Oreo
Wow. It has been nearly a month since I’ve written anything here. Well, you know, I have a few pretty good excuses. First off, as of 15 December I have a job. Woo! And, as of 15 December, I have an apartment. Woo! So, I’ve had to spend a lot of time outfitting said apartment. And, well, the holidays, right? Woo! So, for the holidays, Yayoi came up and spent a lot of time helping me to outfit the apartment. Woo!
Mom’s got a new cat. Woo! Mom’s got another new cat, too! Woo! Okay, the cats? One is named PJ. She is a yellow cat, not at all unlike Madeline. Well, okay, she isn’t Madeline, but the physical resemblance is close enough to be really weird, okay? But the other day Mom was chasing off the little black and white kitty who’d been wandering around several weeks in the cold. She was pregnant, and the neighbors had been neglecting her. It was painful. Then the neighbors explained that the owner had moved out and left her, barefoot and pregnant, out in the very cold cold. (It got really cold here a ways back.) I said hey, if there’s abandoned pregnant cat who needs a home, I’ll put up with her and the kittens! After all, I got room, now. Well, Mom since let her in the house.
But the story gets more complex than that. You see, she really likes this cat, who is horribly affectionate. Except, well, she don’t get along with PJ, so well, but I’m getting ahead of myself. This new cat, Mom took her to the vet, and the vet said we can get this cat fixed up, kittens and all. You know how they fix girl cats? Well, they do a hysterectomy. Hysterectomy is actually an interesting word. The Greeks or some other ancient types called the womb hysterium, or something, and so anytime women got crazy, it was attributed to that organ that woman had that men didn’t. Thus, hysteria is in fact, a general label for women acting crazy. It is, or at least, was, in fact, sexist. Kind of like getting gyped, or receiving and Indian gift, but we can talk about that later.
Anyway you see, they take the womb out of kitties so they won’t go having baby kitties. This helps cats mellow out, because when you take the womb, you take the ovaries, and you take the hormones. Hormones can make you a bit, if you’ll pardon my choice of word, hysterical. So, there’s two things going on here: if you take all that stuff out, you will have a more mellow cat. You’ll also have no kittens, who were until so recently busy gestating in that womb.
I thought it was pretty bad for Mom to have to go and make so many feline life and death decisions, especially after Madeline was sick. Well, she contacted me, to get my opinion, and explained that while she’s totally pro-choice for human women, she doesn’t like making choices for others. She said the cat shelter was full of kittens who needed homes. Well, you know, if a homeless cat can’t get adopted, in our imperfect world they don’t live long. So, well, I agreed, with the same sadness, that yeah, getting the new cat fixed that way, that was wise.
I still feel kind of bad, though. Having choices can be tough, but making tough choices beats being stuck without options.
Well, so, me and Yayoi visited the new cat today. She sure is cuddly. She’s black and white, looks kind of like Joe and Lorah’s Max. Well, not really, except that Max is also black and white. Anyway, I’ve never been much for naming cats. I got one in high school and called him Kitten until Grandma came over and pronounced him Dinkum. Well, in California I found myself with two more kittens, and took to calling them Stripey Cat and Gray Cat. This because, well, I’ll let you figure out why.
Mom said that this new cat was kind of struggling without a name. Well, Mom was struggling. The cat herself didn’t seem so worried about that. She was more concerned with PJ, and whatever crazy hormone balances were floating around her body since her life-changing surgical procedure. She tends to hiss at PJ, and then at whomever is petting her, even though she really loves petting and actually doesn’t mean to hiss …
Well, so, you see, PJ came to Mom from my Sister, who has another crazy cat who used to terrorize PJ. So, if this new cat can’t stop being a nut, well, I might have to take her in. PJ was really horny and weird today and this new cat wasn’t exactly herself either but after Mom gets PJ fixed this week, she’s hoping her girls can settle down a bit, and live in playful harmony. She says the vet said that if you have kittens, better to have a pair, because they can entertain each other, even while the humans are busy spending most of their time going to work, sleeping, reading books, and sewing quilts, like my Mom. That, and Mom really likes both of her new cats.
Well, so I was talking about how I don’t name cats but today I looked at sweet little black and white cat folded up in my arms purring in ecstacy, and Mom explained that Uncle called her BF as in “Bare Foot” as in “Barefoot and Pregnant” but Mom, being the liberated woman that she is, had a hard time liking that name, and I did too, and I looked down at this cat and called her Oreo.
Oreo.
Cookie, for a nickname. And then we can call PJ “Biscuit” for after all, she does have that nice honey color.
PJ’s got her own name problem. She was named, as I recall, by my Sister and my Sister’s then-boyfriend, and they … well, they think divergently from each other, so PJ stands for Persephone José.
Yeah, I can’t handle “PJ”, so maybe, just maybe, Oreo Cookie and PJ Biscuit or something? Well, Mom likes “Oreo” so as far as that goes, maybe Oreo she is.
I was actually thinking of the time that Sheila said that she’d gotten pregnant with Dad’s baby, and they referred to this would-be black-and-white baby as an “oreo cookie” so when I had to go thinking about aphorisms for black and white critters, this half-sibling that I may in fact have out there somewhere in the wild jungles of the South Side of Chicago shares a very strange nomial heritage with Mom’s black and white kitty.
Well, it beats “BF” anyway.
Speaking of which, time to return the GF’s call. I had to drop her off in Kankakee today so she could drive home to Champaign, thus freeing me up at long last to start writing some more here for a change. That I had to drop her off in Kankakee is another story. So, I guess I got plenty of material to work with this week, in terms of telling stories, but like I said, first I gotta call the GF.
