Your indoor cat: You are sometimes overcome by the irrational and persistent feeling that everyone else you meet at social gatherings has been given a guidebook on how to behave normally and interact smoothly just before you arrived, and that they are secretly glad you have not been given one. You are, for once in your life, correct. They have been. And they will never tell you, and you will never see the book, but that does not mean it is not very real.
Your outdoor cat: No one has ever told you that you are given to mispronouncing words like “foliage” and “pronunciation,” words you have never heard other people say and have only ever read in books. No one ever corrects you, but then no one has to tell you something’s gone wrong when a conversation ices into something smooth and arch and mannered, when only a moment before it was warm and easy.
Your declawed indoor cat: It doesn’t matter if you rescued it already clawless or declawed it yourself in your linen closet with a pair of pliers. You are fated to wander the earth, deathless and restless, like the Ancient Mariner, corralling smiling wedding guests and badgering them into conversation until the smiles melt from their faces and they tell you that declawing a cat is exactly like removing the wrists from toddlers without anesthesia.
Your indoor cat: You pride yourself on being fair and impartial and given to introspection; in reality you simply spend an enormous amount of time mentally justifying everything you have ever done. You rule in your own favor every time, and you never wonder why your friendships seem to fail at the three-year mark.
Your outdoor cat: Every night, when you open the door to let your cat pour itself out into the darkness, you whisper “Kill a bird for Jonathan Franzen.”
Your indoor/outdoor cat: You can menstruate consciously. Not on command, exactly — it isn’t a parlor trick, you can’t just bleed at the drop of a hat — but if you spend an evening focusing your energy, the next day your period will have begun. You have done this all your life, but only told a handful of friends about it. They have all responded with equal parts bafflement and tolerance. You can’t show them, exactly, or prove it, but it’s true all the same. You’re more than a little proud of it, too.
Your declawed outdoor cat: You have never been sorry for anything that you have ever done. In your dreams, you are always falling.
Your indoor cat: Whenever your cat leaps up from a peaceful sitting position and suddenly flees the room, you whisper “You are right to fear me.”
Your outdoor cat: Every time you speak with a certain acquaintance, you have almost exactly the same conversation, right down to the letter. You are not sure if they have noticed. Surely they must have noticed. But they never say anything, so neither do you.
Tags: cats, indoor cats, outdoor cats
So that book DOES exist! I knew it.
This is surreal and wonderful.
Oh, you might want to fix the phrase “that does not mean it is very real,” because I think you mean “it isn’t very real,” unless I”m misunderstanding.
you got it boss
oh god the last one. OUCH. All the ones, really. Clearly I am the cat lady-est, even though my allergies deprive me of their companionship. :'(
You don’t even know me, but you GET me, melis. How do you do that? It’s both freaky and comforting to read things like this that so perfectly capture that funny/weird/haunted space in my head that I can never quite express and no one around me really knows is there.
Related Posts: Texts From the Lorax.
“That funny/weird/haunted space in my head that I can never quite express and no one around me really knows is there.” That is such an accurate description of that…thing. That strange, restless space. It’s moments like this when I realize how limited language really is. It’s good to be reminded that other people have those spaces too, though. Ahhhh, feelings, so many feelings.
I’m starting to think I should just direct friends/family/potential love interests to The Toast and be like, “Here, read this for a day or a week or so. It’s pretty much me in internet form, and if you get it, you get me.” There are so many things here that resonate with me, more than any other space I’ve found on the old interwebs, but that I don’t feel I can adequately communicate to people who know me or who I want to get to know.
ALL THE FEELINGS AHHHHHHHHH
I actually might start doing that…
hit a bit too close to home byeee
I know, right???? I wanted to pull the blankets back up over my head and cocoon myself in a sadness burrito by the end.
And yet still I love it. Behold the magic of melis.
I found myself wondering, “do I have any friendships that lasted, or at least didn’t start declining, after the 3-year mark?” Shit I’ve had a bunch of close friends but come to think of it, after a number of years, there are a lot of reasons that make it difficult to keep in contact regularly. I think I’m a friend-slut.
My cat and I share deep, crushing regret that he isn’t allowed out to kill birds for Jonathan Franzen.
These are like horoscopes based on Your Cat. I can dig it.
If I could menstruate consciously I’d deliberately start myself the week before my holiday, not the day after I arrive in a strange place.
Purrrrrrrfect
(goin for the cheap jokes)
But really, amazing.
I am weirdly offended by the first one, but I also only recently became a cat person. I grew up with dogs and a terrible cat allergy, so my personality is probably rooted in that.
OKAY SERIOUS QUESTION: what is the difference between outdoor and indoor/outdoor?
Outdoor cats, like on a farm, or at my dad’s house, are always outside, and never allowed to come in, no matter how delightful the smell of frying bacon may be. Indoor cats live inside, but go outside to terrorize the neighborhood / get material for their poetry / sell meth.
Okay thank you! That’s what I thought but the “kill a bird” line made me doubt myself.
~the world is strange and confusing and I understand less and less each dayyyyyyyyyy~
Oh, that part is confusing! Maybe the cat in question has been asked inside for a strategy meeting.
That explains why several years back my mom’s cat disappeared for 2 weeks. He was working for Walter White and trying to think of a good rhyme for “lymphoreticulosis.”
I’m tempted to make one of my indoor cats an outdoor cat, as he has taken to peeing on our weight lifting mats. We had a house-guest for a month, and now he has daily accidents after 4 years of an accident-free life. It may also be because I’m pregnant.
I’m super ready for this behavior to stop; I’m not sure what else we can try. My husband took him to the vet today, and the cat does not have a UTI, so this is 100% because he’s stressed and/or he’s an asshole. We’re putting a second litterbox in the weight room today, so hopefully that will help.
Ugh, my cat has done similar things to me, I’m not pregnant, but I do think she gets jealous of women who come over. Sounds crazy but I swear it. More likely, she needs that litter box cleeeean. If I slip up and forget for a day or so, she lets me know by peeing on anything soft where she doesn’t sleep.
Also, she was born in the urban wilderness and discovered/rescued at around 2 or 3 months old. That was enough time to make her personality very obvious that she wants to go outside and hunt. She’s the wildest indoor cat I know. She is always staring out any one of my four 3rd-story windows making weird clicking sounds at whatever moves out there on the streets of West Oakland (notorious feral cat population, she’d get her ass kicked in no time). I want to take her outside on a leash but then again, I really do not want to take a cat outside on a leash. Maybe someday I’ll rent a house in the country and she can stay there with a kitty door–inside/outside situation.
late reply, but I have useful information to share!
my asshole cat used to pee on all the furniture.
here is a pdf article about feline inappropriate elimination from the osu veterinary school. http://vet.osu.edu/assets/pdf/hospital/behavior/f…
key addenda to the article:
1. they recommend feliway, a pheremone diffuser. it ended up being a $50 waste of money for my cat. I recommend trying a “calming collar” (they’re like $10-$15 on amazon) first. It has the pheremones infused into the collar, so they just stay right near your cat instead of being diffused throughout the whole room.
2. I tried basically everything in that article (under the guidance of a vet) and what worked for me is fluoxetine (prozac). You’ll notice under the “Drug Therapy” section that it has a very high effectiveness rate. one study said that it got rid of 90% of peeing incidents in 100% of cats. so far, knock on wood, it’s gotten rid of 100% of her peeing incidents.
My cat Harry wants very much to kill birds and leave their bloodied carcasses by Jonathan Franzen’s feet. Also squirrels and mice.
He is not allowed outside, though. The cat, not Jonathan.
Your haunting lack of cat: You spend a lot of the day sitting around in pajamas, trying to “work from home” but actually listening intently to your upstairs neighbor’s cats rollicking from room to room while she’s out of town.
Before I got the cats I have now, I spent a lot of time on facebook, writing on my friends’ walls that they should post more cat pictures.
Your haunting lack of cat: You spend a lot of the day sitting around in pajamas, trying to "work from home" but actually listening intently to your upstairs neighbor's cats rollicking from room to room while she's out of town.
Your roommate’s cat whose litter box is in your bathroom: You do not like cats. You do not like the bathroom smelling like cats. How can people tolerate poop just sitting there *inside the house??* And the cat litter all over the floor is gross.
My cat Klaas-Jan Huntelaar could be indoor/outdoor if he wanted to be, but he has very little interest in the outdoors. I live in a residential area with a garden in the back and a walkway/courtyard thing in the front, in a country where indoor/outdoor is the norm. And he is just not into it. My housemate had the back door open most of the day and he apparently sniffed at it, then went back upstairs. (He did go out the front window for a few minutes, but then came back.)
Cats, I swear.
late reply, but I have useful information to share!
my asshole cat used to pee on all the furniture.
here is a pdf article about feline inappropriate elimination from the osu veterinary school. http://vet.osu.edu/assets/pdf/hospital/behavior/f…
key addenda to the article:
1. they recommend feliway, a pheremone diffuser. it ended up being a $50 waste of money for my cat. I recommend trying a "calming collar" (they're like $10-$15 on amazon) first. It has the pheremones infused into the collar, so they just stay right near your cat instead of being diffused throughout the whole room.
2. I tried basically everything in that article (under the guidance of a vet) and what worked for me is fluoxetine (prozac). You'll notice under the "Drug Therapy" section that it has a very high effectiveness rate. one study said that it got rid of 90% of peeing incidents in 100% of cats. so far, knock on wood, it's gotten rid of 100% of her peeing incidents.
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