It's a Catspiracy, I Tell You

The Siamese twins were really ganging up on their human yesterday.

First it was Princess, who leapt up onto my laptop out of nowhere while I was writing. The problem is, my natural reflex is to pick her up. Big mistake. Out came her claws, and then out came two keys on my keyboard. I got one of the keys to snap right back in. The other, not so much. Great. (This has been the fate of several computers I've owned now!) The sign of a true catlady: I can't have nice things.

Now, I already knew Princess was the evil one. She seems sweet and innocent and docile, but in reality she's so evil that all she has to do is stare MadMax down -- with her giant blue eyes -- and he runs off to the other end of the house and hides. Which is probably half the reason KittyProzac became an absolute necessity (unless I wanted him peeing all over the house to announce that the house was his, not hers).

When it comes Monster, on the other hand, Princess always has to evict him, wherever he is, to steal his spot. But first she waits for him to warm it up for her and then just stares at him until he moves. If necessary, she'll swat at him in the middle of his nap. It's out-and-out cat elder abuse. She's such a...Princess.

It's easy to say that Monster is evil just because he doesn't like to be held and has had to undergo so much "affection training" (i.e., I give him a snack only if he lets me pick him up and and pet him for one second without growling, biting, or scratching). However, Monster doesn't have the sense of entitlement Princess has, so his heart basically seems like it's in the right place.

Usually Monster just follows me around and rubs up against my leg if he really wants something (such as an affection training session -- i.e., cat treat -- although honestly he fails to earn his treat at least 25% of the time). If worse comes to worst, he might start knocking things over to try to get his way (I sometimes refer to this as "throwing things.") It's that classic cat move  -- "nudge nudge nudge CRASH!" He was doing a lot of that yesterday -- even though he had plenty of food and had just gotten a snack. Sometimes I have no idea what he wants from me.

Then I was in the kitchen making a tuna salad sandwich, when suddenly Monster leapt onto the counter, right onto the bread on a plate!

I mean, who does that?

I supposed that if he could talk he would have said, "Catlady, make me a sandwich!"

MadMax was the only one who was behaving at all yesterday. But he's on the drugs that apparently all of us so desperately need...

Catmuters Embrace New CitiCat Program

MadMax has always been a howler. The day my ex-husband and I adopted him, his former owners (who were giving him away on Craigslist, for what later turned out to apparently be a urine-marking problem...making him a "pisser and a moaner"?) told us that he cried the whole way to Brooklyn. Taking him to the vet always promises to be a nightmare.

Recently I bought this new cat carrier on wheels, though, and he actually seemed to LOVE his trip to the vet, sitting up the whole time and looking out at the scenery during the entire 20 min. walk, sniffing the air like a dog with its head hanging out the car window.

Maybe he felt like royalty, being chauffeured from place to place like this. (Or maybe it was the "cat calming" pheromone spray I'd spritzed inside before putting him in there?) I don't know. But now I want to turn into one of those freaks who takes her cat to the park.

Turning Into a Cat

Do cats have anxiety dreams? I know I've been having anxiety dreams lately, and they're exhausting. I wake up completely skeptical that I've had any rest at all; the temptation is to put in a few more hours to try to make things right.

Earlier this week, I was away from home for the night, and I had a dream that my house had been destroyed and was down to a pile of rubble. Only, the actual stressful part was simply that my cats were hanging out on the rubble pile, wondering if I was going to be back any time soon. Time was slipping away before they became likely to wander off and get lost.

Clearly these cats have cast a spell on me.

Perhaps they have been trying to turn me into one of them. The truth is, I don't just have trouble transitioning out of sleep when I'm having a bad go of it; actually, I have exactly the same problem when sleep is going really, really well. I realize there's a saying that you should leave a party while you're still having a great time, but tell that to the comfortable corpse of my sleeping body when I'm  in the zone.

I get into it -- sleep, that is. It's like I was made for it; I'm training for the sleep Olympics! I have three of the best sleep coaches a cat lady could ask for.

Cats: Please Kill Me!

A few years ago I got the idea of using one of those wheat cat litter products from a crazy cat man I was dating at the time. He used the stuff with no problem, and it struck me as possibly more environmentally friendly, since you could just keep the litter box right next to the toilet, scoop the waste right in there with your own, and then flush it down instead of sending it out to a nasty landfill somewhere.

That was all well and good until I realized I had mice who were feeding off the stuff. Which sounds a little ironic -- the mice were, in a roundabout way, coming around because of the cats!

Not so ironic, though, considering that study that basically says that cat feces contains a bacteria that works away at their little mouse brains (and possibly human brains) and makes them want to throw themselves into the path of a cat, crying, "Kill me! Devour me! I don't care! Just be near me!" (Seriously, if you don't believe me, look it up on Google.

And what about that? Wouldn't my cats just oblige by devouring the poor, insane, suicidal little mice and be done with it?

Well, apparently it wasn't working. And I guess that statistically, only one of my three cats is a psycho mouse killer (another one for the Google search!) -- but it has also been my observation that 1) Princess will torture a mouse, 2) Monster will completely ignore it, and 3) MadMax, despite having only one tooth left in his entire mouth, will gum the whole thing down.

I guess that maybe the cats were outnumbered. I just know that the mice were scaring the crap out of me, and shortly after switching back to clay I never saw them again.

(With apologies to the environment).

House as Scratching Post

So,  what was that I was saying about cats being a relatively inexpensive source of joy?

Well, in my defense, my furniture is cheap, and this isn't a structurally important beam or anything. Still, I know I will have earned my crazy catlady stripes (you know, like tabby stripes) once these critters scratch all the way through.  Not too much farther to go. Pretty impressive. They're all like, Scratching post? What scratching post. Oh, yeah, right; that. Anyway...

An "A" for Her Indifference and Fattitude

I'm not really sure how Princess has managed to become the star of this blog. She's by far the least interesting of the bunch -- most compliant at the vet's office, least likely to claw, hit, bite.

At the same time, perhaps she is most typical of the species in her fatness and her general catly indifference, far preferring my shoes to my actual person. (See attached)

Oh, and she is a Princess.

Like a Little Old Lady

Getting Monster's teeth cleaned (and any number of extractions, as deemed necessary) wouldn't be worth it, the vet said.

Obviously, a cat has to be put all the way under for something like this, and Monster is old. "It would be like putting a 95-year-old little old lady under anesthesia," she explained.

Monster is probably about 17. He's a boy, but the image of the little old lady fit somehow and has stuck ever since. He's a scrawny little thing. Though he's Siamese, his points are a faint, pale brown, which has the effect of making him seem old -- like a white-haired old man.

He's always been grumpy, too. Actually, he looks like he could be related to Grumpy herself. "Get off of my lawn, you kids!" one can imagine him yelling. Recently Monster was scratching his ears a lot and seemed to lose a bit of his brown fur in the area as a result. My boyfriend suggested that maybe this was simply male pattern baldness.

So yes, he seems old.

At the same time, he's a cat. Which means he's incredibly athletic for an oldster! He can be spotted leaping at least a foot straight up into the air just to hop over one of his cat siblings (who happens to be in his way).  Too grumpy for a simple "excuse me". He's also been seen leaping halfway across the room, from the desk where he's climbed, all the way over to the chest of drawers, on top of which is a bowl of crunchy food. He does this with the grace of a ballerina or Olympic athlete.

Oh, Monster! You're not getting that old, are you?

You've still got it, old man!