Cat Power

I looked out the window this morning and saw a woman doing her exercises. If you get up early you can often see people of a certain age performing calisthenics, or waving their arms around, or slapping themselves, or shouting very loudly.

This particular woman was standing on the roof of the hawker centre. There's a basketball court up there and a lot of air vents, and the woman. She was waving her arms around. I suppose if I'd hung around at the window long enough, she might have started slapping herself.

Sat at her feet, with a look of bored resignation visible even from several hundred feet away, was a white and ginger cat. The woman waved her arms and looked at the cat, then waved her arms again. I wondered if it was her cat, or just a feline that was wandering past and had decided to sit and watch her.

The latter is unlikely; most cats aren't attracted to calisthenics. Then again, it's against the law to keep a cat in an HDB flat, so unless the woman lived somewhere else and was sneaking into the hawker centre in order to stand on the roof and do an aerobic freakout, there was some illegal-cat-related-activity going down.

Assuming it was her cat, I'm not sure what she hoped it would get out of it. Was Mr Tiddles getting a bit fat, and in need of exercise? Did she feel it was important for the two of them to have something in common, and so she brought it out for her impromptu workout? Was the cat happy to be there? It looks a bit embarassed, but my lens isn't good enough (and my hands were too shaky) to capture every emotional detail.

Perhaps if I'd waited long enough, the cat would have been at it too. I've always wanted to see a cat slapping itself.

I ran tonight, badly, after falling asleep at 7. I'm not sure if that's post-marathon fatigue, or a cold, or a sign I need to start doing star jumps in front of a vaguely dissatisfied tabby in the future.