Automatic Paper Towel Dispensers and Speaking Cat – Thoughts from March 5 and 8, 2023

March 5, 2023

I’ve been listening to a book called Animals in Translation by Temple Grandin. She is autistic and has a similar connection to animals that I have. I speak fluent cat and could learn to speak other animal languages. The languages of other animals are mostly non-verbal. Many people have a problem with this because they only use verbal language to communicate with others. Patti talks to the cats in English and swears they can understand her. When they continually do what she told them not to do, she says they’re being brats. In reality, they are only reacting to her physical language, which is minimally communicative. They react to her tone, but only understand that she is angry at something. Them speaking English is just as unlikely as Patti speaking cat.

Temple talks about the senses of different animals and how animals experience sights, sounds, or smells differently than we do. This will change how they communicate to others and how they receive information. Normal human behavior is completely abnormal to animals. Much of this is because of our unnatural lives. We do things that no other animals do. What we think of as normal behavior comes out of our unnatural lives. Talking to other animals in a language they don’t understand and expecting them to react how we expect is absurd. Animals have many ways of communicating that we would have a hard time understanding and some communicate in ways we would find impossible to understand. Only considering human communication is ignoring most of the glorious animal languages of the world. You’re reading the one language I speak (unless this gets translated into another human language), but I also speak cat. It is not a written language.

March 8, 2023

I know what to expect from the automatic paper towel dispensers in my life. I’m so in touch with them that I know how to change them if I don’t care for how they dispense. My learning increased when I tired of how slow a dispenser was. I opened it and saw there were settings for how quickly paper dispensed, how much paper dispensed, and the time it waits before it dispenses another paper. On the ones I have opened, the switches to change the settings were tiny. I had to use a pen on them to move the switch. They usually have three settings of slow, medium, and fast for each of the functions. I usually do this when no one else is in the restroom or wherever the dispenser is. I have noticed nicer restrooms give you more paper towels. Public restrooms in heavy traffic areas give you a small rectangle and make you wait longer between dispensings. You truly can judge a restroom by its automatic paper towel dispenser.

Some people have learned nothing in their time on earth concerning money. It makes super rich and super poor people miserable. When people obsess over it, everything else in their life gets neglected. We go from one job to the next and make more and more money while giving no thought to whether we enjoy the job or our lives. We apply for jobs we hope we have the qualifications for. I always knew I could do anything if I was interested in it. Quickly, I learned being able to do something didn’t mean I would be happy doing it. If you have only a few interests, you will have a hard time finding a job that makes you happy. Spending time at work is a huge chunk of our lives. Making more money at work that we barely have time to spend means most of the time we are looking to money to make us happy. Money can’t buy you love or happiness.