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.