wake up sleeping pet / make sure they're not dead
A Anxiety Cat post.
A black cat with wide yellow eyes and flattened ears, staring at something off to the side, on a purple and orange background. The photo first went around on a demotivational poster from about 2007, "What has been seen cannot be unseen". Its run as Anxiety Cat began on Meme Generator in 2011. The top line is an ordinary, harmless situation. The bottom line is the cat's response, which is always several floors of panic higher than the situation requires. "Someone says 'can we talk later?'" / "Rewrite my will." "Phone rings" / "Stare at it until it stops." "Order at a drive-through" / "Rehearse it for four cars." The best ones are the small rituals: waiting for someone else to flush, typing a long comment and deleting it. The cat never actually does anything. It just watches the world with the expression of someone who has read the side effects. That's the whole joke, and also most people's Tuesday. **Why it caught on:** it said out loud the tiny private panics everyone assumed only they had.