A real pussy of an entry
Monday, Nov. 21, 2005 at 1:41 p.m.
Dammit, I�m just going to come out with it.
I really love cats.
Cats are the ultimate in pets. If you get the right one, that is. They can be cuddly and lovey-dovey but you can ignore them to some small degree, and you just need to make sure that their food dish is full, their water dish is clean and full, and the litter box is clean.
Yes, I know that�s really an oversimplification of cat-ownership. However, I feel the need to justify this.
(I have a Master�s Degree in Fine Arts, by the way. I can justify anything, except perhaps for the reasoning behind keeping Bush in the White House. And any other reasoning behind any of that yahoo�s actions.)
Moving on: When I was a kid, we didn�t have pets. Not a single damn one, unless you count fish. Which I didn�t, back then. You couldn�t cuddle a fish, and if you did, Mom was apt to go into one of her screaming fits about water on the tile floor. Or Dad would ask if I wanted to learn how to clean it. And �cleaning� fish was not high on my list of priorities.
When I finally left for college, I was plagued by apartments that demanded HUGE and UNBELIEVEABLY ASTRONOMICAL amounts of cash for deposits, etc. And these were the days, of course, when tuna on ramen was good eating. Furthermore, I was working at school during the year and then running off every summer to work in summer stock theatres and that wasn�t conducive to cat servitude.
So, when I finally graduated and packed my car to run off to the Pacific Northwest (and I thought I was going to live there forever, and forever lasted 14 months) the first order of business was to get a CAT. So I started poring over the �free to a good home� listings in the Tacoma Daily Fish Wrap and calling around to see what folks had in cats.
For some reason, I had it in my head that I wanted a Siamese. God knows why. I wasn�t sure about kittens, mostly because I knew I wasn�t going to be home a lot and I wanted to make sure that my cat was well-behaved. Although I love kittens, they are the shizzle, mostly because they act like this a lot:
Yes, Grasshopper, walk!
And I didn�t feel like coming home to a shitstorm of litter, torn up toilet paper, and a kitten who got herself wedged behind the fridge upside down. I simply don�t have the energy for that. Little that I knew that ten years later I would using that same line as explanation for why I�m not going to breed.
Anyway.
I answered an ad and took a drive down to Spanaway, where upon I met a lovely family with two young boys, a pregnant mom, and happy dad. And a beautiful long-haired tabby 10-year old kitty named Max, who leapt up on my lap and headbutted my nose and meowed. And naturally Max went home with me and ended up traveling cross-country twice, to Florida and then to Arizona and I cuddled him for 11 years until he got really really really really sick this past summer and I had to put him down.
Now, the Hubster has two cats. Sweet cats, but if you try to pick them up to cuddle, they go screaming and clawing down your body, drawing blood at every opportunity. And one of my prerequisites for cats: CUDDLEABILITY.
Hence why we went and got Wally, who, on our first meeting, leapt up on my lap and headbutted my nose and meowed.
Man, cats are great. Wally leaps like a ninja, Kodoze runs into walls, and Cleo waddles and falls off the table. Wally attacks our feet under the blankets. Kodoze curls up between us in bed. Cleo lays on Hubster�s stomach. All of them respond like maniacs to the sound of the cat food jug being rattled. Cleo and Kodoze, being sisters, curl up around each other in rather interesting positions while they sleep. Wally lays flat on the floor with paws in all directions when he sleeps. And he snores. All of them like to walk all over me while I�m in the recliner and sit directly on my solarplexus.
Who says cats don�t have personality? Cats have plenty of personality. Dogs have personality, too, but they seem to have only one personality, whereas cats originated MPD.
And just so I don�t go cold turkey on you with pictures of signs, here�s a sign I�d love to see:
If only.