Tara: Here kitty kitty! Kitty kitty: F%#* You!

I am writing this while I am heavily medicated on expired liquid oxycodone.  A couple of years ago, I was in a very bad mountain biking accident.  I went over the handlebars as I rode downhill on a Tahoe ski slope, in the summer.  I broke my jaw, my arm, and shredded several areas of my body, including my face.  I had bruises on my legs that took the better part of a year to heal. I had two jaw surgeries – one of them in which they tried to fix my broken jaw, the other in which they broke it for me in order to fix it again.  I now have a bionic jaw, which helps me eat brownies incredibly fast.  Having your jaw broken, or breaking it yourself while careening out of control on your bike, is excruciating.  I remember waking from the second surgery and just wanting death.  I had my jaw wired shut.  Twice.  This meant I had to have pain killers I could sip through my metal grill.  Liquid oxycodone is the nectar of the gods.  In the rapping community, it is known as sizzurp and apparently added to Sprite, the same way I splash a little rum in my pineapple juice on Friday nights.  So it’s good stuff.

That’s my disclaimer.  Now, let me start at the beginning.

I went for a job interview today.  I got the job.  That’s not the story, but it’s part of it.  The job is basically helping high school juniors and seniors (who are applying to Ivy league schools with off the chart SAT scores and the grades to match), write their application essays.  Turns out I am good at this.  I gave them a sample edit and they were like, yes, you’re hired!  That’s actually what they said.

Let me back up.  I arrived about a half hour early to the interview.  So I parked in an empty nearby parking lot to kill some time so I didn’t look desperate.  I saw a cat.  It was extremely mangy, I could tell this even from a distance.  I watched him cross the parking lot and disappear into some bushes.  I have attmepted to rescue animals before.  My track record is zero.  Like, I have never succeeded.  Unless you measure success in ER visits for Tara.  Then I am #winning.

So.  I told myself, if I get this job, I’ll see if I can find this cat when I leave.  You know, like a good deed.  The universe sends me a job and I rescue a cat.  YOU FOOL TARA, YOU FOOL (that was the universe).

As I said, I got the job.  As I was leaving, I made a round through the parking lot and there was the cat lounging in the sun, not looking terribly scared of my approaching car, but also looking terribly tired and not in great health.  I took this as a sign.  I parked, then got out of my car.  I crouched down and crooned things I thought might help get the cat into my car and to the vet’s office where he would get fixed up and everything would be wonderful and I’d go to heaven. So I took off my heels because I didn’t want to frighten the kitty.  Here kitty kitty, I said as I went towards him in my stocking feet.  I can help you. And kitty was like, naw, I’m good and started walking away.  Keep in mind I had no real plan for how to get the cat into the car.  And nothing to put it in.  Like, you can’t have a cat loose in a car.  You just can’t.  I tried it once and the cat perched on my head the whole way to the vet, anchoring his nails into my scalp to stay balanced.

So I followed the cat as it walked away from me.  It was such a pathetic looking thing, it made me very sad. He looked mangled, honestly.  Like it had perhaps been hit by a car.  He had watery eyes and no fur on the insides of his legs.  And honestly he seemed to want to come to me.  So I walked alongside him making my case, here kitty kitty, come on, let’s go make you feel better. And then I picked him up.  I’m not sure what I expected, but despite my history and track record, I did not expect what happened next.  It was an epic flailing of fur and howling.  He was a gyroscope of biting and scratching and mayhem. This all happened in a few seconds.  The bite through my nail bed was so hard and so fierce that when I let go of the cat, stunned and already wailing myself, I saw he’d left a tooth behind.  A whole tooth.  That’s how hard he bit me.

I managed to pick up my high heels and scurry to the car, while the cat made a hasty getaway.  The pain was so bad and my anger at myself so overwhelming that I pretty much boo hoo hoo-ed all the way home in the car.  All the while dripping blood on my nice interview dress and sobbing off my eyebrows (I have very light eyebrows, I have to pretty much draw them in).  And of course, because I am a fool and a sap, I cried for the cat who lost the tooth.  And then I cried because I miss my kids and was going to see them on my way home from the interview but was in such a state I couldn’t really stop by the preschool to visit them.  I almost cried about Libya and Charlie Sheen’s kids just for good measure.  It was pathetic.

When I got home, my husband was upstairs.  He came down to find me dousing myself in antiseptic.  He knew I’d been bitten because I texted him.  And when he saw me there at the sink he knew: “Trying to save a cat again?”

So yeah.  That was my day.  Good news:  job.  Bad news:  I’m still a moron.  I leave you with this cautionary tale (and sound insights) from a blogger friend of mine:  A Cat Is Just A Really Small Tiger That Wants To Kill You.

Tagged as: good news, huge tiny mistakes