They Scratched Me: A Writer’s Long Strained Relationship With Cats.

An acquaintance of mine sent me this through WhatsApp:

I don’t know what she had in mind when she sent that—probably nothing, probably grilled cheese sandwiches. But I hadda respond (always the last word, guy, like any doofus). I sent this to match the above:

Yet, it sent me on a trip about my relationship with cats, so in my What’s App Status today, I posted the following:

The difference between dog and cat relationship with human:

- Dog lovers have harmonious, symbiotic, and even almost blood-like relationship, immersed in loyalty, and devotion to each other.

- Cat lovers has one way street to deal with a sour-faced furball who don't give a rat's ass until you feed 'em, and still are in the "royalty" "godly" realm of the ancient Egyptian empire, even if Islam has long came over ankicked [sic] Athe pussies off the pedestal. Sonovaguns still thinks they are kings, queens and gods. Yet, we still want to be nice to them, and please them despite the centuries old toxicity they have been emitting in the name of relationship.

But before I go further into that, in a way, I need to let you know that I owe cats my career. Here’s why.

I was working in Singapore for the last three years at HSBC, doing boring admin jobs, when too much reading and dreaming made me wanna become a writer. But I felt I should come back to Malaysia and be a writer—you know, like how the teen Clark Kent went to the Fortress of Sollitute and returned to Metropolis as Full-Fledged Superman, complete with red boots and underwear outside the body suit?

I was like that. I went to Singapore and came back to Malaysia with a scriptwriting certificate in hand and red underwear. Inside. I think my memory’s a bit hazy.

Being a writer was a career switch move, having worked at HSBC Singapore in the late 90s and then coming to Malaysia to become a scribe. Coming back here, I sent a small piece of article to the New Straits Times on Cat, and they actually published it. I reproduced it here back then (2002).

I clipped the article, made copies of it, and used it for my job applications and interviews, and I actually managed to score my first writing position. I continued to use them in my other job interviews to show my... writing prowess. So, in a way, I owe those felines my career.

My relationship with them has always been outdoors. From the time I was a kid, I was told not to spend too much time with them because of my asthma (mine was pretty bad when I was a kid), and those suffering from it are allergic to cats, which later I found is attributable to felines’s dead skin cells.

So, I never kept them. But I would pick them up wherever I see them and scratch them, or sometimes, as mentioned in that article, they scratch me back with claws, Wolverine-like, and take a flight without wings.

If not for the scratching contest, I would actually talk to them, mostly in Malayalam. Strangely, I was convinced that they too share the same mother tongue as mine. Also, the “meow” sounds like Malayalam-ish, with that soft nasal undertone, because those who speak proper Malayalam always sound like they have implanted cotton balls in their mouths.

But cats are the ones with the most the most attitude issues when it comes to pet-type animals. I agree to that. All dogs go to heaven. But cats will give hell to even Satan, so the red dude will send the furballs to God, and God will send them back to earth another eight times. Maximum. See?

I got to trying to figure out actually why I like cats despite them treating me like a leper or a politician. Is it because they are cute? So are dogs. Is it because they are expert predators? Their bigger cousins, well, you know...

I suppose one of the reasons why I am always drawn to cats, apart from the aloofness and loving being alone, among others, is that both cats and I have big attitude problems. I suppose it takes one to appreciate the other.