Seymour’s Fat Lady

Yesterday’s post reminded me of one of my favorite moments in _Morgan’s Passing_, a novel by Anne Tyler. The protagonist, Morgan, is on vacation, and suddenly gets overcome with “one of those damp little moments of gloom that come and go. they mean nothing.”

I forgot to mention, in all my neurotic ravings, the unparalleled sensual joy of napping with a soft, wriggly, lovely puppy. I’ve only ever owned cats before, so I’ve never before experienced the concentrated love beams that come from a dog’s eyes when he’s looking at you adoringly while curled up in your lap and licking your fingers.

Add to that the beautiful unit we make when all three of us are snuggling on the couch at night, in our new apartment, and I have perfect contentment. I love writing and editing from home, and I’ll bend all my efforts to getting such work.

The combination of raising a puppy and my childhood being exhumed on facebook is starting to FREAK ME OUT. Especially since the holidays and my birthday just passed. I’m really really sad this morning, but I don’t know why. I just know thinking about my childhood makes me cry.

I’ve blocked out most of my childhood. I can’t believe how many good memories people have from grade school. Watching the puppy grow up is so terrific, I wish I could remember being young, when everything was brand new, and wondrous. Seeing a forest for the first time, or smelling the ocean.

It should be perfectly obvious to anyone reading the chronicles of my raising Sweeney that I am absolutely too neurotic to raise human children. Let’s just hope I don’t emotionally scar the dog.

Christmas Day at my sister-in-law’s house was VERY STRESSFUL. I’m so glad it’s over. 

The drive to Morrisville wasn’t too bad, but the drive home was harder because traffic. The hard part was being in a new house with twenty people and trying to keep on the dog’s feeding/potty/sleep schedule. I think he was a little champ, considering. He continues to be sweet tempered, for the most part, except for teething which makes him chew everything.

Nevertheless, I richly enjoyed my birthday the next day, during which I got to sit on the couch and read William Gibson’s _Count Zero_ and then play with the puppy, capping off the evening by ordering in Thai and snuggling with husband and pup.

Rod got me a pair of fuzzy tarantula slippers; they are the best things ever. The dog thinks they’re an amusement park ride.

Last night Sweeney slept (or else quietly amused himself) through the night and didn’t wake us up at 4:00 in the morning. Only his fourth night in our apartment and already he’s settling in! I wonder if this is an anomaly, or the start of a new trend?

I’ve decided to wean myself off the dog-parenting manuals because they’re making me crazy. Must develop my instincts instead.

When we went to the library yesterday, an elderly woman began cooing at him in his little Sherpa bag. She engaged me in conversation about her beloved dog, who’d passed on twenty years ago already–the memory enough to bring the tears to her eyes.

“You learn a lot about yourself when you have a dog,” she said.

“I know,” I said, “that’s why I wanted one.”

Sweeney almost bit Rod’s nipples off today, though, tugging at the nipple rings.

I can’t imagine ever having children. For a long time I hesitated about getting a dog, because I’m such an overachiever and a perfectionist that I’m afraid I’m going to mess up some poor puppy’s life. I’m sick to my stomach with fear that I’m doing this all wrong.

Here are some of my puppy concerns:

What if he won’t ever stop gnawing on my clothing, which ultimately means he’s the boss of me?

What if I’ve scarred him for life by taking him for a 20-minute walk in 30-degree weather without putting a doggie sweater on him?

What if we’re doing the ear medicine wrong and the ear mites and yeast infection never go away?

Is it bad that he chews the newspaper on the bottom of his pen? Bites the outside of his crate?

Should I give him a new toy every day, as one puppy book suggested, or should I do as the Dog Whisperer advises and keep the toys to a minimum?

Am I stunting his growth by limiting his toys? What if his neurons don’t fire because he’s permanently bored and then he’ll be permanently dim?

Will I spoil him by giving him more toys? Keeping him out of the pen more?

I’m keeping loosely to the house-training schedule advised by the Monks of New Skete in the Art of Raising a Puppy book, which advocates letting him out of the pen for limited bouts of play and exercise, but keeping him penned for at least two hours at a time.

The woman at the pet store told me the Dog Whisperer and the Monks of New Skete are sadists and that I should listen to Ian Dunbar’s dog advice.

Too many cooks in the kitchen of my head.

And what does my instinct say? That everything’s fine. That he’s at that age where he’s learning dominance and submission games, and he’s testing his limits, and it’s normal.

The last time I played with him this afternoon, he sniffed my butt like I was another dog. I think he thinks I’m his littermate and Rod is the alpha dog. Figures. Everyone likes Rod better.

We picked up the dog on Saturday, renting a zipcar and praying our drive would not be made miserable because of snow. At 8 in the morning, there wasn’t a lot of traffic on the road, and by the time we left New York the highways weren’t even clogged with snow. 

Readers of this blog know that we kicked around some names for the dog but were holding the final decision until we met him. As soon as Rod picked him up, the dog looked at me out of a baleful eye that cinched his name: Sweeney, for the demon barber of fleet street. Poor thing was terrified, even though I’d diligently slept in a tee shirt for three nights and then mailed it to the breeder to give to the puppy, so he would recognize our scent when he met us. When I held him, he calmed down, so I suppose that tee shirt trick worked. Thanks, Amy, for suggesting it!

During our five-hour drive home, we stopped twice to give the dog a chance to get out of his sherpa bag and stretch his legs. He’s part pug, so he stayed put and looked at us as though to say, “It’s cold out there, ya dinks. It’s warm in here. You do the math.”

I was amazed that such a young puppy could hold it that long until we got home, but he did.

For the first two days I was a nervous wreck, so anxious that I could barely eat. Turns out, the dog is much more chill than I am, so he’s helping me relax about the business of raising him. I’m glad, because I don’t want to transfer my hangups to him.

Yesterday he was extremely brave at the veterianarian’s, taking two shots and two rounds of ear drops without making a peep or struggling. I was kvelling!

Some of the other hurdles he’s jumped in the last few days include wearing a collar and walking on a leash for four promenades across the living room, learning how to jump off the couch, navigating the chair legs under the table (puppy obstacle course), and lastly, dozing while the washing machine is rumbling and tumbling right next to him.

I trumped up reasons to be in the kitchen–cooked dinner, made lunch, swept the floor, sorted the mail–to ascertain whether the washing machine would freak him out, but I think my presence (and not the washer noise) was impeding his nap.

Does this dog have brass balls, or what? He’s a farm dog, so I don’t know what all he’s used to…could be he’s gotten accustomed to tractor noise and all kinds of machinery. But he’s an Amish dog, so he can’t have come across that much technology.

He shows amazing good taste in that he watches Godzilla movies raptly.

I got accepted into the acupuncture school I applied to, but I’ve decided not to pursue it. Who am I kidding? I’m a writer. I may sulk at a streak of bad luck, but I will never want to do anything else. I’m feeling much more on track now that I’ve gotten some freelance writing assignments and have been clocking the dollars while working at home and raising my two-month-old puppy, Sweeney, whom we just picked up on Saturday from an Amish farmer in Pennsylvania Dutch country, just north of Harrisburg, PA.

Here is what he looks like:

Okay, I’m over my  hissy fit and feel much more empowered now. I will never stop writing, but I need a more stable avenue of income. I strongly suspect that the freelance life is not for me. I need a little more stability. I never have these freakouts about writing when I’m in a salaried job. I just slide the rejected poems into another waiting envelope to send them out again and move on with my life.

I’m indebted to my friends for pointing out how my panic was derailing my logic and my magical ability to drum up money out of thin air. 

I’m still applying to acupuncture school, but I’m also going to start reading tarot again (which is a healing profession) just to make sure that I am able to complete my healing agenda and won’t kick a recalcitrant client in the kneecaps. In the past, I haven’t had the tact for healing work. One gruesome example is when a tarot client brought in a picture of her abusive spouse and I wrangled with her for an hour, telling her in no uncertain terms that she should call a women’s shelter immediately rather than go back to that house. It was perfectly obvious that she wanted me to tell her this man would change. It was evident from his eyes in the pic that he never would, and that he would eventually kill her. She went home crying, and I went home crying because I knew she was in grave danger and lacked the capacity to assess that for herself and wasn’t listening to me telling her to wake the F up because this was life or death.

I’m older now and have more sympathy for the ways in which we delude ourselves. After all, I know that a dirty martini and a pack of rolos does not constitute dinner, and that it exacerbates the symptoms of PMS, but I still call that dinner and then complain about PMS.

On a spiritual note, I’m having a good time tuning into the Christ in Christmas. It’s making me much  less grinchy; this is the first time in twenty-five years that I’ve cared about the Advent season. It’s also because some of my favorite holy days, the ones dedicated the the Virgin Mary, are in this month. Tomorrow is the feast of the Immaculate Conception; I will concentrate on what I want to bring forth in my life.

Catholicism is not so very different from goddess worship. It’s all about the focus.

I’ve applied to acupuncture school. Now let’s see if I’m accepted…and how I’m going to pay for it.

The point is, I’m beyond frustrated with working in publishing. For once, I’d like to work my ass off and actually get paid for it, and it seems as though, with a job in healthcare, that might actually be a possibility.

Here are some of the choicer things I’ve heard in my publishing career:

“We don’t have the budget to pay you.”

“We’re offering five dollars for a five hundred word article.”

“So you have a master’s degree, so what? Get in line. Even editorial assistants have master’s degrees.”

or the worst of all:

Nothing. Silence. Zip. Not “thanks but no thanks for your pitch to our magazine, ” just a big howling echo of suckitude, the vacuum of the cosmos ringing out the message, “Magdalena, you were not meant to be a writer.”

I will always write. I love it. But trying to do it as a business has wrung every last drop of joy out of it for me. Honestly, I can’t take the rejection anymore.

I’ve sent out my poetry manuscript 75 times. The majority of the poems have been published in magazines, but the collection itself has not been published.

I’ve written five unpublished novels, the last of which I rewrote four times.

I’m at work on a memoir right now, and in workshops the feedback is always the same as it has been for my fiction: I suck at plot. Characterization, no problem. Plot, not so much.

I want a simple life. I want to work in a field where there’s job growth, not “Oh, you have a degree in creative writing? You want fries with that degree?”

And I’m tired of spending my money on writing classes and poetry magazine subscriptions and books, and getting nothing back.

Plenty of people manage to make a career out of this. I haven’t, though, and I don’t want to try anymore. It’s just as easy to fall in love with the conductor of the orchestra as it is to have a fling with the first violinist. In the same way, yeah, I love writing, but I love a lot of other things, too.

People in my age group will go through, on average, six career changes in our lifetime. And what the hell am I going to do with myself for the next thirty years while I’m working until I’m seventy and not retiring? Blogging about celebrities for five dollars a post?

Frustrated, sick at heart, and entirely at a loss as to what to do with myself. Scared that I’ll be taking out enormous loans for acupuncture school and then not be able to pay them back.