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.

With the weather getting cooler, I have been trying to master the fine art of tofu baking. Well, that and the high price and high fat content of the baked tofu at the coop have inspired the tofu baking. At any rate, I’ve been running my oven more. I don’t use it much: ovens are pretty much for baking meats (so far I’m no higher up the food chain than fish), casseroles (usually with a wheat-based pasta and/or cheese, both of which I’m allergic to), or breads/cakes (also wheat based), so there just isn’t much call for it in my life.

About fifteen minutes or so after the oven would go on, the woofus would go nuts. I’d put in whatever it was to bake, go back to work, and in fifteen minutes or so, until I finally took the food out, Sunny would be at me, pawing, whimpering, trembling. My first guess was that he wanted the tofu I was baking (he likes tofu), but when I cooked salmon on the stovetop and he didn’t react, I began to wonder. A woofus wanting baked tofu more than some version of DEAD ANIMAL? Unlikely.

But there was a problem: I believe I have mentioned that I am a recovering clutterbug. My hated mother’s idea of house-cleaning was to assign each of us a task or an area, leave us to do it, and when we thought we were done she would come and “inspect,” by which she meant let us have it about how lousy a job we did. So “cleaning = trauma” is the equation in my subconscious, and my stove needed to be cleaned before anyone came to inspect it. It took a couple weeks, what with needing supplies to be got in and with my working the night shift, but finally yesterday, Helen and I had a counseling/cleaning session in my kitchen. Helen says that I try to clean too perfectly. I’ll try to keep that in mind in future.

With my newly cleaned stove, I called the utility company this morning. They thought I was a little nutty calling entirely on the basis of a dog’s testimony, but they can’t mess around with possible carbon monoxide poisoning so they sent a serviceperson. He also was dubious about the “call from a dog,” but he listened to my story and then pulled out his gadget and turned on my oven. We waited about ten minutes while the oven heated up and the gadget showed slowly increasing levels of CO, with occasional downturns. My CO detector went off for the first time. Sunny started getting trembly and whimpering. “What’s the matter, boy, think we’re trying to poison you?” the serviceperson asked. Sunny went on whimpering.

In the end, the serviceperson’s summation was “Good job, dog!” He tagged the stove and turned off the gas to it. My landlord is being informed that he must replace the stove or get it cleaned so that it burns more efficiently. One can’t help but wonder how long that will take. Meanwhile, I languish for lack of cocoa and miso.

Sunny continued to tell me about the CO for sometime after the serviceperson left, but we went down to the Biscuitwoman for some well-earned woofy treats and now the little guy is having a nap to recooperate from his stress. He knew that oven wasn’t safe, and his nose was better than the supposed CO detector that’s been sitting in my apartment all this time.

The moral, once again, is take your woofus seriously. Odds are that there’s something really going on and your monkey senses are insufficient to realize it.

“Knitting may not solve many ills, but it creates few of them.”
—King Rupert to his son, Prince Andre, A Baroque Fable by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro

With all due respect to His Majesty, don’t you believe it.

I am returning to knitting after a twenty-year hiatus. In my previous incarnation as a knitter, I specialized in Icelandic wool sweaters. Most of the people I went to college with have one.

Since then I have learned about the horrors in sheep farming. To be honest, I should have known. The animals that are combed for fiber (cashmere goats and musk oxen) are safer than the ones that are sheared, but viewing a being as a production unit, whether human or nonhuman, makes for an abusive relationship. At least humans can do things to defend themselves, like organize. After hearing about the abuses, I remembered seeing a shearing demonstration when I was a child, after which I had protested to my father that the sheep had cuts all over her. He tried to convince me that the sheep wasn’t suffering, but that’s one of the advantages of autism: the parental tie does not bind so tightly that one believes flagrant nonsense like “Yes, it’s bleeding, but they don’t feel pain like we do.” So why was she crying so loudly every time more blood appeared? Animal fibers are out.

Not a problem, I thought. There are plant fibers out there: cotton, hemp, linen. I can try some of those.

I went over the internet, not to buy yarn but to find types of yarn to buy. I try to buy local when I can, and there’s a yarn shop only a couple blocks from me. Even just combing the internet, though, made me worried. Cotton yarn seems to all come from Brazil. This means that instead of contributing to the abuse of domestic nonhumans I am contributing to the destruction of the rainforest and the abuse of wild nonhumans. Yee gads, what a choice.

I had one knitter suggest acrylic yarn. I did a little research. To quote the Wikipedia article, “Production of acrylic fibers is centered in the Far East, declining in Europe and now shut down (except for precursor) in the U.S.” Centered in the Far East? Can we say “slave labor”? I thought we could. I may like nonhumans better than humans, but that doesn’t mean I’m for abusing humans, especially not economically and politically disadvantaged ones by economically and politically spoiled ones.

I went to the local yarn store, to see what was in stock. The only nonanimal fiber was Brazilian cotton.

This time I did buy local but exploited the rainforest. I’m not giving up, though. The advantage to doing socks is that they take small amounts of yarn, and I can try some of the hemp and linen and so on available on the internet, and when I find something I like, order a color card and go to the local store and ask them to buy it for me as a special order rather than going to the internet stores.

I should mention that there is one animal fiber I am willing to use: Sunny fluff. Dog hair is called “chiengora,” and I am collecting Sunny fluff when I brush him or get him trimmed so that someday I can find a spinner to spin it for me and I can make something from it to always remember my pretty golden boy by. I know past doubt that he is not viewed simply as a fiber production unit, and is not abused, even if he doesn’t get as many WALKIES!!! as he would like. (He did get some today, so all you Sunny fans need not worry that he is losing out to the knitting craze!) I can’t be sure how other nonhumans are treated by their caretakers, however, and as I said, having the nonhumans specifically for the purpose of selling their hair is ethically problematical inherently. So Sunny is it, but only because the hair comes off him anyway while he’s here for more important reasons: the ever elusive UCKY-WET DOGGIE KISSES!

It’s not easy to offend a woofus who has a permanently sunny disposition, but it can be done.

1. Spend a couple weeks working. No frolics, even when the chipmunk is left in plain sight, simply begging to be waved in a woofus face. No WALKIES!!! except to home-buying class. Make sure that the whole time is working an unnatural schedule in which sleep is from the wee hours of the morning to early afternoon, ignoring prime woofus frolic time!

2. Make it rain for one entire day. It is well known, of course, that rain is a monkey-controlled phenomenon, done specifically for the annoyance of woofi, so this shouldn’t come as a surprise. I do mean rain, not misting or sprinkling, and for one entire day, all twenty-four hours.

3. Get up late, even for a monkey. What takes a mommy so long to wake up? Sunny wakes up and he’s up!

4. Tantalize with short WALKIES!!! to a nice but frequently visited place. Mind you, the UPS Store is wonderful, but the woman actually made Sunny sit before he got his cookie! And then Mommy let her take his picture! He thought mommies were supposed to protect woofi.

5. Watch videos and KNIT! OK, so she’s a Vampire Slayer, she does not have eyelashes to compare with Sunny, and what’s with that knitting? It interferes with tummy rubs.

6. Bake something in the oven. I’m still trying to decide if it’s an indication of his desire for the food being baked or if he’s trying to alert me to carbon monoxide, but the little guy goes absolutely nuts each and every time I bake. Pester, pester, pester. Whimper. It’s making my determination to perfect my tofu baking skills and thereby control my passion for baked tofu cubes very difficult indeed. Whatever the motivation for his pestiness, Sunny doesn’t like baking.

7. Give only a small piece of what was baked in the oven. Regardless of carbon monoxide and after the smell of food filling the house, it’s positively mean of Mommy to eat most of the food herself. The rule should be at least halvesies!

8. Pull off a flea. Hey, to pull off that flea I had to tug on Sunny’s hair, and possibly pull a couple hairs out, and that’s worse than the flea!

9. Dose for fleas. Sunny has a whole day until he needs to be dosed with that smelly stuff that makes him feel goopy and sticks to his fur. If Mommy wants him to have goopy fur, Sunny has much better alternatives than Advantix.

10. Watch more videos and knit more! Again with the non-woofus-centered activities! Sunny suspects that thing I’m working on is not intended for woofy use.

11. Working! What’s with the working again? Isn’t this one of those days off where the woofus takes his rightful place as center of the universe? What’s going on here?

12. TRYING TO TAKE A PHOTO OF THE WOOFUS OVER THE TOP OF THE COMPUTER WHILE WORKING! Sunny finally gets my attention to waver from my work by parking on my legs and staring at me over the laptop screen, and I have to ruin the moment with that hateful camera trying to capture his woofy annoyance! The absolute monkey NERVE!

At that point your sunny-dispositioned woofus should be so thoroughly offended that he stalks off to pout in the living room before you get any further flaky monkey notions, like snoot kisses.

I forget how old I was exactly. Eight, I think. I was in elementary school, that’s certain, when I heard that Horace Mann once said, “Be ashamed to die until you have achieved some victory for humanity.” To say I took it to heart would be a mild way of putting it. I did later alter it to be that I had to achieve a victory for everybody, not merely humanity, but that’s what I set out to do.

My original plan was to be a veterinarian for a day job and then be a fiction writer on the side. I was going to show everybody: the kids who harassed me all day, every day (that’s very common for Aspies); the teachers who thought I was a problem (brilliant, but a problem to be pounded into their round hole); and my parents—especially that demon-thing who hostilely admitted to being my mother. I was going to prove that I was a more worthwhile expenditure of time, energy, and resources than any of them by having a much greater positive impact on the world. My veterinary work would make life better for nonhumans, and my writing would change the way people thought for the better. I did want to make the world a better place simply for itself, too—I can’t look at hardly anything in the world today without thinking how terribly awful it is that it isn’t better—but I will grant that “showing them” was as important to me as it is for the villains of so many stories. I wasn’t going to have children not only because I didn’t like them but because they would interfere with my plan to achieve this victory.

The first blow my plan took was my sudden development of allergies to just about everything with fur (dogs excepted). I had already been allergic to everything with feathers. As I left high school, I wasn’t sure what I was going to do for a day job, the veterinary idea being down for the count. After the first year of college, my finishing college was a question, my ability to handle pre-vet being answered decidedly as no.

I struggled with what to do for a day job and came up with a variety of unsatisfactory answers. I was determined on the fiction front. My poor ability at narrative (especially descriptions) left me looking for alternatives to straight fiction writing. I tried to draw, so that I could do comic books. Then I discovered 3D computer graphics and decided that was it, that was how I was going to do it. I could even have different art styles for different stories.

I don’t want to give the impression I was making a success of the 3D graphics when a certain woofus came along, but I had already started investing a lot of time and a lot of money in it. One of the many reasons I didn’t have biological children was because I didn’t want to invest the time taking care of a child properly would require, and I wasn’t about to do something that important improperly. Pursuing my plans for greatness might not have been very successful, but there was time to pursue them when I had Augusta: as long as I talked to her when I was in the kitchen (her domain) and spent a half hour or so of quality time with her a day, my independent bunny was content. That wasn’t enough for Sunny.

I knew it wouldn’t be enough for him. As with biological children, I wasn’t about to do dog caretaking improperly. Raising a child requires an attempt to meet all that being’s varied needs. Caretaking a dog is the same; the needs are just different. In order to be a healthy and happy woofus, a dog needs not only food and shelter and veterinary care, but exercise, attention, frolicking, a varied environment with mental stimulation, social opportunities with dogs and humans, and treatment for any emotional problems, “behavioral problems” being merely the symptoms of emotional problems going untreated. It’s a tall order, and probably nobody can fill it perfectly any more than a child can be raised perfectly, but I wasn’t going to be satisfied with what society says is an acceptable job of caring for a dog. It’s not Sunny’s fault that he needs those things, and it’s not his fault that he ended up with me as the party responsible for seeing to them. I had to give it my best or not do it.

I thought about it before I took him in. I thought about how it would effect my 3D art work. I thought, however, that it would only be a year and then he’d go back to Faith and her kids, and I’d be free to go back to pursuing victory.

I didn’t think about it before I adopted him. My 3D art hadn’t been touched for most of that year, and all I could think about was a certain bundle of gold fur with chocolate eyes and long eyelashes to die for. In all the thinking about how to convince Faith to let me keep him, not once did I reflect upon what a permanent situation really meant.

That doesn’t mean I didn’t go back to the 3D art. I continued to dabble. I spent thousands on hardware and software, always telling myself, just like any gambler, that eventually I’d have the skill to make the hobby pay for itself. I didn’t neglect Sunny because of it, though. I’m not saying I never neglected Sunny—the year after I was laid off was probably the worst of his life with me—but it was never for the art.

In the past couple years, I’ve had to come to grips with the realization that the art was going so very slowly that unless I could magically afford to do it all the time, it wasn’t going to go anywhere. The realization wasn’t quick and it didn’t come easily and I fought it every step of the way because that left me without any hope of achieving my victory. After all, my day job isn’t the sort of thing that makes the world a better place—more enjoyable for some people, yes, but not better. I had everything riding on the art so that I could tell my stories so that could make the world better.

I realized this past week that I may not have realized I was making that choice when I choose to keep Sunny permanently, but that was what I was doing. I couldn’t in conscience keep him without doing my best by him, and I didn’t have the time and energy left over if I did. (I didn’t have the money either, but I didn’t have that with or without him!) I didn’t realize what I was giving up in doing so, but that didn’t change the fact that I was giving it up.

Many people don’t really think through the caretaking thing before they leap into it, and when they realize what they’ve given up, they often resent it and therefore the being they’ve been caring for. My mother was one of those. It’s not so much that I take greater responsibility for my actions, even if I didn’t think things through, but that I just can’t imagine resenting Sunny. OK, maybe when I’m stuck out in the rain trying to get him to piddle so we can go back inside and to bed, I resent him a little, but really, honestly, even knowing what I do now, if I could go back to August 2002 and tell Faith she could have Sunny back, would I? How could I? The little furry guy had already bonded to me. Clearly I had to him or I would’ve been thinking more clearly about what adopting him meant to the rest of my life rather than just “I CAN’T LOSE SUNNY!” And even if I wanted to undo it, how could I blame Sunny for it? His mere existence created the problem of his care, and he wasn’t responsible for his existence. Even his parents, being woofi themselves, couldn’t be said to be responsible for it.

So I did in the end choose to be mother rather than a victor, even if I did it sideways and unknowingly and across species. All the victory I am likely to ever have will be what happiness I have given Sunny. It’s hard: the world continues to be a very hard and mostly bad place and being a dog caretaker doesn’t have much “showing them” potential. I just have to keep telling myself that the world isn’t a very hard and mostly bad place for Sunny and that I care more what he thinks than all those people who have mistreated me along the way.

Maybe someday, it will be enough.

I know that I said this blog is just going to be about the dog, but this one isn’t about hating humans, it’s just about me.

You may or may not remember my trying to come to grips with my long-term lack of skill with my long-term interest in 3D graphics. Not long after I posted that (late March), I came to the conclusion that there’s just no hope of pay-off there, and I should stop throwing good money and time after bad. It hurts to give up what is pretty much my last chance to do anything truly worthwhile with my life, but I need a house for Sunny (the stairs here aren’t getting fewer and he is not getting younger) and some money for retirement for me. I’ve just got to be realistic.

Since then I’ve been doing a lot of kicking of myself for spending as much time and money as I did. I mean, I sank lots of money on that on the assumption that it was more worthwhile than other expenditures because I was going to do something with it. Now I wish I had at least sunk it on DVDs: I’d have a lot fewer videotapes cluttering up the place and if I decided I needed some of the money back I could at any time sell the DVDs, something you can’t do with 3D graphics software that gets obsolete so fast, and even if I didn’t I’d at least be able to enjoy the DVDs. Now, well, I’ve got a lot of stuff I don’t use sitting on my hard drive, a computer that is more than I need for my work that still isn’t paid off, a huge stack of VHS tapes deteriorating every minute, and few DVDs, no retirement fund, no house. Once again, Anne is financially foolish. Even my modest 3D aspirations turned out to be vastly beyond my ability and my pocketbook. Mind you, the kicking myself makes sense, although granted it doesn’t accomplish much, so in that respect it isn’t logical.

But here’s the real thing: every week, I go to all the free sites and download the weekly free model. I download the model for the weekly subscription that I bought for the next year just before I decided how dumb it was. Yesterday I downloaded a thing called a bolladon—I’m not sure whether that’s a real dinosaur or one that’s made up because a 3D artist wanted to create their own. That’s 39MB of my hard drive taken up by just that. I also downloaded a robot mecha that converts into a tank from the same site, again because it was free and for a limited time only. I have most of a medieval village because different parts of it were offered for free at various times. Next week, when I get an alert that there is a new model up for grabs, I’ll go get that, too.

It’s not like I can go back to 3D. I don’t have the time, energy, money, or talent for it; I have too many other things requiring all of what I have of those. It’s nuts to keep trying. And yet I keep stacking up the models on my hard drive, for no known logical reason or purpose. Me, Anne Aspey the Aspie, a raving case of rampant illogic, of which I highly disapprove. I’ve always held that humans say there are things higher than logic only because they aren’t capable of real logic, and here I am taking up important resources for nothing. Sunny is more logical begging for a treat when he isn’t at all hungry: at least he’ll enjoy eating it if he gets it.

Sometimes I wish I could let Sunny make my decisions instead of my making his. I’ve always accepted it on the grounds that I have more logic than he does, but now, I’m no longer certain.

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.

I was going to recycle an old e-mail and post about finding a new food for Sunny last winter, but now I am wishing I could give up eating even more than I was yesterday.

My apologies this is so disjointed. I know how to write much better than this, but I’m too upset right now for that.