Been there, it's just part of the job with my three.

Your cat batting away the slits is such a perfect metaphor for how life intervenes in our neat experiments. The part about reality being inherently messy really hits home, because I've had similar moments where my pets just bulldoze through my careful plans. I mean, maybe we do overcomplicate things to avoid admitting that chaos is the default state. Idk, it's like physics is us trying to impose order on a universe that's just doing its own thing, pets included.