Cats and Dogs and Kids and Parents
Mass hysteria! Plus, Dry January is finally over... or is it?
My kids want a dog. And I can’t blame them. Dogs are great. Dogs—at least the best ones—friendly and loyal and playful and obedient and cute and cuddly.
They’re fantastic companions, and every boy would benefit from having a trusty Labrador or a Golden Retriever or a Border Collie or an Australian Shepherd (my favorite) by his side. The thought of my young kids growing up with a canine best friend warms my heart!
We got a cat.
That’s not meant to be a gotcha. I love cats! (If you follow me on Instagram, you know this already. And no, I won’t stop sharing pics of mine or videos of other people’s!)
We had a dog when I was little, but by the time I was ten my mother had turned our house into a cat home. And I had no complaints.
First came Shadow, the world’s greatest cat, all black, cool as fuck, sauntering around the neighborhood commanding respect like Vito Corleone, and always being warm and cuddly and calm at home. He had an incredible temperament, and raised the bar for cats everywhere. Bringing him to the vet one last time after his pesky tumor returned was a tough day. We also had Kitty, a neighborhood stray we adopted. A tad skittish but friendly, and always down to sleep on our beds, Kitty was a good cat too, if a bit less social and prone to hide when company came over.
Since then, my mother has had a variety of other cats, some I’ve known well, some I haven’t. They’ve all had different personalities, but most have been good pets, and my affection for the species has never wavered. I will defend cats with a passion, especially against close-minded dog people! (I also love a good big cat, like the ones at the zoo, or Cringer. Who wouldn’t want to saddle up their tiger and go kick some ass?)
Cat people get a bad rap as weird and/or lonely, and men who own cats receive side-eye like no other. But in my experience, cat people are animal lovers in general, including dogs, whereas many dog people draw a line in the sand and reject cats, and often other animals, entirely.
Contrary to the negative stereotypes, cats are cuddly, cats are social (if you raise them right), and cats are cute as hell! Sure, they can be fickle, and stubborn and moody and indifferent but unlike dogs, who can be easily bribed with food and treats, a cat’s trust and affection is well-earned. And they’ll never jump on and/or knock over your guests or hump your leg. (There are just as many shitty dogs as there are shitty cats, FYI. Maybe let’s stop generalizing?)
Regardless of how you feel about kitties, a dog is simply impractical in a Brooklyn apartment! At least the kind of dog I would want (see list at the top). To quote the immortal Ron Swanson: “Any dog under 50 pounds is a cat, and cats are pointless.” Fuck you, Ron! But also good point (at least the first part). No offense to Paris Hilton but I don’t want a little dog.
To make matters worse, dogs are one of the biggest parenting traps there is.
In an attempt to stave them off, every parent lectures their kids with the amount of responsibility a dog requires: potty training, obedience training, taking them for walks—both for exercise and bathroom breaks, boarding them when you want to travel, replacing things they destroy, etc. (Dogs and kids are not even remotely the same—don’t even get me started on pet moms, I don’t need anymore death threats!—but they are both expensive and inconvenient as hell.) Kids, of course, shrug those warnings off. All they can think about is the furry upside of their canine companion, and every single kid promises—with eyes bigger than their stomachs (please don’t eat your dog)—that they’ll do the walking, they’ll do the feeding, they’ll do the training.
And then the most predictable thing in the word happens: they don’t do any of it, and you end up doing all of it.
Cats, on the other hand? Give them water, put food in their bowl twice a day, empty the litter box (every 7-10 days if you have an automatic one like we do! PetKit PuraMax, on sale now!), maybe get somebody to come by and feed them a couple of times when you’re out of town. Easy peasy!
So yeah, my kids got a cat, and they love Bubbles—they fight over whom she likes more—and they still want a dog. Which is fine! There are benefits to both animals, and one day, if and when we move to the suburbs, maybe we’ll get another pet. After all, I’ve always wanted to raise a kitten and a puppy to be friends, like in a Disney movie!
Then again, I can’t even get my kids to be nice to each other, and they’re the same species, so maybe that’s not a good ideal.
Social Media Round-up
Bye, January
I’ve been doing Dry January for a few years.
I try not to be obnoxious about it, despite all the people who give me shit and tell me it’s pointless and etc., etc. When the holidays end, I like to have a bit of a reset. It’s not really a resolution insomuch as it’s taking a self-care pitstop; after a couple of months of debauchery, I like to pull off the road, go from 60 to 0 and refill my tank (by not refilling it). Then, when February comes around, I pull back into the race on the way to 11 months of a different kind of self-care (I have kids, get off me!).
These days, when January ends and my self-imposed restriction is lifted, it usually takes me a minute to get back up to speed. Once I make abstaining a habit, it’s not super-easy to break it. So when February comes around, I don’t immediately start doing shots. I ease into things and tend to keep the precipitation down for a few weeks, if not months. (Usually once the first nice day of spring arrives it’s basically off to the races because nothing is better than having a few beers outside!)
There are definite upsides to drinking a little less, not least of which is saving money on increasingly expensive beers. I came across a $30 four-pack this weekend. FOUR BEERS! Unbelievable. Capitalism sucks!
At my age, the other big upside is having fewer difficult mornings. Avoiding the early morning haze that sometimes envelops me even after a small amount of wine or beer the night before is a pretty good incentive. Much like my increasingly painful and easily earned hangovers, the often unearned (after two beers? WTF) morning-after sluggishness only started to befall me as I’ve gotten older, because life is bullshit. But I can’t deny that it’s been a tad easier to wake up and feel 100% during my month of sobriety, so much so that gives me a bit of pause about slipping back into my non-dry lifestyle.
Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy beer and bourbon too much to quit entirely. Life is meant to be enjoyed! And like I said, once winter clears up and warm weather returns, any misgivings I have will probably fade away in the welcoming glare of the sun. But maybe not quite as quickly this time.
TL;DR: Getting old sucks.
We have cats and a dog, and they get along very well. You don't have to start when they are babies, although it helps. I agree that cat people are open to other animals, whereas dog people tend to draw the line at dogs. Their loss!
I didn’t know I was a cat person until four years ago when we got a kitten to scare off the mice. I fell madly in love. Now we have six cats and six fosters! Fortunately we have plenty of room in semi-rural Arkansas.
I did dry January for the first time last year. Like you, once I got out of the habit I’ve been drinking far less.