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.

TOYS R US KID

TOYS R US KID
At some point it became clear to me that I wanted nothing to do with the world and it’s people. I wasn’t a full-fledged agoraphobic, I just preferred to stay inside and, you know, watch a movie or something. I didn’t want to be a doctor, lawyer, a nurse, teacher a politician, a mechanic, a business woman, a sales clerk, a real-estate agent, or a secretary… When I was a kid, I truly, madly, deeply wanted to be a TOYS R US kid.

Something about life seemed doomed, even as a 9-year-old. I mean, why get a job? “You mean, when I’m not your kid anymore, I’ll have to buy my own food?” The stark realization of money, and rent, and retirement weighed down on me. But how will my life be spent… working? My inner and outer little self screamed “But I don’t want to work! I don’t want to do those things you suggest!”

I didn’t want to work most of my days trying to buy more things to keep my feeble existence hurtling towards boredom and more days of work and more days of paying rent. And being a TOYS R US kid didn’t sound like it was going to rake in the dough, so that is when decided to devoted a considerable amount of time to A: Trying to move things with my mind and B: Staring intently at the family cat and wishing myself into its body.

There was nothing I wanted more in life than to accomplish one of these tasks because if A: I moved something with my mind, then SURELY I would be able to travel the carnival circuit demonstrating my amazing abilities and from there, I’d be shuttled around the world performing for heads of state and pampered like a movie star where one day my quiet beauty would capture the wonder of some foreign prince (mind you, some cute, young one, not at all like the one Grace Kelley had to accept) and I’d spend my ridiculously lavish days buying toys for all the poor, unfortunate children who had none… and riding ponies.

Well, if B: happened, I could spend my days lying in a beam of sunlight, sleeping all the time, being petted sometimes, playing with toys a lot and never, never, never, never having to say, “hello” to intimidating strangers or unknown relatives because who expects a cat to be sociable?

But somehow, just somehow, I went on.