Animal Lives

Our cats, Yucky and Luna, have been begging for food since 2PM. Feeding time is still two hours away.

Yucky tends to be loudest in her demands. No, not demands, more like supplications. She begs. She whines. She pleads, "Pleeeeeaaase." Yucky uses about 5 different sounds to ask for food, all of them annoy me and I know if she just understood how to tell time from a clock or if she was sensitive to the complicated lives of humans, that she'd back off a bit. She'd foster patience and self-restraint. But then she'd be a human with an animal's life.

How simple to be an animal. Eat, sleep, run, hide, fight, mate. That's it. That's life in six monosyllabic words.

How much more complicated our lives seem to be in comparison. We all have the same basic needs as Yucky, but we've created intricate systems of communication and value by which to fulfill them. Jobs, promotions, money, investment, double-entendre, alcohol, computers, space missions, pharmacies. The list is as large as there are nouns in our language.