illustration by liz riccardi

A BUB And Beyond: How Do You Decide What’s Important In Life?

Lil BUB Shares Her Advice

by Lil Bub

When

NYLON

decided to get into the advice game, we were faced with a conundrum: Who could advise our readers and our friends with equal parts real-talk and positivity?

Only one gal fits the bill: Lil Bub. H

ere, we invite readers to reach out to Bub for some guidance and vibes. Fortunately, we've been able to translate her purrs and gurgles into real advice, getting some magic Bub-ness out there for all. The third Wednesday of every month will henceforth be known as A BUB AND BEYOND, a day where Lil Bub answers your most pressing questions.

But how, you say, will I be able to send the world's cutest cat all of my inquiries? Reach out to Bub directly at askbub@nylon.com. Boom.

Dear Bub,

Congratulations on the release of your first album! I plan to order it ASAP. You are clearly a very busy inter-dimensional being. You've just released music, written a couple of books, you have this advice column, and you make appearances for your loyal devotees. My question for you is, how do you balance all of the busy-ness in life? You seem to handle it all so well! I'm a very busy being, too. I work and I'm in college. I attend several 12-step meetings a week and there are always the regular tasks of grocery shopping, cooking, cleaning, and spending time with family and friends. I get a lot of help from my amazing fiancé and my mom, but sometimes I still get so stressed out trying to get everything done with what never feels like enough time, while trying to make time to be kind to myself, too! Do you have any tips from one busy Goddess to another?

Love always,

Busy Bee

Hello Busy Bee. It’s me. BUB.

You’ve certainly come to the right place to seek advice. Not because I have trouble finding enough time (time is not a boundary for me, I’ve been around since before it even existed), and not because I am an exceptionally wise, all-knowing space cat (although that’s an added bonus), but because my own dude suffers from a similarly daunting and overwhelming workload, as do many of the people in this day and age. I’m going to be totally honest here: My dude is a workaholic, the most extreme kind. He always has been, even since he was a little kid. And with my exponentially growing Earth presence, and my overwhelmingly prolific output to facilitate, plus the addition of the new Lil Dude, it would be an understatement to say that he feels the walls of time pressing against his sanity. I would be lying if I didn’t say that it brings him and his loved ones around him substantial stress and anxiety. Lucky for him, he’s got me to help him figure out how to manage his time, which is something we’ve been working on for years (which is, apparently, a measure of time), and I feel that we’re finally getting somewhere.

Everyone knows that time is a rigid steel cage, and you can only fit so many yogurt containers in one steel cage before their lids pop off and yogurt just starts spilling everywhere making a horrible yogurt-y mess. And as hard as it might seem, you just have to remove some of the yogurt flavors to make room to get to the others. The challenge, of course, is determining which yogurt flavors have to go, which is especially difficult when every single flavor is SO DELICIOUS. This decision in itself is wildly stressful! But instead of thinking about all the flavors you love, think about the ones you simply can’t live without. Using science and magic, I helped my dude understand that the one yogurt flavor that he cannot live without is Family. Our immediate family consists of my ma, my dude, the lil dude (who is a human kitten), my giant sister Trudy, my little brother Spooky, plus my cousins Josie, Vivian, and Special Agent Dale Cooper, and of course, me. Together, we have determined that our number-one priority is to spend quality time as a normal family with normal pets who take normal naps when they feel like it. And to be honest, I’m not sure if we’ve ever taken a family nap, to date. 

photo via @iamlilbub instagram

In hindsight, this seems like a “no-brainer,” as they say on your planet. But here’s the tricky part…until we really sat down and discussed which yogurt flavor we couldn’t live without, we didn’t even realize that it was on the list! The very best flavor was shoved all the way into the back corner of the steel cage, and we couldn’t get to it until we moved some of the other flavors out of the way.

Now the tricky part…how do you decide which yogurt flavors to get rid of? Well, you have to get rid of the ones that are specifically in the way of the ones you can’t live without. And for us, that flavor was Travel. My dude and I travel an awful lot doing important work, but it is at the sacrifice of spending time at home with the family. While I absolutely love to travel (as a space traveler, I thrive on it), I also love to nestle up in my dude’s armpit and fall asleep in a puddle of my own drool.

And that’s why we have decided that our next string of appearances will be our last (with the exception of some prior commitments). We realized that we could continue our work from behind the computer screen in our home. We would replace room service with cookouts, messy suitcases with messy closets, free HBO with book reading, and fancy hotel toiletries with the regular ones in our house. I would be amiss if I did not point out that this was an incredibly difficult decision to make. In fact, until it was discussed out loud, it didn’t even seem like a decision that existed. But the enormous relief that our family felt when it was made is indescribable. Which is why I cannot describe it.

I’ve said it once, and I’ll say it again: Time is a rigid steel cage, and you can only fit so many yogurt containers in one steel cage before their lids pop off and yogurt just starts spilling everywhere, and then it curdles, and that does no one any good. So, figure out which yogurts you don’t want, find the one that you can’t live without, clean up that mess, and take a dang nap.

Lub,

BUB