Jeneration X: One Reluctant Adult's Attempt to Unarrest Her Arrested Development; Or, Why It's Never Lancaster, Jen (read more books .txt) 📖

acting and the exaggerated incompetence, he believes infomercials are an insult to his intelligence. This makes me love them even more because watching Fletch get mad is always funny.

“Who can’t crack an egg?” he’ll fume.

“Blankets aren’t that complicated! And it’s just a backwards robe, you idiot!”

“Seriously? They can’t peel a simple cucumber without stabbing themselves? Seriously?”

“Oh, noes! I can’t work this Saran Wrap! Look at my butterfingers! Somebody help me because I’m too stupid to work a strip of plastic!”

We’re at the dinner table eating flank steaks wrapped with spinach, prosciutto, and provolone cheese when an infomercial for the Chef Basket comes on. We’re both instantly mesmerized for entirely different reasons.

“What kind of half-witted moron can’t boil a potato without incident?” he barks.

Ooh, imagine all the potatoes I could cook without incident, I think, immediately kicking into lizard-brain mode.

“Goes right from the pot to the plate… dripping boiling hot water across the kitchen the entire time.”

I’d never have to wash a colander again!

“From draining to straining! There’s no difference! Using two words to say the same thing doesn’t speak to multiple functionalities! That just means the intern who wrote this commercial had a thesaurus.”

It strains and drains? Is magic device!!

“And the bonus RoboStir? Please.”

And the bonus RoboStir! Please!

So enrapt are we with the commercial that neither one of us notices when our eighteen-year-old cat, Jordan, climbs onto the dinner table. As I watch, I hear a quiet om-nom-nom in the near vicinity, but it doesn’t really register because the dogs are eating dinner behind us and my, God! The Chef Basket handles stay cool to the touch! Finally I’ll stop burning my hands whenever I go near the stove!

It’s not until the commercial ends that we realize that the cat’s not only on the table, but she also just ingested the nine-inch loop of butcher’s twine that had held my flank steak together while cooking.

Son of a bitch.

“Did she…” I gasp, lifting my plate to find evidence of the string. “She couldn’t…”

But she had and she did and she’s currently smacking her smug, self-satisfied feline chops as apparently I prepare a particularly appetizing string.

I can’t believe this just happened. I’ve spent the past eighteen years trying to keep this stupid cat away from all things dangling, knowing the havoc it would play on her delicate digestive system. I’m so careful that Christmas ribbon is strictly forbidden in this house, as is tinsel and Easter grass. I won’t even toss used dental floss in the trash. I wait until I’m ready to take out the garbage and then I collect the used bits I’d safely stashed in my nightstand. [I almost always forget to do this on Garbage Day and Fletch won’t go near my nightstand because it’s a huge tangled knot of old floss, headbands, uncapped lip balms, free-range antacids, and those tiny silica packets found in shoe boxes for some odd reason. Fletch calls it my Drawer of Shame.]

Fletch thinks more quickly than I do in a crisis, so while I pace and try to convince the cat to barf (by describing the oysterlike substance I once saw on a subway platform) he consults both the emergency vet and the Internet.

“Good news,” he tells me, hanging up the phone. “This isn’t such a big deal. We don’t have to bring her to the ER. All we need is a tablespoon of Vaseline.”

I run to the medicine cabinet to locate the tub I use for my scaly elbows. I scoop up a handful of goo and return to the kitchen. “Okay, what end do I put this in?”

Fletch gives me a Ped Egg–worthy scowl while I wrestle Jordan into position. “Her mouth, you ninny. You put it in her mouth!”

“Well, I’m sorry,” I scoff. “I’ve never lubed a cat before.”

“You think I have?” [Noted.]

Jordan has always been fairly mellow. She’s been a cranky old lady her whole life, but in a passive, sitting-on-the-front-porch-and-exclaiming-into-her-handkerchief-that-those-hippies-need-a-haircut sort of way, rather than an aggressive, get-back-here-Bobby-Dylan-and-taste-the-blue-steel-of-my-clippers manner. But the minute I grasp her about the midsection and try to insert a petroleum product in her mouth, oh… here go hell come.

There is screaming and there is slashing and there is crying and I believe the bulk of it is coming from Fletch. I quickly witness that two hundred pounds of husband is no match for six pounds of ancient, irate kitty.

My entreaties that I’m trying to save her fool life are for naught and we continue to struggle with her but I can’t get the Vaseline anywhere near her mouth. I do, however, get it in my mouth, as well as my hair and my ear and all over the counter, which blends nicely with all the blood gushing from fresh claw marks.

“Now what?” I wail. The last thing I want to do is take her to the emergency vet because trying to shove her in a cat carrier is the same exercise in futility as attempting to force petroleum into her piehole.

“The doc says if we can’t get it into her mouth, we put tiny dabs on her paws and she’ll ingest it when she cleans her feet.”

I slather handfuls on her front legs. She bolts away from us, but not before spraying every cabinet, appliance, and window with tiny blobs of Vaseline before escaping to the laundry room where every piece of lint we’ve ever generated clings to her tacky limbs like tiny leg warmers.

“That didn’t work!” I shout.

“What part of ‘dabs’ did you not understand?”

At this point, poor little Jordie’s beyond upset and were she capable of registering her discontent online, we’d be unfriended, unfollowed, and in social media jail. She’d be begging Khloé Kardashian to “retweet if you think cat lubers are douche bags” and pinging Angelina and Brad to adopt her because clearly she’s being raised by savages.

Despite her anger, we have to get this stuff into her. So I rub down her whole front with Vaseline and, to make it more appetizing, follow it with a smear of creamy