In the last post, I talked about how difficult it was for me to make buying decisions at a certain price point. Under twenty bucks, not a problem. Buying for my cat, well, it’s a problem because he’s become incredibly picky about food, but I have no problem spending money on him. I just have a hard time finding something he will eat. He was sick about two months ago and since then, he’s been extremely picky about food. I think it’s that he can’t smell as well as he used to, but I’m not sure. What I do know is that he used to eat Solid Gold tuna pate for all his meals.
Now, however, he will or won’t touch it, depending. He’ll eat it every three or four days, maybe, but not every meal as he used to. It’s frustrating beacuse he won’t eat any shredded food. He’ll eat the gravy that it’s in, but not the shreds themselves. Flakes? Yes. Pate? Yes. Morsels? Yes. But, and this is the important part, not more than a certain amount. I’ve been trying to figure out what he will and won’t eat, and it changes meal-to-meal. There are some foods he won’t eat at all. Tiki Cate Pate is one. Oh, and he will not eat broths.
Today, he is having a ‘I don’t want to eat anything day’, and I’m frustrated. I know that the standard bit of advice is to just leave out the wet food for twenty minutes and then take it away. It wouldn’t be feasible or ethical to put out the same food for the next meal, but that would be what you do with dry food. Even the food that he loves, he’s only deigned to nibble at. To be fair, he ate a decent amount at breakfast. Not a lot, but decent.
Side note: I learned when I took him to the vet that he had lost several pounds since the last time I took him in. Meaning, he wasn’t eating enough. Well, to be fair, he was considered plump back at the last check-in when he was nearly fifteen pounds. He was ten pounds this time, which was on the thinner side. He is getting older so that’s part of it, but I’m trying to feed him more. So, in general, he is eating more than he did before he got sick. I used to feed him one small can a day of wet food plus free-feeding dry food, and giving him treats during the day. Now, I’m upping it to one big can or two small cans a day, but he won’t eat all of it at a time. Realistically, we’re probably at a small can and a half total during the day with a lot of food wasted.
If he were younger, I would try to change his feeding so that I didn’t have to go through this stress every day. Given that he’s nearly 17, though, it’s pretty much any food I can get into him that I accept as edible that will do. He is eating. I take comfort in that. It’s jsut a matter of him getting something down him.
I think another thing that I have to come to terms with is that there are things I won’t change about myself. Back when I was younger, I bought into the notion that you had to change everything wrong with you. If you were aware of a flaw, then it behooved you to do something about it. The problem is that I wsa well-aware of my issues. I knew of the many things that I should fix. One prominent one was that I worked to the back of a deadline. If something was due on, say, February 1st, I would get it done ournd 11:59 p.m. on the night of January 31st.
My mom and I used to have an issue every thing we worked together because she would give me a deadline and then start asking me weeks earlier if I had gotten to her paper yet. I would say no, and she would be unhappy. It took longer than it should have for me to realize what was happening. When I figured it out, I asked her about it. She said she padded the time because she wanted to give me plenty of time. Which, had she told me, that would have been a nice thing. Because she didn’t tell me, though, I j ust did my usual thing of finishng the work minutes before it was due and stressing her out.
When I finally asked her about it (once I realized what was going on), she told me that she was harboring anxiety because I hadn’t even begun to start the work until days before the deadline. I told her that she had to tell me when she wanted it by, definitively, because I would always work to the back of the deadline.
I knew that it was not ideal to work in that fashion, but I have made my peace with it. I do better under pressure, which means that I won’t kick it into gear until there’s the chance of failure. When I was in college, I had a class called Psychology through Biograhpy. Participation in class was a quarter of our grade while the rest of it was one paper that was due at the end of the semester. You had to choose a famous person and do a paper on them. You had to assess them based on what you read. There was no page limit to the paper, but reasonably, it would not be a ten-page paper.
I wanted to do an Asian woman, but I could not find one at the time who had enough written about her to do a semester-long paper. I chose Tina Turner instead beacuse she’s fucking amazing. I did not even think about it for the first few monhths of the semester. Then, maybe two weeks before the end of the semester, I got all the books (yes, from the actual library) and read them.
Then, six days before it was due, I started writing. I was in the computer lab at my college because I did not have my own computer/laptop at the time. This was in the days when Word (or maybe even WordPerfect?) did not have auto-save. I wrote for six hours, my mind focused completely on what I was doing. Unbenownst to me, there was a pack of high schoolers visiting the school at the time. One of them thought it would be funny to cut off the electricity to the computer lab. Which meant I lost six hours of work.
That was painful. I managed to pull it back together and finish the paper (got an A, and it was 75-pages long), but that was a very low moment in my life.
I will not ever get to the point where I’m doing something as soon as I get the assignment/job. That’s not me, and I have accepted that about myself. I use it to my advantage now, and I’m actually decent at starting with enough time to comfortably finish, rather than with barely enough time to rush to the end. I consider that a win.