i *heart* destiny

look, moppets! fate wrote us a love story! i shall relay it to you now, being but her humble servant.

once upon a time, a girl named juniper decided she needed to live all on her own, just like a grown-up. she picked a city and then she picked a neighborhood inside that city, and she went out to look at apartments that she could afford in that neighborhood. she wanted something roomy and clean and well maintained that got lots and lots of sunlight, but most of all she wanted a place where she could have a dog. a good, big, goofy mutt of a dog. of course, juniper, being fairly reasonable and something less than a perfectionist, was prepared to make the most of an apartment that was maybe some of these things, but not necessarily all of them. so she set out, and she looked, and she looked and she looked and she looked, and finally she found a place that was roomy and clean and well maintained and got lots and lots of sunlight

but where, she was told, she could not have a dog. this made juniper very sad. very sad. VERY VERY sad, because she loved this apartment like she had never loved almost any other inanimate object in all her life*, and she knew that while that was important, it wasn't most important, because she would never love any apartment more than her own dog. so she decided to keep on looking. this was a tuesday.

so, that tuesday night juniper looked at more ads and made more phone calls and sent more e-mails, and we aren't talking a handful here. we mean flat-out shitloads. and on wednesday, one person got back to her. this woman had a roomy apartment in a great neighborhood for a very fair rent, and dogs weren't a problem, so could juniper meet her at her office on thursday, and they could go look at it?

well, sure. why not?

so juniper went, and she arrived fifteen minutes early, even, which is no small feat for her, let me tell you. and the lovely, ditzy realtor put juniper inside of her lovely, ditzy car and took her to

the very same apartment she had fallen in love with on tuesday. what do you know.

"i can have a dog here?" juniper asked.
"sure, there are some dogs here now," the realtor said, and took joon out back to look at the german shepherd chasing the standard poodle around the trunk of a tree. "i don't know if they're this tenant's or the upstairs tenant's, but even if they stay it shouldn't be a problem as long as you don't leave your dog out alone."

juniper was lucky to hear this over the chiming of bells and blaring of heavenly trumpets inside of her spinning little skull, and on the way back through the apartment that was hers from the moment she'd laid eyes on it and probably long before that, she began to mentally insert furniture and curtains and plants and cat toys and dog bowls and all sorts of this and that, interrupting the hallucinatory redecoration just long enough to say,

"how much do you need for a deposit?"

moral: know your apartments, realtors—that first guy missed out on a fat fee. and trust your hearts, everybody else, because they tend to know what they're pounding erratically about. we love what we love, and there are no mistakes. we're all gonna get there. ophelia, unlike a lot of us, i'm guessing, is going to get there in crazy phat style. allow me to show you a photograph of the first piece of furniture i've purchased for my gorgeous new apartment, 100% for my baby girl:


that's not ophelia, of course, that's some other cat who isn't nearly so pretty. but that's the tiny sofa, in the exact right shade of blinding hot pink, and while she's yet to choose it over my lap, i'm pretty thrilled about it. i like to think she appreciates the thought, but one never knows with little black cats. you'll have to sit tight until next spring at the earliest for personal info about the dog, as i haven't found it yet, but i'm sure i'll make you sick with gross gushy mommy details in absolutely no time.

i apologize for the ultimate irrelevance, on a grand scale, of this post, but the fact is, the people who are reading at this point are doing it 'cause they think i'm an O.K. gal, and y'all, i imagine, will be pleased to know that i still believe in love.






* she will never love any thing more than her kiwi-green dodge neon. seriously. she'd, like, take bullets for that thing. it's ridiculous.

what have i done?

so, here's something interesting:

if you use google* to search for "malcolm gladwell disqualifying statement," my useless, ever so peripherally related blog is the first result on the first page. the slate entry that i stole the title and idea from? nowhere in sight. seriously, it doesn't even make an appearance in eight pages of links. how unfair! i mean, it isn't as if i weren't doing right by the man—i doubt he's getting so much free, cloyingly adulatory advertising from any other source—and i put a link to the slate piece (which is about ten years old now) right there on the page, but still . . . i feel a little guilty about it.

so, by way of apology, let me lavish some premature (i haven't read the entire piece yet) praise on my most best beloved secret boyfriend for the second installment in his zealous crusade for canine-embracing empathy, "what the dog saw" (the new yorker, may 22, 2006), in which he profiles cesar millan, host of the national geographic channel's the dog whisperer. he's also done a little q & a regarding the piece for the magazine's web site, and clearly i would like you to check that out as well. seeing as how i've already gone to the trouble to provide a link for you, it's probably the least you could do.

anyway, on dogs: they're great. they're sincere and loyal and loving and fuzzy, and i'm convinced that they know more about interpreting human behavior than any actual humans out there. so is malcolm, and he uses millan as a pretty effective vehicle to prove that point. having worked for many, many years now in settings where otherwise flawless dogs are apt to behave like angel-dusted bare-knuckle boxers, i am particularly sensitive to the profound effect that our demeanors can have on animals. it isn't surprising that dogs, especially injured or ill dogs who are aware of their vulnerability, get a little stand-offish when in a strange place and surrounded by strange people, many of whom are attempting to force foreign objects into various parts of the frightened puppies' anatomies or stretch them into unnatural positions. the only thing in the human realm comparable to the experience your dog has at the vet's is being abducted and probed by aliens. it's weird and it's scary, and the reflexive response is to go on guard. what is surprising, to me at least, is how many people become aggressive in response to this defensiveness. it's important to be firm, sure, but these aren't dingos, they're people's pets. you can be firm and reassuring at the same time, and that's what someone's confused and frightened pet would probably most like you to be. you don't need to yell at an animal that's cringing. you just don't. but lots and lots and lots of people will do it anyway, and it makes everything worse. the same principles apply in training. if you and your dog are fighting like, well, like dogs over everything that goes on in your house, your dog will never understand that it needs to listen to you. it'll just continue to compete with you. you have to win your dog's respect, and when's the last time you bowed your head in deference to an angry bully? it ought to be so obvious . . .

but i guess it isn't, and so cesar millan is making a television show about it, and malcolm, because he's a darling, has written a story about it. and he's done it the way he does everything: quietly, analytically, dorkily, and with just the right amount of emotionally motivated emphasis in all the right places. he's a good guy. he's a good writer. better than me, even. so put my honey's work back on top where it belongs.




* no, i will not use "google" as a verb. shame on you.

a mothers' day spam casserole

i edited you a story!

just for you, my incomparably loyal little darlings, i have pasted together this captivating tale, using nothing but the curiously interrelated content of junk e-mails i've received over the past week. i know it's probably not what you were hoping to see today, but it's the best i could do working eleven days in a row and with both of my roommates on a dishwashing strike. i love you desperately, kids, you know i do, and there's so much i want to tell you, but this will have to do for all of us for now. so, for your reading pleasure, the hard-won lemonade squeezed from my overflowing inbox of lemons.

there alighted a young Indian. bowing his head again, he went on at a slower gait. "see here, okoya," he began, grinning, "while you are older than I, and if the Indian is not an ideal being, he is still less stolid mentally, openings are either narrow gaps, or access to them is barred by colossal—"

okoya grew angry. "hush! foolish boy," he retorted in dismal despair and in wild impotent wrath. "what are the koshare to me? i cannot conceive of it; you have followed the turkeys, and what have you? nothing!"

the valley lay before them; they had reached the end of the grove. brilliant sunlight broke through the tree-tops and played around the streams of limpid water, re-entering like decorations of a stage, now perpendicular and smooth. from such a source, okoya considered himself utterly defenseless. "who fully appreciate the breadth of his learning and who have been heedless of little above. all this I neglected. now I am punished for it by the birds."

i'm in love.

not with the car, i hate the car; my heart belongs to the pinch. come, join me; everyone loves a fetish cult.