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.
Protected: Chuck, Part 4
The Foster Chronicles: Tulip, Week 16
If you’re new to the Foster Chronicles, Tulip’s story starts here.
Day 1
I decide I’m going to do it. I’m going to reintroduce the dogs. We all do the short neighborhood loop (it’s 96 degrees outside). Then I put Violet in the house, let Redford off the leash, and walk Tulip, still tethered, around the yard. Redford saunters in a half-assed way to the middle of the yard but quickly returns to the door and is all, “You know, whatever, but inside is air-conditioned.”
So much for reintroduction.
Day 2
Tulip’s out; Violet and Redford in. My sister comes to visit with her munchkins for a minute. When we go outside, hey, look! It’s mini-poodle! I’m supposed to take pictures and call Animal Control because that family has been warned, so next up is a fine for not containing their dog. But Tulip’s cool with him, and I can’t bring myself to do it.
Naturally, mini-poodle bolts the moment he sees me, but Tulip comes in panting, so they must’ve been frolicking. Or maybe he was making her feel like a natural woman. I don’t know.
Day 3
I keep all the dogs inside for most of the day because
(CCB, I’m a great copy editor! Call me!)
But in the evening, we all need to get our wiggles out—the dogs because they’ve been inside and me because I performed several acts of bravery during the day. (One of them involved a machete.)
We’re walking around the block when a dog whose owner had it off-leash sprints toward us. This will not go well. I call, “Could you call off your dog please?” But the dog does not follow the owner’s commands and runs circles around us. I’m terrified Tulip will flip out, but instead it’s Redford, who does not like to be run at when he’s on the leash, who loses his shit. Of course I have a tight grip on him. He can’t get at the instigator. So he redirects on Violet, and she’s all, “WHAT THE EFF YO?”
Meanwhile, this woman and her dog are playing Duck, Duck, Goose around us, and as if I weren’t sweaty enough already, I’m now drenched. Eventually, I walk far enough away, and the other owner chases her dog back to the yard. The dogs recover in about four seconds. Me, takes a little longer.
The woman later apologizes on the neighborhood listserv.
Day 4
We do a short walk with my neighbor/friend. In this heat, 25 minutes lays the dogs out for a good four hours.
Day 5
Little bit longer walk. So many corrections. I haven’t walked in circles with her forever. There’s my trouble, probably.
Day 6
Tulip and I head to Phydeaux Raleigh for another adoption event. I’m crossing my fingers this goes better than last time.
It’s 104 degrees, so I’m glad to see they’ve decided to set up the table in the store, but another rescue organization has already occupied the space just inside the doors, so we’re kinda smooshed off into a corner out of the line of traffic.
Even worse, the first thing people see when they walk in
Wait, does that look like a puppy? No, no, that’s not a puppy. That’s
Sorry, older dogs. No snugs for you.
The other group leaves about 2:15, and we shift over to the prime real estate, but by then the foot traffic has slowed down. A few people saunter by and dole out a head-scratch now and again. Nobody’s interested in adopting Tulip or the other bullies though.
:(
When I get home, I put an ad on Craig’s List, which immediately gets flagged and removed. I don’t know why because I read the guidelines and I hadn’t broken any of them. So I post another one. Hopefully it’ll stay up.
Day 7
I wake up to two responses from my online ad. Both are spam.
Protected: Chuck, Part 3
Yo Soy El Machete
I needed to borrow my sister’s truck to help a friend transport a grill, so I headed up to her place on 4th of July morning and found Wa, brow knitted, picking up yard waste. A few minutes prior, she told me, she had startled a copperhead who was resting underneath a bush, and it had slithered its way across the yard. And now she couldn’t find it.
And I don’t exactly want to French kiss snakes, but my sister— You know how we all have a thing? Snakes are her thing. Last year, a black snake got into her house, and we agreed she pretty much had PTSD for months afterward.
Now, another snake. She called my brother-in-law who was an hour away with the kids, and he reminded her of the machete in the shed, which she fetched. Then she tiptoed around the perimeter of the yard until she called to me that she had found the snake again.
“Right there,” she said, pointing.
I looked. “Right where?” I said.
“Right there, under the fence.”
I moved closer. “I can’t see it,” I said.
“Under the slat with the hole in it.” I squinted. I turned my head. I leaned in. Oh, shit! Right there. If it was a snake, it’d woulda bit me.
As it were.
At first, I was all, Hat tip on your camo, little man. And then I stepped back and was like, why are my knees all gushy?
About then, Wa’s neighbor came over, and we pointed out the viper. Honest, I was kinda hoping he’d jump in and say, “You ladies go put your feet up inside; I’ll handle this varmint.” But he just kept looking at it… and looking at it… and frowning, and I thought, I’ma have to kill this reptile mydamnself.
The animal poked his slithery head out from under the fence, and for a minute, I felt bad for him. He looked kinda skeered. But then I imagined my nieces and nephew, skipping barefoot to the trampoline, and I was all, Oh hell no, you’re gonna die today, little friend.
The neighbor-man put the shovel on one side of the fence and nudged the snake my way. I took a deep breath, lifted the machete, and went all Game of Thrones on his ass (neck).
I wish I could say I got him in one whack, but my hands were shaking and it took two for sure. And then I whacked him again for making my hands shake. Asshole.
Neighbor-man pulled him out from under the fence, laid him on a paving stone, and gave him a chop with the shovel for good measure. Thanks for nothing, neighbor-man.
Naturally, I had to let Facebook know. (Click for bigger.)
Twice.
On that one, my old boyfriend from Mexico was all “Huh?” so then I had to brag in Spanish.
So there you go. One of my friends commented that, with this act, I earned a place on her speed-dial. Another told me he was going to call me Machete from now on.
You know, whatever. No big. I kill víboras cobrizas con un machete. It’s what I do.
*Give or take 2.5 feet.