Reaching New Cat Counter Feats
Today is the last day of June and I gotta say: What a good month for counting cats. Perhaps even the BEST month for counting cats, for as long as I've been doing it. Check out those stats on my cat counter page!! 125 cats in June! Last night I went on a skate and came across SEVEN cats which pushed me over my previous record of 121 cats in September of 2021, right after I started keeping track with a tally app on my phone.
This is a huge celebration for nobody other than myself, but I'm celebrating it! It functionally means nothing nor does it indicate much other than I've gone on a bunch of walks and skates this month and gotten lucky quite a bit. The highest number of cats I saw in a single day this month was only 16. Honestly I assumed that when I would beat my old record it would be with at least one or two days in the month where I'd see like 20 or 30 cats. Last July I had a walk with a pal where we saw 47 cats over the course of like 3ish hours, then two months later another walk where we saw 31 cats. But no, those months only saw me 78 and 74 cats respectively. That tells me that this month was about CONSISTENCY.
This whole endeavor feels like fishing in FFXIV. I've gotten back into it (help me (jk I'm having fun)) because I missed indulging my fishing minigame brainworms, and it's been giving me a similar kind of indulgent joy! There's some amount of work involved: ya gotta show up to the fishing holes during the right fish windows and ya gotta be out in the neighbourhood during Optimal Cat Hours, and there's also some amount of random chance that you've gotta roll with. In both, you're working towards some arbitrary goal and keeping track of data and looking at charts and graphs and it's fun!
And I wouldn't even say it's like... meaningless fun? Counting cats has been meaningful in a similar way that filling my FFXIV fishing log has been! I get a lot out of being out in my neighbourhood and getting to say hi to the local alley cats and seeing their wide range of personalities. In FFXIV I get a lot out of thinking through problems of manipulating the game's RNG to catch the fish I'm aiming for, and I really enjoy just having my character hang out in beautifully made digital spaces. It might be inconsequential fun, but it's meaningful fun!
It's good to do things that feel good to do! It's good to celebrate little personal achievements even if nobody else particularly cares about the specifics of what you're doing or celebrating! 10/10 would recommend finding fun new ways to engage with least 1 thing that regularly gives you small bits of joy in your day-to-day life. Going on walks/skates makes me happy, seeing cats out and about makes me happy, making charts and graphs makes me happy, and my cat counter just combines all 3 things to really bring out the most fun in engaging with all of them.
It might just be numbers on a website to people other than me, but know that when you look at that cat counter page and see "Up to date as of 4 hours, 20 minutes ago", just know that I'm having a great time engaging with the things that make me happy and am excitedly sharing that with the world at large in case it brings anyone else some kinda secondhand joy.
Anyways I love you all! Here's the 122nd cat of June that broke my previous record at the end of my skate route last night — just slowly crossing through an intersection at 1:46 AM, paying me no mind. My grandma would call this "crossing kitty corner" cause "kitties don't follow the crosswalks they just go where they wanna go" :)
