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[This Year's December Days Theme is Community, and all the forms that it takes. If you have some suggestions about what communities I'm part of (or that you think I'm part of) that would be worth a look, let me know in the comments.]
( The story of cats in my life, up to this point )
Having a cat (or more) makes you part of a community. One where you can share pictures of your adorable little floofs, or videos where you have to be a barrier to women in technology (because the cat is climbing on keyboards and printers and is unrepentant about it), or where your cat occasionally shows up on the virtual meeting and you have to pay the cat tax to all the others who want to see. (One of the things that has been an unexpected benefit of virtual meetings and such as a disease mitigation measure is that I have gotten to see so many more cats and pets and others on the screen where I would not have otherwise.) Or where you see how clever they are. Or how anti-clever they are, which seems to have settled as a stereotype of orange-colored cats. There's also the Cat Distribution System, where supposedly the right cat for the right person appears at the time they are best suited to receive them, so the community of people who are actively taking care of cats swells and shifts as some join up and others leave, hopefully after a long and well cared-for life.
Unlike dogs, or so we are told, cats decided they were going to have a better time of life if they became useful to the humans, rather than having useful-to-human traits selected for and bred in to them, like wolves eventually becoming dogs. Because of that, cats also had to learn how to communicate better with us humans. Which sometimes leads to the question of whether cats can conceive of tax benefits and waffle irons when humans try to talk back to them. And learning that cats have figured out their best vocal range is the same one that human babies use when they want to get attention. Cats as a species are pretty smart, even if the one that you have is not quite top of the class. The podcast Twenty Thousand Hertz did a "Cat Translation Guide" episode recently, to help humans have good communications with their cats, and even they had a little bit of "cat sounds and behaviors need context, because sometimes the same thing means different things in different contexts." They spend a fair amount of time on the story of a cat that learned to use talking buttons to communicate with their owner, and the eventually sprawling communication system that resulted from that (Including the "mad" button getting used a lot.) It's a good story, even though it ends, as so many stories do, with the humans outliving the cat.
Living with a cat is an interesting thing, because cats are fiercely independent and creatures that want to be in your business at the same time. Brat Cat likes to wave her tail in my face as she parades back and forth in front of me when she wants pets. Or when she doesn't want pets or snuggles, but she does want me to pay attention to her and not whatever the glowbox has on. At other times, she's content to find a high place, usually the back of a chair or a couch, curl up, and then either nap or observe the world from a high perspective. When it's close to the time where she should get fed, there's plenty of meowing and getting in my face. (Mind, her idea of "close to the time when she should get fed" is "when I come home from work, regardless of how close that is to the actual time.") We've gotten her trained to understand that a specific alarm tone going off means that it's time to get fed. Which means she doubles and redoubles her efforts to yell and lead me to the spot where she gets fed, as if we have forgotten. (Sometimes I get distracted or involved in what I'm doing right there, but I don't forget.) When it's time for bed, she'll come up to the bed, and then, if things aren't arranged to her liking (i.e. I'm under a blanket), she'll yell about that, too, until I'm situated properly, and she can guard me while I fall asleep. Guard me by sleeping on my chest, or my legs, or my midsection. And while I know she goes off in the night, often times by when the alarm goes off in the morning, she's back, and in her usual guarding position. If there are nightmares or things of the insubstantial that tried to haunt and hurt me, I have no doubt she would be after them to chase them away in the same way she wants to chase away other cats.
She's my cat, even if she's a brat, and she wants to make sure that I understand the relationship we have with each other. I handle the logistics of feeding, litter, and ensuring she has a nice place to sleep, she handles the logistics of love, naps, and the occasional bout of the zoomies, especially when we can get her hunting instincts engaged with laser toys. She's mostly self-sufficient, which is great for me, and she tolerates my excesses of snuggles and love well, and if I'm being too rough for her at the time, she yells at me and scampers off. She has complaints about the speed of the service, and the fact that all of her meals seem to be soup. (Because she has some kidney function issues, due to being a senior cat, her wet food has additional wet added to it, to make sure she takes in enough moisture.) She complains when there are people on the bed and they have not made themselves properly arranged for cat. She complains about the existence of other cats.
I take pictures of her when she's being srs cat, when she's asleep, when she's blocking me from getting up in the morning. And others have taken pictures of her curled up next to me, asleep, when she's on my back on the blanket I'm using to keep myself warm. Cats make great icebreakers between people, and they're almost always involved in some kind of great story to tell to others, sometimes the ones that make the most sense to other pet-owned. Supposedly, the love of a pet is unconditional, but I think hers is much more in a reciprocal exchange. If I take care of this Brat Cat, she'll give me love.
By putting her tail in my face. Again.
( The story of cats in my life, up to this point )
Having a cat (or more) makes you part of a community. One where you can share pictures of your adorable little floofs, or videos where you have to be a barrier to women in technology (because the cat is climbing on keyboards and printers and is unrepentant about it), or where your cat occasionally shows up on the virtual meeting and you have to pay the cat tax to all the others who want to see. (One of the things that has been an unexpected benefit of virtual meetings and such as a disease mitigation measure is that I have gotten to see so many more cats and pets and others on the screen where I would not have otherwise.) Or where you see how clever they are. Or how anti-clever they are, which seems to have settled as a stereotype of orange-colored cats. There's also the Cat Distribution System, where supposedly the right cat for the right person appears at the time they are best suited to receive them, so the community of people who are actively taking care of cats swells and shifts as some join up and others leave, hopefully after a long and well cared-for life.
Unlike dogs, or so we are told, cats decided they were going to have a better time of life if they became useful to the humans, rather than having useful-to-human traits selected for and bred in to them, like wolves eventually becoming dogs. Because of that, cats also had to learn how to communicate better with us humans. Which sometimes leads to the question of whether cats can conceive of tax benefits and waffle irons when humans try to talk back to them. And learning that cats have figured out their best vocal range is the same one that human babies use when they want to get attention. Cats as a species are pretty smart, even if the one that you have is not quite top of the class. The podcast Twenty Thousand Hertz did a "Cat Translation Guide" episode recently, to help humans have good communications with their cats, and even they had a little bit of "cat sounds and behaviors need context, because sometimes the same thing means different things in different contexts." They spend a fair amount of time on the story of a cat that learned to use talking buttons to communicate with their owner, and the eventually sprawling communication system that resulted from that (Including the "mad" button getting used a lot.) It's a good story, even though it ends, as so many stories do, with the humans outliving the cat.
Living with a cat is an interesting thing, because cats are fiercely independent and creatures that want to be in your business at the same time. Brat Cat likes to wave her tail in my face as she parades back and forth in front of me when she wants pets. Or when she doesn't want pets or snuggles, but she does want me to pay attention to her and not whatever the glowbox has on. At other times, she's content to find a high place, usually the back of a chair or a couch, curl up, and then either nap or observe the world from a high perspective. When it's close to the time where she should get fed, there's plenty of meowing and getting in my face. (Mind, her idea of "close to the time when she should get fed" is "when I come home from work, regardless of how close that is to the actual time.") We've gotten her trained to understand that a specific alarm tone going off means that it's time to get fed. Which means she doubles and redoubles her efforts to yell and lead me to the spot where she gets fed, as if we have forgotten. (Sometimes I get distracted or involved in what I'm doing right there, but I don't forget.) When it's time for bed, she'll come up to the bed, and then, if things aren't arranged to her liking (i.e. I'm under a blanket), she'll yell about that, too, until I'm situated properly, and she can guard me while I fall asleep. Guard me by sleeping on my chest, or my legs, or my midsection. And while I know she goes off in the night, often times by when the alarm goes off in the morning, she's back, and in her usual guarding position. If there are nightmares or things of the insubstantial that tried to haunt and hurt me, I have no doubt she would be after them to chase them away in the same way she wants to chase away other cats.
She's my cat, even if she's a brat, and she wants to make sure that I understand the relationship we have with each other. I handle the logistics of feeding, litter, and ensuring she has a nice place to sleep, she handles the logistics of love, naps, and the occasional bout of the zoomies, especially when we can get her hunting instincts engaged with laser toys. She's mostly self-sufficient, which is great for me, and she tolerates my excesses of snuggles and love well, and if I'm being too rough for her at the time, she yells at me and scampers off. She has complaints about the speed of the service, and the fact that all of her meals seem to be soup. (Because she has some kidney function issues, due to being a senior cat, her wet food has additional wet added to it, to make sure she takes in enough moisture.) She complains when there are people on the bed and they have not made themselves properly arranged for cat. She complains about the existence of other cats.
I take pictures of her when she's being srs cat, when she's asleep, when she's blocking me from getting up in the morning. And others have taken pictures of her curled up next to me, asleep, when she's on my back on the blanket I'm using to keep myself warm. Cats make great icebreakers between people, and they're almost always involved in some kind of great story to tell to others, sometimes the ones that make the most sense to other pet-owned. Supposedly, the love of a pet is unconditional, but I think hers is much more in a reciprocal exchange. If I take care of this Brat Cat, she'll give me love.
By putting her tail in my face. Again.
