Speaking of dumb kitties (see cat who allows Spay Suit to be put on self)—when mama was trying to get me to use the potty like humans, I saw a (pretty dishy) Siamese in a how-to video who actually went pee-pee on the john and then pulled all of the toilet paper off the roll trying to cover up the smell, as we do, and he stuffed it all in the john and probably stopped up the plumbing for hours. What a dummy. I know how to do all of it. I just don’t want them to know. Yet.
Anal-compulsive, that’s me. But better that than one of those idiotic cats who jumps on visitors and runs around like a kitty with it’s head cut off, jumping on kitchen counters and tearing up sofas—I am NOT one of those kitties at all, even if I do stretch with my claws on the rattan chairs from Ikea that we have around our 19th century dining table—mama says to sort of shake up the décor and mix and match, or at least that’s what I think she’s saying. Cheap chairs, nice table, on which I do NOT jump because I am bien elevée (not raised in a barn, like some other kitties I could mention…).
We live in a tiny village where half the world seems to show up for four months and then there is no one. No one on the streets, no on in the bars or restaurants, just the locals hanging around getting over the onslaught of tourists from all over — England, Ireland, Germany, and of course, a lot of French families who didn’t even know our little village existed until a few years ago. Mama and papa say that they were the first Americans to hit town, along with a man and his wife who had lived there before us and another couple, painters, who are still here even now. He’s a good painter, from California, and his wife is really nice with a wonderfully long pigtail and smiles a hello but they don’t really mix. I think that’s a trait of ex-pats sometimes, just like kitties who don’t really want to brush up against other kitties but prefer their solitary-and-free-from-social-pressure lives. If you think about it, when you go to another country to learn the language, the culture, the ins and outs of the society, it is specifically for the difference that you go. Otherwise, you could stay home and live at the mall or stay in your neighborhood or simply at home just doing the things you did for years and years and never see anything other than the end of your nose.
But we kitties stick our noses into everything, and I think that when you travel, that’s what you do. I’m assimilated, for example, into French and Italian life and I’m even picking up a bit of English from mama and papa. ‘No’, for example is a lot like ‘non, non’ and I learned that one really fast during the days that I was first in my new home and starting howling for breakfast early in the morning and jumping on the bed to get those guys to wake up and feed me.
Oh, now this is funny. There’s this wonderful cartoonist on UTube that I watched with mama and he has a site called ‘Simon’s Cat’, which is this really funny kitty who does things exactly like kitties do—all that stretching and chasing and running up curtains and clawing down the curtains and trying to get in a door and then when someone finally come to open the door, just sitting there looking as if you don’t give a mackerel for coming in—you know, those sorts of cat things. And at the end of each cartoon, this little adorable kitty (for all of us, well, almost all, are, when you get down to it, adorable) sits there after all the chaos of that cartoon is over and the kitty points to its little mouth with a paw and makes a gesture to ‘feed me, feed me’ and it’s just so cute, it’s schmaltzy.
But I’m like mama; I love dumb things and sentimental things and movies that make you cry the whole time and using funny words in place of normal ones, like the little girl who used to live in mama and papa’s neighborhood in Los Angeles, who always called bad people ‘asspoles’, so now I use that because I don’t like using rough language–delicate, fastidious little feline that I am–so I try to get mama to put on UTube when they go out, but instead she read somewhere on the internet sites for how to know more about kitties (which she never did with those other kitties they had, those no good bums, Sushi and Luna—there are watercolors of them still on the walls of this apartment and I tell you, they are two dumb kitties and they had better get my watercolor up there pretty soon or…) and so instead of putting on Simon’s Cat for me, she puts on music from the Auditorium, the Parco della Musica when we’re in Rome and sometimes there is this squeaky, practically indecipherable what they call music that has to have been composed on uppers or downers or maybe just in the middle of the night and then not looked at in the morning for corrections and here I sit, minding my own business while they are out running around doing things without me and I have to sit through ‘modern’ composers and I mean, composers who were born yesterday and want to be innovative and creative, like some of the restaurants that used to be just good old Roman trattorie and now are ‘creativa’ and don’t know their asses from their elbows, in my opinion. At least that’s what I think when mama brings me a little taste from their dinners out—filet of salmon nestled in a basket of rutabagas topped with a sour cherry and banana coulis or some such description like that, but fortunately they do not go to those places often and when they do, they always say why don’t we stick to the good old trattorie that are looking as if they may all die out one day?
And fortunately for me, they do not actually buy CDs of experimental music and leave those going while I’m trying to get my beauty sleep on the piano bench, but instead put on Corelli or Back, I think he’s called—weird name—but I love that guy. He really knew how to put the notes together and I love the fiddlers, too, that Midori and some of her stuff is pretty breathtaking. What they don’t know is that I practice on the piano here when they’re out and I can whip out a mean Kitten on the Keys without any trouble, but my paw reach is not what it could be if I were, perhaps, a big Calico or humongous Persian (which they always turn out to be; some of the Persians I know could pass for shitsus!)—or just the first part….
I know it’s Bach, I was just being funny, haha.
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