March 30, 2003

• Weird was a gift to me from my friend Kat. My exact relationship with Kat at the time is a mystery for the historians to figure out. But the point is that she had to get rid of the cat because he was a semi-feral living very uncomfortably in a one-bedroom apartment with two people.
  
  Kat’s husband had named the cat Natasha, because, read backwards, it’s ‘ah, satan!’ Kat called him Dr. Bombay, because he’s black and is mostly Burmese.
  
  So Natasha/Dr.Bombay/Weird would run around the house and claw stuff up and attack people and generally be frustrated and insane. I managed to get some dominance over him (and I have the scars to prove it), and so he respected me more than a little.
  
  However, they weren’t willing to get the scars, so they really needed to be rid of the cat, and so I got him. And about this time, Kat was learning some sign language, and was showing me the sign for ‘weird,’ which is the first three fingers, similar to W, but you wiggle your fingers like a three-headed cockroach. It seemed natural, in the midst of this, to make the weird sign and point to the cat.
  
  And thus, Weird got his name, which is actually supposed to be in sign language.
  
  It took a while for Weird to get used to where I was living. I was living with my parents, who also took a little while to get used to Weird. We got him fixed, and he switched from being an insane maniac cat who would attack my mom, to merely being an asshole curmudgeon cat. But over time he’s mellowed more and more, and he finally figured out how to run the house without doing cat dominance behavior.
  
  My parents could probably add to this story, since I left Weird with them when I moved to the west coast. I think he likes them and they like him.
  
  I keep thinking I’ll bring him west some time, but my living situations have precluded it. Either no pets allowed, or pets allowed, but the other housemates have pets already.
  
  Ah well.

  • 3:16 pm
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