You know how some people reach an age where they comically lose any desire to hold back from telling people how they really feel? They’ve just gotten too old to bother with social niceties, and they don’t really care what you think anymore? With people, it’s hilarious. With cats? Not so much.

For the past couple months it has become pretty clear that Nala has reached that stage of life where she is just too old to care anymore. This mainly means four things:

1. Anybody is fair game for biting, at any time, for any reason. Sneak-attacking your achilles is no longer just my special gift to Sara; I’m ready to share that gift with the world.
2. You’ll get up and pet me when I damn well tell you to get up and pet me, starting with 3 a.m.
3. If I decide the kitchen table is my throne, than I shall recline on said throne. Your shouting is the buzzing of flies to one such as me.
4. *I* decide where my litter box is.

This has all been a sort of slow evolution, but this is how it went down.

First off, she’s pretty much always woken us up in the morning, but I can kind of understand that. She knows we get up at about the same time, and she’s just early by 30 minutes (EVERY. SINGLE. DAY.) I mean, she’s a cat; I don’t expect her to tell time.

But then she started being off by like an hour and a half. And then she started also being off by about 7 hours. And then also maybe off by 4 hours. And then I started to think to myself, “Wait a minute, I don’t think she DOES think we get up 45 minutes after we fell asleep!”

We started tossing her in the bathroom one of the times she would wake us up so that we could actually get some sleep. She promptly responded by pooping on the bathmat.

Now look, let he among us who has not pooped on a bathmat cast the first stone. I figured that poor cat probably didn’t expect to get tossed into a dark bathroom for a couple of hours with no litter box, and didn’t plan ahead, bathroom-wise. When you gotta go, you gotta go. She did, after all, politely pee directly into the drain in the bathtub, which is about as polite as you can be in your time of need.

Except she did it EVERY DAY FOR TWO WEEKS.

I don’t mean to make it sound like she actually stopped after two weeks. Au contraire, mon frere. It’s just that it took me two weeks to go, “Wait a minute, I don’t think she WAS coincidentally trapped right when she has to go to the bathroom. I think she might even be doing this on PURPOSE!” (Give me a break, I was extremely tired; I was getting up like 4 times a night.)

Sure enough, these days she just saunters in and goes when she feels like it, even when we don’t lock her in there.

Just to recap: she wakes me up multiple times per night, just to show me she can. She uses my bathmat as her bathroom, ignores me when I tell her to get off the table, and bites me whenever I turn my back to her, yet she still expects me to buy her ridiculously expensive, medicated cat food.

All of this is a long way of saying that when Nala goes, and it may be sooner, rather than later, I will never, ever get another cat.