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!

Catputer Decoy a Success!

Ha! It has worked at last!

I had my doubts. You see, I come from the school of thought that says, if a cat knows that something is for her, she'll never use it. One must not say, "Here, kitty! Look what I bought for you!" In fact, it is best that one not buy the thing at all.

"Here, kitty! Look what I made for you!" won't work too well, either. For example, if you think about it, one need not "make" an empty toilet paper roll. If, however, one unthinkingly drops one on the floor, then presto! Instant cat toy.

A cat's interest can be neither purchased nor "made" by man or woman. No.

It is best, in fact, to not even think too loudly, "Gee, I hope that if I put this box on my desk next to the computer, my cat will sit in it instead of on the computer!"

Which is of course the reason it took months for the catputer decoy box to work. You see, I had to stop thinking about it for it to work. And we all know how hard it is to stop thinking about something when all you can think is, "Whatever you do, don't think about how nice it would be for the cat to sit in the box!"

It also doesn't hurt that the box is technically way, way too small -- nonexistent, almost! Cats can't resist a challenge.

Suicide by Cat

"Awww, what a sweet little kit -- OUCH!"

So, I've forgotten why I named him "Monster," have I?

She's Mighty, Mighty

No, this isn't a photo of my cat pole dancing. Or is it? This is actually a photo of her using the cold, hard, metal table leg as a pillow, which is her recent favorite thing to do all day -- it would seem that when one is warm and furry and softy and squishy, a hard, cold piece of metal makes the best pillow.

Ask Princess if she gives a crap. (She doesn't). The vet took one look at her and said, "No, no, no! Bathing suit season is coming! This will never do!" And yet, of the three cats (all of them 10 years or older and thus "elderly") she's the one who was determined to be healthy as a horse, and so, I was told, go ahead and have her put under for a teeth cleaning; why not? For that matter, she's the only one who never has weird gunk in her ears that makes me worry that maybe she has ear mites. In fact, there's never anything wrong with her. Big is beautiful! she says, strutting her stuff such that the boys run away when her tiny but extremely round body is approaching: boom, boom, boom.

And yet the vet suggested I feed her less. Hardly possible, really, when one of her cat siblings looks like he'd starve to death if he missed a meal. How does one really separate these cats from one another when they're eating (without making oneself an even crazier crazy cat lady)?

How about you put the food inside a box with an entrance she can't fit through, the vet suggested. I have since seen whole memes dedicated to such a thing.

So I compromised and started putting the food bowl up on top of a dresser, meaning that a kitty must first climb and then athletically leap -- both before and after a meal. Maybe it's even good for ol' Scrawny Pants! Build him some muscle tone! Turn him into Mr. Universe.

Okay, fine. I am the worst cat parent ever. Next thing you know, I'll be further enabling her by buying her a cute little cat fatkini to wear to the beach.

I Can Haz Phinger?

Cat Librarians!!!!!

Omg, do people know about the cats that live on the grounds of the Bedford branch of the Brooklyn Public Library (on Franklin)? I've seen them there for years -- when I'm paying attention, that is. If you're just walking south on your way to the C or Franklin Shuttle on Fulton Street, you might notice a cat just hanging out, inside the bars of the fence around the grounds of the library. But if you look past that one cat, you'll notice another one. And then another. And then another! One might be sitting right next to the brick wall of the library building itself. Another might be lounging in the middle of the ground. A few might be hanging out along the other side of the fence. Cats cats cats! Insanity!

I don't actually know how many cats live on the library grounds. I don't know if they're related to each other or what, but They Wuv Each Other(!!!!) I know this because if you stand there and make trilling noises, one will come up to say hi to you, and a few minutes later another one will come up to say hi, and the two of them will start brushing up against each other in a little Cat Dance of Wuv. You just want to reach your hand in through the bars of that little cat zoo and do some serious heavy petting and take them home with you; it's like an illness. Then you get all worried that if you walk away they'll follow you -- or, worse, run out into the street and get hurt.

No worries, though. You walk away, and they stay put. They're glad you paid a visit, but they're home. They watch you go with their big flirtatious eyes. They seem to have enough to eat somehow, and they also have each other.

You're the one who suddenly doesn't know how you can live your life without them. Squeeeeeeee!

Cat on a Hot Kitchen Floor

I always ridiculed people who entertained the idea of leaving the air conditioning on for their cats. I grew up without air conditioning and personally waited until I was 39 years old to actually buy a unit (after living in the heat trap that is NYC for more than 15 years, mind you). I still hardly use my air conditioner -- especially now that I'm going into freelancing and am pretty broke. I live on the ground floor in Brooklyn and have trees and foliage right outside my window, all of which keeps it relatively cool in my apartment as long as it's in the mid-70s or cooler overnight so I can put a box fan in the window. During the day I just close the curtains to keep the sun out and shut the windows to trap the air inside.

Unfortunately we're in the middle of a heatwave right now, with temperatures not dropping below the 80s even over night, so there's only so much one can do. I can walk around practically naked, but my cats are still wearing their fur coats. I feel bad for them.

They don't seem to share my philosophy about staying inside where the outdoor climate can be blocked out. Even when it's really hot, some of them seem to prefer spending all down outside, where even in the shade it's got to be 90 degrees if you ask me. Seems crazy, but we cat people tend to respect a cat's choices as much as possible, so they do what they want!

The biggest problem comes if I'm going to be away overnight. Even when the nights are cool enough, I don't really want to leave a window fan blowing outdoor air in because that just makes things worse once the day warms up and I'm not home yet. I don't want to just leave the cats outside to eat fireflies either, so I always lure them indoors before I go for the night.

But then what should I do? I agonize over this. Leave the windows open so that they at least have fresh air? Isn't that kind of silly? I mean, I wouldn't be worried about "fresh air" if it were winter, would I?

But it gets stuffy! Should I go all-out catlady crazy and run the air conditioner for them? Leave the window open in one room and shut in the other? Have the fan blowing the hot air out?

I can't believe I agonize over this. Even when I'm home with the air conditioning on, they don't necessarily gravitate toward the coolness. I sometimes realize that one of my cats seems to be missing. I think, that's funny -- I don't remember letting Monster outside, so where is he?

That's when I wander into the kitchen, this poorly-insulated extension that is easily twice as hot as any other place in my apartment, and find him sprawled out on the floor.

Here I am, making myself sick with worry about whether he'll be comfortable. When given the choice, he doesn't gravitate toward the air conditioner or the fan or the coolest room or even an open window. Instead, he goes to the hottest place in the whole house. Maybe for him it's like day at the spa, basking in the sauna. To each his own.

My Cats Have Inexpensive Taste in Clothes & Won't be Going to College

Part of getting a home loan modification a few years back meant agreeing to do a "credit counseling" session over the phone.

Fine. I'm sure there were people going through the process because they'd spent all of their money on horse races and prostitutes, but considering that I didn't even carry a credit card balance at the time (still don't), don't have cable TV or an iPhone or an iAnything and pretty much subsist on rice, beans, and occasional one-day "vacation getaways" to Brighton beach for $2.50 on my Metrocard, it seems like in my case they could have put their staff resources to better use.

Pretty much the only place in my budget that seemed to raise a red flag was the fact that I -- gasp! -- have pets.

I'm not sure. Maybe the woman on the phone was supposed to suggest that I tie them up in a bag and throw them in the East River?

At some point I just said, "Uh huh" a lot and stopped listening, only bothering to throw in little insincere chuckle and a "They're a lot cheaper than having kids!" to which the woman agreed and actually laughed.

Um, yeah, but seriously.

White Floors = Bad Idea

Apparently, floor paint does not come in a color called "regurgitated cat food," but I'm hoping this darker color is a bit more practical than the white, which I liked better in theory (but which pretty much looked filthy all the time and thus made me feel like a bad cat mom).

There's still lots of touch-up to do, but, as you can see, The Katz are pretty eager to give this whole thing (i.e., their barely digesting stomachs) a whirl.

before

after

Viscious Hell Beast

Forget what I said about vet visits no longer being a nightmare. The ride to and from may have been great, but MadMax was up to his old tricks of crying bloody murder when the vet took him back to get a blood sample. The vet says he actually screamed the loudest while he was being cleaned up afterwards with a wet cloth. I had a chance to glimpse at his chart while he was in the other room and noticed the word "CAUTION" written in all caps and highlighted in the upper right corner. Nice touch!

Cat Assistance Needed in Aisle 3...Cat Assistance Needed in Aisle 3...

I'm late. My Cat Assistant knows the routine: it's morning; he smells the coffee brewing and sees me bringing my running shoes and water bottle out to the deck.

Sometimes, without thinking, I'll put my laptop on his chair...and he totally freaks out. He doesn't know where to sit. How is he supposed to work under these conditions?

Don't I know that he needs to sit within six inches of me while I drink my coffee and put on my shoes? That his duties include licking my fingers while I'm trying to type? It's his job; it's in his DNA -- just like inappropriate urine marking is. (Thank God we figured out the right KittyProzac for that problem -- his last owner was going to have him put to sleep: "Purebred Abyssinian free to a good home...")

It is said they're very dog-like, these Abyssinians. And here he is, by my side in the Cat Assistant chair, hard at work herding his human, watching everything I do -- and if I go too long without petting him, he stretches his paw out as if to say, "Hey! Remember me? Reporting for duty! Put me to work!"

How many other Cat Assistants are out there in the workforce, earning their meager salaries of wet and dry food and chin scratches, I wonder?

What is it About Cats and Retching?

Is it just me? Whenever a vet asks me, "So...any vomiting?" for a split second, all I can think is, "Well? It is a cat after all..."

I don't know. Should I be more concerned when my cat acts like I haven't fed her for years? When she gobbles her food -- which then immediately reappears, virtually unchanged, in a wet clump on the floor?

Is it bad that, when I see my cat doing the infamous "barfy dance" on the radiator, my first impulse is to move her (so that she does her retching somewhere that's a little easier to clean)?

Should I be more concerned that I so often forget about the mess that my boyfriend usually ends up cleaning it up, days later (having only discovered the problem by stepping in it)?

In my defense, isn't the internet full of references to retching cats? Doesn't Henri, le chat noir's film debut make reference to his humans leaving notes for each other on the fridge about this very issue? ("Your turn to clean up the cat barf!" etc.)?

Maybe what I'm trying to ask is, when the vet says, "Any vomiting?" do they really mean "Any UNUSUAL vomiting?"

How to be a Good Community Person and Stop Letting People's Dogs Chase You (You Stupid, Selfish Jerk!)

I was running in Prospect Park one morning when, in the distance, I heard an angry female voice yelling something I couldn't quite make out, over and over again. Slowly the the voice got louder.

"Sparky!" it implored over. "Sparky! Sparky! Sparky! Goddammit!"

Eventually this chorus changed to, "Stop!"

It was getting louder, closer. "Stop!...Stop!...Stop!.."

Wow, I thought. This person is annoying. "STOP RUNNING!" the woman finally yelled. At about the same moment, a small-to-medium-sized mutt had suddenly almost entangled itself in my feet as I ran, and I saw this crazed, angry woman with an empty leash booking it straight toward me.  

She was yelling at me? I thought. That's weird. It hardly mattered, though, because at this point I had stopped running -- merely to keep myself from tripping over the spaz of a dog.

The woman roughly grabbed the mutt by the collar and muttered "Goddammit!" over and over again.

I looked at the dog. Poor little Goddammit, I thought -- and what an unfortunate name.

The woman, now out of breath, gave me the look of death, and I went back to running. But after a few minutes another woman with her own unleashed dog looked at me as I was running toward her and beckoned me to stop. "Excuse me," she said.

I looked at her quizzically, slowing to a stop. "Yes?" I said.

"Can you do me a favor?"

I shrugged, a little confused, and gestured for her to continue; I was listening. "When someone's dog is chasing you," she said, "could you just stop?" I squinted at her --  really, really confused now. "You shouldn't let people's dogs chase you," she explained patiently, as if to a child. She held her Park Slope Food Coop travel mug smugly up near her chin.

"What?" I said, looking at her like she was from another planet (since apparently she was).

She immediately got impatient. How had I failed to get the memo that everyone else obviously had read? "I mean, can't you just be a good community person?" she demanded.

So...I was trying to wrap my mind around this one.  Apparently I "wasn't being a good community person." I was "letting" someone's dog chase me. (I.e., I was going for a run before work in the morning and minding my own goddamned business).

I was stunned. I passed the death stare that the other woman had given to me on in her direction and went back to running without responding.

All this talk about how crazy we "cat people" are -- but at least we keep that crap behind closed doors, you know? Just...a personal matter between each of us and our half dozen felines.

Now I'd heard it all.

Mattresses: Queen-size, King-size, Cat-size

I guess it's a slippery slope once you let your pets sleep on the bed at night. I'd somehow thought a full mattress was big enough for everyone. Yeah, right! Even when I was single -- and even with only the Siamese Twins choosing to sleep in the room at night -- somehow, at least one of the cats always wants to be exactly wherever I am.

It's almost preferable when the cat just takes over one of the pillows (a.k.a. "cat mattress"). Then, at least, you've contained the situation and have a sort of truce: "You take this pillow; I'll take that one." Otherwise, it's anyone's guess -- and you're really too busy sleeping to be guessing anything; the worst is when you wake up because you've accidentally bumped into something furry, and the next thing you know, there's a kicking and biting ambush happening where you're sure you once had feet.

When it's chilly at night, Nick and I get enlisted in Bread Duty for a Monster sandwich, like it or not. Really there's no winning, though, regardless of the weather -- because when it's warm at night there's a whole different problem to contend with: at least one cat stretched out in the most inconvenient place possible, leaving you shoved up against an expanse of unpleasantness that is the human body next to you.

It would be naive and simplistic to simply imagine that a bigger bed would solve anything. The truth is, no bed is big enough for a cat and human to share.

Barking up the Wrong Tree

I read somewhere that "dog people" tend to be more optimistic than their pessimistic "cat people" counterparts.

Well, crap. That just figures, my skeptical cat mind thought.


Then again, ask me if I care. You can bite it, dog people! So there!

No, don't get me wrong. Dogs are cute and sweet. And someone has to take care of them. The thing is, I don't want a dog for the same reason I don't want my own children.

A recent trip to the veterinarian says it all. The waiting room filled up with one dog and dog owner after another -- dozens -- while there was exactly one other person in the room who, like me, had a cat carrier.

The volume in the room was deafening. The tail-wagging and antsy jumping up and being told to sit over and over again...the scene was just absolute headache-inducing chaos!

One young woman in a college sweatshirt apologized to onlookers as her chihuahua mix, aptly named "Lucky," repeatedly humped his dog "sibling." It was the worst, she said, when Lucky did this in front of little kids. She was horrified.

So were we (the two cats in the room and me). We couldn't wait to get the hell out of there and be once again quietly in the company of our civilized intellectual peers.

No offense, dog people. But please stop trying to convince me that dogs are better and I should want one. It just won't work. You are barking up the wrong tree.