Defloofilate (floofinition) – To impair action via an animals’ behavior or presence.
In use: “Sleeping pets in the sunlit living room defloofilated vacuuming and sweeping plans. Instead, he went and played a quiet computer game.”
Day Eight
Locked away, he had time to do things that he’d always intended to do. First would be to learn to communicate with the cat.
Yeah, he wasn’t crazy (so he told himself, trying to sound convinced). He thought he and the cat had a special connection. The little feline (it was little then, in the beginning, not so little now, relatively for a house cat – twenty-three pounds) marched up to him on the street and meowed like Whitney Houston singing “I will always love yooouuu,” bestowing the cat his name, Houston (because it was a male). It was like true fidelity from then on.
Houston was everywhere with him, monitoring his bathroom, trying to steal food (the lovable little thief) with his big white mitts, bolting across rooms and up walls (swear to God!). Now, aged three, Houston had settled into being a more dignified feline. Cagney (his name, distant relative to James, the actor) (he always used his last name, disliking his first name, the unobtrusive, forgettable “Jack”) thought that if Houston could talk, he would sound pretty close to James Earl Jones. From there (and the looks that the cat gave him), he’d decided that he and the cat could communicate, like, telepathically.
Engaging in an effort every day since he’d been self-isolated — this was day eight — he sat the cat in front of him and sat down. “Houston. Look at me. Look into my eyes.”
Although he appeared sleepy (it was time for his pre-nap nap), Houston did as told.
“I’m going to speak words to you. I want you to think them back to me. Do you understand?”
Cagney listened for a response. Yawning, Houston seemed to try to wake up to participate.
“I know you understand me. I know how smart you are.”
Thank you.
Cagney blinked. “What? Do you — ” Had he heard that? “Did you say, thank you.”
I did. You heard me.
“Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God.” Cagney stood up and spun around. He’d only half thought of what would happen next. Like how was he going to prove it? How was he going to prove it?
He stared down at Houston. Houston watched him with interest. “So you hear me, right, Houston?”
Yes, I do, Cagney.
“Okay, okay, I need more than that. Nod your head, nod your head if you understand me.”
Houston nodded his head.
Cagney jumped up and down laughing. “Holy shit. Holy she-it. I did it! We did it. I got to — where’s my phone? Where’s my cell? I gotta video this. Where’s my cell? Where’s my cell?”
Blue eyes bulging, Cagney scanned the room and skittered off. “Must’ve left it in the bedroom. Don’t move, Houston, stay right there, I’m coming right back.” He was out of the room and accelerating, sliding on the floor, and shouting over his shoulder.
Ears forward, Houston watched Cagney disappeared. He’d done it. He’d managed to lower the human’s defenses. Next step would be to take control over Cagney’s mind.
With his defenses down, it’d be as easy as catching a bird.
99 Floofballoons
99 Floofballoons (floofinition) – International hit song by the rock floof band, Nenfloof.
In use: “The song, “99 Floofballoons” was about balloons that animals were using to save trapped animals, but humans, mistaking the balloons for UFOs, began shooting at them. The animals used their quantum cloaking to hide further activities from humans, successfully de-escalating the situation.”
Floofpeasement
Floofpeasement (floofinition) – Policy of giving animals whatever they want just to keep the peace.
In use: “He fed the cats wherever they would eat, pursuing floofpeasement to keep them quiet, happy (and not fighting), and giving him space.”
Floofnomics
Floofnomics (floofinition) – A social science that deals with the production, distribution, and consumption of goods and services in relation to household pets.
In use: “In many homes, floofnomics includes losses (thefts, really) incurred by pets stealing food, or taking and hiding other items, such as socks and toys. Few are the owners that haven’t discovered part of their planned meal purloined.”
Edfloofcate
Edfloofcate (floofinition) – 1. The process of delivering knowledge, particularly about rules, to animals.
In use: “You’re a new cat, so let me edfloofcate you to the house rules,” he said. “Number one, it’s my house and my rules.”
2. The process of training humans to understand that animals make their own rules.
In use: “Sitting down, the cat regarded the man with bemused eyes. Time to edfloofcate him about the truth about his house and his rules.”
Afloofdala
Afloofdala (floofinition) – Small, lima-bean shaped mass of gray matter located in the medial temporal lobes, that allow humans to emphasize with, love, and care for and about animals.
In use: “Surveys and interviews show that people with small or inactive afloofdalas often thought animals didn’t feel pain and lacked intelligence. Those with active afloofdalas reported otherwise. Interesting, but the size and activity of the afloofdala didn’t affect whether people kept pets, but it did affect how they regard their pets and how the pets are treated.”
Self-evident
It’s humbling to think about how little I know, and disturbing to ponder how much I’ve learned and forgotten, or how often I learned, retained, and applied wrong information.
The information was sometimes wrong because we thought that’s how things worked back when we learned it. Then, later, you discovered, “Oh, shit, that works for everyone else, but it doesn’t work for me.”
Yes, this is another Big Lie rant. The Big Lie is that we’re all the same. Eat these foods, gain these nutrients, do these exercises, and you should be good to go.
Yeah, they then admit — you know they, the great aggregate of society, social media, medical professions, governments, you know, they — well, they admit, there are some exceptions. Like, you may be diabetic because your body rejects the insulin it makes. So you’re like, whaat?
Maybe you’re allergic to things. Or you may have problems because your body doesn’t process certain vitamins and minerals well, rejecting them. Maybe you hear things different. Perhaps you hear shapes, or you taste something because you hear a sound.
Whacked, right?
I grew up learning that people that talked to themselves were most likely not right in the head in some way. Now we’ve learned, no, they’re probably fine. Their personality is different from your personality. Conversely, telling me to come out of my shell and socialize more works on the assumption that I’ve made a choice to stay in my shell and not socialize, and not because of the components at work inside me.
Not all people we called slow were slow thinkers, but they didn’t benefit from the learning environment. Too bad for them, back then, because we didn’t know.
We keep learning that there’s a lot that we don’t know, and that what we thought we knew and pushed as truth was wrong. This was sometimes done deliberately to further someone’s wealth — remember how they told us for years that smoking cigarettes aren’t bad? — or to achieve a political advantage.
That takes me to food shopping. Oh, lawdy. I’ve decided to cut down on processed foods and reduce my sugar intake, so I’m reading labels more intently than before. A correlation often exists; if a food is low-fat or non-fat, it’ll be loaded with sugar. If it’s sugar-free, it has a lot of fat.
They say — now — that supplementing your diet with vitamins and minerals probably doesn’t do anything for you, if you’re healthy. You really can’t tell that from the advertising and commercials that abound, can you?
If you’re not healthy, too much of one mineral or vitamin can cause greater problems. All this comes with that caveat, for some people. You need to learn early that you may be some people. You learn by observing your body and reactions to different inputs, studying those differences, and consulting experts when necessary.
And these deficiencies can have profound effects. Constipated, tired, and depressed? You might have a potassium deficiency. Or something else. Just saying.
Consulting experts — or the Internet — doesn’t always work out. Some experts dismiss study results. Reasons vary for why they dismiss the results, or skew them. It could be from ignorance, religion, or false information that they acquired. It could be because they’re being paid to dismiss the evidence, or they’re pathological liars, or protecting someone or something else. This spectrum about why is as broad as humanity.
Even when you find your flaws and shortcomings and address your patterns to cope, it ain’t over. Your body and brain, and our society, are dynamic. Our body is changing, sometimes from aging, sometimes from abuse. Sometimes, it’s just a slow shift because of habits.
As a society, we’re always learning new information, or revealing old frauds, or finding something new about the human body. Our food security gets exposed in unimaginable ways. Consider from this week:
In each case, these findings surprised scientists and investigators because it wasn’t expected. The sunscreen lotions were most interesting to me. They’ve been around back to a time before governments, industries, or individuals worried about the active ingredients in sunscreens, so they were never tested. That was partly propagated by the good ol’ common sense approach that sunscreen is rubbed on your skin; how the heck would it get into your blood? (That’s typically followed by mocking chortles because doesn’t that seem so self-evident?)
Yeah, there’s a lot that isn’t self-evident, isn’t there?
Influenced
When you start chasing butterflies, stalking spiders, and trying to catch house flies, you may have been around cats too much, and might need to take a break from their presence.
This is also true if you get excited when you hear food being opened, or if you try to get into a room when someone else is in there and have closed the door.
Michael Seidel, writer 