Kitt-schy

I have a calendar in my office. It functions perfectly as a calendar. It tells the onlooker the date, the day of the week, the month, and the year. It is normal in every respect except one: It has cats on it. Not just cats, but a lot of cats.

I love furry animals, both cats and dogs. And the boyf got me a silly cat calendar at my request. Little did I know that this particular cat calendar is INSANE.

A normal cat calendar would probably have one large photograph for every month with a cat lying in repose on a fence or in a basket or sniffing a daffodil. Not so in my case. My cat calendar has a thousand pictures for every month. Okay, in actuality, one photograph for every date of every month. Each date has a "zany" photograph with an even "zanier" caption. There are cats wearing boas, cats inside fish bowls, cats wearing scarves, cats wearing ear muffs, cats wearing football helmets, cats wearing other cats. I wish I were kidding. But I'm not. The captions are even worse.

Beneath a picture of a cat inside a hamster gym: "Don't be afraid, Jellybean. It's a hamster spa and I'm going to give you a massage."

Was that even a joke?

Beneath a photograph of a cat next to a Scrabble board: "Cheated at Scrabble with neighbor's pug."

I don't get it.

This calendar is so painfully bad and kitschy, it's funny. Except I always get the distinct feeling that when people walk into my office, they expect to find a 45-year-old woman with a peroxide-bleached-mullet, a pink and yellow sweater vest, and canvass shoes from Wal-Mart.

Then I think about the cats. Did any of these cats have any idea that they would be memorialized in a horribly tacky cat calendar? Did that one cat sitting next to the Scrabble board have an inkling that its decision to sit on a chair that happened to be next to a piece of cardboard would forever link it to a word game and an imaginary canine? I wonder where that cat is right now, and if it has any idea what its owner did to it, or if it will ever know.

At any rate, I feel like it's my duty to keep this calendar posted on my wall. A weaker person would put the calendar down and burn it. But I'll keep it posted and be forever tortured by earmuff-wearing cats.

10.6 months to go.