I am a deeply sensory person who cares about love and ethics. Hufflepuff to the core. The redwoods were my first home and my heart will live there forever. I live in the sensory world, I am only a visitor to ideas and words. Oh, and my alignment? Chaotic-good.
kk-gunner asked: Is Fey named after or symbolic someone or something? I'm guessing that Fey means magical and that suits your cat.
Basically yeah – the connotation of magical, uncannily perceptive, fairy-like, etc. It’s always suited her, she’s always been very intense from the moment we met. It also rhymes with her color (grey).
I’m trying to teach Lovette to put things in my hand if he wants me to throw them
So far he’s tried batting at my hand, then batting at the hair band he wants me to throw, and now he just clasps my hand between his paws
Eeeeeee!
Fey does a thing when she wants me to move things, rather than throw them.
For instance, she likes lying on this backpack my dad made, that I got sent after he died. It mostly lives on my bed. So does a whole lot of yarn. Sometimes the yarn ends up on top of the backpack.
So the other day, there was yarn on the backpack. She stood on the backpack and sniffed each piece of yarn. But it was not ordinary sniffing. It was not to gain information about the yarn. It had a quality to it almost like nudging, except she wasn’t nudging it – it was a movement that was implied rather than actual.
I’d seen her do this before, so I knew what it meant. I moved the ball of yarn out of her way.
She sniffed the next ball of yarn in the same manner. I moved it.
This continued until she had the entire backpack uncovered, at which point she turned around in place a few times and then curled up in a contented ball and went to sleep. But she totally was telling me “Move this, it’s not supposed to be here.”
When she wants me to throw things or play with them (she doesn’t differentiate), she will generally touch the thing with her paw, and then touch me with her paw, both in a playful manner, although sometimes when she touches me there’s a bit of a threat involved, like “Use this to help me play Or Else I will probably bite you.” But then that’s what her personality is like sometimes.
I’m not sure how I would go about teaching her to bring me things if she wanted me to throw them. I’m not sure I could, honestly. Generally, when either of us learns something like that, it’s pretty spontaneous. I’d have no idea how to make that happen on purpose.
I do find it interesting that she has so many different ways of smelling/nosing things, all of which mean something totally different.
Hufflepuffs with animal allergies are quite likely to have a “pet” plant.
This Hufflepuff with a severe cat allergy (as determined any time in my life I’ve ever been tested, as well as by the amount of Benadryl I go through)… still has a cat. And I suspect that may actually be a weirdly Hufflepuff thing as well.
Although I found out that actually unless your allergy is so severe as to be life-threatening, it can be more beneficial to keep the cat around and treat the aI still couldn’t breathe through my nose for the first several months of living around dogs. And I lived around cats all my life, but not indoor cats until I grew up. We found out I was allergic because when we brought the cats indoors, I’d fall asleep, so my mom had me tested. I was furious at the doctor because I loved cats so much and because I was a kid and didn’t know that the doctor not telling me wouldn’t have made it go away.
I had actual reason to be furious at an allergist as an adult who pretty much refused to treat me unless I “got rid of” my pets – and it turned out that the symptoms I had gone to see him for, weren’t even the result of allergies to begin with, but of a really bad lung infection that was mistaken for an asthma exacerbation that was being blamed on my allergies because what else was there to blame? But at any rate, I did some research and the allergist’s recommendation to “get rid of” the cat apparently is not even considered best practice for people with allergies, even severe allergies, as long as they’re not life-threateningly severe allergies.
Which mine aren’t and never have been – both skin and blood tests have consistently shown an allergic response to cat saliva that’s technically well into the severe range, but my actual physiological response to that isn’t to keel over and die or stop breathing, so I’m not in the category of people where “getting rid of” a cat would even make sense. My allergies have actually been improved somewhat by living with a cat, which is one reason it’s not considered good to just avoid the animal you’re allergic to (unless it’s some kind of obscure animal you’re never going to see) – it just means your response will be more severe when you do come into contact with that animal.
So that (and the fact that I love Fey and would probably not mind living with her even if it somehow did shorten my lifespan somewhat, which there’s no evidence that it does at all even a little, mind you) is why I’m a Hufflepuff with a severe cat allergy who lives with a cat. And even sits here typing this with this 16-year-old cat sitting on my chest with her fur right in my face, blocking the fan, on a hot day. She’s lived with me ever since I moved out on my own for the first time, and she’s going to go on living with me until one or both of us dies. She’s one of the closest friends I have in the entire world, and she knows things about me that nobody else knows. I sometimes have a sneaking suspicion, however, that she thinks of me as sort of like a big, none-too-bright kitten who’s never had the decency to move out in her old age, and doesn’t know enough to come in out of the rain and therefore has to be looked after all the time. People always act like the cat is the “baby” in the relationship but I’m pretty sure the reverse is how Fey actually sees it (and I’m not arguing too hard, I call her Grandma Fey a lot of the time).
But I love the idea of pet plants. Although I have plant allergies too, so that’s not necessarily going to work out any better. I guess it depends on the plant – or the animal – and the person.
“A devout cat lives at a fourteen hundred year old museum Hagia Sophia in Turkey, guarding and preserving its religious and cultural history every single day. His name is Gli.
He is a loyal feline that resides in the 1,475 year old museum. He is slightly cross eyed but a whole lot of cute.”
Was trying to get more hair pictures now that my hair is fully dried (and super shiny), but Fey had other ideas, still does (she’s blocking my view of the screen even now).
Argh, I tried to tag this #elderly cats and somehow got #elderly citizens. It seems like tumblr is autocorrecting a lot of my tags in messed up ways lately.
Or rather, Fey is somewhat of an unusual cat, but when people say she’s unusual, that’s not what they’re talking about. They usually comment on how much she communicates with me, and say they wish they had “a cat like Fey”, and then describe their own cats in terms that make it very clear that the issue isn’t the type of cat, but the type of relationship they have with their cat.
[Image description: Fey in bed with me and a lot of yarn while I hold a crochet project in one hand and she touches her paw to my other hand while we look at each other.]
Which is not necessarily their fault, but which is a completely different situation from Fey just being an unusual cat.
If Fey lived with them, they would rapidly discover that they didn’t have “a cat like Fey” either. They would probably decide she was mean and standoffish and uncommunicative. Because it’s not her, it’s them.
I can’t explain to anyone how to have a deep relationship with a cat or any other being.(1)
But I can say that if you take any cat, and try really hard to listen to them and understand them and engage with them on the same level of emotional complexity that you would engage with a human being on, then you’re likely to get better results, and a better relationship with your cat, than if you treat them as food-devouring mousing machines who only like you because you feed them and are probably just faking affection to manipulate you. Or even just if you treat them better than that, but not really taking them all that seriously.
Taking a cat seriously is the first step to having the kind of relationship I have with Fey. And I can tell you right now that it’s not Fey that’s unusual about our relationship. It’s our relationship that’s unusual. Put Fey in a context where she isn’t being respected or understood or seen as emotionally complex and a real actual being with thoughts and feelings about the world, and she’ll look like “just any other cat” to you, and possibly like a particularly mean cat at that.
Which is why it’s sad but almost funny to me when people tell me “I wish I had a cat like Fey, my cat is so mean.” And then describe a situation where Fey would be twenty times as mean if she had to live in it, than their cat is being (when their cat is being mean at all, which isn’t always).
Mind you, I’m not a cat whisperer. People try and call me that but I find that pretty offensive (to cats). I do not understand all of what Fey tells me. I don’t even understand a quarter of what Fey tells me. Fey and I fight on a regular basis, we misunderstand each other constantly, and we get frustrated about our inability to get basic information across to each other in both directions, and sometimes that ends up as frustration with each other.
But seriously?
If you start with respecting the intellectual and emotional complexity of your cat, and the fact that your cat is your equal in terms of worth and value (equal doesn’t mean alike, so nobody blast me for using that word, I find that really irritating and I’m especially irritable at the moment because I’m sick).
And if you make a serious long-term good-faith effort to understand and communicate with your cat as who the cat is, not as who you want or imagine the cat to be.(2) (This may take a lot of time if you’ve been projecting your own fantasies over the top of your cat, because your cat has doubtless noticed and responded to you in kind, and it will possibly take a long while to build trust.)
Then you have a good chance of, if not “having a cat like Fey”, having an amazing, fulfilling, complex, and demanding relationship with your cat, in ways you didn’t dream were possible. Which is what people seem to mean when they say they “want a cat like Fey”.
[Important but somewhat lengthy footnotes below cut.]
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6:05am
August 4, 2015
kk-gunner asked: Is Fey named after or symbolic someone or something? I'm guessing that Fey means magical and that suits your cat.
![4gifs:
Kitten tries to copy mom. [video]](http://38.media.tumblr.com/3455f18ad1e0d8dd4509dcc00e830575/tumblr_nqjfdzPUB51tlb56zo1_400.gif)