The past few weeks has seen me fall behind on a LOT of things. Seems like everything, although I know that it’s not necessarily true. With this posting, I’ll be one week behind (as of Sunday), but it’s better than being three. So there’s that.
One of the things I’ve been confronted by is my sheer lack of focus. The past month in particular has been tough. I’d have all these goals and ideas and what-have-you only to be distracted by–what was that shiny thing? Oh my god!
Kinda like that Doctor Who episode “SIlence in the Library” when Donna’s transported out of the library, and finds herself in a life that passes by instantaneously. She’s talking to Dr. Moon: “You said ‘River’ and now we’re feeding ducks.” Her saying she will bring her children to the park brings her to the park without any of the actual journey.
That’s what my life feels like right now. Only more tedious. Like I’ve lost the time, don’t know where it’s at, but have nothing to show for it. I just find myself having done this or that and managing to skip over what I was supposed to be doing for that better life thing.
And here I am. Starting over. But not really starting over. I’m still 47 things lighter, even if it took me 2 weeks to do it.
It’s a little bit better than a start, at any rate.
Allons-y!
THE JUNK:
1. Bubba cup (cracked–I loooved that cup)
2. Fancy schmancy Christmas ornament
3. Mason jar without lid
4. NyQuil Cold and Flu: Exp date 2013
5. Salon pas (didn’t work for me…held onto because…maybe they would work magically one day? I have no idea)
6. Famotidine Exp 2014
7., 8. White disks something-or-others (maybe floor protectors?) x 2
9-14 Coffee cups X 6
15. Clear lax for the dog — exp date 2014
16. Bottle of pills so old and faded I have no idea what it even is
17. Christmas candle
18. Ibuprofen — Can’t use it now with my every day Nsaid–finding it a new home
19. Plastic cup
20. Styrofoam cup
21. Hair clip (not necessary since I chopped my hair off)
22. Rusty spoon
23. Pink stuffing paper (??)
24.-27.. Four un-mated lids from the garage
28. Sock–lonely and hanging out in the garage
29. Bag of “silverbells gem mix” (??)
30., 31. Empty DVD case x 2
32. Movie: Face Off
33. Movie: Analyze That
34–37, Four plates
38., 39. Christmas stockings x 2
40. Hurricane instructions from 2006
41. Book: Non-Profits for Dummies
42. Movie: Bad Boys II
43. Movie: Hide and Seek
44. “Sherry” shaped glass
45. Book: Walt Whitman “Laws of Creators” — ruined in the rain
Wiggle giggle ball that doesn’t giggle when it wiggles any more
Post its (this time not from work)
Out of date Vitamin D
4 magazines
Dog-chewed lid
Broken scissors (put back in the drawer, even)
Med bottles and various other things from the cleaning closet that I’m just too beat to list. It probably wasn’t nearly 42 things. But it was something.
After a week off (funny how life just happens and suddenly I realized I missed a week), I was attacked by my cleaning closet.
This is what the closet looked like:
In the process of finding way too much stuff to get rid of, I discovered whatever the opposite of a treasure trove of stuff is:
A bread bag (really?)
Spoons from MREs. They were leftovers from Katrina, my only guess is that I brought them into the house before I had silverware
A bottle of Windex with a quarter inch or so of Windex still in it.
A jug of vinegar with even less
Lightbulbs I didn’t know I had
A bag of clean socks (whaaaat?) with medical papers in it (double whaaat?)
I had “stacked” (and I use that term loosely) torn towels and t-shirts in the closet, presumably to use them as cleaning rags.
NOBODY NEEDS THAT MANY CLEANING RAGS!
This week was an epiphany of sorts: I really want to spend as little money as possible. I want out of here. I had left Mississippi years ago, returning after about five. After living in the desert, I fell in love with her all over again. Got a job, got my degree, got another job.
This week I sort of “woke up.” I’ve been complacent. I’ve held my current position for almost eight years–that’s far longer than I’ve held any job before. With an awesome boss and awesome coworkers and a work load that doesn’t ask too much of me, I’ve grown complacent.
Everything I love about Mississippi is wrapped up in my family and my immediate surroundings. I was born here and left the state for about five years in my mid 20’s. The summer nights, filled with fireworks and lightning bugs; the boat rides to Ship Island and from Long Beach to Biloxi and back again; the sheer greenness of the honeysuckle, grass, and oak trees stood in stark contrast to Arizona–a place whose state color should be beige. Beige for the rocks, beige for the houses. Everything running together and nothing really standing out.
So wrapped up in my memories of childhood, I was shocked when the South came thundering back in all its greenness and pinks and yellows and purples of flowers, demanding that I take her back again.
And I did.
But now it’s time to go. I’ve been back for thirteen years now, so very much of that spent miring in complacency. It’s time to go. But there are many steps between here and there.
Paring down the house is just one step. Another is saving money. One thing I did do this week is to change my cell phone plan. From unlimited everything (and I swore, they’d have to pry that plan from my cold, dead fingers) to a finite amount of data. In doing so, I saved $10 a month. After watching how good I am at seeking out wifi, I may be able to pare it down again, for a total of $25 saved a month.
Sure it’s only $10 now (and .70 cents that the state will no longer get in sales tax), but it’s a start. I may be able to pare it down again when I see how my data use works when I’m paying attention to being on wifi.
Ten dollars and seventy cents a month. It’s a start.
Oh, and I also did my taxes. And my brother’s taxes. And go grocery shopping.
And cook up some chicken at 830 Sunday night because I refused to let it go to waste.
16 plastic containers and at least a dozen extra lids (lids without bodies, not counted)
Coffee cup
Expired license (as of May of 2015)
“New Pet folder” given by Vet
Book: Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery
Med Bottle
Dog food mat
Twenty-two things.
I try to get my food together for work on the weekends: Yogurt, nuts if I have them, cereal, etc. and something for lunch, but I’ve been pulling my hair out lately trying to find stupid containers that are a) easy to transport and b) actually have a mated lid.
The first time I cleared out my cupboard, I took pics and pretty much texted them to everyone. It was that momentous of an event.
And there I was, back in the same situation without knowing exactly how I got there. Well-trained by my mother, I’ve held onto every ham/turkey plastic package, every yogurt tub, every little thing. It wasn’t even conscious. More things were migrating back into my house, and it was making life more difficult.
I really like the Rubbermaid Easy Find Lid set. They stack well, the smaller ones are perfect sizes for individual servings, and they’re just so simple.
This is what they look like. I’m not promoting Bed Bath & Beyond (I could never with their careless disregard for commas), but the site does have a “zoom over” so you can see exactly what they look like up close.
I need a couple of more of the smaller pieces to do exactly what I need: have a very compact storage set for five days of three or four different items. I’m trying to pay closer attention to my eating and eat smaller things every couple of hours. These storage things are perfect. I don’t have quite enough for five days of cereal, so, in the mean time I’m using sour cream containers until I replace them with what I really want. When stacked, they take up a LOT less room than what I had before, therefore making room for actual cooking things.
These things work for me, and I’m really loving not feeling guilty about spending money about something that really, really works for me.
I haven’t finished the garage still, but I did have room for both the water filtration system and for the people to work in, so I’ll take it for now. I got away from my filing, and I realized that, here it is the end of March, and I still haven’t done my taxes. I put my W2 somewhere “I wouldn’t lose it,” and now need to make the filing part of organization a priority. So there’s that.
In other news, I finally finished Up From Slavery. I had started it months ago in my quest to read the books I have, only to misplace it, start another book, misplace that one too, and so on.
Washington earned a lot of criticism–both fair and unfair, I think. One of his greatest talents, though was having two messages. One was of “racial accommodation,” that is, leading African Americans through the paradigm that whites had created–that is–stressing education only to the level that allowed them to work with their hands, all the while backhandedly stressing equality very subtly. Washington was gracious and warm in the face of detractors and yet worked around differences in opinions to accomplish his vision.
I think he was a called statesman who was unrelenting in his efforts to better the lives of African Americans while working toward a unified nation of people. The criticism he received from other African Americans was that he wasn’t doing enough. He didn’t push hard enough or expand his goals far enough.
Washington was accused of being an incrementalist–a gradualist. And he was. When others called for more dynamic changes, he took one “baby step” at a time, over and over and over again.
And what he created was magnificent: Tuskegee. It was and still stands as a stepping stone to further progress. Read a little here on Wikipedia if you’re interested.
Sometimes I get caught up in other people’s progress, measuring my accomplishment of goals against that of others. But I can’t. In the end, the only thing that matters is how I stack up against yesterday. Or a year ago. Or decade ago. Have I slacked off, or am I still taking baby steps?
Because many baby steps over a period of time can cover a hell of a lot of distance.
Word Count Map — haven’t updated it in almost a year
Hospital arm band
4 Post it Pads
Stack of out of date coupons
Red nose
Ecig box
A lock–I don’t even know where it came from.
A magnet too weak to hold a note card
Twenty-seven things, and this week was just my scrambling to get the things together. I REFUSED to miss another week.
I also cleaned out my refrigerator, which I didn’t count, and got rid of even more medicine bottles. Also not counted.
The cups, another holdover from my mother (did you know styrofoam cups can be washed through the dishwasher once or twice?). The post-its, accidental thievery from work–they will be returned on my next day back. Why on earth would I keep a hospital arm band? I mean, really? It’s not like it’s a nostalgic time I want to re-experience.
I am coming face-to-face with my waste, and it’s a bit shocking, to be honest. I am really starting to understand why I feel as if I never have any money–it’s being spent on half-eaten food, shoved to the back of the refrigerator, a magazine subscription that was a “free” trial, and I was too lazy or forgetful to cancel it.
I don’t think I even read any of the magazines.
It’s being spent on notebook after notebook, scattered around (and now being piled in the office until I go through them). Half-written, half-focused, notes from a class merged with to-do lists merged with letters I started writing but never finished. Clothes that “almost” fit that I never wore once I could fit in them. So on and so forth.
I look around, and instead of seeing stuff that makes my house “mine,” I see more stuff to dust, more stuff to move around, more stuff I don’t want to take care of yet don’t want to lose. My drum, for example. I can’t even think of parting with it, and yet I never play it. It’s a pain in the ass to dust.
But still I cling.
This is a process, I know. But I want a tidy and organized house. I want to have less shit to deal with. I want less waste and more efficiency.
I want I want I want.
I guess I’m getting there.
What I’ve discovered is that stuff isn’t just stuff. If it were, it’d be easy to get rid of. For me, it’s about memories, about identity, about security and control. It’s about letting go of the need to remember moments when life seemed brighter, or more honestly–to in the past. The stuff is representative of my need to identify myself by the things I own and the things I remember. I’ve never considered myself materialistic, and, yet, I have drums and books and tie-dyed this and that which have become part of how I present: I’ve read these books. I play this drum. I am a hippie, see, I have tie-dye!
It’s about a certain amount of security I’ve attached to having certain things.
After Katrina, it was so easy. Most things had been swept away. There wasn’t indecision or suffering with choices; those had been taken care of for me, literally swept away down the river. There was a bit of mourning and moving on. “It’s just stuff,” I said, proud that I had let go, even as I unwittingly began the process of collecting more stuff.
Stuff isn’t just stuff. Maybe it’s never just stuff. But clearing out is one of the best things I’ve ever done in my life. It’s been–and continues to be–transformative. And I am ever, ever so grateful that my dear friend started before me, inspiring me to begin my own journey.
I missed a week. After 22 weeks of continuous clearing out, I missed a week. Sooner or later, I always drop the ball. Usually when that happens, I get discouraged and distracted and months later wonder how I went from doing whatever it was every day to having gone months without doing it.
Not this time. I missed a week. One week.
Tom Robbins said, “Stay committed to your decisions but stay flexible in your approach.”
So here I am, picking up where I left off. I don’t know if I’ll have 42 items this week–I’m writing this in between gathering stuff, doing chores, etc.–but I will have only missed one week.
Not too shabby for a gal with the attention span of a Mexican jumping bean on meth.
This week I discovered a COLOSSAL waste of money. I had bought 2 sets of Breaking Bad deeply discounted with the intention of selling it. It never happened. I just couldn’t do it. I ended up giving it away to a friend who’s as appreciative of the series as I am. Maybe not such a huge waste of money after all. But still a “holy shit” moment. As
I also realized as I was gathering items–specifically the med bottles–that I’ve gotten rid of a lot that I haven’t documented. I’ve had a lot of med bottles. Small boxes, and things like that.
But I get it honest. This week, my dad texted me a picture of his doctor’s record that showed him bringing me into the doctor. In 1974. Apparently, my mom is going through stuff at her place, too.
I’m in the process of reducing two bookshelves to one; I don’t know if I’ll have it finished this month, but it’s closer. I discovered that by getting rid of a Wii box in the entertainment center, I could move my movies there, clearing out almost a full shelf. The reference books that I have no intention of getting rid of (mostly writing books and some lit books from college), I’m moving to the office now that I have room on the shelves in that room.
I had high heels on it previously. I have NO idea why I thought putting them on office shelves was a good idea, but I got rid of them a long time ago.
There is no horse to get back on. There is just this: my getting rid of things, simplifying my life. Sometimes life gets in the way of those plans.
I realized that I buy a hell of a lot of duplicates. A HELL of a lot. The Xmen movie–which is far from my favorite–I have both on DVD and BluRay. I’m currently reading An Orgy of George by George Carlin, which contains Brain Droppings, Napalm and Silly Putty, and When Will Jesus Bring the Pork Chops. No reason to hold on to the original Pork Chop book, eh?
After my house was broken into, I swore I’d keep all the serial numbers for my electronics and things. I found out the hard way what happens when you don’t. But instead of writing them down and filing them away, I had kept the boxes. Like the Wii, for example. I’ve officially started a “Serial Number” file.
Because I was getting rid of the Wii box, which was inexplicably stored in the entertainment center, I had room to move my movies over, freeing up space on the bookcase. My goal is to get both bookcases to one so I can get rid of the one that’s broken. I’m not close, but I’m a good foot and a half closer.
I realized what a hard time I have taking/sending things back when they aren’t what I ordered or they’re defective. The e-cig I’d ordered off Ebay. I know I could have gotten my money back, but I just didn’t do it. Now, it’s been too long. I just don’t do it. I should. I don’t. I’ll deal with that later.
The only reason I included a picture of a Q-tip box (cause it’s kind of silly, right?) is that it’s a milestone. It’s the first time that I can remember throwing a box out right after using the last one.
I am really, really, really enjoying this. There is something so satisfying about seeing a space–amidst the clutter–that remains unoccupied. There is something so satisfying about seeing the pictures of all the things I’ve gotten rid of. It seems as though everything can go wrong during a week; I may not succeed at anything else that week, but getting rid of 21 things WILL happen. There is something very satisfying about seeing “holes” becoming wider–opening up space. There is something very satisfying about being able to find what I’m looking for because I know that a) I have it and b) where I’m keeping it.
Would I like to be done with it? I’d like to have made more progress, I guess, but I don’t want to be done with it. Maybe it’ll never be done. Decluttering has turned out to be a far richer experience than I would have ever guessed.
So much so that starting in March, I’ll be doing a financial simplification. I haven’t quite come up with a catchy title yet, but I’m committing to the first week of every month. I want to see what I can do to tidy up my finances.
19., 20., 21. Tea that expired in 2011 or earlier, two boxes of it that I had never opened.
If I had a loose plan for finishing one room a month, I’m woefully behind schedule. Good thing I’m not getting graded on it.
I realized a couple of things this week: 1) Sometimes things just aren’t worth messing with and 2) I have bought a lot of stuff that I never, ever use.
The Otterbox has a lifetime warranty, yes. But after having replaced a couple of parts on it multiple times (and dealing with their shitty customer service), I just decided to trash it and buy a new non-Otterbox one. It costs something like $2.50 each time you file a warranty claim. For the number of times I dealt with them, I could have paid for the excellently-rated cheapie that I partnered with shatterglass at least once–and probably a couple of times over.
There comes a point where it’s just not worth throwing money in the same direction.
As I’ve begun keeping a closer eye on my spending (aside, why is it that every time I start tracking my spending a bazillion “unexpected” expenses come up?), I’ve managed to shave a minimal amount of spending down, with the goal of cutting my spending 10% by the end of the year. Maybe because these two things are intersecting, but I’ve noticed that there’s a hell of a lot of low-dollar stuff I’ve bought that I just didn’t need. Or want. Or thought I wanted but got distracted by a shiny object.
I’ve been at the purging for over five months now. Without counting the weeks that I did more than 21 things, that makes it four hundred and forty one things that I’ve counted, and that’s not including the things I’ve thrown out but was too lazy to count because I was in a frenzied cleaning mode. (It’s about as rare as a solstice blue moon, but it does happen.)
Sometimes I amaze myself.
THE LAGNIAPPE:
A most awesome thing happened this week. In clearing out the garage, one box at a time, I discovered that I haven’t lost all my writing from before Katrina after all.
Mud-covered, faded, and stained, I have bits of poems, bits of dreams, bits of stories. Letters from people I didn’t even remember writing me. A whole lot of bits that I didn’t even remember writing. I spent a bit of time ooh-ing and aah-ing over them, tickled that I’d found them.
Lots and lots of words. Words I’d written. Words others had written to me. Words and words and words.
It’s over ten year old writing, from a place I was before college, before the second great love of my life, before my dog, before my niece and nephew were even thought about. Before I had a home for myself. Before R.A.
All of it is now in a file folder to be transcribed when I have the opportunity. Filed away for closer inspection. I daresay I’m in for a bit of nostalgia. It’s kind of exciting, a world I’ll be revisiting.
I came across this, though, before I really studied the meaning and use of words. And here, nearly eleven years later, it still rings as true for me as it did over a decade ago:
Words
Words will be the death of me,
And in truth, I am reborn.
Words, the perfect Universe,
Perfect Circle,
Imperfect Perfection,
Perfect.
Within words, we are born,
Hatching ideas from the Egg of all Wisdom—
We create, and are created—
We expand, and are born.
Words, the jailers of our soul,
Measuring the infinite with finite descriptions:
How does one describe the essence
of God?
of a laugh?
of an orgasm?
Within words, we are slain,
Leeching our power and losing it freely—
We belittle and are belittled,
We wither and are slain.
We choose destruction when we could save;
Choose to begin when we should end.
Gather Hope, in words, for the Spiral dances,
Another opportunity, again and again,
Until it ends.
Only to begin anew.
Raise arms, in words, to destroy the truest monster
That eats away our very soul—
Apathy.
For therein lies true death, from which there is no salvation.
“Fear is not the end of this,”
“Death is only the beginning.”
Truth lies just beyond the doorway,
Embraced, sheletered, and protected
By words.
Will you dare? Do you care?
Are you even truly alive?
20. and 21. Two unmentionables that I will neither show nor name.
This week was a whole lot of memories. Soup that a friend brought when I was sick; one of which I had eaten and, as we say in the South, “swoll up so bad” I couldn’t fit my feet in shoes, and that was way before the RA.
A book from grad school that was pretty much the last of many signs I shouldn’t be so caught up with getting my Master’s. It was brilliantly written–a plethora of different literary criticism styles as the pertained to the original Winnie the Pooh. I joked that it was the Freudian reading–i.e., the sodomy in Pooh–that ruined my desire for finishing grad school, but, looking back, it was the criticism of criticism that did me in. I love tearing apart things I read to look beyond the surface. I love participating in literary criticism, and I love that a degree in literature is the very epitome of critical thinking–a skill I think is clearly not appreciated in today’s political environment.
And yet, this book demonstrated the pretentiousness of parts of academia and made me really reconsider my choice of aspirations–to be a literature professor. I think that critical thinking and the ability to deconstruct what is said to see what is meant are incredibly important, I realized that I can still do what I love without doing that.
I just haven’t figured that out quite yet, but that’s okay. I am, outside the confines of my 9-5. doing all sorts of writing-and-thinking things that I love. And for now, it works.
It’s a great thing–and a huge relief off my mind–to know that it’s okay not to have everything figured out. I just have to know what I’m doing now, and what I might do next.
I did not get my filing done this week at all, although I did start a bin to put all my notebooks and binders in one place. Well, a bin and an empty box, courtesy of the garage.
I have no idea how I managed to collect so many notebooks and binders. I use them to write in, to organize whatever in; I buy them because they have peace signs on them or some other cute design.
Oh. My. God. So it’s a start.
THE BONUS:
The interesting thing about this week is I’m finally clearing out the stuff I’ve had from when I first moved back to Mississippi. The router, the cable, the modem, and the cat feeder (who knows where the other part is) are things that were muddied by Hurricane Katrina, as was the framed butterfly.
My grandmother, before her hands became too knotty to do much, was an absolute artist when it came to crocheting. Filet was her specialty: incredibly time-consuming work, fine thread, and endless patience. She did her best to teach me how to crochet afghans, but all I mastered was the chain and single/double stitches.
I did manage to make a king sized afghan during a 6 week convalescent leave from surgery once. I just kept going and going and going.
While I do have a couple of her afghans, all I have left of her filet is this butterfly. In all of her work, she made window dressings, table runners, and all sorts of gorgeous pieces. When she’d finish, she would give them away.
As I was slushing through the mud, I spied it and grabbed it, throwing it in a box to deal with later.
It’s now later.
I’m going to keep the butterfly and toss the frame. I can wash it by hand, but I think it will always have a blue hue, the background bleeding into her art, forced by a hurricane.
It seems fitting.
One of the big gains this week is my garage. I’m no where on schedule (always on Nancy time, I suppose), but the space is definitely widening on my shelves. There are shelves in this garage. I had never seen a thing until I toured it for the first time.
Ideally, I’ll have nothing on them but animal supplies and water, but we’ll see how that goes. I still have quite a few boxes left, ones that aren’t even on the shelves but are on the floor, making it difficult to get to the shelves.
I think it’s still a win. And these days, I’ll take any win I can get.
Doing it in chunks is definitely working. The filing cabinet is almost entirely cleared off. I’ve started noting my mileage for my doctor’s visits—definite progress toward my taxes.
THE GARAGE:
So far, one and a half shelves holding only things that I absolutely need: catfood, water, etc. I’ve cleared out boxes in front of the water heater, and can almost walk to it without pushing something out of the way.
Progress!
THE JUNK:
1. Brown shoes
2., 3., 4. Champagne glasses
5. Blue zipper pullover
6. Grey pants
7. Black pants
8. Hand held mirror
9. Dog picture frame
10. Red star makeup bag
11. Shock Collar
12. Best of Cesar Milan
13. Old Cable Modem
14. Cesar Milan Season 1
15. Some sort of gelled gloves
16. A Bent something or other
17. Eyeliner
18. Diaper sacks
19. Dead pen
20. Bendy skeleton
21. Rusty green mini stapler
22. Unidentified object—if you spot it and recognize it, kudos.
I saw someone post on Facebook the other day, “People who don’t walk their dogs every day are assholes.”
I am an asshole for this and many other reasons. But I am a pretty terrible dog mom.
The minute I saw her, I fell in love. I had made the mistake of getting a dog out of absolute need: I was scared to be in my own house after a break-in and multiple incidents of vandalism. Every little noise; every little sound that sounded “off,” and I’d feel like I was climbing out of my skin.
It was not the best of times.
I decided on a puppy despite a friend’s experienced advice. I wanted a female, and I wanted her to bond with me. I didn’t know a whole lot about dogs, and what I did know was mostly wrong.
I spent a couple of weeks looking through the local Humane Society’s site and couldn’t find what I needed. It apparently wasn’t puppy season, and what they had at the time were pitbull-type breeds. While I was—and am—totally against dog specific legislation, I didn’t think it would be prudent to get as my very first dog one that was—in my mind—more labor intensive than say, a Lab.
I really, really didn’t know anything about dogs.
I found true love on Craig’s list; a young couple with a baby had adopted a teddy-bear of a puppy who was far too wild for them with their baby. They had gotten her from the Humane Society and had her for three days before they decided they couldn’t handle her.
I saw this and knew she was mine. The first minute I held her (obvs on her best behavior), I felt a knowing, a belonging that I had never felt before.
How could I not?
And she came home with me.
And she was a terror. I had named her Durga, picking the name before I found the dog—again, against the well-seasoned advice of my experienced friend. Sanskrit for invincible, for fortress, it was exactly what I needed after the break-ins. Durga is a Hindu goddess, a warrior with the appropriate weapon for every situation. Defeater of demons and yet possessor of the lotus.
I really, really needed some lotus juju.
What I didn’t know until later that Durga is a manifestation of Kali Ma, and if there’s anything non-Hindu people know about the Hindu religion, it’s Kali Ma. In fact, Kali sprang from Durga-maa’s forehead, which is to say Durga actually contained Kali. And more.
Oy vey.
My Durga, my pretty little puppy, was the epitome of “being careful what you wish for.”
We watched Cesar Milan together as I hoped against hope that either of us would learn something that would make our life a little better. We didn’t. I enrolled her in obedience school, which she promptly failed out of.
She’d herd me down the hall, snapping at my ankles and calves. She’d come at me with her monstrous puppy teeth, jumping and biting down on clothes and skin alike, ruining shirts and making scars I still have to this day. I was terrified of my dog.
I’d call my friend J in tears, saying that the next day I’d return her to the Humane Society. I just could not live with her. “Tomorrow,” I’d tell her. “Tomorrow I will force myself to drop her off.” But tomorrow came, and I’d try again. Stubbornness reigned. I did not want a 10 pound dog to be the boss of me. I didn’t want to fail when I so desperately needed a win. I knew there was a sweet dog behind the teeth—I had met her and fallen in love. I just needed to find her again.
She was finally beginning to settle down—just a little, and we had settled into a life of a lot of play and as many walks as I could squeeze in.
But then she ran out in traffic, slipping through the front door and out into the street. I called her and she wouldn’t come back. I went toward her and her little puppy legs pumped faster than I’ve ever moved in my entire life.
She came back when she was damned well ready to.
I borrowed a shock collar to try to teach her not to do it anymore. I knew even less about shock collars than I did about dogs. The next time she slipped out, this time through the gate and into the street, I pressed the button.
She fell over and lay completely still.
I thought I had killed my dog.
I screamed, picking her up and carrying her inside. She panted heavily but her eyes were white, the irises rolled so far back in her head I couldn’t see them. As she lay on the couch, I stretched over her, crying and begging her to move. The shock collar had been set on the highest setting for a 100 pound dog. My 10 or 15 pound puppy didn’t have a chance.
As it turned out, she was indeed invincible. After I cried over her for what seemed like forever, she popped up, wagged her tail, and started licking my face.
Horrified by my ignorance and grateful for her survival, I hugged her so tightly that I probably almost killed her a second time. Not only had she survived the shock, but she had also completely forgiven me and was ready to play the moment she could stand.
Invincible indeed.
I never shocked her again, instead throwing it into a box that somehow got shuffled to the garage. It was in a box I cleared out this week.
Five years later, it’s finally time to let go of that garbage.
We both survived her horrific puppyhood, and I ended up with an awesome dog. A really, really awesome dog.
Lyrical Fool 