my terrible horrible no good very bad day

I am blogging because I am curled up on my couch watching tv and looking at my cat (which is as close as I get anymore, since they refuse to cuddle now that the couch smells so much like dog). The reason for this is that I refuse to go anywhere near a moving vehicle for the rest of the day and possibly the rest of the week.

Today, I am cursed.

This morning I walked the dog a little longer than I should have and headed to work a little later than normal. As I sat at a traffic light on Route 1, minding my own very muddled and sleepy-headed business, the world shifted slightly. And abrubtly. I glanced up in my rearview mirror and saw a sunglassed brunette chewing on a muffin and waving at me distractedly. Evidently, the effort of scarfing down her breakfast was so exhausting that it became impossible to hold her weary foot on the brake pedal and so, weak with hunger, she Hit. My. Car.

I was furious. I leapt out of the car and banged on her window, screaming obscenities and demanding an apology. She cowered and cried, sobbing profuse regrets and whimpering under the stern glare of my steely-eyed fury. I let her go after repeated promises to stay alert, focus on safety and never cause another accident again.

Actually, I yelled at her from my car and made repeated and violent arm movements, increasingly infuriated by her stubbon refusal to acknowledge wrongdoing. When the light changed, she switched lanes and sped off in her poncy little red convertible, still chewing and still oblivious to the cold restrained fury of my irritatingly ineffective middle finger.

I managed, after a long day otherwise occupied with saving lives and bettering society, to forget the incident and finally, only 6 minutes late today, I crawled into my baking hot oven of a car and headed towards home. Not five minutes from the shelter, I flicked my eyes to the rearview mirror and clocked a cop behind me, far behind me, must have been right behind me at the stoplight I'd just been waiting at. But he was still far behind me, like he'd lingered at the light, and I had plenty of time to carefully assess my speed and drop from 38 to the posted limit of 35. Those of you that know me know my ingrained and inflexible terror of getting in trouble, my utterly catholic fear of authority, and my insanely bad driving skills all combine to create the most infuriatingly slow driver in Northern Virginia, so I didn't think twice about the police car and instead focused on staying in my lane.

Imagine my heart attack, then, when the lights flickered, the siren sounded, the cop was on my tail and gesturing to pull over. Muddled with anxiety and confusion, I did so, wondering if he had the authority to pull me over for my outdated stickers and reasoning that since I had the current registration in the car I'd probably be just fine. When he swaggered up to the car, I had my window open, my hand on the registration, a very curious look on my face.

"Did you notice the posted speed limit on this road, ma'am?"
I had, but I think this is an inefficient conversational track. "How fast was I going?"
"Did you notice the speed limit, m'am?" He is irritated now.
"I wasn't going over the limit," I say. "I know I wasn't, I looked when I saw you!" I am earnest, pleading.
"Ma'am, the limit on this road is 35 miles per hour. Do you know how fast you were going?"
"I guess I don't, I really thought..." I am terrified now, babbling, confused.
"I had to go over 60 to catch up with you. You blew right past me at that light."
Well, the light was green, I thought. But still. I am shocked. "I am shocked." Pause. "I really, I honestly didn't think I was speeding." I point at my dashboard. "I looked, the needle was right here."
Wait.
Hey.
"You had to go over 60 to catch up with me??"
Pause.
"I'm not going to go back and forth with you over this," he says. He backs away from the car a step, then two.
"To CATCH UP WITH ME?"
He is definitely backing away at this point. "Look, have a little respect for the law, is what I am saying. You need to be more careful and slow it down."
I babble a bit more, I am thanking him for letting me go, apologizing, pledging future caution. And, yet...my high school physics teacher is screaming at me in my head, straining to be heard over the ingratiating apologies. The officer gets into his car, gestures abruptly for me to drive on, I carefully change lanes and proceed at a turtle pace down the road. But, thinking...

Now that I have settled, my heart has stopped pounding and my stomach stopped twisting, I have two good theories about what caused his rapid change of attitude. One is that he saw my shirt, my uniform proclaiming me to be a member of the city's public service, a fellow soldier-in-arms in the battle for public well-being. It would be in pretty poor taste to hang me out to dry over such a questionable complaint. But, primarily, I think that his high school physics teacher caught up with him, too, as he realized the questionable science in asserting that I was speeding because he had to go above the limit to catch up to me from behind.

I've tossed this around so much that my brain hurts, and I know I wasn't speeding, unless my speedometer has suddenly broken. But what really frightens me is the idea that an authority figure, someone armed and trusted with the power to issue citations and penalties, can be so arbitrary and, at the same time, so dense.

Meanwhile, I perhaps should put those stickers on my car now.

wondering

Every morning for as long as I can remember, I have heard the Frey's "How to Save a Life" on the radio on my way to work. At first I thought this an amusing but insignificant indicator of how a juggernaut tv show like Grey's Anatomy can combine with a catchy tune to create an annoyingly constant radio presence. But months went by and I continued to hear it--sometimes just the end, sometimes just the beginning, always on a different station, every single day. The song no longer rules the charts but it rules my radio every morning (sometimes I hear it twice!) and now I'm beginning to wonder if I'm stuck in some freakish rendition of "Groundhog Day" or if some powerful omniscient being out there is trying to tell me something or if maybe, just maybe, I should invest in HD radio or at least a couple of new CDs.

woof

My dog is the same color as my couch. There is a rule in the dog world (don't worry, I didn't know this either) that you own any piece of furniture that you match. The upshot of this is that, though she knows she is not supposed to be on it, she spends a large portion of each day--while I am at work, working, working hard--stretched out in doggy bliss on my beloved couch. I know this because when I come home at the end of the day she has rearranged the cushions in a more dog-friendly fashion, pulled the slipcover all to hell, and left a Doberman-head-sized imprint on the pillow. I also know this because my beloved off-white couch is now more of a dirty yellow-grey. I also know this because she gives me a baleful glare whenever I dare to sit down.

Somehow I have managed to incorporate this, too, into my life, along with the dog gate in the bedroom doorway and the hours of walking and the MIA cats. It is amazing what you can adapt to when you have convinced yourself that you are doing something noble, or when you realize that you have made an irrevocable choice and can't go back.

I always thought that when I had a dog, if I had a dog--a prospect that seemed to dim significantly when I fell into obsession with my cats--it would be a shepherd or a shepherd mix. A male, obedient, well-behaved, beautifully colored and just a bit shaggy. He would walk to heel even off-leash, respond to the slightest command, but be comfortable on his own and good with other dogs. I did not expect this, this sleek pale cancer-ridden female with her eyes that glow red in the dark and her sunburned nose and her stomach stretched from years of puppy-milling. She knows nothing, barely more than "sit," and pulls hard at the leash. Dogging my heels every minute, she hates being left alone and loves, loves, loves me and hates, hates, hates meeting new dogs. And, of late, the whole "bathroom outside" issue has come into question.

I thought I was prepared for this, but every day brings a new challenge. It does not get easier. It gets more complicated. One hurdle cleared, two more appear. Adjusts to cats, pees on the floor, gets a stomach bug (?). Find a toy she will actually chew, she gets into the trash when we're gone.

The scariest thing is that I don't know when to worry. I don't know dogs well enough to know what is normal and what might be the cancer, sneaking in, taking over. Do any of us really know cancer symptoms? If we did, the survival rate would be so much higher. So is our poop-smeared patio a victim of worms, something she found in the trash, something much more sinister? Do I spend $50 to ask the vet each and every time she acts erratically? Or just let it go until it is bad enough to do what we know will need to be done, inevitably, sometime but we don't know when?

I always have buyers' remorse, with everything I do--the job, the house, the animals, college, new jeans. Whenever I make a choice, I mourn the lost chances, the possibilities the other choice presented. It is a curse, maybe sometimes a blessing. I have to keep thinking I did the right thing, bringing this girl into our home for the time she has left, however long that is. I have to keep thinking she's happy, it's worth it, she's better off than the alternative. Otherwise it makes the early morning walks, the uncleaned bathrooms, the utter grossness of my backyard...well, an exercise in something resembling futility. And I hate futility.

Also, I do not know how to clean up my own yard. Which is a shame, because I need to water the plants.

welcome back kotter

So.

It's July, the beginning of July, steamy hot sweaty heavy summer. The last time I was a regular blogger, it was sharp chilly early spring. I lived in a tiny little fake-townhouse and arranged my life around my cats; I traveled and drank a lot and did everything I could to distract myself from the crushing desperation that was imprisonment in the wrong job.

In the past few months I quit my job, bought a house, brought home a dog, and switched to a Mac. I am not sure which of these things is this most momentous life change.

Also, I am tan now. It is from the dog walking. Of course by tan I mean sort of a darker shade of pale but you understand, this is still a major life change.

The point is, a different person than I, a more engaged person, a less lazy person perhaps, would have taken all these life changes as an opportunity. She would have chronicled these changes, blogged regularly, let the world in on the perspective of an American girl in flux. She would have kept friends and family in the loop and not dropped off the face of the planet. And maybe she would have even had a little writing to show for it all.

Clearly, I am not that person.

Here's the thing. I was blogging at work, mostly. I didn't have that much else to do. And I can't blog at work anymore, because I'm working. I might be shaving tangled mats off of a dog's face so he can see, or consoling a distraught volunteer about a dog we just couldn't rehabilitate, or herding a very confused sheep into a dog kennel padded with straw (to use last Friday as an example).

Sometimes I blogged at home, sitting in front of the tv. I don't do that anymore, because I am not sitting in front of the tv. I might be walking the dog down to the frozen custard shop for mint chocolate custard and puppy pops, or watering my plants in the backyard, or pushing a dust mop endlessly around my floors, or trying to figure out how to get my windows-formatted iPod to work with my new Mac without losing all my songs, or thinking about dinner and deciding between farmers' market foccacia and sweet corn or one of the adorable cafes down the street.

So I'm at a crossroads here. Part of me wants to keep (start again) blogging--I like having an outlet when I want to share something funny or upsetting or confusing, I like keeping in touch with minimal effort, I like keeping my mind active and my communication skills sharp (ish). But the other part of me is slightly lazy and constantly overwhelmed with work and stress and keeping house and staying in touch. That's the part that can't be bothered to open up the computer and sit down to blog. That's the part of me harboring the sneaking suspicion that my passive, accidental choice to stop blogging was the right choice after all. That maybe it's less important to talk about life changes and more important to live life changes. That while it's nice to ponder and muse and share thoughts, I'm better off experiencing and feeling and enjoying.

Also, you can't get a tan from sitting in front of a Mac.