There is a cat that lives nearby my apartment. I've sort of befriended it, which means it thinks it can follow me around meowing. Like Siamese cats, Cambodian cats have very loud, obnoxious voices and are very vocal towards humans. So, to get it to shut up, I've been feeding it baby cat food left over from that one time when I had the baby sparrow.
I don't have a balcony-proof bowl, so I put the baby cat food into an old piece of tupperware and left it on the balcony for the cat to consume at will.
Now for you to understand why the next part happens, you need to know that the landlady has a maid who cleans up the balconies sometimes. Although this means I have less work to do myself, the maid inevitably comes at 7:45 in the morning, just as I am leaving for work. And there is no fixed schedule--sometimes she doesn't show up for weeks, and sometimes she shows up on two consecutive days. Then I have to either step all over her while she's scrubbing the floor, or else wait inside the apartment till she goes away. It's always very inconvenient.
This morning, I discovered her bent over on my balcony at 7:45 as I was trying to get downstairs. Then, as I rounded the corner at the bottom of the steps, I saw that she had commandeered my tupperware full of catfood. It was sitting with her other belongings. I wasn't sure if she intended to steal it or not, but I, for one, wasn't about to let it happen.
Running late for school already, and unwilling to climb back over her to get inside my house, I took the cat food with me to school.
I probably looked fairly ridiculous carrying a lidless piece of tupperware half-filled with cat food five blocks to school, but that didn't really occur to me at the time. I was saving that food from an untimely disappearance, dammit! My world was back in order, and nothing else mattered.
Of course this meant I was stuck carrying baby cat food around to each of my classes.
I found it made a pretty good conversation piece, and had students write about why a teacher would bring baby cat food to school. Certain that I would use it to illustrate a point, they developed elaborate theories as to why it was sitting on my desk. It was pretty funny when they found out that, like my propensity to walk around barefoot, there wasn't actually any reason for it.
Baby cat food is also pretty good for making people leave me alone. Case in point: I was sitting around during break and a student came up to me demanding "English practice with a foreigner".
Me: OK, but I charge for it.
Him: Are you a student or a teacher here?
Me: I said, You have to pay me if you want English Practice. No free lessons.
Him: I bet you're a teacher!
Me: I charge for English lessons, OK?
Him: So how long have you been in Cambodia?
Me: * ! * Would you like some American food? It's REALLY GOOD.
I also found out that cat food can be used as a disciplinary measure. Like lumps of coal, it was distributed to noisier members of my "special" class, who were then forced to eat it. In all, I'd say it was pretty serendipitously wonderful.
The glorious adventure of the baby cat food came to a somewhat inglorious end when, on my way home, I inexplicably dropped the tupperware and the little pellets spilled all over the parking lot of Sacombank.
