You know you’ve been hanging out with the dog too much when you are watching Meet the Press and you suddenly yell, “No, Speaker of the House! Don’t bail out the auto industry! Bad! Bad bailout! No.”
I’ve come to realize that in the search for a decent relationship, a pet owner is an especially good bet, particularly when the pet is a dog. Ownership of any animal means that on a basic level, an individual can handle a serious commitment; it means they can remember to feed something besides themselves, and that they’re used to dealing with shit on a regular basis. But I think a dog is still a special case. A dog makes you schedule your life around its need to urinate. A dog will come at you with love in its eyes and breath that smells like a zombie’s ass. A boy who owns a dog is a boy who is not afraid to come home every day to a creature that jumps for joy and gives him a look that says, quite obviously, “I love you I need you I depend on you for my every requirement take care of me forever.” This is no small thing to face. A dog may not be a child, but it is still needy and dependent and has a knack for embarrassing you in front of people.
There is also something nice about being in a relationship with a pet owner, at least when you like the pet and the pet likes you back. It makes your duo into a nice little trio. It gives you some shared responsibilities that make you feel like a team, and that teach you how to rely on each other and work together to make sure the dog is fed and walked and bathed. These are fairly minor tasks, no doubt; you don’t have to send the dog to school or teach it table manners, and you can walk around naked in front of it. But they are responsibilities no less.
I don’t know as much about the trials and tribulations of cat ownership. I have never actually dated anyone who owned a cat. I guess this is good, because I am allergic to them. This puts a slight damper on my enthusiasm, which is further dampened by much of my interactions with cats. I tend to get along best with cats who act like pointy little dogs. In fact, I have noticed that people tend to brag about their cats by saying that they are like dogs. This to me is telling. If cats are so great, why are they even better when they act like dogs? Why not just get a dog and save yourself the disdain?
I think that’s really my main issue with cats, is that they don’t seem to care for you particularly. You call to a cat, and he just stares at you from across the room, and then turns and continues walking away. You call to a dog, and his ears perk up, and his eyes get this look like, ‘Who, ME?’ and he can’t get over to you fast enough. Granted, it’s probably because he thinks you’re going to take him outside so he can finally pee, but still. I crave that validation. I want him to want me. I need him to need me. I need therapy.
I face enough coldhearted rejection in my daily life. When I get home, I want total, complete acceptance and love. Even if it comes with breath that could flip a tank over.
This afternoon I saw a couple of hawk-like birds circling overhead while taking a walk.
“Huh. I wonder what those are,” I thought. “When I get home, I should look them up in my bird book!”
Then I realized how nerdy that thought was.
“Wow, I’m such a nerd.” I thought. “I should write a blog post about it.”
Then I realized how UNBELIEVEABLY nerdy THAT next thought was.
Which made me want to post about it even more. And each time I thought that, I thought about how it made me exponentially more nerdy each time I thought it.
So, my question is, where does it end? It reminds me of how the Cracker Jack box used to blow my developing mind every time I looked at it as a kid. Remember how the Cracker Jack box has a picture on it of a sailor (?!? that seems weird now?!?!) holding….a box of Cracker Jacks! And on that box, you could just make out a picture of a sailor, holding…wait for it…a Cracker Jack box! And on that Cracker Jack box, even though the blurry two-color printing on the box couldn’t show it, you just KNEW there was another sailor holding a Cracker Jack box, and on that Cracker Jack box….This was the kind of thing that used to keep me up at night when I was six.
Anyway, my train of thought this afternoon, like that crackerjack box, may just keep continuing on until I explode in a cosmic burst of nerdy light. A cosmic burst of light that will likely be wearing a pocket protector. And have its glasses held together with tape. And be thinking about birds.
But in North Carolina…
Garner Nightly News: “There’s going to be a HARD frost tonight, so remember:
-Check your Pipes
-Check your Elderly
-Keep your Pets Warm”
The night’s low was 27.
Also, I like that pipes were listed before the elderly. I guess because the elderly don’t explode when they freeze?
I just sat through another wretched “Cash For Gold!” television ad. The prevalence of these low-budget commercials has increased in direct proportion to my general malaise about the state of the economy. This latest ad showed a woman digging through her jewelry box and shaking her head in disgust. Her expression was that of someone who had just discovered mold on her shower curtain. But what was really bothering her were the heaps of jewelry taking up space in her jewelry box.
“Great-Aunt Shelia’s locket,” she seemed to be thinking resentfully, “Why keep you when I could have cold hard cash instead?”
See, the concept of wanting to get rid of your “old, broken and unwanted” gold jewelry doesn’t make much sense to me. If your gold jewelry is old, it’s probably because it has sentimental value. If it’s broken, you’re probably hanging on to it because you’ve been meaning to have it repaired, because it’s got sentimental value– but, you know, in this economy, now is not the time to repair your old, broken gold jewelry. If it’s unwanted but valuable jewelry, you probably pawned it already so you could afford to keep your television so as not to miss those hilarious “Cash for Gold!” ads. (There’s an O. Henry story in there somewhere.) And if you’re like me, and your jewelry is unwanted and not valuable, it’s because it came from a plastic egg out of a fifty cent prize machine.
Back to the commercial. Next, another woman appeared onscreen, managing in her seven seconds of airtime to convey a sense of utter and complete dishonesty. Had she been my waitress, I would not have trusted her to put my leftover sandwich-half into a take-home container without first wiping it on the floor behind the kitchen stove.
“I put my wedding ring from my ex-husband into an envelope, and the next day I got back an envelope full of MONEY!” she crowed, clutching fistfuls of bills…all of which appeared to be singles. One look at her and I instantly sided with her ex-husband.
That’s another problem. These ads seem to count on viewers’ lack of awareness that there are other methods of finding out what your jewelry is worth besides sticking it in an envelope and mailing it to the mysterious address that flashed briefly on your television screen in between a motor-scooter infomercial and the start of ‘Jeopardy’. You could mail it to me, for example. I am completely trustworthy. I will definitely mail you some dollar bills back, if you include postage in the envelope.
Or, you know, you could take it to someone called a ‘Jewelry Appraiser’. However, that probably involves leaving your house, and possibly even putting on pants. (Though I can think of a few other ways you can earn fistfuls of dollar bills by staying pantless, this is a family blog.)
Hmm…I think I now understand the underlying success in ‘Cash for Gold!’ I too want to profit from the laziness of others! Perhaps I should start a “Pants-Free Jewelry Appraisal Business”. And I would, if that didn’t sound completely wrong.
This morning I ate a chocolate-chip bagel with hazlenut cream cheese. I think it made me become 10% less New Yorker.
Sometimes I don’t even know who I am anymore.
Granted, the bagel was free, discovered in the break room at work, on top of a stack of other similarly sugared bagels from Panera. Stupid Panera, with your sweet candy bagels. If you want a Danish, I say have a Danish. If you want a pixy stick, have a pixy stick. If you want a bagel, have one with some damn seeds and salt on it.
The last time I actually set foot in a Panera, I told my friend that I wasn’t sure I wanted to bring children into a world that had Passion Fruit bagels. I have not been back since. But this bagel invaded my working turf, and everyone knows that when you’re at work you will comfort yourself by eating anything wearing a snack wrapper.
I have always been a purist as far as bagels are concerned. Granted, I do enjoy most bagel flavors in the savory pantheon. Onion, Poppy, Sesame, Everything, even Garlic. (Although I sneer at Egg, and squint at Salt). I am likewise fairly flexible and magnanimous in my allowance of toppings. Bagels can be graced with tomatoes, loaded with lox or ham, strewn with raw onion. I have on occasion been known to use a fancy Lox Spread. Toss a few scallions into my cream cheese and I will not slap your face. But there is no place for low-fat or fat free cream-cheese based spread, and I will NOT stand idly by while cream cheese is sullied with sugar or fruit.
Until this morning. Oh God. I hang my head in shame. No stomach of mine should have accepted that tainted sugarbagel.
I need to return to the city of my birth and devour the delicious boiled bread of my homeland.
As I mentioned previously, I cried like a baby on Election Night when Barack Obama was announced as the next president of the United States of America. Until that moment, I don’t think I really believed it was going to happen.
This may seem strange, because the polls had been calling the election in his favor for weeks. But still I worried, and fretted, and disallowed myself to celebrate in my mind or to count on his victory until it was absolutely unequivocal. I know there were a lot of other people like myself who were equally nervous about the whole thing—particularly those who perhaps felt, as I did, that the last election was a crushing blow to their faith in our political system.
I can still remember my anguish at watching the Electoral College gradually creep up in W’s favor during the last Presidential Election. My shock and disbelief grew as it become more and more likely that Bush was going to win a second term. I went to bed in an angry, drunken stupor before the winner was announced, and woke up not wanting to hear the truth because I knew it already, even though I didn’t want to believe it.
The last Presidential election coincided with a rocky period in my life, coming only a few months after I moved back to the East Coast from Honolulu. I went from living in a sunny, breezy paradise that seemed far removed from the highly-charged political climate of the rest of the world, to living in cold, conservative, election-obsessed Cape Cod. The Cape is a beautiful place in the fall, but there is something unpleasantly morbid about the chill in the air and the constant scrape-y rustle of dead leaves at all hours of the day and night. George Bush’s re-election, though it was a marginal victory, made me want to move again, out of the country this time, rather than just off the continent.
There are probably many Democrats who also remember the election before that, Bush v. Gore, as a horrifying, wrenching spectacle of agony and incompetence. In all honesty, at the time of that election I was a jubilant 21-year-old college student who worried more about my crushes than the candidates. Also, in those days we didn’t know all that much about George Bush’s leadership skills, or lack thereof. He was a question mark in a cowboy hat, a jaunty, shoot from the hip kind of guy who might be fun to have a beer with. And Al Gore was so stiff and robotic. For those of us who missed Clinton, he was no Bill Clinton. Why not take a chance on this fun-loving Texan? I recall reading more than one New York Times editorial (whose authors likely lived to rue the days they editorialized) about how there was something strangely seductive about the idea of George W. Bush as our swaggering President. Really, what could be the harm?
By 2004, we knew what the harm could be, and had been, and would continue to be. So when W was re-elected, I began to think that Presidential Elections were destined to be staggeringly disappointing events for me. My candidate had lost in 2000. And had been defeated in 2004. By 2008 I was on eggshells. I didn’t want to think too much about the outcome either way. I supported Obama, I donated to Obama, I made phone calls on his behalf, I engaged in vigorous debate with McCain supporters, I hated on Sarah Palin with all my shriveled, twisted heart, but through it all I tried to quiet the voices in my head that whispered, ‘you are getting your hopes up for nothing.’ So I was not counting on victory for Obama. I hadn’t let myself seriously consider the idea of his presidency right up until Tuesday evening.
So when he won, and I cried, and watched everyone on TV cry, and called my parents and cried, and listened to the news the next day and cried, I think part of what I was crying for was the realization of how much faith I had lost in my country. I hadn’t even realized how hopeless I had felt about America, until I was suddenly able to begin to hope again.
Even still, watching the President-Elect give his victory speech, I felt a twinge of fear. This new President already has so many Americans counting on him to do the right thing and make life better for them. Is that something that any one person has the power to do? Are the standards we have set for him even within the realm of possibility for anyone to live up to?
It is scary, to have this much hope now. But I guess I am learning that it is better than the shame and despair I have lived with since 2001. Nothing is scarier than absence of hope.
I Heard Tell 