Two of my cats, when they want me to do something for them at night – feed them or let them out or let them back in – sit and meow until I do it, like good little cats, even if it takes all night. Oliver, the oldest and largest cat, might try a meow, if he’s in the right mood, but if I don’t wake up immediately, he says, “fuck this shit” and proceeds to my night stand. He used to jump up onto it and knock things off until I woke up. Now, he has a broken hip and is lame so he stands on his back legs and rakes stuff off with his front paws – the alarm clock, my reading glasses, books. It’s only a matter of time until he snags the lava lamp.
My wife and I are both light sleepers. I suspect – and I suspect that Oliver also suspects – that we already wake up when he enters the room, at which point we have a pretending-to-sleep contest. When stuff starts flying onto the floor, this gets hard to maintain, and one of us usually gives up and gets up immediately to feed him. Usually me, cause it’s my shit hitting the floor.
One night, I tried locking him in the cellar after he woke me up. I figured it would be negative reinforcement. But he has this special way of scratching the cellar door that makes it sound like a madman is standing on the other side pounding and rattling it that makes it hard to sleep.
All three of ours do that; each has his own style. The smallest one climbs to the highest point in the bed, usually my hip, and sleeps there, purring. To wake me up, he does the pillow thing too. For fun, he attacks my feet under the comforter. The middle cat, the best-behaved of the three, just meows and only jumps onto the bed in emergencies. He is rather low-maintenance, and doesn’t like a lot of contact. The largest cat climbs onto the bed and purrs too, but we have tried to stop that because he still has these open sores on his back from his car wreck and gets blood, puss and ichor on the comforter and bedspread, which is disgusting. Under normal circumstances, he will give me headbutts while purring, or shake his head, throwing saliva onto my face, until I get up if the throwing-stuff-onto-the-floor thing doesn’t work. Turtles. Turtles are the way to go. Our turtle hibernates in the cellar from October to May. Of course, when awake she is trying to escape 24/7, but I’ll blog about that when the time comes.
I like that your cat says “Fuck this shit.” Beauregard speaks, sometimes, too, but when he wants me to do something he slithers up to my pillow, sits there purring, and if I don’t wake up he takes his paw and verrrrry carefully taps my cheek. Claws in, just the pads of his toes touching me: “Um, mom? Mooom. Can I go out, please?”
Brendan gets jealous that I get all the cat snuggles, but the cat knows who gets out of bed at 4am to let him out, so there.
Turtles do sound something close to ideal, but my spiders are content to just brandish their fangs and pose for pictures.
oh my god my cat does that too. first he whines, then if we don’t do his bidding, he jumps up on the nightstand, bookshelf, or anywhere he can start knocking stuff on the floor. when we were in our old room, chris kept his, uh, tummy medicine in a shoebox on the bottom shelf — so kitty figured out that the quickest way to get chris on his feet was to go threaten to upset the shoebox. either that or kitties like the smell of tummy medicine…
when i was a little girl, i loved cats (dogs too). now . . . its somewhat of a different story. now after reading this story – cat talks, and bangs on the door like something possessed – i’m even more afraid. damn cats . . . next they’ll want to take over the world.
Fish. The only way to go. Mine, until deceased, were named “Kit” and “Caboodle”. They weren’t too cuddly, but they didn’t knock over the lava lamp either.
Another good thing about fish is, when they start looking a little peaked, you flush them and get new ones. I’ll never forget, as a kid, reading some hobby book about raising fish and finding a chapter about caring for sick fish, and thinking, “people *care for* sick fish?”