I’d say this is maybe 1/4 finished. Glasses are hard. As are noses.
Ragnar and the Drinking Fountain, an Adventure in Pictures
Orion
When we bring him home the first day he’s covered in dirt. I carry him past mom and into the bathroom to wash him while Dave runs interference. We weren’t supposed to get a puppy, we were just supposed to look. But really, send Dad and Dave and me out to look at puppies and expect us not to get one? Losing battle, that.
Washing him has the unexpected side effect of arousing mom’s sympathy. Wet bedraggled and bewildered puppy is apparently one of her triggers for mothering.
My brother names him Orion.
Soon enough Orion loves everyone. He spends his first hours with us trying to lick our noses. Our older golden retriever starts drooling uncontrollably; her anxiety response. Eventually she decides Orion’s okay. He’s remarkably tolerant of her drooling on him.
Six months old and Orion is limping. He can barely walk. Both front legs are having problems. Watch a six month old puppy try to play and stumble because his legs won’t hold him.
Osteochondritis Dissecans. Congenital problem with joints and cartilage. Dad calls up the breeder and chews him out about faking the health certs for the parents. The breeder offers to take Orion back, which we all know would be a death sentence. The man would just put him down.
Mom and Dad comb through the budget to find the money for surgery. It will cost 2k, and they can only scrape up 1k. Uncle Stan gives us the rest.
Orion goes in for surgery on both shoulders. He’ll need to stay at the vet for a week after surgery. The receptionist calls to tell us what a wonderful dog he is.
He comes home looking like he’s wearing go-go boots.
He can’t go up the stairs, so Dave brings his sleeping bag downstairs and camps out on the living room floor next to Orion for the next several weeks. Dave is Orion’s person.
Dad and Uncle Stan drive Orion back for a follow-up at the vet. Orion is so terrified, he shakes the entire hour long ride there. Uncle Stan holds him the whole way there. Orion will be the first, possibly the only, one of our dogs Uncle Stan bonds with.
Orion heals and no longer limps. He never stops being a puppy, though, as the years pass. He’ll look at you with complete adoration, like you’re the best thing in the world. Half an hour later you’ll catch him giving the same look to a sprinkler head.
Orion sleeps on Dave’s bed with him every night up until Dave leaves for college six years later. Then he sleeps in Mom and Dad’s room. .By this point neither Dave nor I live at home. Gaia, our older dog, passes away suddenly. No warning. Orion is the only dog now.
Dad and Dave and I get sent off to look at puppies again (you’d think Mom would have learned by now…). We commit to a pup, though she’s still too young to bring home. When we finally bring her, Orion bounces.
Even though he’s six, he acts as young as she is.
The two of them become best friends, curling up to sleep together. Where he goes, she follows. Sienna. She is frightened of everything, and he is her brave older brother. Even though she eventually comes to weight 15 lb more than he does, she always believes he’s bigger.
Mom gets diagnosed with breast cancer. The treatment leaves her bed-ridden for the better part of a year. Orion and Sienna are her constant companions. They’re gentle with her. They know she’s sick, and she’s lonely, and they don’t mind when she needs to cry and hold them. Without them, she would be completely alone most days. For the first time since Bryse died more than 20 years ago, Mom truly bonds with a dog. Orion.
Likewise, Orion doesn’t mind when Dad falls apart and holds onto him and cries. Because Dad won’t let himself cry in front of Mom.
Orion has bonded with every single one of us. Dave, Dad, Mom, Uncle Stan, me. The only one of our dogs to do that.
Dave and I come home for Thanksgiving, and Orion is limping. He can barely use his front legs. But he’s excited to see us. Dad buys a vest with a handle on the top of it for Orion, so we can help take some of the weight off his legs when he goes upstairs. Sometimes Dave just carries him up. Orion is tired, and in pain half the time.
Mom and Dad sit us down. He’s not going to last much longer, they tell us. Which we all knew, but no one wanted to say. So, they tell us, you should probably say your goodbyes now.
We’re all crying. Dave lets me hold him while his shoulders shake. Mom holds Dad’s hand.
We don’t want him to suffer, Dad says. We won’t let what happened to Spock happen to him. No long and painful decline. No dying alone in the veterinary hospital.
Orion makes it to Dave’s birthday. He even makes it to Christmas.
When I arrive, he’s so excited that he gets up and limps over to me. Stumbling. In that time he’s lost even more muscle mass. His left front paw is useless. He can’t go up the stairs.
So Dave gets out his sleeping bag and sleeps on the living room floor.
Dad ups Orion’s pain meds, way past what the vet recommended. But what harm now? When he’s on the pain meds Orion wants to play. When the pain meds wear off, Orion is completely unresponsive.We take pictures. And we make this last week as good as we can.The day after Christmas we spend the morning petting Orion and giving him whatever treats he wants. Uncle Stan comes over and Orion struggles to his feet to go welcome him.
When afternoon comes we walk him out to the car, and he’s wagging his tail and it feels so wrong, because we’re taking him to die. Dave holds him the whole way there.
Orion can’t get out of the car; I carry him. When we get in the door the vet tech helps me carry him the rest of the way.
He’s trembling. We all gather around him, petting him. Each one of us touching him and trying to comfort him. His trembling seems to go away. The vet gives him a sedative.
A few minutes later, when Orion is calm, the vet comes back. It’s an extremely high dose of an anesthetic he tells us. Orion won’t feel anything. His body will twitch, but that’s not him. That’s the body trying to stay alive. He won’t be aware of it.
And it happens just like the vet says.
And Orion is gone.
They say you need to love yourself before you love others… I call BS
Cubby Selby used to say that the reason cliches exist is because they’re often true. I think, maybe, we’ve learned that cliche = turn your brain off.
They say before you can love anyone else, you first need to love yourself. Which has always struck me as ridiculous. You can love someone else with a desperate ferocity without ever loving yourself: witness my mother’s absolute dedication to both my brother and me. She never, in her entire life, loved herself. I think she’s learning to, now. I think the cancer made her examine herself and what she wants more closely. If not love herself, I think she’s beginning to at least value herself.
I don’t think my father has ever really loved himself, either. Â But he loves my mother, my brother, me, Uncle Stan, the dogs. It’s a small group, but he would do almost anything for any one of us. I don’t know if he’s learning to love himself or not. It’s a bit harder to tell. But I think he’s learning to accept himself. He apologized to me for the way he treated me during my childhood. Completely on his own, he apologized to me.
To be able to look back and see that about himself, and then not only realize he wronged me, but to actually make the apology unprompted… That’s pretty amazing.
It’s no secret to those who love me that I’m not particularly fond of myself. Remember that sketch I posted of myself at seven? I picked that particular picture to draw because of how much hatred I felt towards that little girl.
Tonight, walking Ragnar, I was listening to the audio version of Things I Overheard While Talking to Myself (which is a pretty damned awesome book). Something Alda said at the end about knowing your own values struck me. I wish I knew what it was in particular that made it hit home. I’ve certainly heard plenty of variations of essentially the same advice. But something did strike me.
I tried to figure out what I valued. Family? Partnership? Dogs? Writing? Which did I spend the most time doing? Well, I spend the most time worrying about things and trying to come up with absolutely perfect solutions (yay OCD!). I don’t want that to be my value. But I was really startled that I didn’t know the hierarchy of the things I valued. And then it occurred to me, well, I don’t much value myself so why would I have even cared what things mattered to me? Of course I didn’t know. Because it didn’t matter.
No, I’m not saying it doesn’t matter. But that I’ve felt that way. And then that line of thought went even further. Each of those potential values I listed is a partnership: my parents, my boyfriend, my dog, my (possibly entirely imaginary) audience. In each case, I only value half of the equation. So why would I even care what happened to the other half–in this case–me?
The answer is I don’t. Or I didn’t. Gah. All this self actualization language is so imprecise… can I tell you how much I hate using lifecoach-y sounding terms? I hate it. Possibly as much as Gollum hated Samwise. Or maybe it was as much as Samwise hated Gollum…
Imagine you’re making a meal for two people. One, you care deeply about. The other, you don’t. In fact, the other you may even actively dislike. But you put up with that other because, after all, if they hadn’t shown up there wouldn’t be this dinner. Person A happens to love kale, and brownies, and pasta. Person B likes pasta, but isn’t so much into the dark leafy greens and doesn’t like chocolate (blasphemy!). So what do you make? Pasta, kale, brownies. Hey, Person A gets everything they want while Person B at least gets one thing they like!
(BTW, you’re Person B.)
Aside from this making you a bad host… the math is wrong. Person A isn’t getting what they want at all. Person A is here for dinner with Person B. How can Person A be happy if their friend is getting shortchanged?
Now let’s take away the theoretical dinner and go back to those values. If I value my family but I don’t value myself and take care of myself–my family won’t be happy. Same with my partner, or my dog (I would treat myself like shit, which would affect all of them), or my possibly imaginary audience (which, you know, might not be imaginary if I valued myself and therefore dedicated more time and focus to my writing. And, uhm, sent editors stories when they asked me for them…).
Both sides of the equation need to be considered. A + B isn’t equal to A. It’s impossible to have a relationship with someone who isn’t there, or is intermittently there. And it is impossible, as that person who self negates, to build anything lasting and healthy.
You can love someone else while not loving yourself, but you’re not going to do a very good job at it.
In Which Job Hunting is a lot Like Dating, Number 1
Freelancing has made it even more obvious to me that job hunting and dating really have a lot in common. Even more so if you look at internet dating sites (which I have, that’s how J and I got together. And Rayhawk and I before that, and…. Right. Internet dating, it works.)
As ever, we come back to Communication. Which is how one sets Expectations.
You don’t know very much about the other party when you enter into contact. You have a vague sense:
“Oh, yeah. This company focuses on video games and they’re looking for a copywriter who knows the field. Awesome. That’s totally me.”
Which is a lot like:
“Hey, this guy is an engineer who’s into hiking and looking for a geeky girl who likes old Alec Guinness movies. Awesome. That’s totally me.”
All of which certainly merits some investigation. An email. A phone call. A preliminary interview. But really, you know nearly nothing about the other party. Just some extremely basic info. You have no idea how organized they are, how laid back, how they behave under stress. Nor do they know those things about you; you’re both on your best behavior. Neither of you have any real sense of what to expect.
I’ve found that a lot of companies don’t know how to express what they want. They’ll often just expect you to know. When I taught, I used to call this being writer-based, not reader-based. They know the info so well themselves, it doesn’t occur to them that they need to explain it to anyone else. Communication fail.
When pressed for more details, they might say something like, “It needs more pizazz. Some zing.” Which is completely meaningless. It’s like a girl saying to a guy, “I want you to be more romantic.” There’s nothing actionable in there. Define for me pizazz. Show me a picture of zing. Quantify romance.
I find going to the pinball hall of fame with my partner romantic. A friend of mine thinks going out to a fancy restaurant is romantic. Still another thinks going to a rave together is the height of romance. Good luck figuring out which one of those things to do when all the girl says is “I want more romance.”
So pizazz and zing and romance are all pretty vague. For that particular gig I eventually figured out that if I wrote the copy like it was porn, the CEO liked it. (No, I’m not telling which company).
Heck, I like it when a guy gives me flowers. But not red roses. Try predicting that.
And here’s one of those things that just completely sucks; the other party decides that, because you didn’t get it perfect on the first try, you’re a horrible person or not The One or you just don’t love them enough.
This actually hasn’t happened to me in romance. I think that’s more of a chick thing than a dude thing. Usually. And man, I’ve been guilty of it. Having now dealt with employers who’ve done that (and no, not telling you which company)… It’s awful. And unfair. And totally ignores the fact that human beings are really kinda designed to learn and evolve.
When a company, or a romantic interest, does that, you have to figure that’s a big red flag. You’re getting yourself involved with someone (or something) that communicates like a toddler. Or an 18 year old (amazingly similar, those two). Which means drama. And, you know, maybe it’s worth it. Maybe the perks make the job worthwhile. Or maybe the other person is just so hot, you can’t pass that up. At some point down the line, you’ll end up telling stories about the whole experience and shaking your head ruefully.
So, when J recently got me a bouquet of six red roses and one white one, I thanked him for them. And I felt loved. Because, dude, the effort was there. And I’d never told him, “Red roses, not so much.” And I made sure to tell him that the white rose was my absolute favorite of the bunch.
What do you want to bet I start getting more white roses?
My Boy and Me at the Masquerade
We almost met at this very same party four years ago. But that’s another story.
A Portrait of the Artist as a Seven Year Old
What do you see in the expression? I know what I see, but no one else seems to see the same thing I do…
Borrowed Prayers
I don’t have any appropriate prayers. Perhaps the El Malei Rachamim if I knew Hebrew — .
But Emily Dickinson… her poems can be my prayers. I think, maybe, they always have been.
Death sets a thing significantThe eye had hurried by,
Except a perished creature
Entreat us tenderlyTo ponder little workmanships
In crayon or in wool,
With “This was last her fingers did,”
Industrious untilThe thimble weighed too heavy,
The stitches stopped themselves,
And then ‘t was put among the dust
Upon the closet shelves.A book I have, a friend gave,
Whose pencil, here and there,
Had notched the place that pleased him,–
At rest his fingers are.Now, when I read, I read not,
For interrupting tears
Obliterate the etchings
Too costly for repairs.– Emily Dickinson
In Memory of One Kick Ass Biker Chick
Have you ever had one of those friends? One of those prickly friends who is never easy, and sometimes you think maybe they’re bat-shit insane — either that, or brilliant, and then you realize, maybe those two things are the same?
I had one of those friends. An incredibly prickly, incredibly savvy woman who was willing to make a stand on something she believed in, even when it cost her a job and threatened to get her blacklisted in her industry.
She was a woman who escaped a cult, but lost half of her children to it in the process. I don’t think she ever forgave herself for that…
She made her way to LA, worked in Hollywood with some of the craziest people you’ll ever meet. And she fell in love. With motorcycles. They gave her freedom, and my words will never do justice to how she felt, but maybe some of hers will: I am a Motorcycle. Check it out. Really. It’s about a lot more than riding motorcycles, a lot more than gender, a lot more than being a writer…
I knew her in grad school. And she really did come across as intense and maybe a little crazy. But damn, she was fun. And she cared passionately about her friends, and about gender roles, and about motorcycle safety. She cared a hell of a lot about me, and I cared a hell of a lot about her, too. Even though she reminded me often she was closer to my mother’s age than mine. She’s the one who kicked my ass a year and a half ago about getting back to my own writing, and I did. And I sold that story. But we lost touch. She was depressed, I was overwhelmed with my mom’s cancer…
I looked for her a few times on IM, but didn’t see her. She’s been in hermit mode before, disappearing for a few months at a time. A few months became nearly a year…
She’s dead. She died in January, of a heart attack. The only reason I know – the only reason – is another friend, a close friend of hers and mine, had a student hand in a paper referencing one of Wendy’s articles on motorcycle safety. That friend looked up the website and saw that the article had been published posthumously.
Wendy Moon died January 9, 2011. Look her up. Google her, and you’ll see dozens of websites mourning her loss. Motorcycling magazines, list serves, personal blogs… She was fucking brilliant and she actually did something to make a difference. She called out the motorcycle industry on shady practices.
She was not an easy woman. Nor a happy one. But she was amazing. And knowing that she’s gone… well, my world just got darker.