I've learned many things during my years on this spinning blue rock, but perhaps one of the most important is this:
The only day it is good to own a white cat, is probably your wedding day.
That cat has shed enough hair to make about 22 more cats of his large size & stature. Knowing this, we decided to rescue another kitten. But this time one with long hair. God we're smart.
So which one do you think sheds more?
Anyone with an appreciation for irony will realize just by posing that question the answer is the short haired cat, which - as it turns out - is not so short when it's on your clothes & furniture. It gets into places that are beyond explanation.
Enter: Friday morning.
Alarm goes off, I sit up. Cat jumps up to greet me. Still in my morning fog, I pet him a few times as I'm emerging from my foggy groggy morning stupor. I rub my eyes, stretch and prepare to take on the world for yet another day.
BUT WAIT.
There is something in my eye. So I rub it more in case my contacts are just being funny. While its nice to have the contacts you can sleep in, sometimes they roll in and out of place creating minor issues in the morning. Little did I know this would be no minor issue.
It soon became apparent that the more I rubbed it the redder & more swollen it got and it was not an eyelash or my contact. So I summoned my he-man to the bathroom to check if there was something in my eye.
So I lift my lid and my eye is blinking and blinking and blinking. Fucking reflexes.
So he says, "I'm trying to see, but you won't keep your eye open."
Brilliant.
Anyone who has ever had anything in their eye knows it waters uncontrollably and begins to override your ability to voluntarily keep it open. It wants to shut.
So after about 5 minutes of us bickering back and forth, he finally gets a long enough look and says "I SEE IT! You've got a cat hair in your eye."
Fucking great. That cat hair has plagued me since the day he entered my life, and now its found a way to the deep crevasses of my eyelid?
Now what?
Of course my response was to yell at he-man to get it out, so he proceeds to tell me to hold still and... wait for it... keep my eye open (GUH) as he attempts to manually remove it with his fat fingers.
Needless to say, that didn't go over so well, and the retrieval of the hair was thus-far a failed endeavor.
I explained that this was my eye, and I will need it for future use...
Miraculously, he was able to remove it - with his fingers. How? I don't give a fuck.
He mumbled something about being late for work, and I thanked him as I started to rub my eye again to make sure it was debris-free.
Uh oh. It felt like something was still in my eye.
Him: Just blink - it'll take a few minutes for the swelling to go down.
Me: Um. Okay...
Five minutes later, he's about to walk out the door, and I tell him I'm pretty sure there is still something in my eye. I can feel it. But GEEZUZ. WTF else could be in my eye? Everything but the kitchen sink?
So I direct him to look again - this time at the left side of my left eye... and there it was.
Another. Fucking. Cat. Hair.
Son-of-a-bitch.
He tells me there is no way he can get to that one with his fingers, and gives me a cap to try an eye flush with. He's a MacGuyver, my honey. Except MacGuyver's shit usually worked.
At this point I'm starting to panic, because I'm going to be late for work. WTF am I going to do? He looks again and says "The only way I'm going to be able to get it is with a tweezers".
A TWEEZERS? IN MY EYE? The idea sent me into instant panic. I've seen him miss with a hammer. And I'm suppose to be chill with a tweezer in an eye that won't stop blinking uncontrollably?
What other option did I have?
So... in he went and out it came... but I must say, THAT is trust.
As soon as my eye is cat hair-free, it instantly felt better. So I thank him and send him on his merry way. It felt better, but holy shit - it did not look better.
My eye looked like I'd been punched by Mike Tyson. The eye was so red, a gallon of Visine wouldn't have put a dent in it. It looked like one of my eyes had been smoking joints all night, and the other was perfectly normal. And the entire area around it was big and puffy and red.
Wonderful.
I had little time to wallow or whine about it though, as I was about to be late for work too.
It wasn't until I physically stepped out into the bright light of the morning sun that I realized how sensitive my eye had become. Not only was it red & swollen, it watered in light. I don't work in a darkroom, so this was going to be a problem, as was driving 17 miles with one eye.
Where is an eyepatch when you really need one?
Needless to say, I drove to work and spent the whole morning walking around with my left eye shut. A fucking pirate. This wasn't helped by the fact that I was filling in for someone and working with a bunch of people I barely knew. Nice impression.
Around noon the swelling went down, but the red eye stuck around til about 230.
You don't even wanna know how many people asked me if I was okay, or if something was the matter. I couldn't help but wonder if they thought I'd been crying or if they thought someone was beating the shit out of me at home.
I have the feeling that no one else in the office had ever had ONE cat hair stuck in their eyelid, let-alone-TWO. Who does this shit happen to?
Me, my friend. ME.
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