A girl's best friend

I'm addicted to television. Most people don't realize this about me. They see me eating vegetarian sausages, going to Crossfit classes and collecting cans and bottles at my office to take home to recycle and they think I'm someone who doesn't eat meat, likes to exercise, brings my own bags to the grocery store and doesn't watch television.

But I love it. Television is one of my best friends.

Last night I was flipping through the channels and happened to land on Animal Planet, on a show about problem cats. I've seen lots of shows about people with problem dogs. There's my favorite Mexican-American Cesar Millan, the dog whisperer and also that British lady that judges dog owners.

The common thread here with both cats and dogs with "problems" is that the problem is the people.

I guess I took it for granted that as a child I got a kitten and spent a lot of time just watching her be a cat. One of the cat owners had this problem where he'd play with the cat and after a while the cat would start biting him and clawing at him. Sounds like a problem with the cat until you see how he was manhandling this poor thing. It's a cat, not a Labrador! That was something my first cat taught me, how to play like a cat.

I guess it was some sort of marathon of this show, and I couldn't stop watching. At one point my cat, Ruby, realized there were other cats in the room, you know, on the TV. She's never noticed the television before, not the things on it. I've seen her perk up at the sound of the Meow Mix cat, but this time she was fixated. I think it was made worse by the fact that the cats on TV looked like a neighborhood cat who taunts Ruby by sitting right outside the window where she spends a lot of her time. For the next 15 minutes Ruby attempted to get inside the television, until she finally tried climbing up something, it fell over and she was spooked.