Buddy the Cat writes a guest column

Hey, I’m Buddy. I’m a cat, as you may have gathered from the title. Suspend your disbelief for a moment and accept that you’re reading a furry creature’s thoughts.

My people found me in their garage one day hanging out. Most people would be like, “Hey, there’s a strange cat in our garage. Let’s call Animal Control.” My people put out a food dish instead, so I stuck with them, patrolling their yard for intruders and snacking on their food. I let them pet me, of course.

Then one day I cut myself on something in the garage, big cut at the base of my tail that looked like I tried to skin myself. No big deal; I’m an outdoor cat and we’re tough. But my people caught me and loaded me up and took me to someone they called “the vet”, who stuck me a few times and stitched up my tail. But then the vet said, “Keep him indoors for at least three-four days,” and that’s how I became an indoor cat.

Indoors is warm, but it comes with five other cats. I’ll sit near them sometimes, but I’m not an overly emotional guy. The big cat likes to chase me around, but I set him straight, and now he respects my need for space.

It’s nice living with my people. I still go outside sometimes, usually by making a break for it through the basement door before they can catch me. It’s important that I guard the yard from miscreants, because my people don’t know how to. It’s up to me to take care of them.

Gotta go now. It’s petting time.

For my cat Stinkerbelle

Stinky bit me in the nose last night.

Stinky — Stinkerbelle in full — earned her name as a kitten by crawling up my chest and sweetly punching me in the eye. Adopted as a feral kitten out from under a friend’s porch, she hasn’t mellowed in her fourteen years on earth.

Stinky has not come a long way since we adopted her. She chooses to stay upstairs, mingling only with our other five cats when wet food is served. She hogs the food and now rather resembles a soccer ball — black and white and round. She hisses at the other cats, at us, at inanimate objects. She likes to have her back scritched — until, suddenly, she doesn’t, hence the bitten nose. All in all a disagreeable cat.

But Stinky will sit on the bed sometimes, close to my head, purring just out of the happiness of being near me. She will rub up against my hand ecstatically when I pet her and eventually bliss out into a cross-eyed state. She doesn’t hate — she just doesn’t know what to do with herself.

So we love Stinky in the way one loves their problem children. Awkward, unbeautiful, cranky, at times lashing out. She reminds me of me as a child — roly poly and uncoordinated, unaware of how my intelligence put off people. I did not believe myself lovable, and told the school psychologist only the monsters were my friends.

I study Stinky and find my inner child, runny-nosed and crying, yet still worthy of love.

Guest blog — Girly-Girl the cat

My name is Girly-girl, which I find a ridiculous name because I am a cat. I answer to Girly, of course, because that’s a good way to get petted.

I have a favorite human — the female one who lives in the house. She usually sits on a specific soft place in the gathering room, and makes clicking noises on the flat surface. It gets enough of her attention that I want to sit on it and get attention too. But she usually pushes me off it, making swears when she does.

I do not sit on laps. I sit near them. I’m sitting on the arm of the soft place next to my human. I try to look vaguely disapproving of everything, It goes with not being a lap cat. But when I get petted, I purr. No sense in playing completely hard to get.

I’m starting to get on in years. I don’t feel the need to feel charming anymore, not like that smarmy little Chucky who wants to play all the time. I do not play. But I get along with my human just by being me.

Classism and consumption in romance novels

I used to read a lot of romance novels, probably because I was single for a long time. Over time, I kept seeing tropes pop up that rubbed me the wrong way:

Vast differences in social class between male and female protagonists. Titles like “The Millionaire’s Pregnant Secretary” and “The Sheikh’s Prize* make male wealth and female beauty the main selling point in the book. Edwardian romance paints the man as a duke or an earl and the woman as a genteel clergyman’s daughter or an orphan or a nanny. And don’t get me started with JD Robb’s romantic police procedurals — she’s a cop and he owns half the planet. The exchange of her beauty for his money is classic, but perhaps outdated in a society with much more egalitarianism.
Large amounts of money in the happily ever after — research shows that, although money changes everything, it does not necessarily change it for the better. Lottery winners are no more happy than us normal people, and maybe even less happy. People tend to throw their fortunes away, and given the bounty the male protagonist drops on his true love, romantic males are no exception.
Speaking of money, conspicuous consumption. When the male protagonist spends money, we get detailed descriptions about his wardrobe, his car, the dress, the dinner, the yacht, the trousseau, the … you get it. We witness how the protagonists spend their wealth, because if they didn’t spend it, nobody, including us, would know how rich they were. That’s the meaning of conspicuous consumption.
Overdone sex and male prowess. Don’t get me wrong, I like sex.** But these invariable rules make me skip ahead to the next scene: If the female is a virgin, she’s overwhelmed by the size of the male’s penis. If she’s not a virgin, he supplies better orgasms than anyone else. No matter how badly the two protagonists fight, they still have better sex than any of their readers. They always have sex before falling in love, and they spend the rest of the book dithering about why they can’t marry the other person, and it’s invariably that they don’t want to subject the other person to embarrassment or ridicule or a life of servitude. We, the readers, don’t only vicariously consume the couple’s wealth, but their out-in-the-open sex life.

I admit I’m not the typical reader. Wish fulfillment to me would be living in Canada as a published author, retired, and a cat***. I like my couples to have more equal footing, and the woman to supply more than just her pretty face to the union. I like strong females and males with depth, not just “strong and silent”.

I have to admit that I still read a few romance authors. Robin D. Owens I read for her world building and her focus on emotional baggage rather than “He/she wouldn’t possibly want to marry me”. Also, her sex scenes are reasonably anchored in reality. I read Barbara Michaels, although her books may not be considered romance, because she has very real protagonists who seldom have the immense social class disparities. I read a few others — Mary Balogh among others. And I still read JD Robb, but I skip over the sexual acrobatics.

* These may actually be real titles for all I know.

** Oops. TMI.

*** I would not be the first published cat. That honor goes to Lil’ Bub, the pint-sized alien cat.

Decoding a Poem I Wrote in High School

I wrote this poem in high school: *

Quand PJ, ma petite chatte **
vient, elle me demande ***
“c’est vrai, est-ce vrai?” ****
et je répond “c’est vrai”. *****

* This is the only French I knew besides
“Bonjour, Guy!”
“Bonjour Michel! Ça va?
“Oui, ça va. Et toi?”
“Pas mal.”
People who took high school French in my age cohort will remember this as the first conversation in Son et Sens, the high school French 1 textbook.

** Was PJ a petite cat? Bwahahahahaha, no. She was a watermelon on sticks.

*** Did PJ demand anything of me? Food. She demanded food.

**** Was PJ an existential cat? No, she was Stupid Like A Box of Rocks. She liked drooling on feet.

***** What was I discussing with my obese, slabor cat? (See **** for explanation of “slabor”). What is true? What is really true? It’s lost to the ages, friends.

I was so pretentious in high school.