Meeeoooow Zedong

Lunchtime, leaving the office to walk to lunch- across the little street behind our building there's a small crowd of people in the road looking up at something. as usual, when i see a crowd of people in the street, i hypothesize that something mildly amusing must be happening (see previous post r.e. high-velocity winds), so even though it's as cold as butt and i'm hungry, i stopped to check it out. sure enough, up on the balcony, something funny was happening. here's two big puffy fluffy white cats, both straggly and dirty and clearly homeless, sitting facing each other, noses almost touching, meowing back and forth at each other. meowing in unusually big voices, i should add. i don't know if they realized it, but those two cats looked pretty silly up there- among us spectators, i'm pretty sure we all agreed on that. the cats weren't fighting or trying to get it on or anything, just looking each other in the eyes and having a meow contest. although i generally consider myself, as a cat-owner, to pretty much know everything about cats, i didn't know what this spectacle was about. so i asked the old shifu (the old doorman) what on earth they were doing. i figured he might know since he seems to be pretty tight with the cat who hangs out in our office (a fat stray cat sitting on my desk when i come in in the morning being possibly the MOST unprofessional thing ever) cause he gets all nervous and protective when i try to interact with the cat, or at least because possibly he had seen something go down before I arrived on the scene, but he just looked at me and said "Who, them? tamen xiang hao le" or something. "One is a girl cat, one's a boy cat." I didn't know what that middle sentence meant so I just looked it up. I thought given the context it might mean something like "they're performing a mating ritual" or whatever, but no, it just means "they're making noise." duh, right?

anyways, i always get a kick out of watching people getting a kick out of watching animals do funny things. like back at UNC one day when there was a huge group of people behind Lenoir dining hall looking up into a tree, where a huge bird of prey (don't ask me what it was i'll just say Falcon) was sitting on a lower branch dangling a dead squirrel from its talons while two tiny birds dive-bombed kamikaze-like into him. everyone, including the 5 starting players for our NCAA championship basketball team and their throng of admirers, had their camera phones out, snapping photos. all day long when you get to class people would be like"hey dude did you see that bird out there?! that was off the hook, man. fuckin' badass." it's such an innocent, genuine fascination people have, watching other species do their thing. yea, it's pretty much a hoot, and watching these cats was no exception- all of us standing there, the soot-covered migrant construction workers, the pharmacy students in their white lab coats, the old bored retired folks, and me, all laughing at the ridiculous cats sounding off on the balcony- was in fact charming enough to write an entire blog entry about.