Month: July 2012
The Foster Chronicles: Tulip, Week 19
Day 1
Zero comments on the last Tulip post. I get on Facebook, which I really shouldn’t do when I’m feeling stabby, and post:
Fourteen out of 15 commenters say they do read these posts. I start another edition of the Foster Chronicles. But it’s mostly because I can’t help myself.
Day 2
Day 3
Late night playdate with Mini-Poodle*!
(I only catch the tail end of it.)
Day 4
I let Tulip out in the morning, as usual. When I go outside later, I find a puddle on the deck. Did it rain? I look around. No. No rain. Hm.
Day 5
Another puddle on the deck after letting Tulip out. I think she’s picked up a bad habit from Mini-Poodle.
Day 6
Saturday morning. Tulip wants to go out, so I let her and then flop back onto my bed. When I stumble outside with her breakfast later, I find that the gate to the yard had swung closed during the storm in the night so she’s been trapped on the deck for 45 minutes. Puddle of pee. Aaaaaaaaand pile of crap. On the deck.
Not her fault.
Day 7
I take Tulip into the yard and make sure she pees out there, then I head inside to get her breakfast. When I walk out with the bowl, I find a perfect poop pile right in front of the rocking chairs.
Probably not her fault, but having a hard time feeling like it’s mine.
*I should probably note at this point that Mini-Poodle is not actually a poodle. He’s probably a bichon frisé. But I’ve been calling him Mini-Poodle for so long now, it seems dumb to stop.
Ducks, But Water
My lack of talent in the kitchen extends beyond the stovetop, over the counter, all the way to the coffee machine. I make coffee that is not good.
At work we have
Makes a single cup of perfect coffee at a time. I used to use it now and again, in a pinch, but in the last week, the Keurig and I have become besties. (For some reason, I’ve been acting like a child and refusing to get in bed at a reasonable hour, which has made over-caffeination a necessity.)
And now I waaaaaaaaaant one.
There’s even
Back in January, some girlfriends and I took a road trip up to my childhood home, and we were watching Violet and Redford frolic along the creek. (Stay with me; I’m going to bring it back around to coffee.) When a raft of ducks came around the bend into view, Violet made a beeline at them, charging without a moment’s hesitation into the water. “DUCKS!”
Redford ran at the water fowl, but when his toesies got wet, he backed out and sprinted, frustrated, back and forth along the bank. He always does that. Wants to get at them varmints so bad, but does not enjoy getting wet. I can’t remember who it was, but one of us said, “DUCKS!… but water.” And now we use that phrase when we want something real, real bad, but there’s another thing deterring us.
So, DUCKS!
That is, KEURIG YUMMY PERFECT COFFEE! But all that plastic.
I consider myself a pretty ecologically conscious person. I recycle everything I’m allowed to. I drive a fuel-efficient car. I catch the first gallon of cold water from the shower in a pitcher to water my plants and fill the dogs’ bowls. If it’s yellow, I let it mellow.
But every time you use a “K cup”, you stab Mother Earth in the ovaries.
And I just don’t know if I can be that guy.
Now is when some of you point out that they make
But you’re forgetting that I HAVE A PRETERNATURAL ABILITY TO FUCK UP ALL THINGS KITCHEN-RELATED. That reusable filter requires filling, and despite the fact that I have a brain and measuring spoons, I promise, I WILL FUCK IT UP.
Those K cups are so very, very delicious and perfect.
Ducks, but water.
Just Now Realizing How Funny This Conversation from a Few Days Ago Was
Me: The problem is, when you buy a 3-pack of underpants—
My sister-wife: STOP. The problem IS that you buy your underwear in 3-packs. You’re an adult.
The Foster Chronicles: Tulip, Week 18
Who’s Tulip? Start here.
Day 1
Day 2
Friends Craig and Michelle come over, and they bring
That’s their 5-month-old pit bull foster, Malcolm. Nom nom, want to put him in my mouf.
I put Tulip on the leash and let them interact. He’s a little scared but waggy. Tulip can’t feel her legs she’s so excited. She wants to love him and hug him and wrestle with him and love him. At one point, he tells her he’s a little overwhelmed, but she just doesn’t get it and keeps loving him, and I have to pull her off.
Day 3
After work, I put Tulip outside for a little while and sit on the couch to read my book. Violet comes in
And I tear up because I’m realizing it’s been so long since I’ve hung out with my own dogs. Most of the time, I figure Redford and Violet have each other, so I love on Tulip, but I know my dogs miss me.
This is hard.
Day 4
Hey, guess who comes by and
In fact, Jorge and his sons come looking for him at this point, and they tell me his name’s Jumpy.
I think I have to keep calling him Mini-Poodle though.
Day 5
Lately, we’ve been waiting until 9:30pm to walk. It’s still 94 degrees. I’m drenched, and the dogs are parched. As much as I love Durham, there are three months during which I despise walking my dogs.
Day 6
I stay out too late trying to make good on a new goal. (Chill out, Margo; I don’t succeed.) Tulip’s been in the kennel for hours, so I bring her and the dog bed into my bedroom for the night and say a little prayer that she won’t be up and at ’em early.
Day 7
She lets me sleep until 9:00! Good dog, Tulip.
We go to an adoption event in Chapel Hill in the afternoon. Tulip is really excited to see two other fosters. She wants to love them and hug them and wrestle with them and love them.
But when she’s not distracted, she lunges at the other dogs and makes monkey noises. A couple times we have to take a breather outside.
She does have a couple of brief, positive interactions with one of the other fosters, a notoriously chill dog. So there’s that.
People stop by and scratch her head and say things like, “She’s so cute; I wish my apartment weren’t so small,” and, “If I didn’t already have two…”
No prospects.
Protected: Get-to-Know-You Letters
Protected: The Lesbian Your Mother Warned You About
The Cult
Sometimes people call CrossFit a cult. That’s pretty dumb. I want to say, “Do you know what the definition of cult is?” I guess when people join a group and use a certain lingo or jargon, it has the audacity to make other people uncomfortable, and all of a sudden, it’s a cult.
It’s the jargon. People don’t like jargon. If CrossFitters talk about WODs and AMRAPs and metcons—Well, I don’t understand! Gack! It must be a cult!
Eleven years ago, I took this seminar called the Landmark Forum. If you look online, you’ll find their website, which is pretty cheesy—lots of phrases like “extraordinary life” and “design your future”—and other websites full of bloviating and the cyber-equivalent of people getting red-faced and throwing their hands in the air. Negative stuff.
I personally found the Landmark Forum both eye-rollingly self-helpy… and extremely helpy for myself. Swear to god, I use what I learned that weekend pretty much every day of my life.
But, in essence, the structure of the seminar is to call people on their bullshit six ways from Sunday, and people don’t like that. We like to wallow in our bullshit until we can’t smell it anymore, and then just call it ‘reality’. (Don’t get me wrong: I still have bullshit, but I can often spot it and work through it in a shorter amount of time than I used to.)
Anyway, you’ll see it called a cult, which, again, is super dumb because the corporation (yes, it’s a business—they make that pretty goddamn clear) that puts on the Landmark Forum is like: Here’s our course, and here’s how much it costs, and we have other courses you can take if you like that one. And here’s how much they cost.
As with CrossFit, if someone does the Landmark Forum and comes out talking about rackets or enrollment conversations or “empty and meaningless”, well, he must be getting brainwashed.
But every organization uses jargon. Every organization has vocabulary specific to the industry and acronyms that save time.
At my place of business, we talk about AYP, Gifted Service Provision, and Site-based. You non-teachers tell me what any of that means without looking it up. Kids have 504s, IEPs, and PEPs; they’re labeled EC, AIG, AU, ADD, ODD, and OLT (all right, that last one just means Obnoxious Little Turd).
I bet I wouldn’t understand half the vocabulary my friend, a doctor, uses with her colleagues in a given day. Or you with yours because you’re a lawyer and, to me, tort reform is what I’ve had to do to my fruit dessert recipe since going gluten-free.
Or because you’re an IT guy, and even though my brother-in-law has explained it a million times, I just don’t understand how fax machines work. You put a picture in a phone, and it breaks into ones and zeros and gets reconstituted in another phone two thousand miles away?!
No.
Not possible.
Elves.
Even outside the workplace, organizations use their own lingo. I bet your church does, and your family. There are things in the Scott family lexicon that an outsider would never understand. Tell me, what are ‘wooly bears’? What is something that might be ‘wapsed’, and where might it be ‘wapsed’?
And stuff you might understand, but if you didn’t know us, it’s possible you’d think we were mentally impaired. Like, we say we love our chother because when my sister was little, that’s what she said instead of ‘each other’. If two people speak the same words simultaneously, my siblings and I will certainly say, in a deep southern drawl, “Y’all must have ESPN!” because Mrs. Harris, our sophomore high school English teacher, seriously didn’t know the difference between extra-sensory perception and the highest-rated American TV sports network.
One of my groups of friends has a whole language we call The Worst. We say things like “also too”, use a lot of flat vowels, and waggle our fingers at the sky while proclaiming, “Their body temperature is quite low.” Because all that stuff means something to us.
But we have no charismatic leader; nobody’s driving a wedge between us and our families; we’re not forking over our life savings to the organization; and we certainly don’t think our bat-shit way is the only path to salvation.
So, can we cool it on calling groups cults?
Except Scientology. That shit is a cult.
P.S. If you’re curious, wooly bears are fuzzy footie pajamas that zip from ankle to neck, and something that might be wapsed is a wet towel. Where? On your bedroom floor.
And you’ll get in trouble for that.
The Foster Chronicles: Tulip, Week 17
Don’t know who Tulip is? Start here.
Day 1
MI
NI-
POO
DLE
for breakfast playdate!!!
(He pisses—no joke—eleven times in my yard. And that’s only the ones I see. I wonder if it drives Redford crazy when he goes out there and finds this fucking Napoleon has planted his tiny flag all over Redford’s territory.)
As I’m walking out for work, dude drives up in a pick-up asking if I’ve seen his little white dog, and I let him know Mini-Poodle just left. We chat for a minute. His name’s Jorge. I tell him how well my dogs get along with his. He says, “I know, I couldn’t believe it the first time I saw it happen, I was like, ‘Oh my gahd, those are big dogs!'” He apologizes for Mini-Poodle’s trespasses. I tell him not to worry about it. Oh, how my attitude has changed about that little muppet.
Day 2
Gark! So many corrections when we walk! In a 25-minute loop, I correct Violet a dozen times, Redford only twice, and Tulip an average of every sixth step. Not joking. So frustrating. She’s learned other things. Why can’t she learn this?
Probably because I stopped walking in circles. I’m too tired. I’m tired, and I’m in that feel-bad-don’t-sleep-feel-bad cycle, and I’ve never been less inspired to start a new school year, and I don’t want to walk in fucking circles.
I go to the gym. None of my friends are there. Everything ass to knee is still burny, or as we say, Meredith Baxter Burny, from too many back squats on Saturday. And for the first time ever, I turn around and walk out.
Day 3
I’m at work for a long time, so when I get home, we do the 2.5-mile loop which we haven’t done in weeks. Twice the walk, twice the corrections. Tulip’s real bad at this.
Day 4
I keep taking Tulip into the yard on-leash to try to get the dogs to interact, but Redford and Violet are always so hot after our walks that they just stand on the deck waiting to go into the air conditioning.
Day 5
I decide to try the reintroduction before our walk. Redford runs laps around the shed. Tulip really wants to join him. At one point, Tulip approaches Violet, and I realize I’m too terrified. This is never going to happen.
Tulip and I walk circles in the driveway. She actually does pretty well and sits when I tell her to.
Day 6
To raise awareness of Breed-specific Legislation and the harm that it can do, CCB posts on Facebook pictures of all the adopt-a-bulls with the caption “I am Lennox. End BSL.”
A couple people comment on the photo of Tulip that they want to adopt her. I don’t get my hopes up because people say stuff like that all the time. Except that I do get my hopes up. Kind of a lot.
Day 7
We go to Auntie Wa’s house for dinner, and Tulip does this for about 45 minutes:
When we get in the car, she does this all the way home:
We need to go to Auntie Wa’s more often.
Neither of the people who commented on her photo follow up about adoption.