4 posts tagged “cats”
It's "The Jessica Numbers".
When people share their "Top
25 Most Played" music lists complete with play counts, I am freshly
reminded that other people do not listen to music the way I do. I
listen to albums or little temporary mixes on loop all day long all day
all day, and sprinkled in I will get crushes on individual songs and
play them on individual endless loop. I stay in these little
ruts for a week or more on end. And this is how it comes to pass that
my #1 most played song has been played 387 times since I imported my
music library onto this computer a mere five months ago.
No one wants to hear about your cat.
The other day, I was telling Snark about my ingenious plan to wean the cat away from his habit of racing after me and leaping into the sink every time I enter the bathroom. He does this, with great vigor and consistency, because I began turning on a little stream of water for him to drink whenever he happened to be around. The entirely foreseeable leaping behavior is sub-optimal, though, what with the way he sheds all over the sink and the fact that I am often in the bathroom because I want to use the sink, say to brush my teeth, which is somewhat hampered by the presence of a furry, insistent creature filling my spittin' basin. (My ingenious plan, by the way, is to turn on the trickle of water in the bathtub, instead.)
Snark does not have this sink problem, because the cat is apparently capable of remembering that bearded human does not produce delicious water trickle, while russet human does. We were discussing all this, musing about the mind of the cat and its mysterious ways:
Me: Russet human supports life!
Snark: Hey, bearded human supports life too. You just give him water. I give him delicious food.
Me: True.
Snark: And yet he loves you better. Not rational.
Me (brilliantly): Ah, but I give him water. Whereas you are continually not giving him food.
It's true! For every time that Snark actually feeds him, there are probably dozens if not hundreds of times that the cat wants food and is denied. Whereas I am simply not implicated in the food question at all. Ergo, I win.
Sent off a batch of applications today. I wish it had been the last of them, but it wasn't. Someday. I am trying not to think too much about the daunting piles of other work that have been getting neglected in favor of the orgy of self-description. I worry, too, that if I do this too many more times I will lose all ability to distinguish between sense and nonsense, and will send off an application that is all deranged spliced-together fragments of previous letters and research statments, all adding up to utter babel.
This process is getting associated in my mind with sickly fluorescent light as the days get shorter and greyer and I have to turn on my office lights earlier and earlier.
The weather today has been truly vile, rain and sleet and pellets of snow coming down in sheets. On the way to the post office I saw a dead cat. It looked quite perfect, sad and damp and entirely dead, curled up next to a lamp post. Perhaps someone moved it there after it had been hit by a car? Hard to imagine that it would choose such a relatively exposed spot to crawl off and die on its own, and yet it seemed undamaged. I walked back on the other side of the street.
Our next-door neighbors and landlords (we live in a side-by-side duplex) have a few cats. One, Miller, was originally the husband's mother's cat. He's very old, but still sweet and affectionate, and has a truly remarkable meow that sounds just like someone saying "hello" in a funny voice: "hey-ro". I like him a lot and try to remember to give him some love whenever I see him out on the porch. Apparently he's been ailing for a while, though he doesn't particularly show it. He's not leaky or in pain and does a decent job of keeping himself groomed. But, we're told, he's more or less given up on eating and stays alive sheerly on the basis of some kind of nutritional supplement he's given every three days.
This weekend we got back from a long day of driving around running errands, and Mr. Landlord came to the door as we were putting groceries away.
"I have sort of a strange request," he said. "Can I look under the hood of your car?"
Miller had been missing the night before and all day, and they were afraid he'd crawled off to die -- and the last place they'd seen him made them think that he'd crawled off to do it on our engine block.
"I meant to catch you before you went out, but..." Urrrrgh.
Fortunately, it was not so. Later, we found Miller sitting in a rocking chair on the front porch, and he lived to have another nutrient-supplemented few days, at least. Hooray! And I was reminded of the classic example in linguistics (from Ron Langacker, I think) about how canonically count nouns can be used as mass nouns in the right circumstances:
(1) There was a cat in the driveway.
(2) Now there's cat all over the driveway.
Just a little sumpin' sumpin'.
Oops, fixed to deal with the stupid misplaced highlight I originally had on the front cat-guy's pants. I don't know what I'm doing wrong with my color profile when I save this -- the raspberry color is much more intense in my Photoshop file. Oh well.
