Ridiculous Opinions #213
The cat you see in the picture above is our cat, Rosetta. She is approximately fourteen-years old. Right now, it is mid-afternoon and she has just eaten. She is curled up for her mid-afternoon nap in the sun, enjoying the warmth of the light shining in through the window onto a very soft bed upon which she is usually the only occupant.
I don’t take naps by choice, but I wish I did. Yesterday, I had a nap, but again, I must point out that it was not by choice. I had come home from work and sat on my favorite chair to surf the internet. Lo and behold before I knew it, I was snoozing with my head bent at an awkward angle and my computer perched in a way that could have spelled disaster. Luckily, I woke up.
I don’t like naps. They ruin the day. Naps only seem to want to occur when I have something that I’d like to do, like watch TV or peruse my computer. They don’t happen when I want them to. Plus, naps have a tendency to keep me up at night, and for me, there’s nothing worse than being up late and having nothing to do.
I wish I had the ability to nap like a cat. I have an ongoing debate in my brain about whether the life of my cats is either nothing short of heaven-on-Earth or some god-awful form of torture. I mean, how awesome is it to be a cat? You get food when you want it; you get petted when you want it; you sleep all day; you frolic all night. When you’re bored, you go have a nap on a sunny spot on the bed and you’re able to fall asleep almost instantly. Sounds pretty good, right?
The alternative to that is that these cats have spent almost their entire lives trapped in these apartments. Perhaps they’ve gone mental at the lack of stimulation or the fact that their owners leave them all by themselves for two months a year in the summer. I wonder if they get depressed; if they sit and think, This is an existential nightmare…I cannot escape this awful life, even by my own hand! I am dependent upon two utter and complete morons for food and shelter. I am trapped in the house with another cat; one that I don’t like, but that insists on being around me at all times. I am in hell. This is hell.
Since we’ve moved to our new apartment, the cats seem somewhat invigorated. Whenever we used to move the furniture around in the house, it was high entertainment for these cats. They would run all around, sniffing at things that were familiar but were in entirely new places! When we would do this, we would give them entirely new places to nap! This was a joy!
Now that we’re in a new apartment, the cats are happy as can be, and considering they spent the last seven years in a confined space with no outdoors, they have taken to our balcony as if it’s the cat version of Netflix. They want to go outside all the time and just sit there. Somedays, it’s blisteringly hot out, but they still want to go. It’s entertainment.
So, what’s the conclusion to all of this? Besides the fact that it is blatantly clear that I am too brain-dead to come up with a subject for this week’s newsletter?
I have no conclusion, folks. I’m going to go try to read a book.
