Cats, unlike dogs, can produce a wide variety of sounds comparable to the numerous sounds used in human speech. In fact, cats can produce more sounds than particular languages have in total. It’s fascinating (and science fiction) to think that perhaps cats have their own language. Maybe I’ve been watching too much SeaQuest DSV where they’ve created a program to translate dolphin’s sounds, but every once in a while I wonder what it would be like to have a translator program for Kitty. In fact, sometimes I would go to great lengths to understand the furball.

Take this morning, for example. It’s four thirty in the morning. Why am I awake? Well, normally it would be because simply hadn’t gone to bed yet. However, today I went to bed around one and should (potentially, barring the usual insomnia) still be dreaming about some random boat race where the boat is racing merpeople, not other boats. Oh no. I’m not asleep anymore because our quite vocal four-legged companion decided she needed to stand on my pillow directly over my head and purr as loudly as Kittily possible. Now, Kitty can stomp on me, she can take up all the room at my feet, she can lie on my chest, but one thing I can’t stand for her to do while I’m in bed is be on my pillow. I eat/inhale far too much cat fur during the course of the day, and I don’t need more of it creeping into my eyes/ears/nose/mouth/hair while I’m sleeping. So when I find her on my pillow, she gets thrown to the floor or at least to the foot of the bed.

First attempt to throw the cat: I grab her, tell her to stay the fuck off my pillows, and I drop her at my feet then push her off onto the floor. She jumps back up and walks up the body pillow I keep along the wall (mostly to keep from touching the cold wall while I sleep but also to keep from banging my knees into the window sill’s corner) up to my pillow where she sits down on my hair, still purring. Second attempt: Ian (who gets woken up about 75% of the time I have problems with the cat waking me up) grabs her and tosses her on the floor. She jumps back up on his head and steps over onto my pillow. Now not only are we both very awake but Ian’s pissed off because she literally jumped on his face instead of off to one side. The cat? Purring away like nothing has happened. I lean over to glare at her and ask her what her problem is when she head butts me in my open mouth. Spitting out fur, I decide to just get up and go to the bathroom since clearly I’m already up anyway. Kitty follows me, keeping her away from the annoyed husband. I know she doesn’t need food because I fed her last night. She’s fine on water, and barring sickness, there’s no reason for her to get us up so rudely. While I’m in the bathroom, she goes to her food dish. The light was still on in the dining room for some reason, so I flcked it off, grabbed a soda and sat down at the computer. About five minutes into the post, she hops up on the couch nearly knocking my mouse to the floor on her way to the back. She is now quietly stretched out looking over the street, not paying me the slightest bit of attention. Looking out the window, I see a full, yellow moon and nothing else worth waking two people up for in the middle of the night.

What I wouldn’t give to be able to understand whatever the hell’s going on in her peanut-sized brain for just one day. Of course, half of it would be “Let me outside” but there might be some more useful things like “Hey, I think I’m gonna puke on the living room carpet right in front of you then rush into the bedroom to puke again; just a heads up.” Some days I think she’s just completely mental, and with nights like this, I think I’m justified in pondering her sanity. Then I remember: she’s a cat. On the domestication scale, she’s still practically half wild, which mean, in my opinion, half bonkers and damn-near completely illogical. She’s a cat. She’s hard-wired, it would seem, to elude understanding and logic. It would be fascinating to crack the code, to peel back the layers of mystery, but then I guess she would no longer be a cat since cats are inherently mysterious, which is part of their allure. Fascinating as that may be, it’s still frustrating as heck in the middle of the night when all I want is nothing more than than what she does 75% of the day: SLEEP! Crazy cat. You’d think she’d understand the desire for sleep at the very least. I consider snoring to be a sort of language universal.