Just what is the point of cats anyway? The entire Internet has become one giant cat fanboy palace and I’m sick to death of it. Our cat is not cute, she is entitled, and anyone who’s ever stood within 25 yards of an American teenager knows that entitlement is not attractive, it’s obnoxious.
We paid a shelter in Culver City $200 so we could ‘rescue’ this little princess. If it wasn’t for us, she’d still be in a cage in the back of Century Vet Group with a herniated cornea. Is she grateful? I doubt it.
Ben says I shouldn’t be so upset. Ben says it’s unhealthy to resent your own pet. After all, she was a homeless adolescent mother when the shelter took her in. She clearly harbors trust issues from her time spent on the streets. She refuses to sit on laps, hates being held, and randomly flees in terror. She does this weird little test of friendship thing where she sits just over an arms length away and meows at us to see who will reach out to her.
Our cat is terrible at petting. She squirms, she repeatedly head butts the hand that is petting her, or she goes all wet noodle, reducing her petable surface area to a fraction of its normal size. Of course she hates being pet on the belly and will kick at you viciously with both of her back feet, rabbit style, if you try. She is also mostly disinterested in play, and generally immune to cat nip.
I can’t tell you how it feels to get up early every weekday, and let her lazy ass oversleep in the warm patch I’m leaving behind while I go to work to pay for her food, her medical care, and her litter only to come home again to her in the exact same spot, still fast asleep in a comfortable looking ball. In other words, the biggest problem I have with my cat is that she is unemployed. She’s not very good at being a cat, we can’t give her back because we’re not bastards, and she’s not bringing in any money otherwise.
On the other hand, it is sort of an Elizabeth Smart situation we’re in. Here this cat had a way of life for however long it was before some stranger stuffed her and her kittens in a box and dropped her at a shelter for unwed kitty mothers where she spent 6 months in lock up and all her kids got taken away. Now these big fat monsters have taken her to their house where she’s not allowed to leave, and she only gets wet food sometimes. To her it probably seems weird that all we want to do is touch her, except the random violent outbursts where we hustle her into the bathroom and medicate some part of her that probably doesn’t feel well as it is. When I think about it that way, I feel kind of bad for her, and all I can do is hope that Stockholm syndrome sets in eventually.
At least she’s extremely soft, and well behaved, and sometimes she falls off of things she has no business falling off off and it makes me laugh. Ben says it took several years for me to be good at petting, and play, and general humanity. He’s joking, but not really. I suppose I shouldn’t give up on the cat after only one year. Anyone know how to teach personableness to a cat? Whoever says that the answer is to lead by example can fuck right off.
Ben said that this blog post makes me sound angry at the cat. I asked him if I should add a disclaimer that I’m not really angry, that I just needed something to blog about. He said I should do whatever I want. So, who wants a free cat?