The Internet Likes Cats, Right?

 
Olivia was a months-old kitten when she was found abandoned in the woods of West Virginia. Starving and probably cold in the mountain air, she was nursed back to health by a co-worker of a friend. Said co-worker was unable to care for Olivia for long (work commitments, or something, I never got the complete story), and reached out to whoever could provide a decent home.

My wife--then my girlfriend--had been asking for a cat from (quite literally) the moment she could speak. She cites destiny for the fact that she was wearing black and white the day she learned that a small black and white cat needed a home. I classify it as something more like coincidence. Wearing a cat costume on the day she learned of Olivia: that would've been destiny. Nonetheless, Olivia would be L's a few days later.*

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*I don't think I've mentioned this before, but my wife will remain unnamed here, per her request. I suggested some code names for her (she shot down both "Starfox" and "Shaniqua"), but she decided that the initial "L" will suffice, alternating with "the wife."
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Olivia didn't yet know or trust L or myself--especially myself. During my first stay-over following Olivia's adoption, L woke in the middle of the night to find Olivia literally pissing on her; the wife blamed my apparently disconcerting presence, I blamed the cat. At several points, I reiterated my desire to name her "Goddammit" because, when it comes to cats, a name like "Goddammit" just saves time.

Goddammit Olivia mostly calmed down over the next few weeks, which is why I felt more or less comfortable taking her in when L had to go out town unexpectedly. And so, after a nice dinner at L's, we proceeded to pour Olivia into her carrier (a first for Olivia, whose hatred for the plastic box both peaked and plateaued that night) and, with no car and no convenient bus route, lugged her mewling, sobbing, pooping ass a mile and a half to my apartment. Once there, the wife cleaned cat shit from both Olivia and the carrier while I called my cat-allergic roommate to explain the temporary situation (I felt significantly less bad when I learned that while we were doing this, he had been at the Samuel Adams brewery, tasting a then-experimental offering that would later become Latitude 48).

A few months later, we threw Olivia back into her carrier and moved her into our first apartment together. Three years and two apartments later, Olivia remains a crucial element to our household. A crucial, noisy, haughty, dumb, adorable element. The sort of element that mews intermittently during the night, occasionally climbing on top of us as a reminder that she's still awake and why the hell aren't we? An element which, in spite of some obvious learning disabilities, has figured out a way to make her nine-pound frame take up a third of the bed. An element that will demand to be played with, get us to play with her, grow bored two minutes later, start demanding more play ten minutes after that, and get us to go along with it every step of the way. An element who runs from everything and everyone and still gets it in her head that she'll hunt us: running after us at top speed down the hallway, pulling up short at the door, and then slapping her paws against the door frame, demented eyes staring up at us, as though to remind us that we only continue to live at her whim.  This terrifies my wife and makes me fear for my wife's sanity; "it's not the ability, it's the intent," she testifies, each time that much closer to a psychotic break.

And yet. 

As a matter of routine, we'll get home from work at the end of the day, crumple onto the couch, and flip on comforting, predictable Seinfeld reruns in order to summon the strength needed to rise and make dinner. And like clockwork, this little hairball plops down into our laps, looks up at us with those big, black pupils, and begins to rumble. And, knowing full well that it's a trick--a trick keeping us from doing something we need to do--we melt. Because that's what cats do to earn their keep: fifteen seconds of minimal labor per day that makes them absolutely indispensable once they've wormed their way into your heart. The rest is unreconstructed id. And you love them for that.

This post has nothing to do with acquiring page hits (it kinda does). There's context for this. Or, rather, this is the context for a future post that had grown too large already. But, as she would remind me--and as I'm sure the wife would agree--Olivia deserves her own post, anyway.