Oh man, do I have a funny column to write for you today. It’s SUCH a funny column. If a person could write a funny column for you, then this funny column is what that funny column would be.
Just so funny. It will have you cracking up. It will have you like holding your sides. It will have you rolling in the aisles with laughter. It will have you writing ‘ha ha ha’ on Facebook. It will be the doyenne of funny columns, the Sine Qua Non Plus Ultra of funny columns. WOW! What a funny column it will be!
That truly would have been a wildly hilarious column. UF, I have just realized that BEFORE I write you that extremely, intensely funny column about my cats, first I have to give you a little background about said Katzen.
Results of mitochondrial analysis indicates that all the Felisae descended from a common ancestor that was present in Asia during the Oligarcene era (1895-1907). Cats are divided into two families. The Panzera include panzers, and the Felixans include felixes. Every other type of cat is just a cat, or Cattus as we who know Latin would say.
Die Katzen were landed on me by Cathy the Crazy Katt lady, who sent me a despairing message asking if I could take two recent mummy cats, because nobody else would. Thinking she meant Egyptian-type mummy cats that I could auction on Ebay for a substantial profit, I agreed, and got two poor little living cats landed on me. They had ridiculous names when I got them (for cats), something like Paige and Megan. I wouldn’t have minded nice Trad names like Margaret and Catherine, but Paige and Megan? Cathy the Crazy Katt lady is usually sheltering at least 15 cats so I guess all the good names (for cats) have been taken. My oversensitive easily-upset dancer friend Megan immediately demanded I change the name of the cat saying that I had given it her name intentionally to insult her. When I told her it had come with that name she snorted in derision and said “Who would name a cat Megan?” which is unanswerable without knowing Cathy. This made me determined to keep the name, but after about a month when they had sopped fleeing at my approach, the cats’ natural personalities began to emerge, and I used the good old Tibetan habit of descriptive names. Now in most Buddhist cultures, the boys are called things like Vigour, Courage, Lion, names like that, and the girls are mostly named after flowers. All same same as here. But Tibetans are rather earthy, and also mostly don’t really have surnames, so the kids end up called things like Fat Bottom, Big Nose, Born on Wednesday, things like that. If they are called like Patience, Compassion and that, this means a lama has been through the area. I have a friend whose sister was only called Girl until she was 15. You see they were nomadic herders who lived in such a remote area that they didn’t know that vegetables were human food. Not unlike the majority of Australians really.
There weren’t any other girls within half a day’s ride, so she ended up being called Girl, and not minding in the least. When she was 15, the family figured they had better ride a few days to see a lama to get her properly religioned up in case a yak ran over her or something, or she wound up choosing a husband. Buddhist cultures are rather casual about names and people tend to change them when they get a run of bad luck. It’s in the West that a sword is called something like Hamstringer or Gutbuster, Westerners are very romantic. In the East they just call it ‘my sword’. A car isn’t ‘Fifi’. It is ‘my car’. There are too many names to remember already without making up more.
Parents in traditional agricultural and farming cultures love their kids but tend to be a bit casual about things. That’s why a lot of Africans who migrate here, their passports say they were born on 1-1-1960. You see when the family tries to figure out when the kid was born, the mother says it was the year the weird American came in the new truck to collect rocks, the grandmother says no, it was the year the big tree blew down, the grandfather says you are both wrong, it was the year he saved up and bought a new spade. As to the season, well who can remember such things amid the excitement and danger of giving birth? The father remembers that it was raining and the son thinks it was dry. If a culture knows dates and times, what it means is that it is into astrology. Traditional Christian and Islamic African cultures tend to regard astrology as the work of the devil.
Anyway, as the cats’ personalities emerged, they ended up being called Pudding and Hassle. Serves them right, too.
