From:	gwyneth.vg
To:	gwyneth.vg
Date:	June 7, 2002
Subject:	She doesn't purr, nor does she meow

     She's not really our cat. She's our roommate's cat, but our roommate isn't often home, and so she's become our cat.
     Her name is Dinah, and we tell people that she's named after Dinah Washington or after Alice's cat in Through the Looking Glass or "Dinah won't you blow." In fact, we tend to call her "Kitten" or "Squeaky" or "Smelly," after her size or her noises or her scent. Sometimes we call her "Crouching Dinah, Hidden Dinah," but not often.
     Our mother has two nice short-haired, black-and-white cats, but Dinah is a tiny tabby thing with long hair, especially long around the back. Unaware of the length and thickness of her back hairs, Dinah often wanders out of her litter box with clumps of her own excrement clinging to her. She sometimes deposits it near us as a sort of gift, or stares at it on the floor and sniffs, completely unaware what this strange deposit could be.
     When she first came home, she peed in our black, unwashable jacket.
     She doesn't purr, nor does she meow. Her language consists entirely of a series of squeaks, not unlike those of R2D2. We have begun to interpret these squeaks as "Please put me down," or "Turn on the faucet," or "Please make love to me immediately."
     Despite the fact that she has been fixed, Dinah has a healthy libido, which she tends to take out on her brush, humping it like, well, a cat in heat. When the brush isn't around, she makes due with us. We now identify much more closely with David Sedaris's essay, "Dinah, the Christmas Whore." She is our very own Christmas whore.
     Her best friends are cockroaches. She tends to kill the things she loves.
     She is not without her cute points--she is very tiny, and often sleeps in the bathroom sink, and sometimes pretends to like us. The growing number of scars on our face attests to the contrary, not to mention the "I wish you would just go die" squeak.
     She doesn't really hate us, and when our roommate is away, she even seeks us out for affection, but whenever our roommate returns she reverts to her attitude of complete disdain, letting out squeaks that indicate "While you were away, I was repeatedly beaten." Understandably, our roommate no longer completely trusts us around the kitten.