I always wanted a cat. I like the stupid little furballs. Can't help it.
I know it's irrational and expensive and environmentally suboptimal
and you're basically just setting yourself up for inevitable heartbreak,
but when they bump their dumb soft heads into me I melt like a chocolate
bar on the dash of a black car in the August sun.
My Dad was allergic to cats, so I wasn't allowed to have a cat. Then my
Dad left and I still wasn't allowed to have a cat. In retrospect that's
pretty suspicious, Mom. My college had an extreme zero tolerance policy
for pets: they caught this one dude red-handed and called animal control
to come murder his pet snake. Then someone in that same dorm burned a
bag of popcorn and the sprinklers wouldn't shut off, flooding the entire
building and destroying everybody's shit. I've never been a big fan of
the "snake guy" archetype but no one deserves that degree of irony.
In my first apartment, I wasn't allowed to have a cat because there was
a cat quota which was already filled by my roommate, whose cat hated
me. That cat would wait until I brought a girl over and then walk up to
us while we were making out and just piss right there in the middle of
the floor, making eye contact with me. At the time I really had no idea
how devastating cat urine can be to a rental property.
I stayed there for way too long because I hate moving. You know when you
start to hate everyone who lives in a city, like it's their fault that
your personality grew out of that lifestyle? Time to go. I carefully
selected only rental units with pet clauses, paid everyone in the world,
and slowly realized that the carpet was saturated with cat urine from
the last tenant. I report this to the property manager, who reports
it to the property owner, who replies back to the property manager, who
tells me, "Yeah, no more pets."
So now I'm sitting in a townhouse that smells like cat piss, waiting weeks for
these colossal dipshit moron douchebag numbskulls who installed carpet
all over a pet rental to go through the doomed process of paying a
series of professionals to tell them that you can't actually get
crystallized uric acid out of a carpet pad, and I'm still not allowed to
have a fucking cat.
That sounds like a whole lotta crap to go through just to still not be able to have a cat. Especially dealing with the aftermath of someone else's cat... You'll get there eventually though, and one day I'm sure you'll find a furball who loves you to the ends of the earth and will give you many head-bumps :)
That sucks. I am sorry that you can't do the simple thing that so many of us take for granted. My animal friends are real friends to me and I am so glad that I get to have them in my life.
I'm sure that if you keep pushing, you will eventually find yourself in a position to make it real. In the meantime, here are two of mine. This is Dipper and Aang.
Sorry to hear about that. Hopefully you can still "borrow" cats in the neighborhood like I try to do.
A tip for renting: work with an independent rental agent. They're hard to find (especially for something small like apartments or townhouses) but often spot what wrong long before you get there. Once I find a job that pays enough to move I'll be paying for one to move across the country.