Ridiculous Opinions #183
As I am writing this, our youngest cat, Mango, is sitting beside me, staring. Every once in a while, she will let loose with a rather pathetic “meow” that sounds like she’s had one-too-many beers the night before, and she continually purrs, as if she’s extraordinarily happy to be in my company, but with a tinge of sadness that I am not giving her more attention. In this instance, she is talking to me, telling me she wants in my lap, but this infernal machine is in the way.
I have learned to communicate with our cats. This is not a two-way communication, though. This is me understanding cat-cues and what they are saying to me. Their main method of communication is The Stare. When our cats want something, especially Mango, they will STARE at it.
Mango likes to play. She especially loves it when I break out a stick with a feather on the end. She will bite at it and scratch at it. She will roll on her back and desperately swipe at it in an attempt to DESTROY it. She will run around in circles like a dog chasing its tale until she gets tired and flops over, purring like a freight train and breathing heavily. But even then, she will not stop pawing at The Stick because she really wants to kill it.
But when I am not playing with her and she wants to play, she will give me The Stare. Usually, this involves standing over The Stick and staring. Part of the time, she will stare at me. Part of the time, she will stare at the stick. She is communicating with me in those moments, saying, “Hey, I’m ready to play with the stick now.” I do not always listen.
Mango is a Bangladeshi cat, acquired in 2015. Feral cats were all over the place in Bangladesh. One day when we came down to the parking garage of our apartment building, we heard a constant meowing coming from a corner. I ignored it, because I knew what it meant, and I have a very soft heart when it comes to these things. The meowing went on for a couple of days. Eventually, I went to look and there was poor, pathetic Mango, teeny-tiny and without a family.
That little ugly cat could fit in the palm of my hand. She meowed all the time, but was as loving as a cat could possibly be. We put an ad in our school email to see if anyone wanted her, but no one did. And thus, she joined our family, alongside out Chinese cat, Rosetta.
Mango doesn’t always like the food we give her and would rather starve than eat it. Mango will endlessly meow outside the bathroom door when we close it. Mango likes to rub her face up against our dark clothing, thus forcing us to constantly use a lint remover to get rid of the evidence if we ever go outside. Mango can jump higher than any cat I’ve ever seen. Mango will react with utter and complete fear at any loud sound, and yet she will be the first person to rub up against a stranger that comes in the house. Mango is an ugly cat, but she wears it like a badge of honor, as if people just don’t understand her inner beauty and the rest of the world is pathetic in their constant fixation with looks. If Mango is asleep on you and you move, she will look at you like you’re a BASTARD for committing such a heinous crime.
I sometimes think that Mango views us as a piece of furniture. If we are in the room, she will lay on us. If our legs are stretched out, she will squeeze into the folds of our legs and stretch out to full length.
She is the tiniest cat that I’ve ever seen.
Now, we have no daughters at home, but we still have the two cats that we got for our daughters. So, I guess we’re still a four-person household. Rosetta, our older cat, pretends we don’t exist, except when it’s meal time. But Mango, our ugly, little runt of a kitty, sits on our laps, demands food, follows us around like a dog, and stares at us constantly, trying to convey her messages to us, which usually consist of something along the lines of, “I will eat your face if you die in this house.”
