Life With Harmony the Cat: The Ten Commandments for Humans

I am Dictator of the House,
and you may speak to me
when I deign to notice you.

My name is Harmony and I am a cat.  Now that we have established that, I’ll get to the point.

There is a two-legged, mostly hairless creature who lives in my house.  I call her Big Human.  It has come to my attention that Big Human has often written about me, including here.  It’s only fair to give me equal time.

Typical Human (Female)

Because I do not have fingers or opposable thumbs, I have persuaded Big Human to type this into the Big Flat Thing That Does Funny Stuff.  I did this by staring at her, meowing forcefully and threatening to bite her ankles.  It works every time.

Here are my Ten Commandments for Humans.

1.                   Thou shalt acknowledge The Cat as master and obey The Cat in all things.  If more than one cat shares the domicile, thou shalt obey the Top Cat first, then all the others.

2.                   Thou shalt acknowledge that The Cat is master of the house and owner of all things therein, including porcelain figurines, Christmas nativity statues, hairpins, rubber bands, pens, pencils, Q-tips, jewelry and anything else that is in or about the house, and that The Cat is free to do anything to these items, up to and including hiding them under the furniture and knocking them off the shelves.

3.                   Thou shalt never do anything to annoy thy master The Cat, including poking him in the buttocks or blowing on his ears when he is sleeping in order to make him twitch.

4.                   Thou shalt not ignore thy master’s head butts, nose nudges and leg rubs when it is time to feed her, lest thou suffer a good swatting.

Humans have been known to
throw these at cats when they
don't have a squirt bottle handy.

5.                   Honor thy master at all times, lest she overturn trash cans or do some other mischief to gain thy attention.

6.                   Thou shalt permit thy master to kill bugs, mice, birds and other small prey, thou must not become wrathful when thy master presents thee with dead or half-dead kill, and thou must acknowledge the fine hunting lesson that thy master has just given thee.

7.                   Thou shalt present thy master with choice food of a savory character, served at the right times, with no exceptions.

8.                   Thou shalt provide thy master with attractive scratching posts or pads, or allow thy master to sharpen his claws on the recliner, the sofa or the table legs.

9.                   Thou shalt spay or neuter thy master lest thou be forced to suffer thy master to take part in loud, yowling orgies by the back fence, along with the neighborhood alley cats.

10.               Thou shalt not force thy master to abandon any chair or bed, or any spot where he is taking comfort, lest thy master turn his back on thee and give thee a cold shoulder.

If all humans who live with cats obey the above commandments, you will make us very happy.  A happy cat means a happy household.

Any questions?

Reading for Writers

Cute Cat Picture.  Cats can't read.

There are two things that budding writers hear all the time: (1) Write what you know;* and (2) You have to do a lot of reading.  To most of us, reading is enjoyable.  There are, however, ways to make reading even more fun than it already is.  Here are some suggestions.

1.    Start a drinking game:  one swallow of beer for every cliché you come across.  It is considered cheating if you are unsure if a phrase or sentence is a cliché or not and you take a swallow, anyway, without looking it up.  You have to raise your glass or the bottle/can of beer and shout, “Shame!” before you take a sip.

 
2.       Make a list of every cliché that causes you to take a sip of beer.  When your list is long enough, write a short story or a novella, incorporating every one of those clichés.  See if you can get it published – under a pseudonym, of course.  You don’t want to be blamed for that one.
 
3.       Put 50 cents into a jar every time you read the latest bestselling novel before you start reading the work of your unknown author friends.  When the jar is full, use the funds to throw a party.
 
4.       Get up and do a victory dance whenever you come across something that you KNOW you could have written better.
 
5.       Count the number of old “New Yorker” magazines on your bookshelves in which you have been reading nothing but “Shouts and Murmurs,” and the cartoons, with the intention of reading the Fiction sections someday.
 
6.       Challenge yourself to read a book that has been turned into a popular movie without automatically picturing the stars of the movie in their respective parts. 
 
7.       Read a book that has been turned into a movie that you have seen, and eat a cookie every time you want to say, “The movie was better” or “That wasn’t in the movie.”
 
8.       Go around talking like one of the characters in a book you are reading and watch the looks that people give you.  Give yourself extra points if people step away from you.
 

9.       Go through all the books in your house.  Classify them into (A) Real Literature - Boring, (B) Real Literature – Fun, (C) Trashy Airplane Reading, and (D) Toss.  Donate the “Toss” books to your local thrift shop or church flea market.  Marvel at how neat your bookcases look and how much space you now have on them.  Buy new books to fill up the space (and maybe some nice knickknacks or real-looking silk plants, or whatever).
 
10.   Make up new lyrics to a familiar song using nothing but the names of famous authors.  Example:  To the tune of “I’m a Little Teapot,” sing “Stephen King Jane Austen Danielle Steele, Shakespeare Dan Brown George Eliot ….”
 
11.   Reward yourself with chocolate every time you are able to sit in a recliner chair and read anything without falling asleep.

If anyone has any other suggestions, please feel free to post them in the Comments section below.

 

Writer Reading

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*This is either good advice or a crock of shit, depending on the situation.

For more of my humor, go to Humor Outcasts.

Writing a Perfect Funny Piece if You Are a Slow Writer with ADD

Writers are ALWAYS publishing essays, and even books, about how to write.  I’m not going to do that – well, at least not this time.  I don’t know what I might do tomorrow, let alone a year or two from now.

Instead, I would like to share with you my own personal habits when writing a short piece, such as a humor essay or a short-short story.  I am not about to advise anyone else to do things this way.  You see, I am not what you would call a naturally prolific writer.  I write the same way I read – slowly.  And oh yes, I have a mild case of Attention Deficit Disorder, in addition to genetically inherited long-term low-grade Depression.  These things make trying to do anything complicated even more complicated, if you know what I mean.  So please don’t use me as a literary role model.

This is what usually happens with me when I’m trying to write a short piece, in more or less this order.  By the way, I love to exaggerate when I write humor.  Just saying.

My Ideal Reader

Get a good idea

Decide the idea is stupid.  Try to think of another idea.

Go out for a walk and pay attention to everything around you, hoping something interesting will happen and that it will be something you can write about.

Surf the Internet for ideas.

Give up for now, sit down, put your feet up on an ottoman and close your eyes.

A brilliant idea pops into your head.

Spend the next hour thinking of ways to make that idea really funny, while watching TV at the same time.

The next day, think about it again several times and come up with more funny stuff.

Sit down at the computer.  Start to write.  After a few paragraphs, stop and think up a title.  Try a few titles.  Find one that would attract YOU if you were a reader.  Use it.

Write some more.

Read what you have written.  Yuck!  It’s awful.  So is the title, which you immediately scrap, even though you have saved the piece on your computer under that title.

Do some severe cutting, pasting, adding and editing.  Take a couple of hours to do this, even though the piece is only supposed to be about 500 words long.  Make up a new, much funnier title.

Get tired of doing this.  Save your work and set it aside.

The next day, read it again.  It’s better than it was, but still not the Thurber Prize material you hoped for.

Do some more cutting, pasting, adding and editing.

Read it again.  Decide that’s as good as it’s going to get.

Look in the ever growing stash of stock photos on your portable hard drive.  Choose one that more or less illustrates the masterpiece you have just written, or that at least would be a funny addition.

Post your masterpiece, with the illustration, online.  Post links on Facebook, Twitter and every other place you can think of, and hope you get some readers.  If anyone likes your work, feel flattered.  If it doesn’t get much attention, threaten your computer with a fist, mutter a few words your mother never taught you and eat two double-chocolate muffins.

Awful Lessons Taught by Familiar Stories

There are fairy tales, folk tales, books and movies that have become so familiar to us that they are programmed into our nerve endings.  In most cases, we are taught to see positive messages in these stories.  On the other hand, there are multi-layers in these familiar tales, and if we look deeper into them we find some lessons that are best left untaught.  Here is a partial list of these sneaky subliminal messages.

Batman:  You can always recognize an evil person because they are the weirdest looking bunch of psychopaths on the planet.

Beauty and the Beast:  Bestiality will be rewarded.

Cinderella:  Your most important measurement is your shoe size.

Goldilocks and the Three Bears:  If you are a cute little blonde kid, it is okay to wander into a house when the occupants are out, eat their food, mess up their furniture and sleep in their beds, then, when they come home and find you, run away without even offering to clean up after yourself.

Hansel and Gretel (a):  If you get lost in a forest, you won’t freeze or starve or be attacked by a wild animal.  You just have to stay away from evil, cannibal witches.

Hansel and Gretel (b):  If you don’t have any food in the house and your kids are pestering you because they’re hungry, it’s okay to send them out into the woods to pick berries, even if an evil, cannibal witch lives nearby.

... like this one

Jack and the Beanstalk:  Breaking, entering and burglarizing is perfectly okay, as long as the victim is a giant.

Old Yeller:  It’s alright to cry buckets of tears when Old Yeller gets rabies and the kid has to shoot him.  (Yes, this is a GOOD lesson.  I just want to see if you are paying attention.)

Rumpelstiltskin:  It’s okay to get someone to do all your work for you, then stiff him on his wages.

Shrek:  It’s a lot of fun to pick up random animals in the woods and fields and blow them up into helium balloons.

Sleeping Beauty:  It is perfectly alright to sleep for 36,500 days, and no, you won’t die of hunger and thirst in the process.

Snow White:  Necrophilia will be rewarded.

Star Wars (a):  Never try to kill a wicked monster who destroys whole planets because he might turn out to be your long lost father.

Star Wars (b):  A brave, intelligent, resourceful, valiant young woman like Princess Leia is appreciated, but she will never be invited to train as a Jedi because … well … she’s a woman.  She also needs a new hairdresser.

Superman:  Forget what you hear about journalists who go after stories with all the energy they have.  Big metropolitan newspapers hire mild mannered reporters.

The Lord of the Rings:  If you think you are being spied on by a huge, fiery eye, you are.

The Terminator:  A machine that used to be a murdering monster will make a great substitute father if you reprogram his brain.

The Wizard of Oz (a):  You can kill evil, green-skinned people by forcing them to bathe.

The Wizard of Oz (b):  It is worth it to risk your life for a great pair of shoes.

La Voce Italiana According to Me

I am a female singer.  I am not a man and not a tenor.  I still sing Neapolitan songs.  Contrary to popular belief, being a tenor is not a requirement for singing Neapolitan songs.  Being able to sing is a requirement, preferably with a voice that is not painful to listeners.

There are Italians who can’t sing, but there are so many who can sing that most of the world thinks all Italians can sing.  We prefer to leave non-Italians to their illusions in this matter because this particular stereotype can be good promotional material for those of us who sing professionally or own restaurants.  There are many Italians who have done other things with their lives that have nothing to do with singing.  We are grateful to Guglielmo Marconi for inventing the radio, to Antonio Meucci for inventing a telephone about 5 years before Alexander Graham Bell got to it and to Leonardo da Vinci for inventing a bunch of things that don’t work but show what a genius he was.  I won’t mention Napoleon Bonaparte.  He started out Italian, but ended up French, which is okay with the Italians because they don’t want him, anyway.

Nobody cares if HE can sing or not.

Where was I?  Oh, yes.

I have a pretty large repertoire of Neapolitan songs and, like most singers, I love to show off.  Most of the time I do this in socially acceptable ways, such as in front of an audience that is expecting it.  On the other hand -- consider this a warning to anyone contemplating knowing me -- I might burst out into O Sole Mio or Torna a Surriento at any of the following times:

1.                   While waiting to be seated in an Italian restaurant.  I did this once.  Really.  Nobody asked me to sing.  It was not that kind of restaurant.  The people I was with wanted to kill me first, then hide.  I was singing well, too.  Some people just don’t appreciate my efforts to bring joy to their lives.

2.                   In my apartment.  This is safe, as long as I don’t have angry neighbors descending on me with torches and pitchforks.

3.                   On the street.  See No. 1, above.  If I am with people at the time, they will probably speed up and pretend they don’t know me.  In that case, I can stand there, sing and let people give me money.  I haven’t tried this yet, but there is a first time for everything.

Neapolitan songs are fun to sing.  They are Neapolitan because (1) they were composed by Neapolitans and (2) they are in Neapolitan dialect.  For those of us who studied standard Italian, this is a challenge.  Neapolitan dialect is to Italian what Jamaican Patois is to English.  If you have ever heard Jamaican Patois, you know what I mean.  Only a real Neapolitan can sing that dialect right.  The rest of us can only do the best we can with it.  We don’t care.  We sing it anyway because, as I said, those songs are great fun, even if you are embarrassing your companions in public.

I am not the first woman to sing Neapolitan songs, and I won’t be the last.  There’s no reason why male singers should have the best songs, just because most of them were written by men from a man’s viewpoint.  If anyone is looking for reality, I can’t help them, but if they are looking for someone who can sing the pants off Core N’Grato, complete with high notes and molto emozione, I’ll do it, even if there are two or three tenors present, hyperventilating because they think I have no business singing a first-person song about a man who loves a woman who can’t stand him and that one of THEM should be singing it because they are men.  To this I say, “Deal with it.”  If you want reality, watch the Kardashians on TV.

In the meantime, maybe I’ll travel to the nearest Little Italy and look for a restaurant.

Tenor Getting Attention

Pampering Myself Silly

The Front Part of My Left Foot,
With  Blue Polish

I would enjoy pedicures if it were not for one thing:  my feet are ticklish.  I mean paralyze-the-nervous-system ticklish.  Yes, they are that bad.

So why do I get pedicures, you ask?  I have two reasons:

1.    When my feet are smooth I am less likely to end up with holes in the expensive support stockings that I have to wear because the veins in my legs don’t work properly.  I more than make up what I spend on pedicures by not having to buy so many pairs of those damned things.

2.     Plain old ordinary vanity.  This is not logical because I almost never wear sandals, even in summer.  The only beings who see my feet all the time are me and my cat, Harmony.  Harmony doesn’t care if I have neon colored polish on my toenails and smooth heels.  She’s more interested in staring out the back window at the local urban life forms, both animal and human.

Cat in the Act of Not Caring About
My Feet

Pedicures are great at first.  I immerse my feet in a luxurious whirlpool bath with blue stuff in it and it feels really good.  If I could just stick my toes in the spot where the whirly water comes in and leave them there indefinitely I could be happy for the rest of my life.  Then the pedicurist makes me take one foot out of the safe comfort of the water and prop it up in front of her.  It’s all downhill from there on.

No matter what she does to my feet – clipping my toenails, massaging my arches, scraping my heels, buffing the nails – it tickles.  Sometimes it tickles just a little, sometimes it tickles a lot.  What should be a luxury spa experience becomes an involuntary jerky, giggly sitting dance.

It occurs to me that tickles are like pain.  If something hurts and you focus your mind on how much it hurts you are going to make the pain worse.  If you don’t think about it so hard, it doesn’t hurt as much.  I figure that if I apply this principle to my ticklish feet, they won’t tickle so much.  This works fairly well until the pedicurist touches one of my feet in the wrong way, and the spasms and giggles are suddenly back, worse than before.

All things must come to an end, however.  When this whole procedure is finally over, my heels are smooth again, my feet are clean and doused with sweet smelling lotion, my toenails are shouting with color and I am happy in the knowledge that my support hosiery bill will be smaller again.

Thoughts of the Day

1.  It is better to turn on one air-conditioner than to curse the heat, especially when the heat index is up around 100 degrees Fahrenheit.

2.  If everyone but turns on one air-conditioner, the whole world will be cool … until the circuits are overloaded, causing a huge blackout.  In that case, everyone is cooked.

3.  When that happens, everyone should put on bathing suits, go out into the yard and squirt each other with a garden hose.  This is a perfect excuse to revert to childhood, which we all secretly want to do, anyway.