We went to a movie tonight. Fortunately, Jaws kept herself entertained during our absence.
I’d like to point out that I had put this yarn away. I mean, I didn’t freeze it in carbonite, but out of sight out of mind, right? Well… see for yourself.
We begin our tour at the coffee table. It’s a storage coffee table. Unfortunately, I thought it was secure. It was not secure. In a former life, this was a skein of really nice Cascade Yarn Co. “Indulge” in a pretty green. It was a lovely mix of 70% alpaca, 30% angora. Now, it’s a mess.
Slightly to the left of the coffee table, we find our first satellite of yarn. Over the carpet and through the wheels. We’re not going to Grandmother’s house though. We’re going to a place where, after four hours of impotent untangling, we’ll use the bezoar of yarn to dry our bitter tears.
After decorating the Casa Cianci headquarters of industry (it’s not all porn. Ed actually does write code at that desk) we move on to the Kitty National Monument. You see a tourist in the background, assessing the success of the mission. That’s Indiana - the one still in the will. She doesn’t do stuff like this. Let’s be realistic, most of the time, you throw her a toy and she drags herself towards it without actually getting up and walking. She doesn’t have the ambition for a caper of this scope.
Next it’s off to restaurant row, a place where all of your champagne dreams and caviar wishes go to die. If you want hot dogs or $50-a-bag veterinary-supplied kibble, we’ve got you covered. Notice that the yarn here is not simply strewn about; the yarn is actually wrapped around the legs of not one but TWO chairs. It’s almost as if the artist were trying to convey something. Perhaps a commentary on the dichotomy between the table that unites us spiritually and condemns us physically to awkward conversation and plate-scratching noises. It could also be she just likes hucking herself over the chair leg supports.
From here we remain in the kitchen, but move on to highlighting the inviting space of the open-concept kitchen. Having done this, we continue on…
We end the tour back at the bound chair rails, evocative of the continual return to the communal table, regardless of the strictures and conventional obstacles this setting engenders. Maybe we were just going for the water dish (slightly out of frame at the top). Both cats enjoy a rousing game of “Put Useless Things in Water.” I made them a knitted catnip ball not too long ago. Five minutes, and into the dunk tank it went. First and last knitted cat toy of their extremely overprivileged lives.
It is of interest that, while typing this, we heard a large clack that turned out to be Jaws once again venturing into the coffee table storage.
When we decided to get a cat a few years ago, I had the typical daydreams: A little fluffy creature to sleep in my lap on the couch, snuggle on cold winter mornings in bed, and occasionally play a rousing game of “chase the ribbon.”
What we got… was Jaws.
This should have been my first indication that the “cat” we got was not what it said on the tin.
Isn’t she precious?
My furry landshark still lives up to her name every day. She strikes at any moment (typically from under the bed), and circles her territory looking for opportunities to sneak up on an unsuspecting victim and -
PLAY! PLAY FETCH! PLAY KILL THE MONSTERFEET! PLAY PLAY PLAY!
Our cat has a problem, in that she’s not a cat. We think she got mislabeled at the factory. She’s a dog, for sure. She can outfetch, outbeg, and outkeep-away any Labrador retriever you’d care to put in her path. She’ll then ride that Labrador like a circus pony, and send it away with a therapist bill.
I’m not sure how it happened, but our cat needs to go to Play-play-play A.A. My day goes a little like this:
Are you awake? It’s two a.m. Not getting out of bed? No problem, I’ve got a ball with feathers on it. Very low-impact early morning workout. Throw! Okay… :::run run run::: Now, again.
Hey are you in the bathroom? I’m waving! Can you see me waving? Under the door? Hey. HEY! Okay, now throw me a Q-tip. I can make due.
Ooh! You’re in the closet? Cool. I seee you. I’m behind the door. See me? Through the little crack? I seeeeeee you. :::BAT!::: Tag, you’re it!!! Aww too slow. It’s 7:30 a.m. Still not bringing your A-game. What’s up with that?!
Are you getting up off the couch? Perfect! Here, drag the string around for me. C’mon DRAG! Man, it’s like I have to do all the work!
It’s gotten to the point where shifting position on the couch means she snaps awake, leaps from her bed, falls over dead in front of you and cries, like you’re killing her with your lack of enthusiasm. This happens… about thirty times a day.
We tried “auto-play”. There was one contraption strapped to the door that fluttered a ribbon around on a motorized belt. Jaws decided it was more fun if the ribbon was detached from the device. Greater range. There was another toy that swiped a stick through the air, with a ball and feathers on the end. The base is now a paperweight, but the stick (denuded of its once glorious plumage) is still her favorite. She drags it around the house with her like Linus’ blanket.
Remember when you were a little kid, and the best thing about a sleep-over was getting to camp out in the living room? Well, I’m here to tell you that you can do just the same as an adult.
I say this, because I am writing to you from our second bedroom, comfortably wrapped up and floating on an air-mattress, with the kitten between us purring like a jack-hammer. Why are we camping out on a tiny air mattress when we have a much more expensive air mattress right in the next room? (AKA: Sleep Number bed?)
The vet told us we have to keep Princess Roid Rage under wraps for the next 10 days while her sutures heal, and for that we need to keep her low to the ground. We’ve moved everything out of the second bedroom that’s over 6″ tall, thinking that this would keep our newest addition happy. Unfortunately, two things happened last night: A) She figured out if she cries long enough, we will capitulate, and B) She likes to cliff-dive off of our bed. This made for swelled stitches this morning, which don’t seem to bother Jawsie in the least, but scare the hell out of her parents. (Editor’s note: Ed is still holding out hope that I will start to refer to us as “her people” or “her humans”. He got to name her Jaws? I get to name him Dad. That’s the gig.)
Fast forward to tonight, and we are camping out in the cat’s room (this statement is as ridiculous as it sounds, I know) to make sure that our wild child keeps her paws close to terra firma, and keeps our bleeding-heart wits intact (She’s like a cougar in miniature. She stands her ground and CRIES at me for getting anywhere near the door like I was murdering Santa. It’s ridiculous, but it gets me every time.)
So here’s to the start of the camping season, even if we didn’t need to drive a stake or burn a marshmallow to get started!
I should have known that nothing reasonable ever comes out of lunch at Eddie’s work.
Ed and I have been giddy all week about new kitten Jawsie, who comes home tomorrow at noon after a very long wait (a whole 6 days). We were jawing about the Jawsmeister while in the kitchen at ILink, and Tom (who is very awesome) started joking about how he’s a crazy cat lady at heart, that his three cats are his kids, and he refers to them as such. Ed, who is still making transition from growing up as a “pet owner” to being married to a “pet mommy” gives Tom an emphatic “Nooooope! No! No.” He expects that will end the conversation (as if it ever does.) He despises the idea that people would call themselves “pet parents”. Of course, my take is, if I’m cleaning up your shit, feeding you, loving you, and not being earth-endingly pissed when you destroy my house, all for gratis? There’s little chance I’m anything else BUT a mom. Just sayin’.
So anyway, I got a little silly and said I was going to torture Ed by tweeting and blogging as Jaws, a trend which has become all the rage ever since Jason Scott started tweeting as his two cats Penny and Sockington. Socks has somewhere in the range of 575,000 followers. To give this some perspective, President Obama had about 300,000 devout web-worshippers during his campaign. Of course, President Obama didn’t joke about funny shit like chasing shakymice and fighting with Penny. Maybe if he threw in a dig about Michelle here and there, he would have bridged the gap. He just had to settle for being President of the free world.
So I get back to the office, and decide that yes indeed, Jawsie has to have some time in the tweety spotlight. She is our technorati kitten-kid after all. So I created a tweetstream for her. She immediately followed Ed, annnddd all of his co-workers who had been in on the conversation. She’s a very outgoing girl. Ed was suitably embarrassed. My work was done.
Here’s the thing about tweeting as your cat: It’s funny and all, and it’s cool I guess to jump on the Sockington gravy train, but there are some people who are obviously really into it. Perhaps… a little too into it. This can’t have been what the great democratic medium was meant to produce. Tweeting as your cat/dog/horse in any serious, continuous way, let’s not even mention building a network of OTHER fake pets, is… hmm. Well, I mean, I don’t want to burn any bridges with potential readership.. but I guess the term that springs to mind is “sad”.
Actually… tweeting as your pet - or tweeting as a fictional character from a TV series for instance - it’s a little like larping. What’s larping, you ask? Actually, it will be more effective if I show you.
This is LARPing
Now… in the interest of full disclosure. I have larped… but let’s qualify this. I was seventeen years old. Around eighteen, I graduated from high school, stopped working at a video game store, and started fucking someone who eventually went on to move out of his parents house and put a ring on my finger. There. Consider my deep dark past disclosed.
Anyway.. tweeting about your cat licking its own ass and breaking Great Grandma Bessie’s bone china as any sort of actual pass-time, for any sustained length of time sort of leads me to assume that being yourself (or even :::gasp:::: being human!) is just too taxing or conversely too depressing. This generalization of course does not apply to Jason Scott, who is going to make a dirty-fisted fortune selling the book “written” by Pennycat and Sockington to the probably-by-then million fans who light their incense at the altar of Socks and Mrs. P.
I’ll admit, if karma kicks in and my next go around is in a different form, sign me up for being a cat. I’d be a natural. My two favorite activities are A) Sleeping and B) Thinking everyone else in my vicinity is an asshole who lives to serve my whims. The cat’s life would be a perfect fit. I’m just not willing to use my five-pound brain and two opposable thumbs to imitate that life 140 characters at a time.
Okay, so this is my second rescue-related post of the week. I went and met Roger the other day at the MSPCA in Methuen, and although I really loved the guy, I knew he just wouldn’t be a fit for the house - in some respects literally - and so I left Nevins farm feeling not elated, but bummed out for all the cats left without a home to call their own. Rescue facilities are a wonderful thing, but the reality of so many pets without families to care for them is heart-breaking for a bleeding-heart such as myself who beeps to get the pigeons out of the way when she parks, stops the car to usher bunnies off the street, etc.
I came away with the conviction that I wanted to rescue a pet. Eddie and I had one last talk about the reality of bringing home a new family member. He had three stipulations:
That it be a kitten, so he could bond with it.
That it be a girl, because his tom-cat experiences were less than stellar.
That we name her “Jaws”.
I’m still working on that last one, but I set out to the local Humane Society today to check out what they had for kittens. After going to the PAWS event at Petco and to to the MSPCA after that, I didn’t hold out any expectations of finding a kitten, of filling out an adoption form… certainly not of falling instantly in love, (although isn’t that the best way to lose your heart?)
But this little girl? She had other plans.
It was pretty diabolical actually, the way she snuck in. I picked her up, she gave me a look that said “Okay. You look like a pushover.” and promptly conked out in my arms, with her chin propped up on my hand. She had a big-block motor that wouldn’t stop running, and that was it. Love at first narcoleptic, adorable, snoozy sight. A few of the people in the room said “Yep. That’s it!” and they were right!
I got an application from the girl at the desk, and jokingly said “I told my husband I was going to go out and find an adorable little ball of fluff. He said that would be okay.” She laughed, “Well that’s exactly what you found!” I looked at the application. Her foster name? “Fluff”. As if the deal needed any more seal, that did it.
I tried to fill out the app while simultaneously not waking the fuzzball. It was at that very moment she decided it was time to play, and proceeded to tap-dance on the clipboard, boogie up my shoulder, head-butt the pen, check out the chair next to her, consider a run across the room. I finally relented and had to put her back in her “house” for a moment. I snapped the above shot just as she decided it was time to pick a fight with the sign of the front of her cage. I hurried through the paperwork, handed it to the girl at the desk, and presto-chango, became the proud owner of the most adorable cat in the world. I didn’t think it would be that easy actually! I think they were impressed by my neat handwriting or something.
I spent another half-hour playing with Not-Fluff-Not-Jaws Cianci (although Ed still thinks that we could name her Jaws. Could you name that adorable little fuzzball Jaws?! C’mon…) She was over the need to beat the hell out of the sign, and decided another nap was in order. I had found myself a snuggler. When she was hungry and ready for some down-time, she let me know by giving me the long “hellllooooo??” stare, and poking me a few times with a paw to make sure I were still with the program. She already knows how to handle me. I have no doubts she will beat any alarm-clock money can buy.
So sometime Wednesday, after a visit with the vet for all the necessary poking and prodding, Not-Fluff-Not-Jaws will be coming home to explore the wild world of Casa Cianci. Until then, I’ll will be kitten-proofing, shaky-toy shopping, and getting the camera ready for pictures of kitty’s first day in her forever home.
About the author
I’m a writer, artist and degenerate internet addict. I have a day job only to keep the lights on and the internet working. I’m not always PG, but I’m always A+ (not to mention humble.) Please do not try to make me think before coffee. It will only end in tears.
