Everybody wants input

Sophie really is the sweetest, most adorable, loving cat on the planet. I've been around a lot of cats, so I know.

Sophie is about 12 years old, maybe 13. She appears to be having some kind of mental rejuvenation, unless it's actually senility. She runs around the house at high speed in the wee hours of the night. She will do this until get out of bed and bring her to the bedroom to calm down.

She's always been chatty--she's a Siamese, after all--but the last few months have been nonstop. Sophie doesn't sleep unless I try to get her to do it. She doesn't seem to have gotten the memo about cats needing 18 hours of sleep. She's hyper, she's chatty, she doesn't need sleep...

Oh, dear God, my cat is manic.

Frank says, "Yep, honey, that's definitely your cat."

When I sit down to write, Sophie wants in. It's like she has to keep interrupting because she has things to say about my writing. Everybody's a critic. She's not like those comic-strip cats that roll on the keyboard. No, she's way more annoying than that. She bats at my hands with increasing impatience until I stop typing. What she wants is to lick me. A lot. If I ignore her, she'll eventually hook her paw over my wrist and yank my hand toward her mouth. It's not funny. I compensate by trying to type faster before I forget what I wanted to say. That just makes the cat more agitated. The only way to get her to stop licking me is to pet her, which isn't what she actually wants, but it's a good distraction.

Sophie sleeps next to my head, in a space between the pillow and the edge of the mattress. there's a velour-type towel there for her comfort and to keep the sheet clean. She purrs very loudly which is a warning that I'm about to be licked. Sometimes she wakes me up in the middle of the night with the licking. I have to pull the covers over every exposed bit of skin. She's crazed.

I love this cat, but she's making me look bad. Check back on a post with a lot of typos. It means I gave up writing because I was too exasperated to finish. I usually go back within a day or two and fix the typos. I'm not a bad typist. I know how to use spell check, and want to make sense.

A manic cat. How perfect. I love her, manic or not. I am certain the feeling is mutual. Sophie sat on my lap for almost a year straight when my BP tanked and I lost the will to live, let alone participate in the world. She's not a lap cat by any means, despite her affectionate ways. She won't even allow anyone to pick her up. She was willing to overlook those personal traits and just stick with me when I most needed a true friend.

She definitely didn't judge me or expect me to snap out of it. She was patient, she was steady, and she behaved much better than 99% of the people I knew at the time. The dog is fickle and really only pays token attention to me if Frank isn't around. Everybody needs what Sophie has to offer. A little mania is a small price to pay for her genuineness. We should all be so unself-conscious about who we are and what we feel.