Why My Cat Is A Dumb-Dumb

My cat is stupid. No, that's putting it mildly. My cat is brain-damaged. No, that could be taken offensively. My cat is a basket-case of crazy. Still not right...

Ah. Got it.

My cat is a dumb-dumb.

Alright, so my cat, Pippin, is a fat gray ball of fluff. She's very pretty, but there is NOTHING going on in her head. In addition to being stupid, she is a coward. Excessively so.

I got her when I started high school, when I was deep in my Lord of the Rings obsession. I named her after my favorite character at the time, Pippin. YES, I know she's a girl-cat, and he's a boy-hobbit. I knew it then, too. I just did not care. He was cool, she was my cat. Therefore, she was Pippin.

At first, the kitty seemed normal. She would cuddle with me, she would play-wrestle with her sister we got at the same time (my sister named her Lupin. My sister loved Harry Potter as much as I loved Lord of the Rings, and had as little issue with gender-related names as I did). Pippin was cute, she was fuzzy, she was happy.

And then... things started to change....

Our cats were indoor cats, because some of our old ones had been killed by cars. One day Pippin got out. We only know about this because my dad found her CLINGING TO THE SCREEN DOOR, screaming in terror at the outside world, desperate to get back inside where she could hide in the ceiling.

She started hiding in the ceiling when the vacuum cleaner came out, when people came to visit, when members of the family got home from school/work. She started running in terror if the dog sniffed her head, or if her sister jumped at her. She got fatter and fatter, since all she did was eat and hide.

And then, last summer, my family moved to a new house.

She. Freaked. Out.

For WEEKS, she hid in the basement during the day, wide-eyed and terror stricken. The other cats and the dog eventually got used to it, sleeping everywhere and clawing the furniture like nothing had changed. But Pippin would not come out during the day. At night, however, she would haul her fat butt up the stairs and then stand in the living room, screaming in terror, because everybody else was upstairs in their beds, asleep. When we came down, groggy and still half-asleep, she ran in fear from us, because we were so scary.

This went on FOR MONTHS! This stupid ball of fluff was afraid of everything!

One time I brought a friend home with me from school, because she needed somewhere to stay over break. We were standing in the kitchen, talking to my mom about... I don't even know, when Pippin came inside. She took one look at my friend, panicked, and started trying to flee.

I say trying because my friend was standing near (not in front of, but near) the cat-door to the basement. Pippin couldn't wrap her tiny little mind around how to get to safety if the cat-door was blocked, so she ran in circles around the stairwell until my friend took two steps to her right, leaving the cat-door clear for my furry bag of neuroses to access the basement.

Another time, over Christmas break, I was home alone and started talking to myself, like you do. For some weird reason, I decided to try talking in a British accent. I was standing at the top of the stairs, putting things away in the closet, talking to myself in a British accent, when I glanced down the stairs and saw Pippin. She was standing at the foot of the stairs, staring blankly up at me in stark terror. For a full two seconds, we locked eyes, me puzzled, her petrified.

Then she ran.

Part of the reason she ran was because she did not recognize me. I hadn't done anything to look different, so it must have been because I sounded different. Because I was talking with a British accent. Which is the stupidest thing I've ever heard of! Not the talking in a British accent, the not-recognizing-me-because-I-was-talking-in-a-British-accent.

I have no idea what set her off. I don't know why she's so dumb, why she's so terrified. It started before we moved, or I'd think the trauma of that had something to do with it. But she was a basket-case before then, so I just do not know.

Either way, my cat is stupid. I love her, but she's dumb as a sack of bricks, and she's a coward.

She is my dumb-dumb.