Cat Lady

There's something very socially damning about being a single woman with a cat. I'm not sure why this is. Other than the stereotypical Cat Lady image that has proliferated from the one woman we all know whose house is overrun with them, stinky, hairy, and with a shocking lack of separation between human spaces, dishes, and food and cat spaces, dishes, and food. This lady will inevitably be single, (because who would really want to get with that?) and so there you have it. The Single Woman with a Cat Stereotype Inevitability.

For me, the threshold has always been multiple cats. Sticking to one, I maintain, is just normal pet ownership. Now, I do own cat "things." There's a cat quilt on the back of my chair at work. There's a cat clock on my desk. I have a few cat tank tops I wear to the gym. I hardly think that's Cat Lady territory, but it does show that I like my cat enough to admit that I like having a cat. When I got to work on Halloween, the girl who had dressed up as a Cat Lady (grey curled wig, stuffed cats sewn onto a ratty bathrobe) shouted over to me excitedly, "For you!" I guess because...I'm a Cat Lady?

And perhaps I am. I did admit to her that I liked the pants she was wearing, a rather psychedelic pattern of colorful cat heads, and half-joked that she could give the pants to me after Halloween if she was looking to get rid of them. I had forgotten about this until last week when the pants showed up in an intraoffice envelope on my desk at work. I became immediately embarrassed that I had asked for them (like, to wear for real), but, as you can see from the above picture, really, what's not to love about cats on cats?

Maybe don't answer that.