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My oldest cat is… well, pretty much just like any other cat. Both of them are. The youngest one is laid back and doesn’t care much about anything except being petted. Food is a distant secondary priority, but she’d be more unhappy if it weren’t around for her to graze on. However, if any of us were to die, she’d probably happily make a decent meal of our faces.
The oldest is weird. Jumpy. Paranoid. And a little creepy. She seems intelligent. I’m sure we’re just humanising her, and she’s really just a freak ass but otherwise normal cat. She’s a puzzle solver where the other one just doesn’t care. She’s alert when *no one * else cares. Her eyes are wide and bulging, her ears constantly twitching, tail forever flickering. Everything and everyone, even those familiar to her, are a threat of some degree to be measured, calculated, and eventually, cautiously observed. We don’t know why. I got her when she was just a kitten of a few months old, from a pet store back home in Saint John, and have always been gentle and careful with her, since she was always so jumpy.
She hates to be petted or coddled, unlike her younger step-sister, who lives for the attention. The one thing that does give Sebastian (the oldest) cat pleasure, is playing fetch. She always returns the mouse for you to throw it again. Er, eventually, anyway.
She gets really pumped when you show her the mouse, and will whine like a spoiled child if you don’t throw it immediately. (video is delayed a bit; she’s not a ventriloquist cat.)
Today, I guess she didn’t want to play fetch. Well, not after her sister Kero heard the commotion Bastian was making and wandered out of the bedroom from her nap. Sebastian gets really defensive of her toys when Kero is around, even though Kero doesn’t care about her toys, and just wants to sit around in the middle of things and see what’s going on. Like the weaker child watching the bigger kids throw a ball around, she sometimes makes a weak lunge for the mouse, but Bastian barrels her over and she decides not to bother. She has her own toys, and her own regularly scheduled playtime, and she plays happily by herself.
Bastian does have another trick, if fetch isn’t an option, and she knows she can beat little Kero every time at it: Jumping. And she is quite good at it. Her record is about three feet and some change; perhaps not terribly high, but certainly disconcerting when my husband thinks that putting her mouse on my shoulder is a funny idea, and suddenly I see a large, wide-eyed and very determined cat face between my breasts, taking wild swipes at my shoulder, then disappearing from view seconds later.
She is, however, something of a klutz, and has a problem retracting her claws, and so often gets stuck on things. This is amusing and often destructive. However, sometimes her klutziness is comedy gold. She is unhurt, by the way. Happens all the time.
So here’s to you, little flying Sea-Bass. You weirdo.