Anyone can be a cat. All you have to do is follow the rules.
Rules For Being A Cat.
1. Anytime you go in or out a door you must pause at the threshold and contemplate whether you deign go through that door. You must do this until a much larger being is ready to give you a boot in the ass. You may then go through the door.
2. Anytime any flat object is laid upon the floor, you must go to the exact center of that object, lie down, and go to sleep.
3. If you see any space anywhere that is just about your size, you must get into it and look around.
4. Kill.
5. Want a good place to be a cat? Try anyplace it would be inconvenient to have a cat.
6. Anything that was OK the last time is not OK anymore. If you wanted to be picked up the last time, you no longer want that. If you liked Swiss cheese the last time, you no longer like it. If you wanted your head scratched the last time, you now regard anyone who wants to scratch your head as a mortal enemy of cats.
7. If two doors lead into the house off a porch and someone opens one of them, you want to go in the other one. You will not enter the first door, but will wait until someone opens the second door. Then you will enter the house.
8. Unless you decide you don’t want to go through that door either.
9. If you do go through that door, see Rule No. 1.
10. Kill.
11. Center of the room? Bad idea. Better stick close to the edges, and pour yourself sideways around the furniture.
12. If you share a house with a larger being who is stronger than you, who provides you with meat and drink and so on, you must disregard that being. You must treat that being with utter indifference.
13. Unless you did that the last time.
14. Kill.
15. Occasionally, you must act as though you are absolutely insane. You must chase shadows, spring upon ghosts, do battle with invisible beings, arch your back and somehow become larger than you are.
16. If anyone sees you doing this, you must stop at once and pretend you were not doing it, and treat the being that saw you with utter contempt.
17. Occasionally, you must disappear for three days to a week, then return home and sleep for 36 hours without moving a muscle except those necessary to breathe. When you get up, you will stretch and then kill something.
18. Want to try something fun? After sitting in one place for several hours and watching an empty room, go someplace else in the room and watch things from there.
19. Kill something and leave the parts you don’t want in the kitchen. Or under the dining room table.
20. Stick one leg out in the air at an impossible angle and lick it for several minutes. When you get tired of licking it, just leave that leg sticking out in the air and stare off into space.
21. Any human caught lying down is your property, to inspect, walk over and jump onto or from as you see fit. The face is a good jumping-off place.
22. Just because you are more handsome, more self-possessed, more relaxed, wiser, and a better athlete than humans does not mean you are superior to them. You are also superior to them for other reasons.
23. You need not obey the law of gravity.
24. If you follow all these rules, you may be a cat.
25. Unless the cats change the rules.
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