No Real Title; Of Course There's Dogstuff At The End...

I had an apartment, a long time ago. It was going to be the first time I lived without a roommate. My apartment was freaking adorable. It had two front doors, for some reason.

The first person who wanted to move in was a really good friend/boss/twice-sex-buddy, who I will call Smith. Smith and I hung out together one of the first nights I lived in the new place. We went out, I'm SURE we got drunk as skunks, and somehow got locked out of my apartment. We had to break in. There was a piece of wood sticking out of the stoop of the apartment next door, advertising that the house was protected by some sort of security system. Smith took the wood out of the ground and proceeded to jam my window open with it. We crawled in. I can't remember what happened that "we" decided he wouldn't live with me, but it never happened, so I'm sure we came to some sort of agreement. I liked sleeping with him, though. We certainly had an affinity towards each other, and while "affinity" doesn't sound superhot, it made for sex that was. Who knows why.

After Smith, my wackadoodle blond friend wanted to move in with me. Would this have been fun? Yes. Would either of us have made it out of that situation alive? No. Again, I hate when people ask, then answer, their own questions, but it works here. No blond wackadoodle. End of discussion.

So, Smith, then BW. After that, I enjoyed an extremely short stint of living alone. I got cable. I bought a green sofa. Four days later, a friend of a friend, barely known to me at the time, had to move in. I forget how this happened, but I know that one day when I came home from work, all his crap was there. We had two front doors.

Living with him was way more fun than living alone would have been. I particularly remember one night: he was sleeping in the room next to mine, a mutual friend of ours, JC, was over, sleeping in my bed with me, and JC's dog was between us. It was perfectly still, and I was the only one in the house awake. I wasn't bored, and I just remember feeling perfectly safe, happy to be breathing under the same roof as these people. I miss that feeling. It lasted only for a second.

A booty call ruined it. Dude. To this day I wish I never answered that phone, and that I could have gotten a few more minutes of the peace-feeling. The booty call guy was a really good guy (and it actually turned out that I was the only one who thought we were booty-calling; he thought it was more relationshippy), but I could have done without it that particular night.

Weird, that this stands out as a regret of mine.

PS: Gia gets fixed tomorrow!

Introducing....

Miss Gia.

Our little miss ladypants has been with us for a week, today, and I couldn't be happier.

FAQ:

What is she?

She's a mutt. We don't know. The vet doesn't know. No one knows. I have been told by guy at gym that I can pay $150 to send a cotton swab of her spit to a guy in California to analyze what she is...I'm going with no on that one. She's cute and awesome. That's what she is.

How big will she be?

According to the vet, somewhere between 25 and 40 lbs. Again, we don't know.

Does she rock?

She rocks. And she is hilarious. She takes after me.

Are you turning into one of those annoying dog people who only want to talk about funny shit their dog does?

Hmmm... Hope not. Probably, though.

Boy and I love her, and so do all her new friends. She loves her vet and her vet tech, and I'm lucky that my punkass buddy knows a ton about dogs and dog raising (because he's a great dog daddy), so he's been a great resource, too.

I promise she won't be the focus of every post from now on, but I had to gush a bit. Cheers!

Coma Plans, WYR, Other Things

it's been a while.

also, i don't feel like capitalizing today, so i'm not going to.

i guess the way i can do this best is to write down what i did this weekend, map out what i want to say based on that. sound good? good.

friday. friday was good. i went to see a friend of mine and his ridiculously adorable clown-like dog, and we played a game...an old fave of mine, "would you rather." my favorite thing about this game is picking out the raunchiest, most uncomfortable scenarios, and then forcing people to choose between them. for this reason, many people hate playing this game with me. my ex used to get angry with me, in fact, when (often drunkenly), i would give him one of these fake ultimatums.

my friend and i were really getting into it, and because he and i are very much alike (read: very self-absorbed), there were certain questions that really made us think. here is one of them: would you rather save the lives of five loved ones, or 1,000 strangers in another country (who knows why they had to be in another country). we both picked loved ones. then we changed it to this: would you rather save the lives of five people, and they'd never know it, or let 1,000 strangers die, and EVERYONE would know it. this one, for us, was more difficult. same end, but the difference was that in one, people would hate you. boy, of course, picked saving 1,000 people each time, no matter who knew it or not. he's like that. we're not.

then we met boy and two of my other, delightful, wonderful friends for a few drinks, and had a lovely time all around. i think. i may have drank a bit too much. i pet a great english bulldog mix while we were at the bar. (it was actually a really great weekend, dog-wise, for me). often it's awkward to hang out with friends that have never met, but it was far from it. good times.

saturday. bachelorette party. then we met up with the corresponding bachelor party. fun, but not a lot to say about it without putting anyone's shit on front street (i love that expression).

sunday. woke up. felt droopy. mopey. played with a dog. ate brunch way too late. watched ghostbusters. walked to a brooklyn neighborhood near ours, and saw the bastille day festivities. hit a bookstore for a while. i bought two books, one of which was jonathan ames' the alcoholic, tried to laugh a little. hung out with boy. he had a rough night at the bachelor party the night before.

we had dinner in the bastille-day neighborhood, and i started to get tired. i'd had...not a hangover, exactly, but a sense of sadness and malaise all day (does sadness mean the same thing as malaise? don't i teach english? wow). again, droopy and mopey. at dinner, a little boy sat next to us. he had two small stuffed animals named pablo and austin. he wanted to go home.

i asked boy a question. "if i were to go into a coma, would you secretly be a little bit happy that you could tell people you had a 'girlfriend in a coma?'" he said that he would not, and that even though he loves the smiths, he would be sad about my coma status. and that if he found any kernel of happiness in the whole sordid scene, it'd be that he could, in fact, tell people that he had a girlfriend in a coma.

then i asked him: if i was your wife, and i was in a coma, would you downplay our relationship so that you could say you had a girlfriend in a coma?

he said no, very quickly. i was happy.

then i reminded him of a deal that my friends have, that i've always wanted to get in on. i told him "don't forget to tell n&c to pluck my lip and chin hairs."

"your coma plans are extremely thought out," he told me.

"yes, of course they are. do you have any?"

he told me the only thing he wanted was for me to make sure that no one wrote all over him with a sharpie while he was in a coma.

"oh my god! is that a thing? do that to me, too," i said.

phew. good thing he hipped me to that.

anyway, as we were walking back home, i felt worse. sadder. mopey-er. spoke to my friend via IM, a little. he sounded sad and mopey, too.

right before bed was the worst. sad. lonely. droopy. mopey. sad sad sad. scared. alone.

boy just looked at me and said the most depressing/helpful words i'd heard in a while...
"sometimes i get that way after a rough weekend, too."

A Big Week For Me; Puppy Porn

Despite the fact that, like Ron Burgundy, I've been living in a glass cage of emotion this week, there's several things going on that I'm excited about. First and foremost being that I'm getting my pupster in a few weeks. I can't WAIT to have a dog. As I've been told before, my biological clock is certainly barking. In consideration now:

• A rescue mutt of any kind, medium size (Boy's favorite idea right now. Bu this "of any kind" business freaks me out a bit...you don't ever know what you're getting. But I love mutts. And I love the idea of a rescue).
• A boxer (so lovey! They are prone to fatal health problems, though, and I want my pupster to be around for a long while).
• A French Bulldog (ahhh, oui. I am somewhat against trendy dogs, but that's just Martha Stewart's fault, no one else's. And I admit, I've never thought about the Frenchie thing before. But I am head over heels in love with one right now, and he's really just the best pooch ever).
• A mastiff (my favorite forever, and yes, I know, not practical).
• A pittbull terrier (ditto).

Help, Naked Readers. Not that I'm not doing my own reasearch. Every day I look at what my friend calls "puppy porn."

And yes, there are other things happening right now, good, bad, and confusing, but this is all I choose to get into right now.

Later.

Open Letter

Dear People That Live Upstairs,

I think you are girls, and I think there are three of you. That's my best guess. Our apartment has three chambers that can reasonably be called bedrooms, so if you have the same layout as us, and if you're as young as I think you are, you probably use them all as bedrooms and split the rent.

Here's my question: how is it that you can possibly be so loud? I mean, you're always loud, but last night you really outdid yourselves. Boy and I are used to your little "conversations" that you have on the stairwell at top volume, usually one of you screaming, most likely drunk. But those are few and far between, and as they usually go on between the hours of 5pm and 9pm, they've never really bothered us. But clomping around at FOUR AM in the hallway, shouting on the stairs, and making your yappy dog wake up every time you walk in: NOT COOL. I don't care if it WAS a Saturday...I had a house-guest, bitches! A judgey one, too. A judgey houseguest that was considering moving to the area. I don't mind telling you: you ruined the borough for him, y'all.

Anyway, a version of this note is posted downstairs on my door. I should have said something to you whilest you were stomping your asses around this morning, but I was having a tumultuous night anyway and didn't have the energy to get out of bed.

Good day.

Your downstairs neighbor.

This is Not the x365 Project.

I read about this thing called the x365 project. Yes, it was created in '06, but I'm sort of slow on the uptake on this kind of thing. Basically, what you're supposed to do is write fifty words or less, every day, about various people in your life.

I'm not going to do that.

It's really limiting, and I have enough trouble keeping up with this blog without having rules. Also, I'm not always comfortable putting people's names, even just their first names, on this thing. What I will do, however, is do a few of these whenever I damn feel like it, with whatever names I want.

So here's three.

#1 You were an ex of mine. You were two exes ago, so I'll call you Double Ex. This name fits for you for many reasons. You were verbally abusive. Let's not mince around on tippy-toes about that, either. You were. I'm glad I am able to let it go a little bit now, and that I no longer feel I have to hit ignore on my phone when you call. And I won't lie, I sort of relish the fact that you are so sorry you "let me go;" I'm not proud of it, but I sort of like that you feel shitty about how you treated me. I'm sorry you don't know what to do about that girl you just got pregnant. I hope you find a way to be happy, but I'm pretty sure you never will. I'm sure at some point we'll see each other again; NOLA is not that big of a city, and your armada of trucks swarms around the place like roaches.

#2 Nutty ex boss! Granted, I've had many nutty ex bosses, and you were not even the nuttiest. Your weird relationship with your dog bothered me, though. You were a crazy rich dude and you tried to make your dog into a crazy rich lady. You said she would only eat if there were no coats on the chairs, and if the dishwasher wasn't running. When she pooped blood once, you said she was developing an ulcer because I watched her when she ate. It was strange that you canceled an interview you were supposed to do because of the blood-pooping incident, by the way. You told me she did yoga. She did not do yoga. She was lanky, so I'll admit, sometimes it looked like it. But she wasn't. Want to know how I know that? Because she was a dog. Know the only thing she was passionate about? Chasing cats. You bought her perfume once. That was crazy.

#3 I will call you Lucian. You and I were on the same trip in the summer of 1993. We were fifteen. You lived across the country. I was attracted to you, despite your weirdness (not because of it. I was too young for that at that time). Once, on a bus trip in Germany, we almost held hands. We did not, because you thought I had a boyfriend back home. The reason you thought this was because I told everyone I did. Needless to say, I did not. After you and I did not hold hands, you got up and sat with another girl. By the end of that bus trip, you and she were a couple. After returning home, you wrote me a few very strange erotic letters. I never wrote back. After a few weeks, you "broke up" with me. You said it was because of religion.

And there you go.