If only there was more love...

Just click on your news website link and you get deluded with news on the multiplicity of warring around..pretty prevelant. Wars are fought and battles are won and so on. I hate bloodshed, but who cares about what I think. All I can do is stay away from personal wars, and all forms of conflict and confrontation with other co-human-inhabitants. Life is a basket of strawberries....or so I thought.

Along came the cat.

Yes, the cat, that furry item that people love and feed and cuddle. The cat. The evil cat. The hateful cat. The vengeful cat. (Get the drift?). The cat. That wages a war with me day in and day out. That confronts me and waits sadistically for a reaction. That is so assured of its position as victor that engaging me in combat has become a playful, almost obsessive habit. Hell, the cat isnt the party with anything to lose.

Moving on to me.

I wake up every morning, ungroomed and at my height of vulnerability. And what do I find confronting me? Davy-cat from upstairs has chosen this particular AM hour to come sneak under the connecting door and position himself in the middle of my living room. I scream, but he is hardly perturbed. You see, he has been smart enough to acquire his ammunition before a face-off. A half made purple scarf, hanging off the edge of a ball of wool replete with long, pointed needles. My purple scarf, my ball of wool, my pointed needles. The prick, he dares to use my own weapons against me!

So, here I stand, fuzzy-headed from a night of dreaming, glasses askew, weaponless...and, for want of anything smarter to do, I let out another scream. Davy-cat winks at me, gets up and begins to close in. Yikes!

I do some on-the-spot strategizing and shut my room door. If I can't fight, I can at least run! Problem solved, no? No...if I dont get him out of the battlefield, which until last night was still my living room, I will be forced to stay in here. So I call the folks upstairs and order them to retract squadron leader Davy-cat before he commands Doreen-cat to come join him. They comply, thinking, wow, some people are real wimps, yeah? Davy-cat is such a darling, so playful, so friendly, so curious. I cringe when these thought vibes flow to me through the shut door.

And so, finally I emerge, shaking all over...believe me, wounds can be inflicted without any form of contact. As I shower, I reflect on the morning's events. The cat wanted a good, honorable fight, but I resorted to third-party mediations. The cat now knows that I am not in a position to stand up for myself. Strike one goes to the cat. The cat now has seen me screaming and shivering. These wounds will stay with me, not him. Strike two goes to the cat. The cat now has a story to tell its cronies this afternoon, winning popularity points for humor. Strike three goes to the cat. And, speaking about humor, folks upstairs have a hearty laugh at my expense, my frantic call to Amma recounting the horrid event causes some across-the-seven-seas laughs, and let me not forget the cat laughs. Homerun to the cat!

Okay, my baseball analogy didnt make sense, but who cared! Here I was, loser once more, as has often happened in the past. Its okay, I tell myself, I can immerse myself in other things and forget about the morning's tragedy. Ha, I wish! I am wrong again. There's no escaping from the feline-infestation for me today.

Davy-lookalike-cat from next door is on this daily rounds. Apparently, his schedule involves poking his nose straight into my row of eight tall windows and cocking his head to get a better view of me. He moves from window one to window two. I sneak a peek at him, while fervently murmuring a prayer of thanks to the inventors of window-glass for making it cat-proof, and try to focus on my typing. But then I can just feel it, he's now onto window three. I bravely peek up again, yikes! He's on window three for sure, not just that, he's settled down pleasantly in the sun, right outside of window three! He faces me on the inside and winks.

How ironic, I get a wink every time my day gets turned upside down. So here I am, forced to meekly sit at my chair, while the cat is assuredly positioned across my window fortress barely five feet away. What follows is a cold-war-type impasse. He sits and waits. He closes his eyes for a nap, stretches every now and then. He is so good at presenting this picture of wondrous calm. And on the other side, I am a carpet-bag of nervous energy. I am obsessed with peeking up at him every five seconds, hoping against hope that he's dropped dead, and I've even thrown a couple of couch-cushions at the window. He merely moves onto window five. Well, this lack-of- communication ridden morning turns into afternoon, and eventually, Davy-lookalike-cat moves on to more engaging targets. And my pulse gets back to normal.

My fear of cats is, err, obviously ridiculous, and I've tried to get over it. Putting on a contrived face of bravery, I've offered to cat-sit for friends. But each time, at the last minute, I chicken out, and get another friend to do the needful. Sheesh, so I'm never going to do that again. I've also stopped telling people I visit that I'm afraid of their cats, because they rarely take it seriously. Who can be afraid of cats is the prevelant thought framework. And they ignore that their cat is trying its best to rub up against every inch of my legs, and that I am exercising immense restraint to not create a scene in public and biting every centimeter of my bottom lip to stop the scream thats dying to get out. To avoid all this misery, I lie and say I am allergic to cats: Oh yes, very allergic, my eyes puff up like balloons if I even smell one! That way, they are more respectful of me and lock their stupid pets up before I visit.

At the end of the day, this never-ending conflict really is a lot of trouble for me. Too complex for my liking. Too many resources expended without corresponding returns. I pretty much am super-pro-animal except when it comes to house-cats. And I know I have to get over this somehow. Maybe, someday, there will be more love.