The Best Thing I Did For Myself This Year Was Something Everyone Else Did Last Year

I adopted a pandemic cat after the world reopened. I love him so much!!!

For someone who loves pets so much, I sure waited a long time to adopt one myself. For a while I didn’t really see the point — everyone around me had a cat or dog I could affectionately dote on and buy little gifts for, so I didn’t really need my own. And then this year I parted ways with my longtime roommate and her cat when we both moved into separate apartments (all this after enduring two bad landlords, one suspected gas leak, and a pandemic together over the course of 3–4 years) and I suddenly felt a bit lonely. Alas, that didn’t last long. Enter: Carmichael. If you missed it, here’s how he came to me:

Carmichael appears to be part fox but is allegedly fully cat. He has a big bushy fluffy tail and orange pointy ears and big funny eyes and a little birthmark next to his nose. He looks funny but sophisticated. The person who initially rescued him off the streets a couple months ago found me on Instagram (I am simply telling you the truth when I say they run a cat colony in which every cat is named after a character in the Lin Manuel Miranda musical Hamilton) to tell me the story of how she found him: He showed up at her cat colony one day when she was feeding the cats. He let her pet him but he was very scared and hungry and he ate three large cans of cat food (this tracks, tbh). She came back with Flatbush Cats and picked…