i  think that my cat is strange.
or rather i think what he things of me is strange.
or both.
let's start with the simple one. i think he's strange because for the past 5 days or so he has spend hugely inordinate amounts of time staring at the corner of my couch.  the corner where the couch meets the floor against the wall.  just sits, quietly, staring. for half hours at a time without moving.  and he does it a lot.  i don't know why. when i get up out of bed in the morning, rousting him from sleeping on me, he goes there and stares some more.  it is almost like, at one point in his life, say five minutes before he saw a mouse disappear into this corner.  only he has been doing it for a week. 
   he doesn't meow, or make any noise. he just watches. it is actually kind of the same thing that he does when he bats one of his fake mice under the couch.  only he forgets about those in an hour or so.  and i checked.  i moved the couch and the stuff at the end, there's nothing at all there.  so he's just a freak.  a curious little freak.  and now i'm curious. what the hell could be under there.  and what the hell happened a week ago that makes him think there's something there.  there he goes again. he was just playing here with me for a while but he just went over to check out the corner of the couch again.

strange.

ok.  now from his perspective.  i think he thinks that i have a strange and dangerous addiction to water.  i think he sees running water of any sort as a some sort of heroin-like drug, the using of which will someday kill me.  it started with his meowing, wailing really, when i take a shower.  when i take a shower the first thing that he does is meow.  depending upon what he takes my mood to be, i guess he may do it in different places in different ways. 
   Sometimes it is just my going into the bathroom that will start almost amiable meowing that will escalate as i step into the tub and turn on the water.  he will stand outside the shower and meow at me. getting louder as time goes by.  it seems to help a little if i talk to him as i shower but it almost always gets louder to the point of annoyance.  if he gets too loud and has made the mistake of staying just outside of the shower i will fill my mouth with water, stick my head out and drench him.  he doesn't like that much but it doesn't make him give up. it makes him run away.  so then he wanders through the apt whining, wailing, for a moment until he comes back to stick just his nose inside the bathroom door and wail some more.
   at other times he will sense some other difference in my mood, or perhaps in his own and he will sit upon the toilet tank (mercilessly pushing the things that normally it there aside, Shar, i am afraid that Shell Game has been damaged, i am pretty sure he did it out of jealousy and spite. after all while there are no pictures of him up in my apt, there are 3 of you.  the one of you that he can reach, it seems like he is trying to trick it off of the wall to shatter.) and meow at me from there.  the meowing will not reach irritation levels however i must admit that my irritation levels have grown quite a bit from what they were before i owned this somewhat insistently loud cat. so we will talk back and forth, myself merrily enough and he like at any second i am going to die and he does not like it.  the one truly piteous thing is the look he has on his face when i poke me head though the shower curtain and he gives me a loooooong plaintive cry.  sometimes he misjudges my mood though, and i am sticking my head out of the shower, not to talk to him but to squirt him with yet more water.  he doesn't like that all.  of course all it does is ensure that he will go to the door and nose poke while he cries some more.  when wet, his cries take on this undertone of universal suffering.  it's almost funny.  or wouldn't be if it weren't simply annoying.
   it's almost as if he knows that someday this water addiction will be incredibly harmful to me, in some way taking my life.  sometimes, i am not sure why, he likes to sit on my sink and meow.  he hasn't figured out yet that this is likely the best place to sit as my sink is around the corner from the tub and quite unreachable by me with water while i am in the shower. 

   originally i thought it was because he thought that my shower meant that any second i would be leaving the house for work or whatever, leaving him alone for the day.  only then he started doing it when i run water in the sink.  either sink.  at first when i would shave he would sit on a tiny shelf above the sink and stare at me in wonder.  just what the hell do i think i am doing.  then after a while he would wander away in disgust.  half the time whining.  when i run water in the kitchen sink though, he thinks nothing better of wandering around the kitchen crying.  or when i am going to the toilet, even without the sound of running water, he seems to know that it is bound to come soon. so he wanders around the apt whining, or just sits right in front of me and looks up at me and whines.  so charming.  in that strangulation warranting sort of way.

   too bad for him i love water so.  have you seen those movies where the man or child is into drugs, or gun running or some dangerous habit and finally it is all that the mother or wife can do but to cry and cry at the impending doom that their loved one is destined for. it's like that. only not quite as fun.

sometimes though, he's a pretty cute cat.

note about editing.  2 chapters left. it's been a very productive week. i plan to be done, um, today.  we'll see. i've not been able to do 2 full chapters on any full day yet. i'm liking the book right now though.