Shamrock's Quarantine

It’s currently the day I don’t know what, of quarantine and concentrating has been a little hard. Working from home isn’t as easy as everyone thinks it is you know. My uncle is a pretty established lawyer and he says he does a lot of work from home. I honestly don’t know how he stays disciplined. For every 15 minutes of homework I do, there's at least 30 minutes of fumbling around with my phone, sharpening my pencil, flipping through the tv, and on and on and on. I know what you're thinking but I am a hard worker, just maybe not with school so much now that I have to do it at home. Plus, it’s not all my fault, now that I'm home so much my mom all of a sudden has made me an entire list full of things I need to do around the house, it's almost a full time career. I’ll sit down for five minutes to do work and I'll hear my mom yell “Marcus” from across the house and she’ll have 30 chores waiting for me. Although I distract myself a lot, my cat Shamrock, distracts me more than anything else. 80% of the noise I hear all day “meow, meow, meow”. I mean, don’t get me wrong, Shamrock is a cute cat, and most people would agree, but when I'm trying to do work and he’s biting and swatting at my leg, it starts to get less cute. Like the other day, I had this really important english assignment to get done. I had about 2 hours of time blocked out and I was determined to get it all done. Sure enough, here comes Shamrock proclaiming that his food bowl was empty by meowing 80 times so I got up to go check on his food, to see if he needed a refill, but what do I see? I saw what I always do. As soon as he can see the bottom of his bowl, even if there is tons of food around it, if he can see even one cubic centimeter of his bowl, he needs a refill. So I refill it, go sit down and work on my essay. You know in Spongebob when one of those flowery screens pop up with the guy saying *5 seconds later*. Well, imagine my life as that because I swear, not even five seconds later I hear, “meow, meow, meow, meeeoowwwwww”, and Shamrock comes running in the living room, jumps up on the couch and starts meowing even more. “What??” I ask him like he’s going to give me an answer. “Maybe he wants to play”, I thought to myself. I got up and started to look for some of his toys. Most of them I had no idea what he did with them. I would buy them, bring them home, and then within a day they would all disappear. I know he has a stash of about $100 worth of cat toys hidden somewhere in this house but the part I never could seem to figure out was where. I guess I lost track of time because I spent almost 30 minutes looking for some toys for him, “great”, I thought to myself as I realized I still had a 7 page essay still to write. After about 45 minutes I gave up looking for them and just gave him an old shoelace to chew on. That kept him busy, for a few minutes, and when I say a few, I mean a few. I had only written one paragraph by the time he came back and this time he was meowing louder than before. I figured maybe he just wanted some attention, I’ll sit here and pet him while i'm brainstorming for my essay. That only worked for so long, it became fairly hard to pet him with him biting me or chewing on my thumb, and typing at the same time. When something really good came to mind I pulled my hand away to type with both of them so I could get it down as fast as possible, or course shamrock didn’t like that and he would plop himself right on top of the keyboard for attention. At the rate I was going it was going to take me a week to finish this essay, and it was due tonight. I suppose it was my fault that I didn't work on it a bit sooner, but it was Shamrocks fault that I couldn’t get it done now that I did decide to work on it. “Okay, this is ridiculous”, I thought to myself, someone has got to keep this cat company because I can’t do it. I knew Shamrock was an attention seeker but today he seemed extra needy, he was acting like an excited dog, following me around, jumping on me, cats don’t act like that usually but this is Shamrock we’re talking about. I went to my little brother's room to ask him to watch Shamrock while I tried to finish this essay and you know what he told me? “No, I'm playing video games”. Are you kidding me? I have an essay to write, what doesn't this kid understand? I think one game of Fortnite can wait. Then suddenly a great idea came to mind, I think I still had some “treats” left in one of the cupboards. Although these are not the regular treats you’re probably thinking. This “treat” was catnip. Shamrock loved that stuff, i'd give him just a little bit, he’d act a little funny and then he’d go right to sleep from being all tuckered out from running around. I ran to the cupboard and there it was. I grabbed the bag and poured the entire thing into a bowl. I called him over to the bowl and said “have at it.” Shamrock stuck his nose right in the bowl. Sure enough a couple minutes later he was going crazy, as expected, but about 15 minutes after taking it he passed out, sleeping like a baby. I could finally get to work and finish this essay. I sat down ready to write and it’s like my thoughts, ideas and anything I had planned to write about the essay was gone. Thanks Shamrock.