I have a cat. And I absolutely love my cat. She is a wonderful companion and a great source of amusement. But sometimes I wonder if she's just so dumb that she comes across as mean or so brilliant that she's mean on purpose.
When I moved out of my mother's house after college, I was living with my then-boyfriend, who is tremendously allergic to cats, so my cat (Annabelle) really couldn't live with us. So she had been living with my mother in my mother's house. My mother would let Annabelle and the other cats go outside as they wished, so when I moved to my current apartment with Annabelle a year and a half ago, she had to adjust to being an indoor cat. So for the past year and a half, every single time I have come home, I've opened the apartment door, and Annabelle has gone running into the hallway. I throw my stuff inside and chase after her. Most of the time, she just rolls around on the floor in the hallway. Normally, this is only moderately annoying. Sometimes it's even funny. However, I share joint custody of my dog. When my dog is here, the cat not only runs into the hallway and rolls on the floor, but runs straight down the stairs. So I come home from working eight hours, the poor dog needs to go outside and pee, and the jerk cat is running around the building. So I frequently let her continue to run around while I run the dog outside, bring the dog back in, then the dog and I chase the cat around the building. I can't imagine what my neighbors think when they see this spectacle.
I knit. I'm not great at it, but I like it and I do it regularly. I always have a project going. Annabelle is absolutely certain that I took up knitting to provide her more toys. Every day, I leave for work and my apartment looks pretty good. Then I come home to find a yarn maze. I'm kind of upset right now. I just dicked around in Paint to make a shitty representation of the yarn maze, and now I can't figure out how to embed it. Blarg. Oh well. Basically, I come home and find yarn dragged around the apartment. I always thought "Oh, poor kitty. She's so bored, all she has to do all day is play with yarn." Well, one night, I fell asleep on the couch. I woke up in the middle of the night and watched this furry little jerk carefully pick up a ball of yarn in her mouth and trot off down the hall. A moment later, she came walking back down the hall, perfectly calm, with the end of the yarn in her mouth. I watched her walk into the kitchen, dragging the yarn behind her. I watched her walk through the kitchen, into the dining room area. She walked around the table. She walked through the dining room chairs. She walked under the table. I watched her deliberately tie up the kitchen table and chairs with this yarn. So the yarn maze I come home to is definitely one hundred percent intentional and by the cat's design.
My cat's name is Annabelle. As crazy cat ladies do with their cats, I have given her all sorts of silly nicknames. The obvious one, of course, was Anna Banana. The has been shortened to just Banana. Annabelle was six years old and had the name "Annabelle" for all six years before I started calling her Banana. Now she will not respond to "Annabelle." If I want my cat, I have to call "Banana!" if I want any response from her. And she's very responsive to "Banana!" Sometimes I'll be sitting on the couch in the living room and a sad commercial will make me want my cat. She'll be sitting in the bedroom window. I'll call "Banana!" and she'll come running and jump into my lap. That's cool. However, she'll also come running when the boyfriend is here and I ask if he'd like a banana from the kitchen. The worst part of this is when the cat runs outside and I have to chase her. I call out "Annabelle!" and she doesn't respond. But running through the hall of my apartment building at midnight, yelling "Banana!" gets her attention and makes her stop running down the stairs. So now whenever I speak of the cat to somebody who knows me, I just say "The Banana." My aunt and my mother came to visit the other day and I asked if they'd go to the pet store with me, so I could "pick up some treats for The Banana." I've never seen anybody look as confused as my aunt did then.
When The Banana decides I'm not giving her enough attention, she chews on my hair. I've started putting my hair up most of the time when I'm home. This isn't a deterrent for her. It was my weekend with the dog this past weekend. The Banana got jealous of him and climbed up on the back of the couch and proceeded to bite my head, trying to loosen some hair to chew on.
So, I love my cat. She cracks me up. I'm just not sure what to think of her intelligence level. I'm pretty sure she's just an absolutely brilliant asshole. And on that note, I'm going to go play with my cat.
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