Better Than Cats: My Villain Origin Story

For most of my life, I never really thought all that much about cats except to avoid them whenever I could.

I have never been a fan of cats. Some of that is probably just a lack of exposure, since I grew up in a very dog-centric (and cat-allergic) household. But a not-insignificant percentage of it is that cats scare the shit out of me due to what I think of as The Catcident.

I was maybe 14 and babysitting for a family I had never sat for before; I think they were friends of friends of my parents. They lived in a beautiful, spacious apartment a few blocks from Fullerton Avenue Beach not far from the house where I grew up. The parents were cheerful and friendly and in a hurry, trying to make their dinner reservation, and they were out the door pretty much the minute I got there.

(Aside: gather round, children, while Tante Ami tells you about the Ancient Times, when parents would leave their grade-school children with 14-year-olds they had never met before, arming them with nothing other than instructions to knock on the across-the-hall-neighbor's door in an emergency and a promise to be home, probably only slightly drunk, by midnight.)

Anyway. The kids gave me a tour of the apartment, dragging me from room to room and pointing out the highlights: their bedrooms, the TV room, the pantry with the snacks. I don't remember how the rest of the evening played out, but this was a Saturday night in the 1980s and I had been babysitting for at least two years by that time (see Aside, above) so we probably played hide-and-seek and ate Bugles or Hostess Ding Dongs and had a game of Clue or Life or Trouble while we waited for Love Boat and Fantasy Island to come on.

No one mentioned the cat.

A few hours later, with the kids in bed, I plopped onto the couch in the TV room to eat my own bowl of Bugles and watch Saturday Night Live. I must have dozed off, because the next thing I knew there was a large furry THING sitting on my stomach and STARING at me with its yellow eyes THISCLOSE to my face and doing that weird thing cats do with their murderclaws that Cat People call "making biscuits" but that I think of as "trying to eat my liver."

I did what any normal person would do: I screamed bloody murder, flailed around like I'd stuck a fork in an electrical socket, threw the THING off me, fell off the couch, and scrambled out of the room to lock myself in the bathroom and hyperventilate until the parents got back. (I have no idea what the cat did, but I'm assuming it sauntered back to its hiding place and congratulated itself on a job well done.) I can laugh about it now because the visual is hilarious even to me, but at the time I was legitimately terrified.

(Aside Part II: look, I understand that NOT ALL CATS do this and that even the ones that do are still worthy of love. Also, I'm sure that YOUR cat is absolutely delightful and would never hide under a bed only to emerge hours later to deliberately terrify a sleeping teenager with Bugle dust on her chin. I'M JUST STANDING IN MY OWN TRUTH.)

In the aftermath of the Catcident, what had been a mild distaste became more of an active fear. "Not really a cat person," I would say with a tight smile and gritted teeth when a friend's cat would jump up on the couch next to me during book group. Like a vigilant elephant at the watering hole, I learned to sense cats in the wild–at bookstores and coffee shops and suddenly, inexplicably underfoot at dinner parties–in order to give them a wide berth.

Over the years, I got myself to a place where I could tolerate being in proximity to a cat without having a heart attack as long as the cat didn't do that fucking kamikaze thing where one second it's across the room and the next second it's on top of your head. Occasionally I could even pet a cat if it was fat and old and derpy and stayed in one place for a long time. But for the most part, cats and I settled into the same uneasy arrangement that has been in place since the end of the Korean War: an armistice without an actual peace treaty. As long as we each stayed on our side of the DMZ, things might be a bit tense, but they were relatively stable.

And then came SMOL KITTEH.

Of all the things that are bewildering to me about my life on social media, the prominence of cats in that life is top of the list. I don't really have a clear memory of how it started, but I know it was on Twitter during the Time of the Coven (a story for another time). At some point, I must have tweeted about my fear of cats, and as is typical for how social media works, the Spiritus Mundi took that and ran with it. There were entire days when my feed was nothing but cats and jokes about cats and videos of cats doing extremely cat-like things like pushing water bottles off countertops or sleeping like hairy pretzels or sneaking into cribs to suffocate babies.

Over the years and across multiple social media platforms, this phenomenon has taken on a life of its own. The prevailing wisdom seems to be let's help Ami get over her fear of cats by exposing her to the most unhinged cat behavior possible. And so began the era of SMOL KITTEH, a running joke in which someone on social tags me in a ridiculous photo or video of a cat being terrifying (read: existing) and I reply with some kind of silly shouty all-caps pun. I just did a quick search on Threads for "smol kitteh" (Aside Part III: the search function on Threads really sucks) and came up with everything from SMOL KITTEH HAZ STOCK IN HAAGEN PAWS (on a photo of a cat eating ice cream) and SMOL KITTEH MAKEZ DEPAWSITS (on a video of a cat in a bank) to SMOL KITTEH SEZ FUCK ICE (during the ICE occupation in Minnesota).

The best part about all this is that it has kind of...worked? I am not and will likely never be a true Cat Person, but the ridiculousness of the entire thing absolutely delights me. SMOL KITTEH posts are my catnip; I will gobble any and all that are thrown my way. For the last few years on April Fools Day, I have posted a picture of a derpy orange kitten (the one at the top of this post) with a caption saying something like "welcome to the newest member of the family!" and watched the hijinks ensue. Someone on Threads told me that she once described me to a friend as "that online person who is afraid of cats" and I'm wearing that as a badge of honor.

Mostly, I figure it's my contribution to the repository of unhinged whimsy–a scarce and valuable and necessary resource right now. At a time when the absolute worst people in the world are doing their absolute worst, when so many things are heavy and awful and depressing, having a silly inside joke that anyone with an appreciation for nonsense can enjoy feels like a smol but significant gift.