DW’s foster situation is not working out. Apparently, he’s shown some “barrier aggression”. “What does that mean? Fence? Crate?” I asked my girl inside.
“Yes, something like that, but they didn’t tell me exactly what,” she told me. He stayed in the crate at my house just fine. I wonder what happened. Can spending a couple weeks in a cage at the shelter made a dog squirrelly?
Also, he has heartworm. Treatable, but expensive.
So many strikes. I hope it’s not too many to get him adopted, but I have a bad feeling that it is.
Last week, I showed all my sixth graders Dr. Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. We discussed its historical context and the impact it had on the Civil Rights Movement in this country. I gave them the assignment to write their own “Dream Statements”, a few of which were chosen to be read at our awards ceremony for last quarter. Some of the kids wrote deep and moving pieces about domestic tranquility and global change. Some of them wrote the following, which are profound in their own way. [Vocabulary words are in all-caps. I didn’t tell them to include them, but I’m glad they did. Though I need to review a little bit with Tobias.]
Cayla: I have a dream for the world to meet people not judge a color by it’s book.
Bongani: I wish I could meet Obama not with his bodyguard like I really want to touch with the bodyguard touch me or stuff. [My family] will like nobody to get sick no more. We will except for me no more baby.
Hillary: …without bullys and fighting i wouldn’t be all shy. This would allow more HARMONIOUS work to happen! It would make me ECSTATIC!
Callie: As a country we need to decrease our death average. I don’t necessarily want everyone to have peace with each other because of course we’d all collapse but at least of whos life your taking away, or who your harming. Think about all the pros and cons, or just dont do it.
Layla: My biggest dream is there to be less crazy people, and what I mean by that is teens and school shootings, parents hanging and raping and droping babys off of briges.
Gabby: I do not be jugged by my hair.
Brandon: …in my dream, everybody puts a weapon into a spaceship and it goes toward the sun, and it just disintegrates because it gets so hot.
Nelson: Since I started 6 grade I want to be somewhere around Americas crime rates. Just something that will help the nation incredibly…I want them to decrease not increase. Less people are getting kilt, less drugs sneaked around in our nation.
Siarra: I dream too, that my New born nethew is going to grow up healthy, safe, and Atheletic.
Jay: I will have enoght money to buy a ferreri. but befor that happens I half to go to a good collidg.
Kalim: When I grow up I want to be a good Basketball player because you can Learn a Lot from Like Hit three Point, Layup and Free thorw I aslo want to Past collge so I can g a Degree
Tobias: I have a dream that I am very successful in life. Three of those things are get into a good college and be SCHOLAR[L]Y. Also [for my family to] follow there dreams and be successful and have a AMIABLE life.
Jeremiah: I Have a other dream that people [don’t] call me mexican when Im not…I want my family to stop getting in my bisness my love bisness too.
My girl inside has been sending me reports about DW. First thing, she told the front desk people and the vet techs at the shelter to keep an eye on him because he was special, and they were like, “Everyone says that about every dog.”
They put him in a cage for the requisite five days to give the owner a chance to claim him and then spent more than a week doing tests of various sorts: heartworm, temperament, whatnot.
Another friend of mine who has been considering adopting a dog went in to see him earlier this week. He wasn’t done with all his tests at that point, so he couldn’t play, but she saw how cute and lovey he was. Her concern: “I’m not sure his head will fit through all the doors at my house.”
On Thursday, APS of Durham dubbed him Grayson—come on, he’s not an English lord, for Christ’s sake—but whatever, they posted him on the Adoptable Dogs page! Which I may or may not have visited every other hour.
Then last night he was gone. I looked and looked, but I couldn’t find him. At shelters, Friday is often kill day. I frantically emailed my friend: Where did he go?
She said she didn’t know but got on the horn this morning to find out.
What’s Making Me Happy: One of those vet techs found my little guy irresistible and pulled him from the shelter to foster him until he gets a fur-ever home.
The fortune-cookie fortune that rides around in my wallet, occluding my face on my driver’s license photo, says, “Look for the dream that keeps coming back. It is your destiny.” I think I put it there two years ago.
The Independent Weekly ran this horoscope for me a while back:
Even if you’re not sick, you need some medicine. What kind of medicine? The kind that can transform what’s pretty good about your life into something that’s really great; the kind that will super-animate your merely average efforts and blast you free of any lackadaisical attitudes you’ve come to accept as reasonable. This medicine won’t come in the form of a pill or a potion, but rather will be produced by your own body if and when you slip away from your comfort zone and go out to play in the frontier. Be your own doctor, Libra. Break your own trance. Crack your own code. Escape your own mind games.
It’s been on my fridge since May 2008. I moved last year; it must’ve come with me from Hillsborough. I don’t know—sometimes these newsprint divinations, these cookie runes, they speak to me, and I just hang on to them.
As I was tidying up the other day, I found a fortune on a very dusty dresser that said, “You will be lucky in love.”
And I scoffed. I did.
I said something like, “Psh.”
Being 36 and single in this society makes one feel decidedly unlucky in love.
But I really am trying to be more thankful these days, so I thought, OK, what if I take romantic love out of the picture? If I take romantic love out of the picture, I’m a leprechaun-rabbit’s-foot-four-leaf-clover-heads-up-penny in love.
See, there’s my family: my dad, who is my greatest advocate (and provides much amusement); my mom, the offerer of sage advice, even if she doesn’t remember giving it; my sister/best friend; my brother-in-law, of the Magic Lawnmower Sauce and other timely rescues; my brother, the shifter of paradigms; my sister-in-law, an unsuspecting classmate at Carolina who I badgered for seven years to marry my brother before she finally gave up and did (I must tell that story sometime); and their progeny, including a nephew I got for Christmas! (When I told a co-worker that, he did a double-take. He thought I said I got an Eff You for Christmas.)
And then my friends, who make every day awesome, who inspire me and make me laugh, who know better than me, who let me stay at their houses even though I can be a disaster of a house-guest, who do silly things with me, who like me despite my being self-absorbed, impatient, and mean-spirited. …I could link/name-check all day. If I didn’t link to you, I’m thinking of you, and if I haven’t yet written about you, there’s a very good chance I just haven’t figured out how to express how dope I think you are. Man, I love you fuckers.
And of course, two of my very favorite people, Violet and Redford, who I love so much it sometimes startles me.
I’m pretty sure all these people and dogs love me back in equal measure, but even if that ain’t the case, I suppose I’m lucky in love regardless.
I sometimes listen to NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast, and the panel ends the show each week with a round of What’s Making Us Happy. As you can probably intuit from the title, they go around the table and name a thing or two (usually a TV show or concert tour or something) that’s giving their lives a little bit of joy. I’ve had some anxiety and depression and overwhelm in the last week (ran out of one of my amino acids; also, I prefer not working to working, but my job preferred that I go back to work), so I thought I’d try to psych myself out of it by accentuating the positive. Who knows? This might become a regular feature.
To wit, my friend invited me to go shopping (thanks, Michelle!), and I have worn actual clothes when I wanted to wear actual sweats several times. I even took two pairs of pants to a tailor to get them hemmed. That’s, like, some Carrie Bradshaw stuff.
I’ve flossed a time or two and made my bed daily.
I’ve engaged in no Facebook debates. Indeed, I’ve expressed nary a political leaning nor a religious dubiety, even though I wanted to post this cartoon real bad when I saw it:
I repeated things to myself that I said to the beasts (even though it feels embarrassing to say, “I love you, Violet… I also love myself,” even when alone in my house).
I went on a first date with a man and scheduled another with a different man, though the latter had to be postponed. Due to a sick kid. I’m probably going to be a stepmom.
Most importantly, I very much reduced my intake of refined sugar. I had some chocolate mousse on Tuesday and Thursday evenings and a piece of cake and two cookies on Saturday. I didn’t wait until after 7:00pm that day, though. But considering that I got the piece of cake at noon and waited until 4:53 to eat it, I’m calling it a victory. In addition, Sunday included French toast with syrup, which kind of fits in the dessert category, but, really, what’s a brunch buffet without the French toast course?
(Again, this might sound like a lot of sugar to you, but I assure you, for me, it’s a smidgeon.)
Naturally, the glutenful weekend, together with my job preferring that I get up at the ludicrous hour of 6:00am, has made me one sleepy girl today. But that’s not what we were talking about. We were talking about What’s Making Me Happy.
You know, I was born here. In North Cackalacky. I was born here and raised here. My mailing address was a rural route and box number (until high school when they changed it all for 911 purposes…and even then it became Old Highway 421—is there a redder-neck-sounding road?). I went to Carolina. I hated Dook with an appropriate passion.
But I always felt a little like a fraud. My parents were Yankees. I had been to Bulgaria by the time I was six. My family was not Southern Baptist. I’ve still never shot a gun.
So I’m pleased to tell you, I cooked collard greens in pork fat for breakfast this morning.
On Saturday, a dog went missing. This wasn’t the dog of a friend of mine. It was the dog of friends of a friend of mine. I had hung out a few times with the owners and with Meatball, their big, sweet, nervous boy.
Meatball wouldn’t let strangers touch him. He was so scared of them. The one time I went to his house—the first time I met him—I fell in love with him, naturally, and spent 45 minutes on the kitchen floor, inching myself closer, not looking him in the eye. Eventually, he let me stroke his chest, and I just stayed there on the tile, petting him, for the rest of the party.
My friend sent me a text saying he was missing on Saturday. I don’t know how it happened. On Sunday night, I posted on Facebook for Durhamites to keep an eye out for him, and a friend that I was IMing with said somebody else had just posted that he was hit by a car.
And I fucking fell apart. I sat down on the couch between Violet and Redford and just sobbed. I thought about how scared he must have been when he was lost and how sad his owners must be, and I cried and cried.
I don’t know if this is normal. I don’t know if normal people get this torn up about other people’s dogs.
I guess that doesn’t matter. He’s dead, and I’m sad.
A couple months ago, I got a bee in my bonnet about putting a fire pit in my yard. Whenever I get excited about a project, I have to say I’m going to do it five or six times before I actually do it. So I did that. I’d say, “I’m thinking about building a fire pit,” and my friends would say, “Yeah! Do it!” and a few weeks later, I’d say, “I’m thinking about building a fire pit.”
Ten days ago, I decided I would have some folks over for New Year’s Eve, but my house is really small, and it was going to be too cold for the deck. So I built a fire pit. Impending events are very motivating to me.
I got online and checked out some plans and videos. I thought maybe I’d make it flush with the ground—I just liked that aesthetic—but when I asked for advice, one of my friends said to build a little wall around it so people would have a place to put their feet. That’s what I planned.
I bought a ton of Appalachian river stone from the Rock Shop. (My knight-in-law delivered it to my house in his truck.)
On Thursday
I made a hole.
While I was digging, a guy driving by slowed down.
Him: You diggin a well?
Me: Fire pit.
Him: You doin it yourself?
Me: (flinging dirt into wheelbarrow) Yep.
Him: You all right.
The soil in my yard is hard-as-shit red clay. I didn’t want to end up installing an ersatz vase that would hold rain and become a mosquito hot spot, so for drainage
I dumped in graveland sandand then set in two layers of river stone and sand.
Another neighbor, Albert, who lives across the street with his 98-year-old mother and has about six teeth altogether in his head, came over.
Albert: You plantin a tree?
Me: Nope. Making a fire pit.
Albert: You gon have somebody do it for ya?
Me: …I’m doing it myself.
Albert: How you know to do it?
Me: I just got on the internet and looked at some plans.
Albert: Innernet. I don believe in the innernet.
Me: …
Albert: That innernet datin done me wrong.
I thought about saying, “Me too, Albert. ME TOO.” But I just wanted him to go away so I could get back to work, and I’ve already dealt with one neighbor of an inappropriate age and tooth-count asking me out and sending me Valentines(!), so I didn’t say anything and he wandered away.
The next day, I mixed 80 pounds of concrete in my wheelbarrow and started ringing the pit with stones. Albert came back.
Albert: I wanna be invited to your first barbeque.
Me: It’s not that kind of fire pit. It’s just going to be to sit around.
Albert: Oh. You jus gon sit around it?
Me: Mm-hm.
Albert: Jus to sit around.
Me: Yep.
Albert: Fire pit.
Me: Fire pit.
Albert: I have confidence in you.
Me: Thanks.
My knight-in-law came back with a couple of his trusty squires. One of them spent a lot of time trying to break the rocks by throwing them onto the other rocks and losing Lego pieces in my yard; the other was quite helpful with sorting the rocks by size and shape.
I kept laying in the rocks. When I got to the top of the hole, my aching back and low blood sugar won over and I was like, screw the wall, I’m done. The knight-in-law took off the top layer of grass and soil, and
we puzzled in a patio-lip-kind-of-thing and called it a day.
Third day, I mixed up another bag of concrete, cemented in the lip, and covered it with sand. Hello again, Albert.
Albert: You done a hellified job.
Me: Thanks.
Albert: How you gon cook the meat?
Me: …Not planning to cook on it. Just going to make a fire.
Albert: In your fire pit.
Me: In my fire pit.
And guess what! That night,
I made a fire in my fire pit!Here's one with the flash on.Here's one the day after. My fire pit was not being particularly photogenic that day. Believe me, it's beautiful.
Some of the stones around the top are loose because people stepped on them and I probably didn’t use enough concrete and WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME? I’M NOT A MASON. And anthropologists in the future will almost certainly look at it and say, “Based on the engineering, we estimate this malaria bowl was made by Homo ergasters.”
But it’s mine. It’s my fire pit. I built it. I done a hellified job.
Also, “hellified”: favorite new word. Thanks, Albert.
In the past, I’ve set the bar low, or as my friend Dan says, “created winnable games”, but I’m going to challenge myself a little bit this year.
1. I will dress better. A few days ago, as I “dressed up” by taking off my navy blue hoodie with paint on it and put on my navy blue hoodie without paint on it, I realized, this has to stop. But it means I’ll have to…go…shopping…I can’t feel my legs…(breathes into paper bag). How am I going to accomplish this resolution when just thinking of trying on clothes sends me into paroxysms? Help, girlfriends. Maybe a standing monthly shopping date?
2. I will continue to floss 2-3 times a week in my car at red lights. I would resolve to floss daily, but after about 18 years of that resolution, it’s smelling a little gamey, and a few times a week is better than nothing. This is not setting the bar low; it’s just knowing thyself. Myself. Thmyself.
3. I will not engage in political or religious debate on Facebook. It makes me not like people who, in person, I really like, and I’m certain the feeling is mutual.
comic from xkcd.com
4. I will make my bed. Life just seems more orderly when my bed is made. To make this easier on thmyself, I turned my bed around, set it at an angle for minimum bed-making gymnastic maneuvering, and bought one of those bed-in-a-bag sets from Bed, Bath, & Beyond. It was $180, marked down to $99, and I had a 20% off coupon, so for 80 bucks, I got a TOTALLY CRAPPY OPPOSITE-OF-FLAME-RETARDANT bed set. Seriously, it might spontaneously combust. It had those anti-theft things on it in the store, so I couldn’t open it and feel how polyester it was. And then, by the time I got it home, I was committed. Anyway, I basically just have to pull up the comforter to make my bed, and that’ll be easy. The 59 decorative kindling pillows that came with it might have to go in a closet.
5. I will reduce my intake of refined sugar. Oh, Jesus. This one makes me jitterier than clothes shopping. Here’s my plan. I can have sugar (and by that, I mean dessert items—I’m not talking about the quarter-teaspoon of sugar I have in my coffee; that stays) after 7:00pm on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. That might seem like a lot to you, but it’s about four days a week fewer than my current intake. We’ll see how this goes. I have no faith in myself on this one.
6. I will talk to myself like I talk to my dogs. Less: “You’re a silly monkey” and “Are you one of the two best dogs in the world?” More: “You’re cute, sweet, friendly, capable, smart, personable, honest, and caring, with leadership qualities.”
7. I will get into a romantic relationship. Jitteriest! How will I do this? I will go on dates. At least one first date a month (unless I find him before December, which will void this contract). That will be twelve possible matches. I’m going to work the Law of Averages.
