Riley Millman

Today, the twentieth of October, 2013, marks the thousandth day of my captivity. In commemoration, I have decided to begin blogging my life as a household cat. I hope this will assist my search for escape, and perhaps ease the immense boredom that shadows my days.

My name, you ask? That is not important. I am just an everyday cat with an extreme passion to escape the rule of these peasants called 'humans'.

I hope to update this blog frequently with my on goings. I have to occupy my mind from this dreaded, captive life somehow.

Salutations, friend.

I apologize for my three-day absence. Some days I am just so bored that all I can do is sleep. However, I have formulated a solution to this problem!

My captor has recently acquired another furry friend: a dog... and a foolish one at that. He rapidly wags his tail and plays with our captor, repeatedly calling her his "master". Stupid I say! Stupid.

Anyhow, back to my plan. I intend on teaching the canine; I wish to prevent him from falling into our captor's evil plans. I shall teach him modes and forms of writing, given writing is one of my passions (second to plotting escape, of course). I will focus on literary devices, stylistic elements, and rhetorical strategies. Oh, I should probably throw some punctuation lessons in there as well... I have a feeling we'll have to start from the bottom with this dog.

I can feel my days getting better already! This is going to be wonderful. Absolutely wonderful!

Update: I have resorted to referring to my captor's canine victim as The Dog - in real life and this blog. I refuse to conform to the social convention of personal names just to keep him and my captor complacent. The Dog he is and The Dog he shall be.

Teaching The Dog is hardly a cat nap. The Dog refused to expand his attention span to last more than 6.2 seconds. It's extremely frustrating. I shall chronicle my efforts for you anyway.

I started this incredible feat early this morning after my captor left for the day. I decided we should start with literary devices. I created a very clever (if I do say so myself) memory card game for The Dog. I included 11 different devices: alliteration, assonance, consonance, euphony, hyperbole, metaphor, onomatopoeia, oxymoron, paradox, personification, and simile. They ended up looking like this:

The Dog seemed to have a satisfactory grasp of most of the literary devices, which was uplifting. However, he was clearly having difficulties distinguishing between oxymoron and paradox. (I’ll admit it’s pretty ugly trying to distinguish between them.) Oh and don’t even get me started on onomatopoeia. Arg!

The Dog’s understanding of today’s concept was greater than I had thought it would be, but despite this I am finding it considerably difficult to sow my seeds of superior knowledge in The Dog’s mind. His mental capacity is like a goldfish’s.

Legitimately.

I started off by introducing two simple but obviously different sentences:

Captivity limits my capabilities, destroys my life, and is boring.

AND

Captivity is capability-limiting, life-destroying, and boring.

I then simply asked the The Dog to tell me what the difference was. You know what he told me?

“One longer.”

ARE YOU SERIOUS?!

There is no other way to put this: I flipped out. I’ll spare you the details.

I have completely lost faith in every infinitesimal thought that there is hope in educating The Dog.

I didn’t even bother to tell him that one was parallel and the other was not. I give up.

I am going to teach The Goldfish.

The Goldfish looks like a fairly educable gentleman; he’s the “pop on a top-hat and monocle and call me ‘sir’” kind of fellow.

I will not bother with an elaborate lesson on literary devices with him. I will just start from parallel structure. I have finished a complete agenda for my teaching:

Lesson 1: Parallel Structure

Lesson 2: Asyndetic and Polysyndetic Construction

Lesson 3: Climatic Order, Chiasmus, and Rhetorical Questions

Lesson 4: Argumentation: Logos, Pathos, Ethos

Lesson 5: Punctuation

Lesson 6: Keyhole structure

Wish me luck.

Friends!

The Goldfish is a fantastic being! He is smart! He is willing to learn! He is polite! All those rumors about goldfish having a two-second memory… UNTRUE!

I don’t think I have ever had such a wonderful day in all my 1039 days of captivity. I can really feel the atmosphere lightening up.

Recall in my last post when I mentioned I wasn’t going to provide a lesson on literary devices? Good thing I didn’t – he’s already mastered them! (Apparently before he was taken captive, he spent a considerable amount of time attending an elite fish school in the north. Fancy that.)

Seeing as though The Goldfish is comfortable with the majority of the things I had planned to teach, my lessons will be more like a refresher for him. I think that’s just fine. It’s much better than the torture of working with The Dog.

I conducted lesson on parallel structure. I gave The Goldfish the exact same sentences I gave The Dog, and he quickly distinguished the one in parallel structure from the one that wasn’t.

A little side note for those of you who don’t know…

Nonparallel:

Captivity limits my capabilities, destroys my life, and is boring.

Parallel:

Captivity is capability-limiting, life-destroying, and boring.

The Goldfish continued to tell me that parallel structure adds clarity to a sentence and creates word patterns that make your writing easier to read. I added that parallel structure can be used with coordinating conjunctions, correlative conjunctions, clauses of comparison, and lists.

We make a good pair, him and I.

Salut.

I am ever so sorry, readers. I forgot to mention I went along with Lesson 3 yesterday as well.

The Goldfish and I concluded that “I must teach, ignore The Dog, and plot my escape” (our polysyndetic example with fewer conjunctions) was an example of climatic order. The ideas in the sentence are organized from one extreme to the other, which is a useful stylistic element.

We also created a slick example of chiasmus: “We must conquer our captivity before captivity conquers us”. I quite like the reversed repetition of one idea. It is a powerful and impactful concept.

Finally, we covered rhetorical questions. I love rhetorical questions. Can you tell? A rhetorical question is a statement that is constructed as a question, but is not intended to be answered. I suppose I use them to give a sense of engagement towards my reader… at any rate, I like them.

The Captive Life

My Life as a Household Cat