I WISH… I WAS… A CAT

Desperately cling to what you once thought was important. It may come in handy one day. Or it might turn around and bite you on the … but what I am trying to say is that even if you had the impossible dream of lying in the sun all day forsaking the responsibility of meeting people and caring about the world, that dream may lead you to a new realization. This is why I was a cat, used to wish I were a cat, and still wish it.

There is a strange duality about life that allows us to wallow in the quagmire that inevitably crosses our path, and at the same time, be happy about it. We are hard-wired to think that the dental floss we have stuck in our pocket because our mother or dentist told us it was the right thing to do, (floss our teeth, I mean) will provide the strong rope to pull ourselves out of the pit in which we were always destined to fall into.

I secretly think this is the deeper meaning behind the success of that awesome TV series “McGyver”.

My childhood desire to be a cat without a care in the world was 3 fold: No job, no cares, no people. As a cat, I would not have to do anything I did not want to do. I did not care about doing anything more than I had to do, and I did not care about making the acquaintance not to mention my utter disregard for what they might have thought of me.

I tried so hard to be and really, for a couple of days, succeeded in being… a cat. I laid in sunshine, I ate, I thought of little or nothing. I could feel my soft, yet regal fur and my long, swishing tail. I moved like a cat, on all fours, and worked hard at pouncing like a cat. I still tilt my head and dance with a bit of cat left in me. Being a cat meant I just didn’t care and didn’t have to care… until puberty hit. Then I was resigned to the fate of mourning my lost glory of cat-hood.

How gloriously freeing it had been. But real people do care…too much. That is the evil and grace of our fussy little brains. Cat-hood transformed itself into more complex forms of “not caring” around age 14 and I became a devotee of fiction. Fantasy, historical, science, adventure, anything, anything, anything besides my small, mediocre life, I loved. It wasn’t so much that I was desperate to avoid a bad ending; I was just terrified of going on and on and on in mediocrity until it just… ended. That is why I infinitely preferred the lives I created in fiction entertainment. Movies were so fantastic and I glorified the people who completed the illusions to no end. Oscar Wilde was a particular favorite of mine and I held, with no sense of irony, a particular quote of his close to my heart. Through the uncomplicated lips of Miss Prizm, regarding successful fiction: “The Good ended Happily and the Bad Unhappily. That is what fiction means.” My mantra and rule in choosing those movies, books, fancies and other modes of escape that would keep my mind safely wrapped in cat-form.

This… this had become my grown up cat life. If I had knelt down and prayed at my bedside at 20, I might’ve said “Please let me be clever, pretty, rich, vindicated and married… please. Oh, and please resurrect Jane Austen from the dead so that she can write a screen-play about my transformed life and please make my thighs skinny enough so I can be cast as myself even though I don’t act, but I can learn because, after all, it’ll just be about my fascinating, NOT mediocre life!” That... was the only happy ending I could’ve stomached.

Who am I kidding? That’s what I sweat and keen for every day of my real life.

I still have such a time with my pretending. I used to be so confused through it all, but how many of us can say we truly have a grip on things? We’re always making things up as we go along. I think that is the adventure of it all… convincing others that we have a handle on things, and that we’ll be the ones most likely to pull some dental floss from our pockets, use it to whip up a handy rope ladder, and lead everyone safely out of the pit; even if, deep down, we can’t remember the last time we actually flossed. I might, ultimately, lead that dreaded mediocre life (ugh, that was hard to admit, even in writing), but my fantasies will ensure that it feels anything but mediocre.