Pandora's Box

If you opened this post, you've probably expected to find either a) a story connected to Greek mythology, or b) a highly valuable piece of art with a mysterious, yet appealing name. However, both of those assumptions are wrong and you are now reading an article about my cat Pandora. Congratulations, you’ve been clickbaited.
As I mentioned in my first post, I am a proud owner of a glorious master-race cat of an even more glorious (Copyright Klara,#allrightsreseved) name and breed, which people in my region refer to as “obična selska đukela,” but hereafter shall politely be called “mixed”. Pandora has been a privileged member of our family unit since May, 2014, whn our neighbour brought her to our home after her ruthless mother (Pandora’s, not my neighbour’s) left her alone on our front porch. She was raised solely by humans and had, for the first couple of months, only had human and canine companionship, which made her act more like a dog for almost the whole first year, which was great, because we know that cats tend to act like a piece of shit. Although in a way this was awesome, because we could cuddle and play with her as much as we wanted without having her taken away from us by her mother (or her running away from us because she wasn’t afraid of us), in a way this was also problematic because for the longest time she could not meow or hiss (having no role-model, she didn’t know how), which sometimes led to her being stuck on a tree or in our basement for hours before we found her because we couldn’t trace her. At first we thought she was both dumb and deaf, but after a while, she started producing some meow-like utterances, so we were cool; however, she never really learned how to meow properly, although her purring mechanism works swell. At the moment, she is the kindest, most polite and lovable cat, but, as the rest of our family (and catkind in general), is lead primarily by her laziness and love for sleep, so most of the time she just eats, sleeps and sunbathes. What a life #jealous.

She is the first official cat we’ve had since I was 8. I say official, because I come from a village, which means there have been literally dozens of other cats (ode jedna, dođu dve he he), which used our yard as a temporary habitat or else a mating court, primarily because there they got free food and no obligation to actually interact with us. Kind of like men in my life.
It is interesting, actually, the topic of these rural cats: when you’re in town and want to have a cat, you have to go to pet stores, shelters etc. in order to get one, but in villages, they just kind of appear out of nowhere and there you have it . I know that, at one point last year, we had 8 cats, out of which the only officially ours were Pandora and her equally magnificent son Pablo (depicted in the photo below when he was a teeny weeny munchkin, and now sadly deceased, R.I.P). Later, we decided to adopt two other cats and acknowledge them as ours, since they let us pet them. Being allowed to pet a cat has now sort of become a way of adopting one – a manifestation of an emotional relationship on a physical level, although it’s not the same because you can’t really bond with a cat the same way if you were its primary carer. At another time when I was 16, there were two twin cats that looked the same (my mother later pointed to the fact that they weren’t actually of the same colour, but I kind of missed that #ohwell) and never appeared together, so I thought they were just one cat and decided to name them/ it Kuzma (only the best for my little ones), which worked well until I realized there were two of them, but then it was too late and they both already adopted the name. At the moment, our only cat-constant is Pandora, although she is now awaiting heirs – or is just fat, we can never really say for sure, as her love life is rather discreet, probably because we can never hear her meowing. However, all of her children tend to be yellowish or white, so we assume she is a loyal lover.

I like to choose the names of all our cats and at every point I have a spare name for a potential cat or dog (I love dogs as well – I’m just not used to them because I was never allowed to have one). The problem is, I always have to run the name with my brother, which sucks, because we can never agree as he prefers inferior, basic names (our last kitten was called Edi (also in the picture) and I never fully accepted it or used the name in his presence). This time I bet he’s again going to have stupid ideas and call our cats something like “Mimi”, “Mici” or Vladimir. Peasant. Anyway, I’m hoping for the best and waiting for the moment when my dream of possessing a little Tristram Shandy comes to life. Wish me luck.

Pandora and Pablo