The Small One has a problem.

He doesn’t keep us awake at night. In fact, he comes to bed and sleeps with us through the whole night.

He doesn’t beg for food like The Large One. Really, why should he? He just needs to hang around The Large One and let him do all the work.

He almost never throws up and what he does is usually very small and in one convenient location. (This is in contrast with The Large One who, when he decides to expel waste the wrong way, usually does it a wide and varied pattern, sometimes trailing into more than one room or even on different floors in the house. It’s impressive.)

But yes, The Small One still has a problem.

Straws.

And nail files. And chopsticks. Basically anything long, slender and stick-like.

He goes CRAZY for them.

As a demonstration, let’s imagine…

Imagine we have gone to one of the many fine fast-food establishments which congregate near our house in an effort to taunt and tempt us. Imagine that, along with several lovely sandwich-esque and deep-fried goodies, we have decided to bring home large, ice-filled containers of bubbly and sugary soft drinks. And imagine that we have inserted straws into these containers, in order to have easy access to the heavily caffeinated goodness within.

Now, imagine that we have entered our domicile with these foodstuffs. Imagine that somewhere in our home, a small black and white feline, using some hideously mutated sense that should be used to warn him of approaching earthquakes but has instead been altered for a much more nefarious purpose. Imagine that he knows, knows more that he knows that he has four paws or likes to hide under blankets, he knows that we have entered his kingdom with a straw. Imagine that he, using some primitive but effective form of teleportation, appears instantly, but unseen, behind us.

Now imagine that our attention wanders. Just for a moment. Say we take off our coats. Or check the phone for messages. Or blink.

In this moment, The Small One will levitate to wherever the straws are (in their soon-to-be forgotten soft drink containers), and he will grasp a straw in his tiny and adorable jaws, and he will take the straw away.

The fact that the drink container will attempt to follow and crash to the floor concerns him not in the least.

Once he has the straw, his life is complete, until he has lost it under furniture or its molecular structure breaks down (whichever comes first). He will carry it everywhere with him. He will play with it. He will sleep lying on top of it. And he will growl if you try to take it away.

It’s a troubling fact of life in our home.

Our attempts to prevent this from happening have only educated us to the strength by which his love of straws has been imprinted in his tiny and fur-covered brain.

Last night, My Lovely Wife and I visited one of the previously-mentioned fast-food establishments and purchased unhealthy but delicious meal-like alternates. Thinking we were out-smarting our small roommate, we declined to put straws in our drinks, thinking “Ha! Thus have we shown that our brains are indeed larger and useful at out-smarting small animals with long tails! Without straws in our beverages, he will remain sweet and pliant! Victory is ours!” (Really, we both thought that at the same time. It was a little creepy.)

But, much to our profound disappointment, his obsession has developed further than we had thought.

Upon seeing the drink containers, his little yellow eyes lit up, because he KNEW…

SOFT DRINK CONTAINER = STRAAAAAAW!

Needless to say, those drinks quickly left those containers and entered much less volatile glasses.

It’s a problem.

This entry was posted on Friday, January 20th, 2006 at 10:54 am and is filed under cats, me. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.