It’s 9:49 p.m. on Thursday March 8th, and I’ve been unwinding for a little while after a long day working on genxchronicle.com. I spent the past few hours trying to figure out how to get all my blog posts up on Instagram.
It’s crazy, because they make it so hard to get your photos on Instagram from the computer. It’s like they only want you to do it from the phone. I asked a friend who’s a millennial, and she had no idea, and I asked my 14 year old niece, and she had no idea either. So at first I was feeling like an idiot, but then I realized that a lot of people don’t know how to do it either.
I try to unwind and chill out by watching Logan on HBO via Amazon Prime. I love the X-Men series, and this one is pretty good so far. I’m only 18 minutes in, but it’s very violent and bloody, and it’s also tense. It seems like another one of those “disheveled burned-out American dude goes down to Mexico to engage in debauchery, drinking, and descent into misery” kind of movies. So I like it a little bit, but it’s kind of stressful, and I can’t say I love it.
I go into the bedroom to see what Copper is up to. I figure maybe I’ll pet her and de-stress a little bit. She’s lying in the cat bed, and the light is out in the room. I turn the light on, and she’s heavy-lidded like she’s been sleeping. She looks absolutely precious, like she always does, because she’s the most beautiful cat I’ve ever seen.
I walk over to her slowly, and try to pet her, but she gets out of the cat bed. She doesn’t usually like to be pet very much while she’s in the cat bed. So I start petting her while she’s standing, and I stand over her and pet her for about a minute. And I’m starting to de-stress, slowly.
Then I invite her into the living room, by saying come with me Copper, come to the living room, Copper let’s hang out in the living room. I walk slowly into the living room, and she follows me, and then I start to pet her in the living room, near the entryway. I pet her again for about 30 seconds.
The crazy thing is, and I’ve thought about this a lot, she always needs an invitation to join me in the living room. It’s like she won’t come out into the living room and hang out with me in the afternoon or the evening unless I go into the bedroom and invite her in. So I say come with me Copper, follow me Copper, come with me Copper.
Sometimes when I sleep in the bedroom, she’ll hang out in the living room on the love seat and sleep in there. When I wake up in the morning and go into the living room, she’s sleeping on the loveseat, but as soon as I come into the living room she usually gets off the love seat.
It’s like she doesn’t feel worthy enough to hang out with me in the living room. It’s a vestige of her life living in a cage for three years in an animal shelter. That’s combined with all the fear and sadness she probably experienced during those years. So she’s shy, that’s just a fact.
But she’s warming up more and more, which is great. We now have extensive petting sessions, and she’ll eat in front of me now, and roll around on the floor and just be free and happy. She’ll climb the cat tree to the third level, and she’ll come on the bed with me sometimes. She’s really made so much progress.
Another interesting thing I’ve noticed is that sometimes when I pet her, I exhale deeply, because it relaxes me so much. Whenever I exhale deeply and loudly, she gets scared, and walks or runs away.
I have a theory about this, I really do. I think that someone at the shelter where she lived for three years must have exhaled deeply when they were around her, and maybe she didn’t like them, or maybe they did something bad to her. Who knows?
But she associates a human deeply and loudly exhaling with something negative, and something scary, and she wants to get away from it. So something must have happened while she was in that lonely place, that shelter, living in a cage for three years. No one should have to live in a cage for three years. It’s just not right.
So that’s the latest. We’ll see what happens next.
