He Loves Me, He Loves Me Not

One surefire sign that a male likes a female: he gives her flowers. He knows that flowers will bring her joy and prove he cares for her.

Recently, Latino offered Lucy a flower. How sweet! Granted, it happened after I was moving a bouquet of flowers to a location out of reach of the cats. He asked why and I explained that lilies are toxic to cats. I could see the wheels turning in his head. Without missing a beat, he looked at Lucy and politely asked her, "Lucy, would you like a flower?" When she did not respond (because her English is lacking), he asked, "How about the yellow one?"

Fortunately, Lucy is a smart cat and did not take him up on the offer. She can see right through his ulterior motives.

Language Barrier

There is a game Latino and I play every night. It was not my invention and I do not particularly even care for the game. It involves a communication problem. This is "funny" because it does not involve an ACTUAL communication problem but a PRETEND one. That is the game. It proceeds, nightly, as follows: I like to read at night before bedtime. I even try to read out loud to Latino. He knows the drill, yet he comes into the room and turns off the light. I kindly ask him to please turn the light back on. He pretends not to understand and he comes over to me and says in the sweetest possible voice he can muster, "What? What, sweetie? What would you like?" I am finished being polite by this time so I yell in a non-inside voice, "TURN THE LIGHT ON!" This is his favorite part. He laughs and laughs and laughs. I realize that I play right into his little game and that if I were to react differently the game might be different or less funny to him. As it is, I have little control over my reaction. Oh well, it brings him amusement. And he does turn the light back on, eventually.

Once I outsmarted him for a few days by duct taping the light switch on so that it had to be switched off on the floor lamp itself. He laughed harder than all of the other times put together. Of course he realized he just had to take the tape off, but he humored me for a few days to give me credit for my resourcefulness.

He always acts like he does not understand what "turn off the light" means, but my favorite quote from him is this: "What? No comprende, sweetie. I think we have a language barrier."

Clearly.

Meow and Massage

It has been said that imitation is the highest form of flattery. Obviously Latino has some love for the cats because he has imitated Lucy and Sasha. Both cats like to "massage" my stomach as if they are kittens and I am the mother cat. Occassionally, Latino will pretend that two of his fingers are a cat's paws and he will imitate their motions on my stomach.

He also went through a phase of meowing. Admittedly, it was not one of his most attractive phases. I think he was trying to communicate with Sasha. He would take turns meowing in response to her meows, which of course would make her meow back. I think he was trying to tell her in catspeak that he wanted her to stop meowing. It seems she did not understand the meowing human.

Neither did I.