My nails

Happy Friday, Fatface! I’m sitting here staring at my fingernails. For you, these would be the white scraggly things at the end of your paws. They used to clack along the floor when you walked and it was such a delightful sound that used to bring be so much joy.

My nails are painted a color called "Lincoln Park at Midnight,” which is a deep purple with a bit of a sheen to it. Not be confused wit ‘Lincoln Park After Dark” which is a dark purple without a bit of a sheen to it. They’re slightly chipped at the corner of my middle finger on my left hand, which means that even though the rest of the nails are perfect, I have to repaint them tonight.

I started painting my nails when I was really young. I remember being 6 or 7 years old and painting my nails (badly) and then my mom telling me that if I just sat and read a book while they dried, I’d train myself to know the perfect amount of time to sit still without smudging. It was amazing advice because it played into my love of reading and my love of pretty things. I became about as good as a child can be at painting my own nails.

I’m lucky because I’m ambidextrous. That means that I can use both hands relatively adeptly. I write and eat with my left hand and do most everything else (like play sports) with my right. Because of this, my brain doesn’t panic when I try to use my non-dominant hand for something and I’m able to apply polish steadily with both hands. I know this makes no sense to you because you don’t have a dominant paw, but trust me, it’s a big deal.

I used to match my nail polish to my outfit in high school. I’d wear a lavender top, lavender belt, and lavender earrings and paint my nails to match.

In college, painting my nails took on a life of its own when, during my junior year after suffering through series of failed “relationships,” I decided to spend my time focusing on perfecting my technique of applying nail polish. I would stay in my bedroom and paint my nails and watch old episodes of Friends and ignore all men. It was lovely.

Once I graduated, I didn’t paint them as much. I did here and there, but it was becoming clear that it was something I needed for self care. I liked how meticulous I had to be when I was using the sharp cuticle nipper. If I made one wrong move, I’d cut myself. You’ve experienced this, actually, but with an automatic nail filer specifically for dogs. You didn’t care for it because it went too far and nicked your cuticle and you yelped in pain (in my defense your cuticles are hard to see because your nails are the same color as they are).

Filing, removing ridges, buffing, they were all things that I got actual joy out of. I loved the look of a finished product and I relished in how precise I could be, how I didn’t ever paint outside the lines.

When I got engaged at 22, I immediately started painting my nails (people were constantly looking at my hand now that I had a diamond on it). Funny how a hand doesn’t seem to matter until it’s blessed with a sparkly reminder that someone loves you. And now, 10 years later, if you added up the full amount of time my fingers have gone bare, it’d add up to about one month and a half total. That’s right. For about 45 days in the past 10 years, my nails have not been adorned by some fun color.

It became a part of my brand. I painted my nails every four days. If any nail chipped, it had to be re-done. I couldn’t sit with chipped nails or sloppy cuticles without it driving me absolutely insane. I mean I would stare and obsess. When I travel, I bring an extra bottle of nail polish and top coat. One time I was in Panama, and I decided that for the time I was there, I wasn’t going to paint my nails. I was going to let them breathe, give them a break. Instead, I freaked out and when to Pharmacie Arrocha and bought nail polish and painted my nails.

Another time, I was flying back from Paris and we were severely delayed in the airport. My nails had not survived the trip and I couldn’t find a file so my friend took all of our bags and ordered me to rectify my nail situation because she could see the breakdown coming a mile away.

I know it sounds silly, and shallow even, but it’s not about vanity. It just feels good to paint them, it’s a small reminder that I am steady. I love the way it looks when I’m typing or holding something. It feels good to me. I don’t care if other people admire them. When they do, I take the compliment very seriously, because I earned it. I literally grew my nails, conditioned them, nurtured them, in order to get them where they are. Painting them was and is a ritual for me. I get out my things, I choose a color, I condition, I file, I buff, I wash. It’s soothing for me in a way that few others things are.

Admittedly, for a while I resented when other people admired my nails too much because they assigned this as a trait of mine. They made it even more a part of my brand. It felt like people wouldn’t see me the same way if I just gave up the ghost and threw out my wall (yes, wall) of nail polish, and it also made it less special for me. In an odd way there is something challenging about being proud of anything external because it’s consumable by the world. It’s not just mine. My nails are like that for me, other people see them but they didn’t know what they mean to me.

To this day, I paint them constantly. There were a couple weeks after I moved to London where I declared that I was going to test how deep my nails were in terms of being rooted in my identity. I left them unpainted for two weeks. I wanted to see if I felt different. What if me painting my nails was literally my entire personality and I didn’t know it? What if I wasn’t funny or interesting without red nails? I honestly didn’t know because my formative years (my 20s were my formative years) were spent covered in perfectly applied nail polish.

The experiment was successful, and it turned out that I am me even with bare nails. I just like it and that’s ok.

For the record, even though I wanted to many many many times, I never attempted to paint your nails.

What's in a name

Hey buddy, I’ve been thinking a lot about names. When we brought you home, you hadn’t even made it into the apartment yet when your dad looked at you, declared that you had a droopy face à la Robert Deniro and the rest was history.

It was easy.

My name was meant to be Jasmine. Which now that I’ve lived nearly 32 years with a different name, seems quite silly. I obviously wasn’t a Jasmine, because I am not currently a Jasmine. But my mom knew when she looked at me for the first time that Jasmine just wouldn’t do, and in fact I was to be Arit Ruler of Worlds. Or just Arit, I suppose. A name is valuable, it’s important. It can be your brand (a brand is like the way people see you marketed to the world, so for example part of your brand would be “humps for no reason and has super soft fur”), it can be your email address, it can sit on political slogan signs, it can determine whether or not you get a call back for a job. It’s kind of a thing that defines you. And you don’t get to pick it. A name is almost always chosen for you.

If you look at marginalized groups of people, you can see that taking back their own name, making a choice about their name, becomes a source of reclaiming power and identity after living on someone else’s terms. You see this with black people in America rejecting the names given to their family by a slave master generations ago, you even see this with transgender people when they choose a name to align them with their true gender. It’s a step, it’s what you want to be called. It’s what you hear ringing in your brain when someone is trying to get your attention, and if what is pinging in your brain is a reminder of some past trauma, or of a you that’s not really you, then that has got to be both maddening and hurtful.

What you’re called has an impact on your life. And forget first names, last names come with even less choice. You just get whatever your dad had passed down. Even though dogs don’t legally have last names, you were Deniro Cummings. I took you to the vet once and changed your last name to mine. Your dad was mad. I thought it was funny.

My name has brought me all kinds of interesting moments in life as a result of people being wholly unable to pronounce it. I’m not alone in this, as the child of an immigrant this is a common problem. But my first name isn’t actually that hard. It has four letters. It follows the typical consonant to vowel breakdown and order (vowel, consonant, vowel consonant), and there are really only two, maybe three ways to say it. But Americans named Katie and Jackson and Paul see it and fumble immediately.

Art. Arti. Rita. Erin. Eric. Erica. Errrrrit. I give up, do you have a middle name. Yes, I do, and it’s spelled weird, too.

My last name causes even more chaos in their sweet little brains. It starts with two consonants that have no business being together unless they’re at the end of a word. Nsemo. Those five letters trick people, fill their mouths with marbles, and out comes some of the most cringeworthy noise.

People think the ‘N’ is silent. Why? Because there are so many silent ‘n’s in the English language?

People think it’s a long ‘e’. This one makes sense to me, but it’s a short ‘e’.

People think the ‘s’ is silent. Again, when is this a thing in their actual language?

Nemo. Nasaymo. Nezmo. Nesemeo Semo. Nizimo. And that just gets you up to second grade. No one just called me by my last name in high school sports. My brother, as a Marine, was referred to as Nemo. He just let that go, though. Because Marines have guns.

Your name isn’t hard. Deniro. Like Robert. That’s how I’d introduce you to people. But still, some people would call you Dinero, like money. In Spanish. I didn’t mind that so much because you did cost a lot to take care of; that doggy daycare wasn’t cheap.

The beautiful thing about having a name that fills people with fear and confusion upon looking at it is that your expectations are low, and you get to be absolutely dazzled when someone gets it right the first time. It’s truly a magical moment.

Then there are the other times, the extremely rare occasions, where not only does someone get it right, but they know it. They see it for what it is. I have a friend in London who is from South Sudan and when I was sharing my contact details with him he asked for my last name. I just spelled it out to him so he could put it in his phone, (you know ‘n’ as in Nancy, ‘s’ as in Sam, etc), and when he looked at it, he said, “Ah! Nsemo! That’s a strong name,” and smiled. It was a moment of actual and sincere appreciation. I think the conclusion I just came to is that I need to spend more time with people from the continent.

My name is a part of me, and when I was young I was determined to change it the second I turned 18, but 18 came and went and I kept this beautiful beast of a name. A name that originates from my father’s home country (Nigeria). A name who’s origin I’m only slightly clear on. But it’s mine. It’s my brand. And oddly, you never knew my name. I was just a human person who squished your face, snuggled you, fed you, and paid for your ridiculous(ly amazing) daycare. But I’m also Arit Nsemo. Nice to meet you.

Things we've lost

Dear snuggle bug smush-face,

Ever since I was a little girl, I’ve thought about the things that are lost. By lost, I don’t mean people, or even death or the loss of friendships. I mean the things themselves that are lost. I used to see a single winter glove on the sidewalk, you know the stretchy kind that cost $1 and don’t actually keep your hands warm, but that for some reason every person has at least 4 pair floating around in various jackets? Those. If I were a betting woman, I’d say that those gloves are the most lost item of all lost items (we’ll talk about socks later).

Whenever I see a single glove on the sidewalk, being stepped on, covered in dirt and slush, sometimes even frozen to the ground (sometimes peed on by you), I think about the other glove. The owner of the gloves. The moment it was lost. They could have been rifling through their backpack and one slipped out. Gloves are soft and make no sound when they hit the pavement, so there’s no alert for when it happens. It just gently floats out of the pocket as you pull out your house keys, like a burglar sneaking into a building behind an absent-minded neighbor. Then it lands and there it lies. The other glove perhaps safely still in the pocket. Not missing, the sole glove. The glove that, upon the owner’s realization that it’s now solo, will become an annoyance. Be locked away in a storage box with other single gloves, because we don’t get rid of that box of single gloves. Maybe they sit in one of those clear plastic storage bins at the back of the front hall closet for years to come, slowly joined by other, inevitable, solo gloves.

And you never wear it again. It’s just there. The other half of something that is lost. Being on its own completely strips away its purpose.

I feel sadness when I see a single item on the street when it should be a part of a pair. The other day, I was walking to yoga when I saw a single earring on the sidewalk. It was a silver dangly earring, it’s small bauble chains splayed out like it had literally fallen to its death. Why is it that things never get lost together? It’s so rare to lose both earrings, but losing one earring is easy. In my jewelry armoir, I have a small compartment for single earrings. That compartment is the definition of hope. One time, a few years ago, I lost one earring. It was a gold hoop that had a lattice design and they were, at that moment in time, my favorite earrings. I was disappointed that one was gone, so I kept the other.

Then one day, months later, the second earring showed up in a random pocket of a random purse, half-stuck into the lining and I rejoiced. But it was such a strange moment because from then on, I never got rid of the single earring, because I could no longer be certain that its mate would be gone forever. But that was the only time I ever found the other earring, and my compartment of single earrings, other halves of something that was lost, is growing.

We spend so much time looking for the things we lose. But the most infuriating things that we lose are the things that leave behind a mate, a reminder of what was lost. When we lose a pair of pants, the whole pair is gone. When we lose our favorite nail polish, the whole bottle is gone. When we lose our favorite earrings, only one is gone. We have the other one still, but it’s now useless unless you’re one of those very cool people who can pull off the single earring. I’m not.

The feeling of frustration of looking for something that is lost is universally human. I don’t think you can even relate. Yes, sometimes you would freak out trying to find a rawhide you hid, but give you a few minutes and you’d forget it ever existed, particularly if you were offered something else. Like a random plastic hanger to chew on. But humans have memory, we can feel what it felt like to have both gloves. We have pictures of ourselves wearing both earrings. We spent time looking, feeling around in closets, turning pockets inside out, shaking out scarves hoping to hear the clink of a metal earring as it falls out onto the floor, revealing itself to you.

Sometimes we just lose things. Sometimes they’re just gone. Sometimes we will walk into the closet and open up that clear plastic bin and look at the pile of individual mis-matched gloves and sigh, knowing that we’re going to add to it frivolously. Perhaps there is a place where all lost things go. Some argue that there were elves in the dryer that steal socks away. But are there elves that steal other things? For example, why can’t I find just one of my black Frye boots? I have the other one. And it’s a shoe! It’s not like it fell out of a bag when I grabbed my keys. But I haven’t seen it in a while. Quite a while, actually. In fact, it’s been gone for so long that I’m starting to think that one of your parting gifts before you were lost to me, was eating that boot.

Anyway, lemme know if you ate it.

Love,

Mom

Moving

Hi, Deniro!

You can keep eating your peanut butter Kong for this. I just wanted to say hi and see how you’re doing. I’m up early, a concept that you don’t understand because time in general is a mystery to you and also getting you up to get you to go on your morning walk was indeed a challenge.

Moving is a strange thing. Our ancestors (people ancestors, not wolves) were hunter gatherers. They were by and large nomadic people so there wasn’t one physical or geographical location that they called “home.” But as we figured out farming, we decided to settle down as a species and stick to one fertile plot of land. We built things, we spent generations in one spot. That is a strange idea for me.

Moving as always been a part of my life. There was an understanding that moving was inevitable for any number of reasons. My mom wanting a better life for us and moving us from Rock Island to Chicago when we were young, before that, moving from one shit hole house to another, depending on where the rent was cheapest. There’s a difference between moving by choice, though. A big one. In my adult life, post college, I’ve lived in 7 apartments. You lived in 5 (two of which you lived in part time since your dad and I shared custody of you). I believe you knew you were in a “different” place each time, but really all you cared about what that we were with you. It was about the people of the place and not the place of the place.

Moving was not the same for me. Each decision to move in adulthood ranged from dramatic to downright silly in most cases. My first apartment after college was this very nice two bedroom in Edgewater. Your dad found it. I still remember him calling me when I was walking to class in the English building senior year of college to tell me he thought he found a place. Then calling me again when I was in class (I stepped outside, I’m not rude), to tell me we got the place. I hadn’t seen it, but he wouldn’t have chosen badly so I was excited.

Moving into that place on Granville, was such a surreal experience. I had the distinct feeling that with that apartment, I would start a different kind of life. I was living with a boy, I would find a job, I would be an adult?

We only lived in Granville for a year. Looking back, I don’t actually remember why we moved out. I think they offered for us to buy it (which wasn’t financially possible), and we wanted more space? Or perhaps the place felt tainted because we had some of our first blow out fights there. The kind of fight that feels dirty. Icky. Cuts through to you and whether you like it or not, the kind of fight you hold onto, that you build resentment over. You may not understand the word resentment. It’d be like you having a feeling that caused you to withhold love from us because we disciplined you for stealing an entire cheeseburger off a plate. The cheeseburger looked so good! And no one was eating it at the time! Why would you punish me?! And those thoughts over that specific cheeseburger would spiral in your little doggy head until, over time, you stopped wanting to snuggle with us. That’s resentment.

The place was definitely tainted. So off we went. To a beautiful loft in Lincoln Park. We loved this place immediately, even though getting it was sketchy. It was listed by a company called Quantum Apartments that was housed in a shady storefront on Western Avenue, definitely a cover for something and quite possibly only in existence for money laundering. We paid the deposit in cash (that was preferred), and signed a “lease” that we assumed was legally binding, but at the time couldn’t say for sure. Ok, so remember the time that you were walking up the stairs with your dad, and you saw a man coming down the stairs and he looked normal, but you growled viciously? That feeling that caused you to growl, that instinct that something was off? That was Quantum Apartments.

In the end, the actual apartment was fine, apart from the never-ending-pee smell from the previous tenant’s dog. There was also a weird poo smell coming from the bathroom at all times. But I guess you could partly blame that on us. And you! You came into my life when I lived on Clybourn and you definitely contributed to the poo smell.

We lived in Lincoln Park on Clybourn for about a year and a half, when we decided to move to a smaller place, downsize so we could have extra money for travel. Simplify our lives, we said. Save up, we said. Truth was, Clybourn had started to feel like too much. I don’t know if you remember this, but it was 2,300 square feet of space. It was long and big and you used to bolt from one end to the other when you got the zoomies. You also did not have brakes, so there were frequently saliva smudges on walls where you slammed into them with your drooling face.

It also felt like too much because man, oh man, was that a hard time for me and your dad. If Granville was where the first blow ups happened, Clybourn was where the resentment (remember, the cheeseburger) set in. In such a large space, you may not be surprised to hear that it’s pretty easy to live as distant roommates rather than husband and wife. Oh yeah! We got married while we were living at Clybourn.

The decision was made. We were moving to Rogers Park, to a large one bedroom a block from the lake and Lunt Avenue Beach. This, my sweet doggy, was where you spent your formative years. Moving with a dog was different. We had to first make sure you were allowed to live there (this may shock you, buddy, but some landlords don’t like dogs because you destroy things and are terrible sometimes). I remember when you first got introduced to the place. We brought you over one time before the movers came. It was empty, and you ran in and sniffed every corner as an inspection. Then you shook your butt in approval and it felt like we’d made the right choice.

I know this isn’t how it works with you, but I like to think that Rogers Park is your true home. The lake, the playtime each morning with a pack of other dogs along the beach, the freedom of not having to be on a leash all the time, knowing that if you ran out your back door and down the alley, you’d be at the beach, having lots of time with your dad during the day to hang and chill. It was a dog’s paradise. That is one of the reasons the apartment on Sheridan Road was so special.

It was also cheap. $900 a month split two ways. Though since we had two cars and no parking spots, I’m pretty sure we spent about $400 a month on parking tickets. Oh, a parking ticket is someone punishing you for parking your car where it doesn’t belong, as determined by the great and powerful City of Chicago. It’d be like you getting fined food for sitting on the ottoman that you were not supposed to sit on, but always sat on, then eventually chewed so it had to be thrown out. Imagine each time you sat on the ottoman, you didn’t get breakfast. Horrible, isn’t it?

The apartment on Sheridan Road in Rogers Park ran so deep. During that time we had some milestones (an actual wedding ceremony on Lunt Avenue Beach), we traveled, you started going to doggy daycare (and then stopped going because you couldn’t stop humping other dogs and I was too embarrassed to send you back -- thanks for that), an affair (we can talk about this later), a separation (you might remember this time as when mommy came to visit you every Monday night and we shared meatloaf from The Growling Rabbit), fun, love, more blow ups, name calling, laughter, holes punched in walls, the list goes on.

When I moved out of the apartment on Sheridan Road and into my own place on Wolcott Avenue (the first time I had lived alone as an adult), I missed you. You were over the weight limit so you couldn’t come to visit me and I was too scared to push it at the time. I’m really sorry for that. In hindsight (hindsight is when you look back to an event in the past and see it more clearly, like when you ate the heel off my favorite pair of Frye boots and hid them back in the closet after the offending act so I found them days later -- perhaps you would have instead left them in plain sight? Just a thought), I think there was a reason you were only with your dad at the time. He needed you more. I hurt him really badly, I didn’t think I deserved you.

Moving to Logan Square was a big deal. I did not want to leave the Sheridan Road apartment. After I moved back in (about 9 months after I moved out in the first place), I didn’t want to move again. The act of moving sucks. No way to make it sound like it doesn’t. Packing and purging things. Coordinating movers. Changing the address on the electricity and cable. It’s not like in hunter gatherer times where you just rolled up your shit in a cloth? A large leaf? Threw it on your back and got to moving. We have stuff to move. But alas, one day when your dad was out of town for work, I saw a mouse. Turns out, there was actually a PILE of dead mice under our stove. We immediately started looking.

The loft in Logan Square still gives me pangs in my heart. After four years in Rogers Park, it was a huge change. 1,800 square feet over two floors. Huge windows, sky high ceilings. It was, quite literally, my dream apartment. We moved in on our 5-year wedding anniversary.

When you came in for the first time, you ran around, gave the place a good sniff, and shook your butt with approval. Now that I’m writing it again, I realize this is not a good gauge on whether or not something is good. You weren’t allowed upstairs at the loft on Belden Avenue, because it was carpeted and you were not to be trusted. It was also where our bed was and you had a history of peeing on beds. Seriously? Why did you used to pee on our mattress? Replacing mattresses is so expensive and you were such a little shit for that.

The loft on Belden was a dream, and it also came at an interesting time in our lives. We had better jobs and more money and I felt like an adult. We had also just come off a pretty bad year where I was mean to your dad and he was mean to me and there was talk of divorce. (Divorce would be like you legally choosing not to be our dog anymore.) We had also overcome a lot of shit in our marriage and were on a good path. Just kidding! We were fine, I guess, but I sometimes wonder if you felt the tension. If you could feel when we wouldn’t touch each other. If you could sense the air thick with ickiness. Could you? Dogs are sensitive. Sometimes you’d just come up and snuggle me and it felt like you were telling me it was ok.

You had the world’s best dog walker and doggy daycare when we lived on Belden. You got picked up and went on pack walks with other dogs. You got to walk around and play with other dogs every single day. You loved it. You also started whining when Tony would leave after you got dropped off. That stung, buddy. I was literally standing right there.

Belden ended abruptly. The dream loft was gone in what felt like a flash and 8 months after we moved in, we moved out. I have a good memory. But I don’t remember where you were during that move. The final move. We moved ourselves using a van and our own bodies as labor. Not because we couldn’t afford movers, but because it was important to honor this for what it was by putting our own energy into it. It was a long move. From about 6pm to 2am we loaded and unloaded that van four times. Drove it around the corner in Logan Square to my new place on Milwaukee Avenue, and up north to Uptown to his new place on Hazel Street. It was the kind of night that can beat you if you let it. It was heavy, and it almost felt good to be carrying something because at least you’re still moving.

That night, I slept at your dad’s new place for the first and last time. I still cannot remember where you were. Maybe we had Tony take you. So you could just be in your joy instead of shuffling around with us in our pain and shellshock.

I settled into my new place and started unpacking. When you came over to see our new home, you ran around, sniffed at all the corners, and shook your butt with approval.

On having kids -- or puppies, as you might call them

I always always assumed I would not have children. I met your dad when I was 15 (which is about two in dog years). We started dating when I was 21 (which is about three in dog years). When we started dating I declared, “I never want to have kids, I just want to get married and travel the world with my husband!” He was on the same page, which is about all you can ever ask for as a 21-year old in love.

As I progressed throughout my twenties (which would be age three-ish for you), I remained indifferent to kids. Forcefully opposed, even. You came into my life when I was 24 and I was super into you. Ok. I’m lying. Listen, I want to go on record saying that I love you very much, and I miss you every day, but puppies –- while cute –- are basically the worst. You were exceptionally cute, and exceptionally the worst. Perhaps good behavior is inversely proportional to cuteness.

It was difficult for me when we first brought you home (I’ll tell you the whole story another time. Short version: you’re from a puppy mill.) You were wild and weird and hard to train and you peed everywhere and potty training you was hard because you came to us in January and it’s cold in Chicago in January and you, even in later years, refused to poop or pee outside in the cold. Needless to say, being home with you for a few months in a row was taxing on me to the point where I ::gasp:: lamented to your dad that I didn’t want you anymore. I know! It’s terrible!

We ended up keeping you. You lucky pup. But if I had given you up, adopted you to a loving family with a farm and other dogs, it wouldn’t have been a travesty. In terms of me missing out on the joy and love you bought to my life, yes, but it’s not the same as giving up a kid after spending three months with an infant and being like, “Nah, this isn’t gonna work, take it away.” You can’t do that with kids.  And I knew that.

At 25, I got an IUD. The copper one. I know you don’t know what that is, but remember that fateful day in the summer of 2010 when we brought you to the vet and they did…something… to you? You were asleep and there was a knife and when you came home you could no longer make puppies.  Well, the IUD is a less permanent way of getting the same result, but for people. No puppies for the forseeable future.

A note about that day for you, your dad was very upset that we cut off your parts before you could have a chance to bone another dog. But isn’t that the interesting part? Dogs and other animals don’t spend time deciding when to have kids. They don’t have to think of the financial factors, or the impact to a woman’s body or career, or whether or not it will negatively impact their marriages, plus the whole “what if the kid is evil?!” thing.  If we had not taken that step for you, you would have knocked up another dog without thinking about it at all. So we basically denied you your biological directive. Admittedly, any puppies you spawned would have been super cute.

Now that I’m in my 30s (about age 4 for you), the kid thing is coming up again. I’m not with your dad anymore, not married anymore, but now it’s like well – do I, like, have to have them? I like my life as it is, I like my time and my money.

But I also understand that I have a pretty cool perspective on life, and it’d be interesting to impart some of this hard fought wisdom on a small human. You know what small humans are, remember? You hated them. I think you were personally offended that anything could be close to your size or cuteness level that wasn’t also another dog. You were embarrassing, actually. No one should have to apologize because their dog barked at a toddler.

Dogs also don’t have to worry about who their partner is. Any bitch that’s willing will do, and not raising your puppies isn’t socially and morally reprehensible like it is if humans don’t raise their kids. There are no deadbeat dog dads.  I have to think about that. In fact, I think about it more than most people because I grew up without my dad. It took a lot of effort and therapy and more effort and pain and understanding to get to a point where I grasped how that impacted my life, and my relationships.

I’m not alone in this thought, I know that. But the thought of not choosing the right dude to knock me up is truly terrifying. Sure, I’d be fine, and rock out as a single mom because that was my example (my mom used to say that you were so ugly that you were cute – to which I took great offense, but she’s a good mom).  As a human, choosing who to have a child with is maybe the most important decision you can make. I guess choosing who to marry is also important, if marriage is your thing. We can go into that another time, I guess.

So here I am now, at 31, IUD firmly in place having just passed it’s 6-year anniversary in my uterus; it’s lived in my uterus longer than I have lived in any apartment in adulthood. It’s got history in there. And now I’m thinking about if I ever want to take the thing out. And I still don’t know. I do think babies are cuter now than I did when I was 25, and am more amenable to it. My boyfriend would make a good dad. He can fix things and is kind and sometimes makes lame jokes.

I usually make decisions pretty well. Not too big on hemming and hawing. I don’t have a middle. When we got you, I saw you, watched you play for 30 seconds, then picked you up and ordered, “We’re taking him home.” Then I did not put you down again. It was simple. Maybe if I could see my baby first? Like check it out, assess if it’s cute enough to be worth the trouble? That’d be dope.

Fall is here! Hooray!

Hey, fat face!

It’s officially fall in London. I hope you had a good summer. Who am I kidding. Of course you didn’t. It was HOT this summer. Is it really hot in doggy heaven? Nevermind, there’s no way it would be and if it was you would boycott and demand to be sent back to Lunt Avenue Beach (in the springtime) to live out your resting-place years.

This summer was pretty cool for me. There is no air conditioning in my apartment in London so that wasn’t ideal, but otherwise, I enjoyed my time. I even got a chance to visit Chicago. I just downplayed the hell out of how hot I was. Ok, so you know that time I picked you up from doggie daycare when we lived in Rogers Park, and we had to walk home and it was like 95 degrees and you just stopped after a few blocks and laid down on the sidewalk in front of a sprinkler and wouldn’t move? That’s how I felt for most of this summer.

Lately though, now that reasonable weather has returned, I’ve been thinking a lot about how much power our thoughts have over us. If you have the time, I recommend listening to Impact Theory episodes. There are some really interesting ideas in them, but the biggest point is that our thoughts shape our reality. If we control our thoughts, we can control our reality.

When I first heard about this philosophy, I thought it was New Age bullshit. But the science backs it up and who am I to argue with science? Plus, if you think about it, as humans our thoughts stress us out all of the time. Just thinking about a stressful event, past, present, or future, can send us into an emotional tizzy. I think it’s kind of like the anxiety you felt when your dad would leave and you’d assume he died. Even if he was just taking out the trash. Your reality was shaped by what was in front of you at the moment, and as soon as that thing was no longer there it was very confusing for you.

As humans, our reality is shaped by our thoughts, mostly. It rarely is shaped by what’s actually happening in the present moment, it’s what we’re thinking about what is happening in the present moment. Did I lose you yet? Hang tight.

What I’m saying is that we’re really powerful. I sometimes believe that you thought you were our master, and in some ways you were. You did make your dad watch you eat sometimes. But really, we can absolutely think good things and therefore feel good things. It’s so simple. So, that’s one of the things I learned this summer. To think positively. Or to think about what I want to happen instead of what might happen, or what happened in the past. It’s fun to observe those patterns.

Anyway, just wanted to check in. Hope all is well.

London is a place and I live there

I don’t know if you know this, but I live in London now. It’s so weird because I always wanted to live abroad and one of the main reasons I struggled with the idea of selling all my worldly possessions and living a vagabond life in a foreign land was because I couldn’t take you with me. You were a lot of things, but easy to travel with was not one of them. Take away the fact that you aren’t allowed to fly commercial on account of your smushy face, but there is also the added piece that you don’t like when it’s too hot or too cold or raining or if you’re asked to walk more than a few blocks without the promise of a treat or playtime with other dogs.

But, I live in London now. I know I just made fun of you because you were persnickety about the weather, but the truth is that I get it. It’s gray today. It is a particular kind of gray that I didn’t know existed until I moved to England. Chicago has the kind of crisp gray winter sky that makes you want to consider slitting your wrists, but then you like have a cocktail, mentally bandage them back up and carry on about your day.

England’s gray is different. It’s insidious. It comes from somewhere deep inside something that I don’t understand. It colors the building with a monochromatic hue. I feel like the red buses and phone booths are specifically red because it’s the only color that really contrasts enough with the gray to make them stand out. I bet a lot of people missed their bus or grew frustrated when they weren’t able to make a phone call before someone made that genius chromatic decision.

I know it’s odd to complain about the weather, because I like to try to think about what you would do in a situation. Barring the obviously inappropriate things like peeing on someone or aggressively rubbing my butt along the ground, I find that your reaction to things is a good benchmark for how to live without a care in the world. Except for this thing. You were human-like in your weather preferences. Too hot and you had to be carried, too cold and you had to be carried, too rainy and you’d come to a dead stop when the door opened and you would hold your pee for hours and hours until the sky cleared and you could pee in a dry environment. I’m pretty sure you were dainty about mud too, which is a uniquely you thing because I know a lot of dogs that love the mud.

I feel similarly. I don’t like extreme heat or extreme cold. And this gray day makes me wants to curl up. I have anxiety about things that don’t matter at all. For example, today I worried about the following: how I would pay my credit card bill (hint: with all the money in my bank account), how I would go about getting dressed this spring with the obvious lack of clothing in my closet (a lie), how your dad and I worked so well together on simple tasks (a weird thought given we’ve been apart for nearly two years), how I’m going to deal with the humidity and my hair with London weather (that was followed by a mild panic attack that I’d have bad hair days for several months at a time), how many likes my picture of my boyfriend and I got on Instagram (data point: people like pictures of just me more than they like the two of us together!), and finally, whether or not I should go to yoga tonight (I definitely should because I agonized over this one the longest).

I know I’ve had days like this before in this city. Days that feel endless, monotonous and gray. But when I try to recall one vividly, I can’t. I only recall the joyful days. The days when I walked to work and the sky was blue-ish (London blue, if you will), and I could hear the click of my boot heel on the pavement in time with the music in my headphones (reggaeton, thanks for never judging me about that).

Then there are times when I know I had bad days. I know I have been sad. Desperately so. I know I was hurt and angry and wanting to scream but the kind of scream that isn’t loud, but silent and internal and vibrates your capillaries. I try to remember what I did when I felt worse. When I felt much much worse. And all I come up with is you. I used to come home to you and your fuzzy face and fat rolls and I’d snuggle up to you. So on this gray day in London, I’m going to keep sipping my tea and channel those days when I’d cuddle you and try to make you walk in the rain. Then I’m going to take my overthinking ass to yoga.

You like food, right?

Do you ever remember the food that you ate at different times of your life? I’m sure you don’t, because you’re a dog and you forget instantly that you’ve eaten an entire steak. But I’m a human, so I do remember these things.

When I was in high school, I worked at Nordstrom on Michigan Avenue in Chicago. I was broke. I was a teenager who had no allowance, but a lovely part time job. The thing was, I had to feed myself at my lunch break and spending $10 on lunch every day just wasn’t an option. I remember my friend and coworker -- Ellen, you know her, you’ve humped her arm before and you repeatedly try to hump her dog, Penny -- and I used to walk to Potbelly’s and order one meatball sandwich with tomatoes added. I know it seems weird to add tomatoes to a meatball sandwich, but it was a tasty addition. We would split the sandwich and split the cost. It came to $4.22 each. Not a bad deal for two broke high school kids.

First first job out of college, I worked at JP Morgan Chase and my soul was sucked out of me on daily basis. I wore the same black stretchy, wide-leg dress pants every day. I pretended to complete my spreadsheet, but really, I would fill out a row of cells at line, say, 967, and then leave my screen scrolled to that line. Then it looked like I had done the previous 966 lines, when really I had done 7. You know, like when I’d walk into a room and you’d pretend to be softly and innocently resting your head on a shoe, when really you had just been chewing on it.

Since I was so miserable, and my pants were so stretchy, I ate one of those cobb salads from Corner Bakery nearly every day. I know you just heard the word salad and tilted your head in confusion. But the cobb salad from Corner Bakery has 780 calories in it. And bacon on it. And I’d also get an M&M cookie for dessert. I spent something like $10.80 each time I did this to myself and it felt worth it.

You know what I mean when I say it felt worth it, right? Like the time you were left alone with 2 pounds of ground beef in the car and you ate through a pound of it before your father intervened. Then you passed out for hours in an epic food coma. That kind of worth it.

After I quit working at Chase, I had some time to myself. I worked part time, I guess. I wrote content. But the best part of it was my freedom in lunch choices. When you work at home, you can do whatever you want for lunch. Grilled cheese sandwich? Yep. Frozen pizza? For sure. Ride my bike to the Thai place a mile away and have a sit down lunch special with spring rolls, pad thai, and a drink for $9.00? Of course. I remember the feeling of that. The knowing that I could get on my bike and go somewhere. Or not get on my bike and go nowhere. I wasn’t hemmed into eating options by proximity to my office.

In high school, we had off campus lunch and could go anywhere within walking distance that we could get to, eat, and get back within 45 minutes. I know what you’re thinking, Deniro, that’s a tight timeframe. You’re right. It was. It was plenty of time if you left right away, went to Allende on Lincoln Avenue, had two tacos and rice and beans and walked back to school. But if you wanted to go to McDonalds? Oof. You better jog there and take your burger to go on the way back. (Always eat your fries first if you can, cold fries are disgusting. Ok, ok, ok, I forgot who I was talking to. You eat garbage and have no preference for hot or cold food.)

What you eat and where you eat it says a lot about your freedom. I mean, look at you. You were fed delicious food throughout your short, but brilliant life and you still took advantage of every additional food opportunity available. Garbage. Unattended tacos on the dining room table. A box or three of Girl Scout Cookies. The loveseat. For you, everything could be a meal, or at least a snack. And your repercussions were mostly disappointed looks from me and perhaps some diarrhea (that I had to clean up). I’m just saying, sweet boy, that you had it made when it came to food. My life, and the life of my fellow humans, feels like it can be a series of agonizing decisions about what to eat. Which is silly. Sometimes I wish I could just eat the loveseat and call it a day.