several situations showing his stupidity. He used to walk up to someone's feet who's standing at the kitchen, fixing food or doing some other activity that would keep their attention focused on what they're doing like reading, and lay down on the floor, right behind them. So what happens next? Obviously he gets stepped on. He's done this several times before he learned not to lay down on the floor, and has been stepped on multiple times, of course. Mind you, I'm not one to make stupid mistakes like stepping on a cat, as it was pretty much everyone else that has done so. I am too aware of my surroundings to not know when a furry idiot is nearby. Had I done so however, there's a good chance the cat would also have been burned by some spilled ramen or something as well. =/

Another situation of complete stupidity is one when I was still playing Patapon on the PSP. Patapon is a fairly fun rhythm game where you control your Patapon by giving them commands via rhythmic drumming on the 4 buttons, 4 beats per each command, and a command prompted every 2 measures. When you keep your rhythm going for several measures of well-timed beats, you get a FEVER bonus. You lose the FEVER bonus immediately when you mess up a measure, so being on top of your rhythm constantly throughout the level is important to your success, which takes up an awful lot of concentration. However, Patapon has a fatal flaw of not having the option to pause, despite being a portable game. So you can't be bothered to stop playing until you beat the level.

So while I was playing Patapon, minding my own business, sitting down on the couch, and using my foot in the air, hanging from my crossed leg, as a metronome to keep myself on beat, the idiot cat walks into the room that he doesn't belong in, mind you. As always, I have the FEVER bonus, and I don't intend on losing it intentionally, nor get distracted by anything that would disrupt the pace and rhythm I have going. What does the idiot cat do? Lay on the floor? No. He walks, face-first, into my kicking foot and gets kicked in the face. It's a simple pattern of my foot going up and down. Nothing complicated like the swishy movements that an orchestra conductor does with the baton or anything, just a simple arc of my leg swinging up and down. What kind of an idiot doesn't think enough not to get kicked in the face by something like that? If this doesn't convince you of his stupidity, I guess he needs to die to do so. Forget "curiosity killed the cat", it'll be stupidity with this one.

Alright, I'm getting too far off on a tangent here. I'm here to talk about my troubles living with the cats in the house, not about how fun Patapon is and how stupid the father cat is. The next point of problems lies in the kitchen, again, but specifically in the kitchen. I am, for the most part, the only one who enjoys cooking in this house. Therefore, having a clean kitchen is a must. But when dookie-pawed cats that used the litter box are jumping up on the kitchen counters and running all over the place, it's unsanitary, and a health-hazard. Hell, the cats even had worms at one point. Would you like to have worms in your kitchen? I tried pushing everyone else in the house to punish them for getting up on the counters, but Vicki and her mother refused to do any sort of punishment to the kittens "because they're kittens!". Excuse my language here, but FUCKING BULLSHIT, THAT'S EXACTLY WHEN YOU NEED TO START PUNISHING THEM FOR THEM TO LEARN MOST EFFICIENTLY! Consistency is the key to teaching/training your pets, and what they've ended up doing is consistently ignore their misbehavior until it was too late. In fact, they had the nerve of fussing at me for punishing them when they refused to. You know, maybe it doesn't bother them much because they don't care, but I'M THE ONE THAT LIKES TO COOK. Just because you don't doesn't mean that the kitchen doesn't have to be clean. Hell, one of the cats is a thieving brat, and somehow managed to steal one of my chopsticks. MY FUCKING CHOPSTICKS. I don't know how many of you are familiar with Japanese culture, but usually each person has their own personal pair of chopsticks, unlike silverware. When someone fucks with your chopsticks, it's very disrespectful. Being that no one else in this house is Japanese either, I guess they don't get that either, but the amount of disrespect I'm feeling for both as a Japanese and someone who cooks, this is some serious shit that I really can't tolerate.

Firion is better trained than these cats are.

However, it's not just the cats' fault. It's also the caretakers' fault as well for neglecting to punish them. In fact, both Vicki and her mother refused to believe that they could be trained simply because they're cats. What sort of logic is in that statement, really? And I asked that to them. Their retort is "because they're cats.", once again. Getting off on a tangent again, but there are two major issues I have with this. One is my intolerance to repeats. Unless I ask for them to repeat, possibly because I didn't quite catch what they've said or some similar situation, when does repeating something so meaningless ever answer anything? I find it to be a great waste of my time. Particularly in this case where it doesn't answer anything, not even the initial question of why they believe that they can't be trained. Hell, I think ALL multicellular organisms are capable of learning and thus, be trained, if they live long enough for the process. Here's a great example of feesh being trained. Cats have obviously been trained before, like to use an actual toilet instead of a litter box, and some other tricks as well. I also went to check out how fleas were trained for flea circuses, but it turns out their life is too short to be trained and used in shows. Back on the tangent, the second issue I have with the response is because they're clearly no willing to listen to my logic, perhaps in favor of their own ideals some cat paradise and ignorance. When one person doesn't listen to the other, there is a failure to communication. Failure to communications cause many problems in human relationships. I'd really hate for there to be bad tension between someone who I live with under the same roof over something like cats, but I am starting to reach a limit to how much problems I can handle from just living in this house.

Look at all that meat for so cheap...

Hell, it feels like they care more about feeding the cats than feeding ourselves sometimes. And by cats, not just the 5 cats we have here (2 of the kittens[the best behaved ones, in fact] were adopted), but also the colony of stray cats in the neighborhood as well. There has been less food in the fridge lately, and despite them going off to have fun at Universal Orlando and me staying home by myself, Firion, and the cats, they couldn't even be bothered to bring home a burger from Burger King for dinner. WTF...

These cats in the house are hardly friendly either, except for the idiot father, which was what got him in the house to begin with, I guess. But the mother cat, and the other three kittens hardly want attention, hate being picked up, and is only interested when food is involved. That's no pet, they're just using you for food. =/ Firion will ask for attention when he sees someone by swimming around, sometimes erratically to get attention, but everyone else will just walk right past him, and I just watch him sink in disappointment as he watches everyone else walk away... These cats don't deserve the unreasonably favorable treatments, and the amount of freedom they're given in the house, which gives them opportunities to steal items from the kitchen counters and other bullshit. Firion earned his privileges of a $10 log, gourmet food and treats that he doesn't even like, and all that I've given him, for being a well-behaved, good, and friendly betta fish. The next in line for his privileges is for me to get him a bigger tank, if I can find room for it within this sanctuary I had to create from the cats in the house. Without this sanctuary, I would not have kept sanity for this long, probably. 

Finally, today, I was woken up... or have been kept up throughout the night, once again, due to itchiness. All this is because of fleas that the cats have brought into the house, and left all over the furniture, particularly the couch in the family room where the Nintendo Wii and Playstation 3 is at. This (and the house smelling like cat feces) is the reason why I haven't been playing and reviewing any console games so far, as much as I'd like to. In fact, I am itching (no pun intended) to play Star Ocean: The Last Hope now, after having owned the game for 2 years now. But every time I sit down on the couch there, I get bitten by fleas on my arms and legs, leaving some nasty, itchy bumps resembling mosquito bites, sometimes also causing transparent, sticky fluids secreting from it. Not being able to play games is one thing, but not getting any sleep because of this is absolutely intolerable, especially for someone like me who has sleeping disorders where it takes me about an hour or more for me to fall asleep after laying in bed, and only if I'm tired enough to. Being that this is happening now is also very problematic since my spring pollen allergies tend to get worse if I don't get enough sleep as well, if it doesn't disrupt my sleep to begin with. When I get woken up (or kept up in this case), from my sleep without getting enough, I tend to be cranky, which is obvious considering the rant I'm posting. This topic was something I wanted to avoid since the beginning of this blog due to how hateful all this is, especially one directed towards cats. But when people neglect their responsibilities or let some unreasonable reasoning like "because they're cats" be an excuse to not even listen to my logic, it puts the cats at fault just as much as it is their's.

This should be a given that this is way too many inconveniences for a person who doesn't even want to have cats in the house to suffer. In fact, Vicki, who agreed to take on all the responsibilities of taking care of the cats, have had the nerve to try to push the responsibilities onto me afterwards. Like HELL NO would I want to deal with any of the bullshit to keep them in the house any longer. I'd take them outside and punt them over the fence before I'm forced to scoop their poorly covered turds in the sandbox or clean up their barf. I haven't really cooked anything other than ramen for the past year, and I even avoid having to do the laundry because of how I hate going in the laundry room where the litter box is. The cats already hate me as it is anyway since I was the only one who was willing to give them any punishment for their undesirable behaviors, while Vicki and her mom does all the feeding and other pleasant treatments.

If you are a pet owner and reading this, please consider the people around you for any sort of inconveniences that your pets may be causing. I'm sure if you live with someone, you would know of any problems, and whether if they've been handled properly or not. But otherwise, if people avoid you or your household, please try to take further steps to remedy the problem. Like, in my case, I would have punished the cats as needed from the beginning to help teach them, and when I'm not around to supervise them, I would lock them up in a room where they can't get onto the kitchen counters so that they won't have the opportunity to get up on the counters unpunished. Reward them more often for being friendly so that they're at least likeable cats instead of being anti-social. Feed them on a schedule, or for good reasons, other than for conveniences like crowd control. =/ That's just rewarding them for getting in your way. etc. I would have done a lot more of this if Vicki and her mom wasn't so ridiculous with giving the cats too many privileges. Please take into consideration that a well behaved pet is for your own safety, and your safety is important for your pets' life. Firion's life depends on my well-being since no one else even gives a crap about him since they're too busy with the cats. Seriously...