154: In Dog We Trust (2000)
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Heather and her girlfriend lived with a cat named Sid. The girlfriend was always inventing these cute little affectionate niggnames for Sid, but never did that for Heather. She was always praising Sid, and asking Heather to praise Sid, but never gave that kind of approval to Heather. If anything, she was sort of detached when it came to Heather. And so, even though Sid was just a cat, against her will, against her better judgment, Heather started to get jealous. I remember that I would sort of wake up in the morning and I would hear her saying things like, "You are so beautiful. You are a princess. Look at you." And, you know, as I opened my eyes, I realized that she was talking not to me, but to the cat. You felt like the third wheel. Mm-hmm. You know, I know if there had been another woman I would have compared myself to her physically, sort of, what does she look like? What kinds of things does my girlfriend attracted to that I could aspire to? You know, what personality traits, is she funny? You know, but there was just, I didn't know what it was about Sid. I mean, I could see that she was, you know, that she was attractive as a cat. And, you know, I could see that she had this nonchalance that was beautiful. You know, she didn't seem to care, really, that she was loved. So those were the sort of things that I did think about, really, cultivating even. But, um... You thought about cultivating a nonchalance? You know, that I was this concerned about it shows you that it would have been, you know, a fake. But, yeah, I mean, I thought about cultivating that. Since a pet can engage our affection, it also engages all the other feelings. That can go with affection, jealousy, and dependence, and anger, and all the others. And as soon as any one feeling kicks in, all the complicated dynamics that happened between any people, any household, any family, inevitably kick in, as with Heather and Sid the cat. I felt sort of the same way I felt, um... You know how when you have a crush on someone and, um, and then your friends with their significant other, and all the awkwardness as you pretend that, you know, you sort of don't have the feelings that you do for this other person. I sort of felt like Sid was, um, the significant other of the person, you know, for whom I had feelings. And I thought I felt awkward around Sid, and I felt like I had to, to, uh, I don't know. I felt like they were together before I was around, and I was an interloper. Yeah, all the awkwardness surrounding that. [music] And so what's it like to be in a love triangle with, with, uh, another woman in a cat? Well, I, I was pretty, uh, you know, diminishing. [laughs] I mean, it was a beautiful cat. [music] Well, from WB EZ Chicago and Public Radio International, this is American Life from Ira Glass. Today on our program, In Dog We Trust, Stories of Dogs and Cats and other animals that live in our homes, exactly how much are they caught up in our everyday family dynamics? To what degree do they actually function as non-speaking members of our families? We answer these questions today, and others, with three stories in three acts, like one, the youth in Asia, in which writer David Sedaris describes how a great dang, and not a very smart one, was able to completely replace him and his sisters when they grew up and moved out of their parents' house. Act two, if cats are in Hollywood, in which we learned what it is that cats want to watch on television,
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