All Intensive Purposes

I have a co-worker, who is more or less the cat lady archetype. Back when she used to speak to me, she would tell me stories of how she couldn’t sleep because her cat was ‘nagging.’ Apparently, the only way to get a cat to stop nagging is to feed it canned pumpkin. Ninety five percent of the time, if I ask her a question she will respond in one of two ways: she will either shrug her shoulders and laugh nervously or visibly stiffen, look straight ahead and give a barely audible one word answer. Particularly probing questions like, “How was your weekend?” are “How’s it going?” are guaranteed to evoke her trademark guarded, paranoid response. Another time I asked her, “How’s the weather outside?” and she angrily snapped, “Aren’t you going to go out there anyway?” It seems that there are no safe topics. What really annoys me is that when cat lady is interacting with my other co-workers, she momentarily seems to achieve some level of social functioning, meaning she manages to croak out a “Hiyee!” ,or a “Going somewhere?” if someone happens to be walking out the door. I’m lucky if she even looks at me, much less makes to effort to form a syllable. Another thing: she has some sort of obsessive compulsive issue with public transportation. Everyday she stiffly walks past me in the station and makes a beeline for the place where the last car stops. She never, ever varies this routine. When I look in her eyes as she makes her way to this place on the platform, bundled excessively, plaid scarf tied tightly around her head, it’s like she’s on a secret mission.

// posted by t.s. @ 8:47 PM