List of cats.

In the summer of 2007 – 2008 my favourite saying to rattle off and ear bash my nearest and dearest with was “it’s all about perspective.”

It’s a statement that I stand by and, like all good medicine we concoct ourselves, more often than not I have to remind myself  to take a dose of it when confronting a less-than-peachy ordeal.

A couple of weeks ago in Melbourne I was running down along by the Yarra River, a big old coffee coloured snake of water that, legend has it, is hiding saphire clear blue water on its underbelly. There had been a huge storm the previous night and in order to go explore the reconstructive forces of nature that be, I donned my trainers, iPod and ventured West.

The day was grey but warm and as I ran through a park I do not know the name of, I got to thinking about how free I felt. About how in a dinky park, in the middle of this suburban goliath of a city, how totally free I felt and the thought crossed my mind, “you’ll never feel free in the widest space unless you feel free in the smallest cage.”

It’s funny how things will sometimes cross our mind as though it were said by not ourselves, but someone else.

I turned up the song I was listening to and proceeded to run down by the river which had swollen up over night, and was encroaching on the riverbanks where the metal poles of boat docks peered like submarines out the top of that coffee brown water.

Still thinking my thought about freedom being as much, if not more, a state of mind (Bob Marley will back me on this I believe) than a physical state I came back to that strung out summer saying… “it’s all about perspective, it’s all about perspective.”

Today, I am at work. In plain terms – part of my job involves being a receptionist. An average job, for a regular Jane Blogs individual, at a big corporate company.

Currently as I sit at my desk in my mass produced swivel chair, opened on my Fujitsu laptop in the tab two tabs over from this one… is Wikipedia’s “List of cats,” page. I shan’t go in to how I ended up there – the perilous journeys of the internet are far too wide and deep of a traverse to retell each time… but I will tell you, that I am indeed glad I made it.

It’s what inspired me to start writing this.

List of cats? That sounds ridiculous and boring.
God, that sounds boring doesn’t it? List of cats? It sounds like a sad roll call drawn on tea stained blotting paper by a frail and lonely woman. It sounds perhaps as sad as that last sentence in fact.

Except it isn’t. List of cats, as I am finding… is enthralling. List of cats… is perhaps one of the most glimmering jewels in the Wikipedia crown of glory. List of cats is quite truly, in a word – incredible.

It’s List of cats that has taught me that a cat called Arnold Shortzenlegger once sold for $15 000.
Did you also know that once, an American cat called Emily went missing, and was found later in France? Wikipedia knew – it told me so.
List of cats will also tell you about a cat called Oscar the hospice cat, who has featured in New England Journal of Medicine for his ability to predict which patients will die in the hospice by curling up to sleep with them hours before their death. Oscar has beaten death to the door by predicting correctly a total of 25 times.

I am not a cat fanatic. I’m not really an animal fanatic at all in fact. But this List of cats has left me in awe… not necessarily at the felines, but at stories between the lines, the stories between the whiskers – the untold stories of the List of cats owners. These people whose lives were so enriched by their four legged accomplices with their antics and antricks. List of cats should indeed come with an apendix of List of owners who saw not just a regular Tabby or Persian or Munchkin cat (google it – it’ll make you smile)… but a little individual. A story that they bothered to share with the world, because ther cat wasn’t some name on a list and it wasn’t boring – it was something they loved.

It’s got me thinking again about that old perspective chestnut I mentioned before, and coupled with concentrating the idea of perspective to the idea of bordem… I’ve come to a few conclusions.

1)No one is boring.
2) Usually if I think something is boring, it’s more simply because I just don’t know enough about it – or haven’t used my brain to come up with interesting enough questions to ask of the “boring,” subject matter.

and

3) Just like my thought bubble about freedom being a matter of perspective, so is bordem. You will either be bored by everything, everything, everything – or chose to be interested in anything and in doing so… perhaps find yourself at point 1) of these conclusions.

I have an unread book on my bookshelf in New Zealand. It’s title is Everything is Illuminated. Perhaps one day I will write a book called Everything is Interesting; because if illuminated in the correct light – it is.

– Catherine.