Hot, Hot, Hot!

The other day, Dylan was being taunted by a big, manly kitty outside his favorite window. Dylan was making clicking sounds, which progressed to other grumpy sounds until I got up and turned on the light. (By "the other day" I actually meant "at 3:00 a.m. a few nights ago). The bad kitty fled once the light was on and Dylan then released an onslaught of hissing and growling now that he had "won."

This got me to thinking about being territorial...since I have lots of time to think about random things in the middle of the night. It occured to me that I've been running into that a lot lately with people, with the neighbor's dogs, and with my spoiled, only-child of a cat. I'm not sure exactly how the planets aligned to give me so many examples of this, but it especially is funny in people.

I've noticed that, in spite of our very big brains, we're not that far removed from the cat and dog method of handling this. I've seen fabulous examples of territorial behavior that range from the highly subtle to the just-short-of-peeing-on-somthing-to-show-this-is-mine action. Since I'm presented with all of these examples of rational, enlightened behavior, I'm starting to wonder if/when/how I'm doing this, too. So I am now sometimes watching myself with the same fascination and finding I do it too, only without the peeing on things as a sign of ownership (too much).

Related to this is watching active passive-aggressiveness in action. There are two crabby female-types that orbit very, very periphally in my Colorado circle who are masters at the hot passive-aggressive action. I find that when I need to/am forced to interact with them, it's fun to thwart them with overly-kind emails that don't answer their questions. And by showing up to thier events at least 30 minutes late. And by letting my inner-passive-aggressive self free to express itself with them. It's an exercise in passive-aggressive evolution!

And as I think about these things, I'm also reminded that I am stuck smack dab in the middle of using distractions (such as typing up a boring story like this) instead of practicing. D'oh!

An Erinku:
empty string cheese
wrapper
resisting the
garbage can, twice.