Every morning I have the same routine.  My first alarm starts going off at 4:45am, which I promptly snooze.  At 5:09am, my second alarm blares the radio in my bathroom, slowly waking me from my slumber so I can hear the traffic report and news.  Right around the third time I hit snooze on Alarm #1 is when I begin to ask myself, “How many times did I wake up last night?  Five? Six?”

Eventually my achy joints get prepared for the inevitably stiff daily grind of showering and styling myself for public scrutiny.  While I pause at the edge of my bed, I survey the damage from last night’s escapade.  Not my escapade, but that of my cat. 

While I try to savor as much sleep as possible between bedtime and that horrible punishment we call morning, my little kitty manages to knock as many loose items off of any flat surface as she can, as if leaving things where I place them is unfit, if not downright uncouth.

A penny here, a bobby pin there. Oh, there’s my hairspray.  And my lotion. Don’t forget each earring I left on the dresser!  A box of tissues, several bottles of body spray, and the TV remote are strewn about on the floor in front of my bed. Underneath the dresser I find an entire collection of hair ties and safety pins.  They weren’t there yesterday, I swear.  As I walk into the bathroom I survey more damage: my hairbrush is on the floor, along with more bobby pins, some hair clips, and the soap dispenser.  My boyfriend’s hair pomade and deodorant accompany my items in a pool of kitty terror.

This is my daily routine.  Without fail, in the wee hours of the morning, my cat has found delight in watching my items fall to the floor, one by one, as if her sole responsibility is to remind me how desperately I need to secure every item I own to a hard surface with glue.  Sure, I could actually put all these items away, but these are things I use on a daily basis.  The items that procure my presence in this domain. What says “this house is lived-in.”  No one wants to come into a bathroom or a bedroom with bare countertops – that just screams “I eat ramen noodles every night because I’m house-poor.”  So, I must endure the tomfoolery of my sweet little angel of death.

The antics that lead to my morning routine of cleaning an area that should require a hazmat suit are the same antics that wake me up anywhere from four to 13,000 times throughout the night.  Each time kitty enthusiastically knocks off one of the larger may-as-well-be-laced-in-catnip items from the dresser or bathroom counter, the sound infiltrates my sleep, causing me to have dreams of explosions or home invasions.  I can’t tell you how many times I have woken up thinking someone is breaking into my home, bringing me a terror I haven’t known since I was seven years old and watched Unsolved Mysteries in the dark for the first time…

…you know, with Robert Stack’s eerie voice and that insanely bone-chilling theme music that still makes me shit my pants when I hear it. 

Yet, there she sits, my lovely cat.  Staring at me with a look of wonderment…

…as if she had discovered gravity and I dare to not be impressed!  A regular Sir Isaac Meowton, she is. 

What makes this routine all more aggravating is that my normal attempts to scorn a cat’s inability to do as I say are hindered by the fact that she is deaf.  Instinct drives me to scream, “HEY!! STOP THAT!” when she plays baseball with my belongings, but the attempts are futile.  She can’t hear a damn thing, so I must actually stomp hard on the floor and chase her down before she knocks something over (you know, that whole negative reinforcement thing…).  During my waking hours, I can imagine what she must think of me, some angry-faced woman flailing her arms around and running quickly toward her anytime she’s trying to have fun. 

But while I’m trying to sleep, there’s no knowing what she’s into until she’s already knocked something over.  So all she gets is the enjoyment (or bewilderment) of this lump of bedding that sits up really quickly, flails her arms around, and then slumps back down into bed.  Well, that’s no fun!

She has no idea what it’s like to be startled awake by the noise of a hundred items being pushed off a dresser, she’s deaf! Oh what a life, to be so visually stimulated and not to be annoyed by the sound of everything plummeting to the ground. But I must say, it is kind of funny when I gently pet her while she’s sleeping and she jolts awake, not knowing what’s going on or where she is, like an eighty-year-old woman at Chippendales.

With all her ability to cause me to lose sleep every night, she’s still cute as a button and I can’t help but love her. All she has to do is look at me and give a hearty “meow!” and I’ve forgiven her of any wrongdoing. Because she is just…absolutely…adorable.

…And I will get my revenge when she is sleeping!