…so I have written a story. I didn’t like any of the prompts I found online; they were all things like “lol describe your worst experience” or “write about three objects in your room,” and I am not quite bored enough to write a story about my computer, desk, and Nalgene bottle. This morning Quark, my little hellacious fluffball, met Pandora, who belongs to Tracy and who briefly escaped the guest room she’s been trapped in for the past few weeks. Here’s a story about their encounter:

She smelled funny. Not funny like the bizarre new mush-in-a-can that his owner had been dishing into his bowl for the past few days, the can certified ORGANIC with a smiling dopey tabby on the label, but funny in a bad way. Here before him, three yards away, was a fellow member of his species, and he didn’t like it.

She narrowed her eyes. Not a hiss or meow, which offended him. This was his territory. He had been hard at work every day, rubbing his fur against every square inch within reach, and there had been a lot of surface area to cover in the vast and cluttered living room. This was his territory, by all rights, and who was this thing anyways? That was his cardboard box lid she now perched upon, narrowing her eyes at him and not even having the decency to say hello or touch noses.

She crept forward. One of the big clumsy beings, not his own, was making nonsensical noises at the intruder, attempting to coax her out from under the table, no doubt. His table. Avoiding the big clumsy being, she crept closer to him, and he now had a better look at her. Suddenly confused, he drew back, sitting up straight and tall, hoping he’d fluffed up his tail enough to give the impression that he was bigger than her.

Which, as he now discovered, he was not. In fact, now that he could see her, she looked uncannily like what he saw in the tall reflective glass that his big clumsy sometimes stood in front of in the mornings, blocking his way to the food bowl. He had some vague notion that the image he saw was himself. Now the image had escaped the glass and perched before him, in his cardboard box lid, smelling funny and pissing him off.

Wiggle, said a voice from within, the same voice that urged him to eat the tasty houseplants when the big clumsy one wasn’t looking. Wiggle.

And he wiggled his rear end, gathering momentum for the kill. And he pounced.

The act of pouncing evoked some ancestral memory, deeply wired beneath the domestic softness and torpitude that generations of inbreeding and co-habitation with the big clumsy ones had engendered. The three yards of cheap, dingy gray carpet beneath his thundering paws transformed into the wild savannah; she was the rival lionness that had strayed into his territory. His non-existent front claws extended to become long blades, sharp as the knives in the adjacent kitchen. Alarmed and humbled, the lionness turned tail and scattered, into the welcoming arms of the clumsy one, who ushered her back into the guest room, out of his territory, off the lush savannah.

Satisfied, he reclaimed the cardboard box lid. It didn’t matter to him that he could not quite all the way inside, and that his fur and fat draped over one of the edges. It was his.

…And I’m not referring to the KU parking department this time. Last week, when I started work, the parking lot closest to my building was blissfully empty. Even if I happened to roll in late, closer to 10:00 than to 9:00, I would always be guaranteed a spot in the first four yellow spaces. Imagine my surprise on Monday when I pulled up, 9:00 a.m. on the dot, to find a sea of SUVs and sports cars stretching over three fourths of the parking lot. Grumbling, I found a spot on the opposite end and examined the cars on my way to work, trying to deduce what had happened. I noticed several greek-symbol decals on the cars, and sure enough, out in front of the row of sorority houses were big groups of blonde, over-tanned and underweight girls in sweat-shorts and pink tube tops chanting their sorority mantras and clapping in rhythm. Ahh, the joys of rush week.

Now I know people in sororities in fraternities - you can’t avoid them on this campus, really. I’d heard that there was a large Greek community at KU before I came, and I was pretty confused about why they would come to Kansas until someone enlightened me - no tasty baklava or gyros, just keggers and girls in teeny pink skirts that, for the life of me, I’ve never been able to figure out how they can sit down in them without revealing their clam-friends to the rest of the universe. I’ve never actually seen anyone in the act of sitting in those skirts; one minute they are standing and then the next minute they are sitting down, legs crossed and cell-phone/i-pod glued to the ears, fused to bad-bleach-job hair. Indeed this is a quandary for Physics-Boy and his friends, who would no doubt be happy devoting research energy to such a matter.

Anyhow, I’ve digressed. The point is that I know frat/sorority people that don’t fit the stereotype, and that are actually people and not some sort of party-monster that thrives on booze and bronze tanner. Yet the prejudice persists, in part because the cool frat/soro people I know have either quit/are quitting their houses, or just think it’s all a big joke anyways. For every cool person I know, there are thirty more that reaffirm the stereotype. The girls that remain utterly mystified by the bus system, halfway into spring semester, that stand at a bus stop for hours, whining about how stupid the bus drivers are into their cell phones while staring at me in my bohemian/Indian looking clothes like I am from Jupiter (assuming she knows what Jupiter is). Fair enough, sorority girl. You stay in your territory, and I’ll stay in mine.

Prejudices notwithstanding, rush week hasn’t really bothered me thus far, as for the past few days there have been spaces left at the other end - way, waaay at the other end, perhaps, but they were there - but not this morning. They took up all the spots this morning (god, how many more of them can there possibly be? They are multiplying like bacteria). Thus forcing me to park over at Memorial Stadium and having to walk up the big hill in the Kansas summer heat, which feels like being trapped in a sauna with the door sealed. Now if it had been for a worthy event - say cars were here for Relay for Life, for example, or maybe even some sort of track meet, I’d be more understanding and willing to put up with the longer walk.

But having to park on the other side of campus and walk over the bloody hill, so that a bunch of ditzy ex-prom queens can stand outside and annoy passing cars with their rhyming cheers all damned day?

It’s on, bitches. Nobody messes with karenology’s ability to park (save karenology herself, that is).