The Wrong Dog Blog

I had intended to use my vacation to catch up on my blogging, but I also used my vacation to get gallbladder surgery (laparoscopic cholecystectomy—yes, I did have to look up how to spell that! ^_^). Such fun. In fact, it’s a lot better than I thought it would be, but I don’t have the energy for blogging at length.

In fact, the worst trouble I’ve had with the actual surgical site is that I had not accounted sufficiently for woofy bounciness. On my return from the hospital, Joh was ready for Sunny, and after one near miss to my belly-button incision, he was fended off until he calmed down. It seems, however, I forgot one little custom we have.

I sit on the bed, with my legs spread wide so I can get close to Sunny. He accepts some hugging and rubbing, but eventually lies down to get his tummy rubbed. After a bit of that, he gets very excited and wags back and forth in the upside-down position, better known as part of the Snow Spaniel Tango.

All well and good except that part of the Tango when it takes place on the bed is to push off my stomach with his hind feet! I of course knew this intellectually but it only came home to me as I was trying to catch his feet with my hands, and he hates having his feet touched, so it just makes him kick more.

All these years I’ve been a woofy trampoline but it took surgery to make me notice!

I hate the squatters next door.

The people in the house next door didn’t pay their rent, so their landlord, who had been trying to fix up the place after years of neglect by the previous landlord, finally gave up, stopped trying to improve it, and in fact stopped paying the mortgage. Now the mortgage company owns it, it’s been condemned by the city, and there are many people there illegally occupying it. Yes, I’ve seen Rent and read the freegan take on squatting. I’m not convinced. As I said, the landlord was trying to make it better, and the tenants cut him off at the knees. A building cannot be improved if the landlord can’t get enough money to make his mortgage payments and he eats up his savings trying.

I resent the way the squatters behave. They treat the property I live on as if it’s an annex of the one next door, camping out on our stairs, cutting across our front lawn, and even allowing their guests to hang from our tree. (When I told the guest that the tree was on our property, that she didn’t belong here, and to go away, I got a lecture on how the “law of the universe” forbids the owning of a tree. Like she has a pipeline to the universe and I don’t.) They abused their landlord when he really did try to make the building a nicer place to live, in marked contrast to the way I had to pester my landlord literally all last winter for a ten-minute fix that has since given me reliable heat (as of course I’ve only recently found out because he had it fixed at the end of the heating season). The squatters look down at me because they are artistes (yes, that’s the French pronunciation!), and I am pedestrian enough to hold a job.

But I begin to wonder if my hatred is not because the squatters are parked right in the middle of a dilemma of my own.

Most of the squatters, like the characters in Rent, seem to think that society owes them a living because they are artists. (One of them described himself as a genius when objecting that I called the police when he was demonstrating his “genius” with his electric guitar on the balcony to the entire neighborhood, for the dozenth time, early one morning.) I grant that I think our system for making a living by art doesn’t work. It can’t be a popularity contest. The most important art flies in the face of the mainstream; it won’t be popular. It can’t be by connections for the same reason: the people in power want to stay the people in power, and so they will not assist any art that risks a change in the status quo. I’ve often mourned that the need to earn a living has left me little time to explore my own artistic aspirations. I’ve often deplored the soullessness of commercially successful art. And yet . . . the art the squatters are producing seems sterile to me. Except for that inflicted on the neighborhood unwillingly, they are the only ones who experience it. They touch no one else artistically, let alone any of the other ways they could be helping people if they weren’t playing artist to their tiny circle.

I am not sure I’m not rationalizing, though. I mean . . . I have this blog that is read only by people who know me (sometimes I wonder why I bother with the blog aliases when all these people know each other!). I debate whether I should concentrate on my writing or my knitting, which at least will yield something useful for someone else at the end, or just on my woofus (yeah, the Wrong Dog—it’s his blog, remember?—who loves the squatters, by the way). I try to decide whether the writing will actually accomplish something or just detract from what I can do that helps people. Take, for example, this precise moment in time. What am I doing? Blogging on said blog that only some of the people who know me read. What should I be doing? Quick survey of foremost obligations: catching up on Bianca’s financial sheets (two weeks behind and she’s got other work for me to do and there’s a third party waiting for me to do it!), taking Sunny Out (so he can try to con a few more biscuits out of Biscuitwoman—OK, it’s small, but it would make him very happy), knitting on those socks for Joh, or maybe even working on my fiction—it touches fewer people than my blogging, but the potential if I pull it off is greater, but the probability that I will pull it off is very low. So do I hate the squatters because of their inconsideration for the needs of those around them or do I hate them because they have the courage I don’t, to do without a lot of material things for their art?

I don’t know. In a way, maybe it’s better that I don’t know. I remember when George Bush said what people like about him is his moral clarity, and I thought that anyone who thinks morality should or can be clear, of all things, is a dangerous lunatic who should be locked up for the safety of those around them. I think this murkiness needs to be dispelled, though. Hating is Bad, both in itself and in its effects. I’ve always found it hard to stop hating unless I know why I do. Of course sometimes, as with George Bush, understanding the why only makes me hate more. If it turns out that my hatred of the squatters is really about the harm they do, then it’s going to be a lot harder not to hate them.

And here I am at the end of this entry, no wiser than I was when I started it. The financial sheets are no more caught up, the woofus is no happier, the socks no further along. Maybe next time I have a moral dilemma, I should skip the blog.

Today was a near perfect autumnal equinox, with truly splendiferous WALKIES!!! weather, and the woofus enjoyed himself accordingly. Howsomever, today is the occasion for which I have long awaited: an opportunity to write an entry in praise of my boss.

The timing is actually quite crucial. You see, if I do it at a time when she is doing something nice for me, she might think that I am writing it only because I am grateful for that particular niceness and not out of general appreciation. So I kept waiting for a time when something particularly nice for me wasn’t in the works. This has proved to be impossible: no sooner is the refinance settled and done, but she’s offering to fly me to Hawaii for her wedding. But one can hardly say, “Stop being nice to me, Bianca, so I can post a blog in praise of you!” It sort of detracts from the purpose of the thing.

Fortunately for me and unfortunately for the business, there is a temporary staff shortage at the warehouse and it is necessary for me to pick up some duties that can be done remotely by computer. The possibility of a respite from kindness obviously being a spectre of my fevered imagination, I decided that being given extra work would have to do. After all, most people do not respond to being given extra duties with anthems of joy, so Bianca would be forced to conclude that I do appreciate her generally speaking. This is, of course, assuming that Bianca opts for logic in this case, which of course it’s possible she won’t, but I’m hoping that she’ll keep in mind that the being whose motivations are under speculation is me and therefore logic is the way to go.

I met Bianca back in the dawn of prehistory, back when I was working at the Awful Place and didn’t even know I was an Aspie—even before I had a woofus! We met on an electronic mailing list about collecting an item of mutual interest. Bianca was in the process of starting her first business, in which she would sell (among other things) this item of mutual interest. We chatted back and forth for some time about our collections and related topics. At one point my failing business loaned her starting business a little capital and we saw the best profit we saw the whole time we were afloat. Bianca and I did occasional business, we chatted electronically a great deal, we actually met a couple of times when she was in NYC and I went there to meet her, she moved to Japan, she offered immense emotional support during the crash and burn of my business. Then she started her next business and that started really taking off.

We didn’t chat as much during that period, but then Bianca was busy. Starting a business is busy and starting a successful business is busy, squared. We kept in touch, though. I adopted a woofus and attempted to be Super-Mom. My situation at the Awful Place continued to descend until I lost my job there, as Helen once put it, in circumstances that were possibly illegal and definitely brutal. Despite the demands of her growing business, Bianca was there for me.

The next seven months, during which I was unemployed, were rough. I did have a copyediting project that kept me going, but it was going to end, as were my unemployment benefits. I finally begged Bianca to give me a job.

It wasn’t really fair of me. She didn’t need a proofreader or a copyeditor in her business, and she had no way of knowing that I was competent to do anything else. It’s a notoriously bad idea to hire friends as employees. Her business was still in its development stages and she needed to hire staff to do positions she actually needed, not waste the funds on a friend who might prove to be only a liability. She gave me a job, though.

I won’t say I don’t do anything for the company; it’s just that I don’t think I do anything special. Any college kid with an eye for detail and a year of college Japanese could do better. I often think of a Roseanne episode in which Dan asks a neighbor moving back to Chicago what sort of job it is that the neighbor will be doing there and the neighbor answers, “It’s a son-in-law job.” I often think that I do a “friend job,” but I at least try to do it well. Unquestionably from my end it beats any job I’ve ever had: I can work at home, I don’t have to deal with the public, to a great degree I can make my own hours. Periodically Bianca makes raise noises, and I get a raise. We’re long past the point where I feel overpaid, especially now with the refinance that I talked about in my last post.

The job is really the tip of the iceberg, in a nearly literal sense. Like an iceberg, the majority of Bianca’s positive impact on my life is under the surface and goes deep. Of course, it’s a lot warmer than an iceberg, so there the metaphor has to end, but I can’t really cover all the ways that Bianca has been a great friend and a great boss. This is only a blog, after all. I’m not saying that we don’t ever get on each other’s nerves—Bianca’s a human and I’m an Aspie, and sometimes the internet isn’t big enough for the clash of neurologies. I know, though, that Bianca is not going to suddenly disappear on me. In fact, one of the things that keeps me from suddenly disappearing on the whole overstimulating, complicated world is the knowledge that Bianca needs me to not suddenly disappear.

Besides, I think I’m actually starting to enjoy myself. If so, though, that has a great deal to do with Bianca and her unending support.

This post is just to check in and say I haven’t forgotten my blog; I just haven’t the energy for it right now. Two weeks on the no-sugar diet and I no longer suffer the rampaging hunger, but I do not have any increase in energy. I have taken my woofus for WALKIES!!! the past couple days—on Friday we met a delightful Italian greyhound puppy and his humans—but that is about as much as I can accomplish. It’s a good thing it’s a three-day weekend in Japan, although I’m not sure what I’m going to do tomorrow when work resumes.

Well, I suppose I should take my woofus for some WALKIES!!! today before it gets too hot. There won’t be time for any for several days, and the little guy needs some fun in his life.

In Hendrik Willem van Loon’s Lives, in his discussion of Erasmus, he says, “it is a well-known fact, clearly demonstrated by history . . . that most people who have achieved great things in this world have done so because they wanted to avenge themselves for the way in which, at one time or another in their careers, they had been treated by God or man” (1942 ed., pp. 44–45). He goes on to say, however, “In the case of truly inferior characters, it [the inferiority complex] will provoke them into acts of cruelty and malevolence and inhumanity. In the case of superior characters, it may lead to manifestations of great benevolence, kindliness, and deep compassion for human suffering” (p. 45). (Being human, van Loon is of course focussed on human suffering.)

So from here on out, I’m going to try to keep it about the dog. I don’t know that I’ll succeed. I may end up giving up blogging instead. But I’m going to try to stay silent on my rage against humanity. No one ever hears rage beyond the rageness of it, to its source, anyway.

First, the big news: I am finally in Google Blogsearch! I still need to be listed in “Related Blogs” when you search for “wrong dog”, but I am finally on the Web map. Moral of the story: get a WordPress Multi-User blog and tell it when you set up the account that you want to be in search engines and get a FeedBurner account and tell it to ping Ping-O-Matic when you post. I spent nearly six months manually pinging Google on every post at the old host. Here, I was in Google Blogsearch in under a week!

Well, the move has been made. All the old posts are here, and from now on all new posts will be here at Autiblogger. The links back to earlier articles should all go to the Autiblogger versions and not the old host.

So until some of all that changes, there will be no comments at the Wrong Dog Blog. Yeah, my blog ratings will suffer, but those are ratings based on criteria that don’t reflect my priorities. If I worried about that I wouldn’t be true to what this blog is about: about being different (whether that difference is autism or woofiness) and about it being OK to be different and about how humans should stop trying to make the rest of the world a big megaphone for humanity.

[Note: This is a post that was moved from my old blog host. This blog is moving to Autiblogger, not away from it.]

If you have any blogging experience that is particularly good or particularly bad, please let me know about it at the Contact Me link in the left sidebar. Maybe that Google took so long about my blog will turn out to be a blessing in disguise.