stickers & Mr.Yuk.

When I was little, I loved stickers. I would hoard them and place all my stickers in a Nike shoebox in the middle of my bookshelf.

I hated how you can only use them once. Meaning that you have to choose carefully where you want it. Meaning you have to find something that's worthy of you gracing its presence with a sticker.

But once in a while, I would go on a huge sticker binge.
I would go around, my Shoebox o' Stickers in hand and I would put them everywhere and anywhere I wanted.

I remember this one time in First Grade, a guest speaker came in to talk to us about the importance of not eating random things. And that day, we all left with 12 "Mr.Yuk" stickers.

The speaker instructed us to put these stickers on anything that wasn't edible.
When I went home, I went ballistic.

Look, there's a wall, I can't eat that. It needs a sticker. That book doesn't taste good. It needs a sticker. That lightbulb is awfully bright. It needs a sticker. And lemme stick five more of these ugly green faces on the perfectly clean white wall while I'm at it.

You know, just in case I wanna eat it.

The Mr.Yuk is still there in our house, underneath the white paint my mom desperately smothered over it so our house value wouldn't go down.

meow cat.

When I got home, there was a cat waiting for me on my steps.

It was gray, and had these huge yellow eyes.

I think it was a stray, because I've seen it around our neighborhood a lot.

And I know what you all are thinking right now.

It's probably something like "Aw, it's a cute little cat, why don't you adopt it?"

No. I love cats, don't get me wrong, but seeing a random cat on my steps that probably has rabies, AIDS, or whatever awkward diseases cats get, kind of unsettles me.

So we kind of stared at each other for a few minutes.

Me trying to telepathically tell it that it needs to move because it's blocking the door.

The cat undoubtedly trying to tell me that it wants food. 

And it started to follow me as I backed away.

Which just plain scared me.

So I ran away as fast as a could, feeling stupidly uncoordinated with my backpack and ipod headphones flapping around.

Now that I think about it, I should have taken a picture of it.


My mom tells me not to feed it or else it'll stay.... <3 Fi