quiet times

Earlier this week I was hiding from everybody. I wanted to be alone, and I made it happen. I hunkered in my room and lit candles and watched cold-colored films based on Romantic Russian literature. I wrote in my journal and ignored the outside world.

I do this periodically to help myself stay on an even keel. Usually I have to fit such periods into one day of a weekend, a Sunday, perhaps. And then I have to reenter the world, surrounded by people, while I’m being drained of energy, twitching internally. But this time… oh, this time I used four glorious days. Four days to recharge.

I am not a people person by nature. I don’t hate people, though I guess I do have some misanthropic tendencies. Milder ones. But I do have to work at socialization, and it does drain me a little. I get better at it as I get older – while I was in college, I would need two weeks of alone time to recharge. Luckily, these times managed to coincide with the longer breaks.

Four glorious days, and now I’m back to feeling chipper and much more sociable.

*~*~*~*~*

Floyd has been an exclusively indoor cat for three months now, and when he’s with me, he’s shown no indication that he wants to go out. Indeed, when I take him to my mother’s for a long weekend, when I carry him out the front door, he expresses mild alarm, like he isn’t used to all of the light and movement of being outdoors anymore.

Instead, he curls up in patches of sunlight, sometimes on the carpet, sometimes on the living room furniture. He stalks, catches and eats any insects he finds in the house. He sleeps with me at night, and he often tries to follow me into the bathroom. When I come home, he’ll emerge from wherever he’s been napping, with the sweetest look on his face – happy to see me, but slightly brain-addled from sleep.

Perhaps this is all an act, or perhaps my presence is so awesome to him that he just wants to be with me, wherever I am. (HA!) Whatever Floyd’s motives, he has appeared supremely uninterested in the outdoors when I’m around.

It’s not the same when Shon is around. Floyd has correctly guessed that Shon is the weak link when it comes to being vigilant about the front door. Because Shon is often too distracted to remember that there is an indoor cat who knows Shon’s footsteps and hears him coming. Shon is often juggling his work stuff, or his handyman stuff, and he can’t close the door quickly, or he forgets to close the door quickly. And Floyd is off like a shot, out our front door, sometimes out onto the street, if Shon has, for some inexplicable reason, left the main front door open too.

Shon says that he’s had to chase Floyd up and down the street at least twice this week. Turns out that Floyd is a lot more devious than we thought. And Shon is regularly getting outsmarted by a cat.