Theme
3:30pm February 20, 2012
feliscorvus: Nikki (brown and white Siamese cat) sits on top of the kitchen shelf I built last year. Her head is turned to one side and her posture is very dignified. She will be 11 years old in October 2012, and has now lived with me and Matt and the Formerly Feral Trio (of younger cats; they’ll be three this year) for two years, having previously lived with my parents for most of her life (I adopted her when they moved to the Midwest, she is very much a California cat and they didn’t figure she’d like Iowa winters very much).  One interesting thing about Nikki is that she does NOT do that thing where cats will sometimes wind around your legs and brush their  tail against you. She will sometimes RUN at my legs when she’s trying to get me to go in a certain direction, but overall she seems to be a great example of why it does NOT make sense to view “domestic” cats as eternally “neotenized”. She’s not a kitten, and she knows it, and there’s no sense at all in which she treats me like a parent. If anything else she seems to be constantly reminding me that in cat years, SHE’S the senior authority around here. Fey is always reminding me she’s older than me too. In some ways she treats me as if I’m her kitten – and a really thickheaded kitten at that. And Nikki is beautiful in that picture. And I mean her, not just her fur.

feliscorvus:

Nikki (brown and white Siamese cat) sits on top of the kitchen shelf I built last year. Her head is turned to one side and her posture is very dignified. She will be 11 years old in October 2012, and has now lived with me and Matt and the Formerly Feral Trio (of younger cats; they’ll be three this year) for two years, having previously lived with my parents for most of her life (I adopted her when they moved to the Midwest, she is very much a California cat and they didn’t figure she’d like Iowa winters very much). 

One interesting thing about Nikki is that she does NOT do that thing where cats will sometimes wind around your legs and brush their  tail against you. She will sometimes RUN at my legs when she’s trying to get me to go in a certain direction, but overall she seems to be a great example of why it does NOT make sense to view “domestic” cats as eternally “neotenized”. She’s not a kitten, and she knows it, and there’s no sense at all in which she treats me like a parent. If anything else she seems to be constantly reminding me that in cat years, SHE’S the senior authority around here.

Fey is always reminding me she’s older than me too. In some ways she treats me as if I’m her kitten – and a really thickheaded kitten at that.

And Nikki is beautiful in that picture. And I mean her, not just her fur.