Lately, my cat Pebbles and I have been in a rut (Don't be mistaken —Pebbles is a boy. I realize there might be confusion). He's moody and disconnected and I think our relationship is in danger of falling to pieces.
It all started about two weeks ago when he jumped on the counter and ""accidentally"" pushed my favorite glass off the edge, leaving a pile of broken shards at my bare feet. Normally he runs away when he knows he's been bad, but this time he just stared at me with this demonic little twinge in his eye. I knew something was up.
Three days later he escaped out of my apartment door and ran down the hallway towards the elevators in a dead sprint. He just missed an open elevator going to the lobby before I caught up. If he had made that elevator and I ended up chasing a fat, dopey cat through downtown Madison, it would not have been good for our relationship. There would have been one of those, ""Seriously, dude? You tried to escape?!"" kind of awkward elephant in the room for a while.
And it wasn't enough that he had already turned into some sort of Four Loko-infused Linda Blair that tears around my apartment like a psychopath every night spewing green vomit everywhere after eating half the fern hanging in my window, but just to spite me, he's decided to howl at my front door until 4 a.m. too.
Then, to top things off, he hocked up a hairball on my pillow yesterday. I thought he was having quite a hefty breakfast before I left for work. Little did I know he was noshing on all that food just so he could barf it up later on the one place my face is 50 percent of the time.
These spiteful hints were not ignored—I noticed. I played it off, dropped a few hints myself, but this passive aggressive behavior is typical of cats, NOT ME. Not ever. I would NEVER scrub the toilet with my roommate's toothbrush or pour hairspray in her Listerine in a passive aggressive, vengeful manner. Wait, what? Moving on…
I tried the nice route. I bought him new toys, I put out a cardboard box because he loves to lounge in them and I would even ""accidently"" drop my food scraps for him to Hoover off the floor. It became obvious, though, that he was not going to respond to my amiable approaches. I decided to bring my passive aggressive tendencies out of retirement and fight back.
For the next week I only bought the cheap, off-brand cat food that was probably carved off the rotten end of the cow. Before I went to class each day, I would deliberately shut my bedroom door so he couldn't take his afternoon catnaps on my bed. I set aside an hour each night for YouTubing videos of cute kittens in tea cups just to make him jealous. And, I even moved his sunning chair from the window to the dingy, shadowy corner on the opposite side of the room.
Needless to say, he knew I meant business. My plan had worked. I've out-passive-aggressive-ised a cat, which means I'm like Ghandi and Jigsaw combined into one. As a result, he became needy as hell. He's always meowing and always walking all over me like I'm a fucking jungle gym. When I'm sleeping, I sometimes wake up to him doing the Cha-Cha on my face.
Now Pebbles follows me everywhere and he's always sitting next to me, radiating 114 degrees of heat. He thinks that when I'm boiling ramen on the stove it's some sort of game similar to ""‘Rescue' Fishy From Bowl."" He even developed this new habit where he butts his head into my side every time he wants to be pet, just like a goddamn Billy Goat. It kind of hurts. Give it a rest, pest.
I thought that instead of caving in so quickly to my passive aggressive rebuttal, Pebbles would counter me with more misbehavior. I thought he would be on top of his game, firing on all four cylinders in order to continue the battle. But, I've come to realize that there's not much you can expect from a critter who spent his formative years trying to free his reflection from the confines of the bathroom mirror.
Steph should get a TV series for being this clever with felines. Fuck that show ""Dog Whisperer."" If you're interested in her animal relations services, please e-mail your contract stipulations to slindhom@wisc.edu.
