Why?
Well, to be honest, for much the same reason that I don't much like small children in general: They run you ragged with their endless energy and boundless enthusiasm, they never listen to you for more than a minute at a time, they're noisy, they always smell a little funny, there's always something disgusting coming out of one orifice or another, and they have no respect for boundaries of any sort.
I don't blame them for it, any more than I blame the kids. That's just how they are. But just because it's not their fault doesn't make them any more pleasant for me to be around them. And it doesn't hold true for all dogs (or all kids), as I said. The dog Matt grew up with, Abby, is a real sweetheart, for example - quiet, well-behaved, well-groomed, and fairly calm most of the time. And the guy I dated in high school had a dog who was practically a cat. (And a cat who was practically a dog, but that's a story for another day.)
The people who live next door to us have a dog named Princess. She's a small-to-medium-sized dog, and she's always getting out. We had a problem a few months ago where she'd apparently decided that our front porch was the place to be, and she would come up and peer in the windows, causing the cat to have conniptions. She's very skittish, though, so all it takes for us to run her off is to walk outside and try to talk to her. Even when we're not trying to run her off, she keeps her distance.
The people who live on the other side of our next-door neighbor have a couple of dogs. I don't know what kind of dogs they are, to be honest - my guess would be black labs. The guy who lives there trains them, I think. They also have a small child, a girl between the ages of three and five. (I'm terrible at guessing children's ages. I couldn't even do it when I was a child.) Anyway, yesterday I just happened to be looking out the window when I saw the little girl open the door to come outside, then turn in the doorway to say something to someone inside. The dogs, of course, broke for it.
The girl had no hope of restraining them, of course. Their master can barely restrain them - I've watched. She stood on the steps for a minute while the dogs ran around their yard peeing on various things and yelled at them. I could hear her through the window. "Hey! Come back here! Come here!" In her small, high-pitched voice, it was sortof funny. The dogs are young and energetic and she is not the leader of their pack.
This ceased to amuse, however, when they decided that they'd peed on everything in their yard, and headed into our next-door neighbor's yard, and then into mine. Naturally, they headed straight for my mulch beds. I more or less teleported outside (which is to say, I don't remember walking to the door and opening it) and chased them off, but not before they'd kicked up a fair amount of the mulch just by walking on it and taken a dump on my flowers.
About the time I'd convinced them I meant business and they'd headed back towards home, the girl's mother came out and called them in. She apologized to me, and to be polite, and because I knew it was a mistake, I waved it off while I re-packed the mulch as best as I could.
So far, the dogs in this neighborhood are not earning any points with me.
Word of the Day: cursory - hasty; rapidly and superficially performed or produced
I do a lot of things in a cursory manner. Such is life; you have to pick your battles, and decide which things are worth a lot of attention, and which ones can be glossed over.
Most of the time, I give only cursory attention to making dinner. Meat, starch, vegetable. My measurements are approximate, I substitute ingredients to make things easier, and I'm not especially concerned with presentation.
My grooming is somewhat sketchy, as well. As long as I'm clean and my hair isn't in tangles, then I'm fine. That's starting to change, lately - I've started using lotions as my skin dries out, acquired an interest in attractive clothes and makeup and accessories. But to be honest, I'd still rather sleep an extra five minutes in the morning than use that time to make myself more attractive for co-workers who couldn't care less.
The detail in my checkbook is fairly cursory lately, too, though that's something I should work changing. I've gotten lazy, and sooner or later it's going to get me into more trouble than a few dollars in late fees. If I don't start taking care of my financial matters promptly, I'm going to bounce a check.
Afternoon update: I have the worst habit of falling in love with fictional people. It doesn't happen very often, but when it does, it hits me hard. My junior and senior years at William and Mary I was playing a character on the original incarnation of the MeadeHall, named S'ayad'i. S'ay was a HallMaster with a tragic past that was supposed to discourage the sortof romancing that was rampant on the 'Hall at that time.
It didn't work. Chris Herr played a character by the name of Felis, who fell in love with S'ayad'i and set about winning her. In the process (which because of the tragic past was long and involved and excessively melodramatic and sappy) I fell in love, just a little bit, with Felis.
Not with Chris. I had no problem separating Chris from Felis. I liked Chris - he was a fun to hang out with - but I wasn't interested in him "that way." But at the height of Felis and S'ayad'i's courtship, I was actually having dreams about Felis.
In my second year at VA Tech, I discovered the BBS show Red Dwarf. It was funny, in a silly British kind of way, and after a year and a half of watching my thirty-some movies over and over again, it gave me something new to watch. Beyond that, it was inexpensive to rent (the local video store's promotion was 5 videos for 5 days for 5 dollars for movies that weren't new) - a critical element on my graduate school salary.
I watched those tapes over and over and over again. And after about a month, I realized that I'd done the absolutely unthinkable - I'd fallen in love with Arnold, the character whose purpose on the show was to be a pathetic loser and resident asshole. I wrote a fan-fic in which I joined the crew and "redeemed" him. (Thank all the gods, I deleted the story shortly afterwards. It was awful.) But again, there was no confusion - I hadn't developed a crush on Chris Barrie, the actor who plays Arnold on the show. The crush was very definitely, very specifically, on Arnold Rimmer.
And now it's happening again. I'm spending entirely too much time dwelling on the situation on the MeadeHall between Zoya and Marten. I've written two brief stories highlighting possible events between them. For one of them, I wrote three separate endings, depending on how things turn out. All of it is trite drivel. I have no intentions of ever letting anyone else read it.
And the fixation has nothing to do with Braz. Braz is a good friend, but I can't even imagine being romantically involved with him. (Which is good, since we're both happily married and I like his wife a lot.)
I'm not the only one who does this sort of thing. A mutual friend of mine and Chris' somehow found out his password to the system which hosted the MeadeHall at the time, and confided to me that it was s'ayad'i. Karen was forever in love with movie characters, to the point that we named the condition after her - "Ostertag Syndrome."
Hmm. Maybe it's just that about every two years, I need to be swamped in slightly melodramatic romance, and if there isn't anything in my life to meet the requirement, my brain invents something. Let's see...
- 1992 - A crush on Felis, a fictional character from the MeadeHall.
- 1994 - A crush on Arnold Rimmer, a fictional character from Red Dwarf.
- 1996 - I started dating Matt, which was (to say the least) extrememly emotionally intense.
- 1998 - Matt and I got married, obviously an intense event.
- 2000 - A crush on Marten, a fictional character from the MeadeHall.
Anyway, that's enough slightly embarassing disclosure for now. You can thank Johanna of Irregular Ramblings for convincing me to actually post this instead of just tossing it after sharing with me her crushes on Lazarus Long and James Bond...
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