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My family has never had cats. I've visited people who did have a cat plenty of times, of course, but I never really interacted with them much. We were just always dog folks.
That is until recently, when my sister got a cat a few months ago. And this week she went on vacation, leaving the cat in my care. This is the first time I've spent any real time with a cat. She's a friendly cat, by the name of Cherry. She seems to like me well enough. Petting her is an interesting feeling: her fur is soft, but under that her body is very hard and muscular. It's a vivid contrast. And the way she moves is very different from what I'm used to with dogs. I don't know how to describe it in text.
Yesterday evening I noticed some sort of bag on the other side of the room that was standing upright. I glimpsed the shape in the corner of my eye and thought very strongly that it was a black cat sitting over there. My roommate said he'd had the same thought, and we both agreed that neither of us would have thought so if there wasn't a cat actually around. The shape could have been the same, the position could have been the same but up until this week we would not have had any reason to think it might be a cat. It's a reminder that the way you perceive the world is strongly affected by context. Merely knowing the fact there is a cat in a building alters my brain's interpretation of all kinds of shapes.
But I'm not writing this post to talk about the nature of perception. I'm writing it because there's debt to be paid. Access to the internet is not free, and I don't just mean what my ISP charges. The two constants in the world, so they say, our death and taxes. The internet has its form of death; the things you post are not actually forever, files get deleted, services get shut down, things disappear sooner or later. And it has its taxes: cat pictures. And so I post this to pay my taxes.
