TOW #12 - "A Man and His Cat"

I'll just come right out and say it...I only chose this essay because it had the word 'cat' in its title. (And yes I have accepted that my destiny is to become a crazy cat/horse/dog/every animal ever lady). However, I was pleasantly surprised by it. The author did a great job of weaving a humorous personal anecdote into the entirety of the piece. It was a longer essay compared to the past few essays I have read, but I had no attention-related problems when reading it because of how much I enjoyed it. The author writes about his cat whom with he lived for 19 years. One of my favorite lines was, "She appeared from underneath the porch, piteously mewling, and I gave her some cold white crab meat. I did not know then that feeding a stray cat is effectively adopting that cat." He had found the kitty as a stray while on a crabbing trip, and she became his companion for the rest of her life. Most of the essay revolves around how the author wrestles with the idea of being "that cat guy". He adores the cat, and she adores him, but she has a habit of preferring to be spoiled. She would only drink water from a glass, and her green eyes seemed to be outlined in "cat mascara". I found the author's such descriptive monologues about his cat to really emphasize his purpose and title. Tim Kreider wanted to subtly break the stigma attached to a man owning a cat being considered feminine, and I think he did a wonderful job. One of his reining overall arguments simply put it as man always needs companionship, and a cat provides that, so there is simply nothing wrong with a man owning and loving his cat. He also argues that loving a cat provides more than just companionship, and is actually beneficial to the psyche. I found this really interesting; he argued that loving a cat is much less complicated than loving a human being, because they cannot ruin our fantasies about them by speaking. Therefore, they receive the projections from their humans and provide an image of a perfect "insert desire here".