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But liking cats is hard to fake to a cat person.
There are cat people and there are others, more than a majority probably, who “cannot abide a harmless, necessary cat.” If they try to pretend, out of politeness or any reason, it shows, because they don’t understand how to treat cats—and cat protocol is more rigid than that of diplomacy.
Cats have no sense of humor, they have terribly inflated egos, and they are very touchy.
Nevertheless, I fully sympathize with the mandarin who cut off a priceless embroidered sleeve because a kitten was sleeping on it.
Hitting a cat is worse than useless; a cat can be disciplined only by patience, never by blows.
“Uh, yes...but you weren’t cat-petting him; you were dog-petting him. You must never pat a cat, you stroke it. You must never make sudden movements in range of its claws. You must never touch it without giving it a chance to see that you are about to...and you must always watch to see that it likes it. If it doesn’t want to be petted, it will put up with a little out of politeness—cats are very polite—but you can tell if it is merely enduring it and stop before its patience is exhausted.” I hesitated. “You don’t like cats, do you?”
Housekeeping is repetitious and unnecessary drudgery; as an engineer it offended me.
an emotionally disturbed cat is as touchy as mercury fulminate.
I counted to ten slowly, using binary notation.
no matter how many times you get your fingers burned, you have to trust people. Otherwise you are a hermit in a cave, sleeping with one eye open. There wasn’t any way to be safe; just being alive was deadly dangerous...fatal, in the end.
Despite the crepehangers, romanticists, and anti-intellectuals, the world steadily grows better because the human mind, applying itself to environment, makes it better. With hands...with tools...with horse sense and science and engineering.
