Tips for professional development: stop working and look at these cats!

Cat videos might be good for the soul, but they are absolute death to productivity. But hey, everyone deserves a break once in awhile — and it’s Friday- you were only pretending to work anyway, right? Keep that spreadsheet handy in case the boss walks by (or don’t — we tried to create a diversion with the title of this article), but otherwise stop what you’re doing and look at these cats. You’ll thank us later.

1. Kitty wants a hug

This big black-and-white fella is not afraid to ask for affection — according to YouTube, he does it all the time. (We like this video so much we wrote a how-to for kitty bear hugs.) Meanwhile, my calico girl, Phoenix, demands lap time by whining at me like a disgruntled Marge Simpson. I’ll take what I can get.

2. Catch it if you can

Yes, our cats are secretly diabolical geniuses, but every mastermind has that one simple, mundane thing that causes her to come undone at the seams. Phoenix, for example, cannot handle loud noises or sudden movements or tea kettles or closed doors … okay, maybe she is a bad example.

Watch this cat try in vain to catch the incorporeal bass bumping from this speaker, and you’ll feel a little better for getting dressed three times this morning because you couldn’t decide what pants best communicate that you’re a hardworking business professional, dammit, even though you have a raging hangover.

3. Big winner

If you think an affinity for cat videos will never get you anywhere, think again: This Washington family recently won $100,000 on “America’s Funniest Home Videos” (which is apparently still a thing) when the father, a mailman, submitted this video of his daily scuffle with a hostile cat on his route. The most amazing part is the fact that he keeps laughing even after the cat steals his glove.

4. A perfectly timed collision

When a cat ran into a bakery door during the filming of this French cooking show, they opted to leave it in — complete with the loud BONK when kitty collides with glass. In the U.S., we probably would have edited it out, but after watching the video it’s easy to see that depicting reality in all of its serendipitous glory was absolutely the right decision.

5. Better than Batman

It seems like everyone I know has a bat story. One time my boyfriend found a live one randomly concealed in a paper bag inside his apartment. Then there was the time I went camping and found one stuck to the grill of my car, dead center and upside down, wings outspread like some kind of grotesque hood ornament. It was actually kind of cute. My friend told me not to touch it.

When the guy in this video wakes up to find a live bat fluttering around his apartment, his cat knows exactly what to do next. But after kitty snatches the bat from midair and dude traps it beneath a box, what comes next?

Bonus: Seriously, science, how do cats purr?

No one knows how cats purr, but the latest speculation as to why, via this article on Salon, is pretty cool. Cats purr at between 25 and 150 Hertz, a frequency that improves bone density and promotes healing. This is beneficial to a species that has an affinity for 18-hour naps: “Because cats have adapted to conserve energy via long periods of rest and sleep, it is possible that purring is a low-energy mechanism that stimulates muscles and bones without a lot of energy,” the article reads. So holding a purring cat is like working out, basically. Thanks, science!

More by Angela Lutz:

• Valor the Blind Kitten Lives Up to His Name
• I’m Having a Quarter-Life Crisis- No One Understands But My Cat
• Four Ways I’ll Judge You Based on How You Treat My Cats
• 5 Awesome Facts About Your Cat’s Tongue

Learn more about your cat with Catster:

• Weird Cat Facts: 8 Reasons Your Cat Likes to Lick You
• 10 Sounds That Cats Make — and What They Mean
• 8 Things to Try When Your Cat Won’t Eat

About Angela: This not-crazy-at-all cat lady loves to lint-roll her favorite dress and go out dancing. She also frequents the gym, the vegan coffee joint, and the warm patch of sunlight on the living room floor. She enjoys a good cat rescue story about kindness and decency overcoming the odds, and she’s an enthusiastic recipient of headbutts and purrs from her two cats, Bubba Lee Kinsey and Phoenix.