[ 31.10.03] · [ ]
these are some of the things lucie and I saw tonight as we were going for our evening run around the neighborhood: 1. a car accident 2. an old man being loaded into an ambulance 3. a bunch of high school kids having scooter races 4. another car accident 5. stockboy at the 24hr produce store building a fort with empty crates 6. massive fallen tree branch full of bees 7. a small child wearing footie pajamas and a vampire cape 8. three-legged cat 9. something on the order of one hundred thousand leaves, none of which was nice enough to be stolen for my halloween costume when I walk around the neighborhood I just feel like I'm walking, just walking and observing and existing like a normal person. (or a normal person who constantly talks to a dog that has ears like batwings.) when I run, though, I feel like I'm running through peoples' lives, breaking through them so that they flutter away like the remnants of a finish line ribbon. I don't know exactly what it is that makes the difference, whether it's the speed or the brevity or the way they come one after another when I run, like slides in a projector controlled by something else. all those people flicking past me, one for every heartbeat and every other footstep. from what I can tell through my peripheral vision, lucie keeps her focus straight ahead as we run, with her back flattened out and her tail pointing away to show the world where we've been. I think she's waiting for a flock of sheep to materialize in the shadows of the playground. all this city life is only a curtain, and one of these days it will go up and show her the real world behind the velvet.
[ 29.10.03] · [ ]
when I got home from the city today I had a message waiting for me on a purple post-it. call your mom asap! I don't usually get such urgent messages. my mom said, "I have some sad news about cricket." cricket is our dog. we rescued her when I was twelve and she was about seven months old, after she'd been found abandoned and abused on the side of a massachusetts highway. she lived in a vet's office long enough to be spayed and named wanda, and then she came to live with us. I remember the first night after we brought her back to cambridge, when we were all sitting on my bed and waiting for my dad to come home and grant his all-important approval. we were still trying to come up with a new-and-improved name; if we hadn't already had a cat named paisley, cricket probably would have been called casey. cricket turned out to be a good name, though. it was winter when we got her and she went bounding through the snow in springing leaps, leaving behind a trail of sloppy holes. "see," I told one of my friends, "she jumps like a cricket." when there wasn't snow, she jogged like a sidewinder, with her back legs listing off to the side, and she ran like a speeding bullet. no one knew exactly what kind of dog she was, but when we watched her streak around the baseball field with her ears whipping back and her feet barely more than a blur, it was easy to believe the vet who had guessed she was part greyhound. other cricket-lineage possibilities included retriever and border collie. we tell people she's a border collie, even though her coloring is wrong. on the phone, mom told me, "she died today." this is the only picture of cricket that I have on disk. it's from 1997, when I was fifteen years old and she was almost four.
[ 26.10.03] · [ ]
my dreams were about all the tiny creatures that live between my tendons and my ligaments, how they burrow in and plant microscopic roots that weather away my soft tissue the way lichen turns rock to crumbled bits. for some reason when I woke up with my body still intact I was subsumed by the most intense feeling of displacement I've had in years. I took stock of my surroundings: sheets tugged off the corners of the mattress as usual; my purple rug covered in short white dog hair; strings of paper cranes hanging from the world's ugliest light fixture; upside-down stuffed penguin waving his feet at my nose. all familiar, and yet all I could think was why am I not at swarthmore? stupid brain. I should not be feeling nostalgic about dining hall meals, communal bathrooms, endless homework, or nasty mixed drinks served from 50-gallon tubs. maybe I'm really not, maybe I don't miss those things at all, only the people and the culture that they signify. something more ephemeral, less describable. for lunch today I made a small bowl of rice and mashed it with half an avocado soaked in soy sauce, then folded the resultant green paste into small pouches made from squares of nori. I shredded the last of a leftover parsnip and wrapped the long strips around the outside of the seaweed, like I was bundling up little packages to send away as gifts. but then I had to eat them all myself. I think I need to try harder to see my swarthmore friends who are in the city. and also, maybe, not spend so much time playing with my food.
[ 24.10.03] · [ ]
I've decided that chalk dust is one of the world's great unacknowledged occupational hazards, and "dustless chalk" is one of the most impressively wrong misnomers I've ever encountered. the whole reason chalk works is that it turns from stick to dust under just a little bit of frictional prsesure. the only thing that's special about dustless chalk is that it's slightly denser than "normal" chalk, enough so that the chalk powder typically falls to the floor, rather than floating about in the air indefinitely, after it's released from the board by the swipe of an eraser. it also falls onto shoes, clothing, backpacks, papers, fingernails, lab equipment, textbooks, windowsills, desks, and anything else in the near non-ceiling vicinity. consider this: I am one teacher of a few hundred, in a school that is in session for nine hours every day. the boards are washed with water once a week; the erasers are never washed. so far I've gone through a box and a half, or about eighteen pieces, of white chalk, plus I've worn my way about halfway through a box of colored chalk. so we can call that two full boxes, twenty-four sticks, of chalk that's been ground to dust by my teaching efforts alone. normal chalk stick size is 1.25 inches long and 0.375 inches in diameter, which means a single stick of chalk holds about 0.55 cubic inches of solid calcium carbonate. given that I've demolished twenty-four of them so far, that's 13.2 cubic inches of chalk. maybe that doesn't sound like so much for six weeks of classwork, but then multiply it by the couple-hundred faculty members and you get 2640 cubic inches. that's a whole freaking lot of chalk dust. I don't need numbers to see it, anyway. the stuff is all over me, all the time. my hands are dry and gross and a kind of ghostly greyish color by the end of my last class every day. my shoes are white around the toes. I'm always careful not to do the fateful lean against the chalktray, but even though I've so far avoid that embarassing white line across the ass, I always end up with smudges of chalk on my thighs, my shoulders, my forearms, and sometimes in my hair. I bet it's in between my teeth and stuck in my eyelashes. and I don't even want to think about what that stuff is doing to my lungs. forget the stress; it's the chalk dust that will do me in! seriously, are there any working-class jobs in the world that aren't unhealthy in one way or another? at least I'm not getting carpal tunnel...
[ 23.10.03] · [ ]
one of the things I really enjoy about having a dog is the way it forces me to walk around my own neighborhood in loops and double-backs, travelling without a real direction so we end up visiting everywhere between here and back here again. I still find myself on an unfamiliar corner once every few days; today's discovery was the bright green awning of a never-before-seen dentist's office. on sunday lucie and I walked so far that we ended up in washington cemetery, which is one of those burial grounds that is simultaneously sprawling and tightly packed, with family plots surrounded by low barriers made of ornate wrought iron, huge mausoleums that are bigger than the average new york city studio apartment, and rows of shiny new headstones crowding the walkways. nearly all the grave markers and monuments were taller than I am, and as I wound through them with lucie heeling closely by my left knee, I felt as if I'd suddenly grown to twice my normal size, tall enough to see into second-story windows and perhaps too big to fit through the average front door. like a timid giant. one of the headstones marked the grave of a man who had died in the world trade center on september eleventh. the stone was highly polished black marble, with a frighteningly lifelike portrait etched out on the front: a man with thin cheeks and a bristling mustache at odds with his finely pointed eyebrows. his disembodied head floated above a picture of the intact lower manhattan skyline with its two tallest buildings flanked by what appeared for all the world to be a pair of ufos. I think, though, that the artist meant for them to be airplanes. lucie stood quietly at my side while I took this in, patiently sniffing at my shoes since I wouldn't let her off the sidewalk and into the grass. if there's one place they shouldn't have to post curb your dog signs it's in a cemetery, but judging from the way lucie was sniffing around some of the graves, I'd say some people have decided it wasn't worth the effort.
[ 21.10.03] · [ ]
a few more lists, in case you thought I might have been able to think about anything else for even a second. why it might be better for lucie to live somewhere else 1. she could have more attention. 2. she could have someone with more time to train her. 3. she could get out of the city and run around a lot. 4. she could have a forever home for sure. 5. she wouldn't have to move every few years, which would happen even if she stayed with me. I'm not going to live in brooklyn forever. why it might be better for lucie to stay with me even though her life wouldn't be perfect 1. like any creature that has gone through four homes in a year, she has some serious separation anxiety issues and I have seen her make huge improvement with me. she's bonded to me now; she follows me around like, well, a puppy dog. but she's also getting better about being left alone. she seems comfortable and confident that this is her home, and we are her family. there might be more reasons for each list. I have to talk to some experts about it.
[ 20.10.03] · [ ]
you might say that things never happen quite the way you expect them to. you can never tell what something -- an experience, a place, a relationship, whatever -- is going to be like until you actually experience it. right? I've been telling myself that a lot over the last few days. but it still comes down to this: my life was not supposed to happen this way. not this year. I decided that I'm better than this. I'm not going to write off an animal that I know I'm capable of caring for, training, and making happy. I'd planned on keeping lucie with me for years. I'd planned that we would move out of the house here, probably next summer, and live in an apartment together for the rest of my tenure in brooklyn, however long that is. I can't give lucie up to an uncertain situation just because my temporary residence is suddenly not dog friendly. this is what I have now: a furnished house that's a fifteen minute walk from my job; a ninety-second walk from the subway; a little backyard and driveway for my dog to run around in and my vegetables to grow in; a quiet neighborhood; cheap rent; free utilities; a lovely, loving roommate. probably more than I deserved, and certainly a better deal than most people get when they move to new york city fresh out of college. but I also have a dog who's dependent on me and a roommate who doesn't want my dog, formerly our dog, to live with her anymore. this is her house, or rather her parents' house, so there's no question about who needs to leave. the question is, when lucie leaves, do I go with her? it seems insane to give her away because of eight months -- eight months of the eleven or twelve years she has left to live. in some ways it seems equally insane to put myself through the ringer of moving again, in the middle of the schoolyear, landing in a situation that I never would have walked into voluntarily. I am a baby teacher in a wrecked school system, which should be enough of a struggle for anyone. and now I'm saying I'm going to move into an apartment by myself and assume sole responsibility for another living, breathing, needing creature. I'm making mental lists to try and figure out which option is the least insane. no matter what I do it'll involve a serious search for a home, whether it's just for lucie or for both of us. so that cancels out. what's left... the bad things about giving lucie away 1. I wouldn't have her anymore. 2. I would feel like a terrible person for a long time. 3. living here without her would be depressing. 4. I don't know how I would feel about my roommate either. 5. lucie would have to start over with a new owner. the good things about giving lucie away 1. I would get to stay in my semi-cushy house. 2. I would still live with my roommate. 3. my life would be "easier," at least as far as obligations go. 4. maybe I could find something really perfect for lucie. the bad things about moving out with lucie 1. I wouldn't be able to travel (christmas alone?) 2. moving sucks a lot. 3. my monthly expenses would double, at least. 4. longer commute (probably) 5. smaller house, no backyard for lucie. 6. until I got lucie trained to the point where I thought it would be okay to hire a dogsitter, or some such thing, I wouldn't be able to do much away from the house at night. 7. worry about whether lucie could have had a better life somewhere else. the good things about moving out with lucie 1. I would get to keep her. 2. I could find a more interesting neighborhood to live in. 3. maybe we could move nearer to the park, so we could run around there. 4. I would be a truly independent adult. 5. no feeling like an evil dog-abandoner. 6. no uncertainty about whether lucie would end up back in the shelter system. 7. it might be fun to furnish and decorate an apartment all by myself. 8. lucie can become a vegetarian dog. 9. I would have a companion who loves me all the time. ugh. I don't know, you guys. I have no fucking idea what the best thing is to do here. I'm willing to make all the sacrifices I have to for lucie, but I don't want to rope her into a life that doesn't meet her needs just to avoid the emotional trauma of giving her up. I don't want to end up making both of us unhappy. I don't want to be so stressed from trying to move and take care of us that I can't be a good teacher. I don't want to be so depressed and unhappy in my dogless home that I can't be a good teacher. I think I can handle the financial obligations here, but can I really? it was supposed to go like this: I live in brooklyn in a nice inexpensive house with a wonderful friend for a year or two, while I figure out where my adult life is going, and while I do something that is professionally challenging and (hopefully) socially meaningful. we share a pet dog and take turns caring for her so that she gets maximum love and attention. we grow tomatoes in the backyard and cook dinner for each other and make a little family. but sometimes things just don't happen the way you plan. sometimes things go in exactly the opposite direction.
[ 19.10.03] · [ ]
okay. here is the short story. my roommate doesn't want lucie to live with us anymore. I don't know how to explain the details without making it seem like either lucie is psychotic or my roommate is cruel, and neither of those things is true. plus I've had the privileged view of an affectionate, spirited, good-hearted dog who has rarely challenged my authority except in the bratty-little-kid way ("but I want to eat the sock!") or the animal-instincts way ("but I want to eat the cat!"). that hasn't been the case for my roommate, who's been on the receiving end of a few bites. lucie is by no means an impossible animal to control, and for me she's been a very easy animal to love. I was going to love her for the next ten years, or fifteen, or however many until they counted up to fill her whole life. I'm not the only person here, though, and as desperately as I wish I could snap my fingers and make my human companion and our dog companion trust each other, I can't magically change the hearts of other creatures. I don't know what is going to happen yet -- I wish I could just take lucie somewhere else and keep her safe and happy. but I can't quite imagine her being happy in the kind of (tiny, yardless) apartment I could afford by myself, nor do I think it's in her best interest to belong to a single working girl. so, I need to find her a home. I need to find her a great home, someplace she'll be so happy it won't even matter anymore that she's been abandoned three times. it's always been totally inconceivable to me that people can just give their dogs away to uncertain situations, and to have seen even a shade of that in someone I love and respect has seriously shaken me. I can't let her go back to the shelter, not even on the waiting list. I have to find her something almost perfect. but that kind of search takes hope and confidence, and thus far I've only managed to feel devastated and heartbroken. it hasn't yet been twenty-four hours since our conversation, so maybe it's normal for me to cry every time I see a dog. maybe it's normal for me to go throw up during my lunch period because I've twisted my stomach into such wretched knots from thinking about how I'm going to give away the dog I was supposed to have rescued.
[ 16.10.03] · [ ]
things have changed. i'm having kind of a tragic week. i don't know what to think, so now i just feel like i'm going to die. please allow me my melodrama. maybe things will change again before i have time to explain.
[ 15.10.03] · [ ]
today is lucie's one-month anniversary of coming to live in brooklyn. it feels like a lot longer than that, but in the good way. right now lucie is on the floor ripping the fuzz off a tennis ball. she likes to rip and destroy lots of things: fabric; pillow stuffing; paper; pencils; socks; her leash; bills; tissues; sequins; muslin; receipts; plastic bags; books; her rope toy; grass; nylabone ... but for some reason she has completely ignored the dangling batik scarf that we use as a tablecloth in the livingroom. I've been waiting for the day when she attacks my unfinished photo albums, which are sitting vulnerably on the floor next to the fireplace, but so far they've merited only a passing sniff. lucie likes to put other things in her mouth, too. she still eats the same dog food that she was getting in the shelter, because it seemed better not to change everything in her life all at once. but she will eat pretty much everything else, which makes me hopeful that she'll be a vegetarian dog some day. her favorites: liver biscotti; toothpaste; beggin strips; tomato; papaya; grass; yellow pepper; rice; cashews; cranberry juice; broccoli; raisins; walnuts; cous cous; string beans; peanut butter; dried bread crusts; bananas. I haven't tried tofu yet, but I think I will the next time I cook it. the bananas have proven themselves as the ultimate lucie distraction tool. a frozen banana stuffed inside a hollow dog toy will keep her busy, happy, and quiet for at least half an hour. after she's done she'll spend another fifteen minutes picking the toy up in her mouth and dropping it on the floor, like she expects it to break open piñata-style and spill treats everywhere for her. I apologize to those of you who are sick of hearing about my dog. (be glad I didn't adopt a kid.) but I have to tell you that if lucie had any concept of the web, she'd be thrilled to be the star of so much banality. she's the biggest attention-whoring drama queen of a dog I've ever met. and yes, we are completely in love with her.
[ 11.10.03] · [ ]
one of the strangest parts about working on my feet all day has been wearing shoes all day. I haven't spent this much time wearing shoes since, well, the last time I was in high school. for four years I would put my shoes on to walk between buildings, and within minutes of arriving in a classroom or a lab or a dormitory, I would de-shod to go padding around in my socks. even when the construction started in the science center and the basement hallways were a dusty mess of plaster and grime, I couldn't bear to leave my feet trapped between rubber and binding. a lot of my socks are now permanently grey on the bottom. but now, as some kind of model of professionalism and decorum, I can't go around taking my shoes off in school. once in a while I take them off in the prep room, but given how much glassware and acid and rock bits and thermite ignition powder and so on is hanging around in there, it doesn't seem like the best idea in the world to leave my feet unprotected. once in a while I'll slip my heels out of my shoes as I sit grading in a corner, but even this small act of rebellion has drawn teasing from the senior staff. so, for the most part, the shoes stay on. when I left school this afternoon, I only managed to walk a few short blocks before I couldn't take it anymore. it was a perfect sunny autumn day, the start of a long weekend, and I didn't want to be trapped inside my shoes anymore. so, while I waited at the corner of kings highway for the light to change, I untied my shoes and stepped out of them onto the cool, rough sidewalk. the bus stop crowd watched me curiously, especially once I had picked my shoes up and laced them through the straps of my backpack so they dangled against my legs. I smiled in the general direction of the bus stop just as the B82 pulled up, sparing me any actual conversation. my socks were already threadbare, so thin over the heels as to be transparent, and I could feel every little pebble and bump underfoot. my toes have grown tender, perhaps like veal calves in their boxes, so I stepped carefully, almost daintily off curbs and over gutter grates, walking along the paint at crosswalks as if I were a gymnast on a balance beam. even with my eyes down to make sure I didn't land on anything dangerous, I could see people staring at me. you'd think they never saw someone walking through the city sockfoot before.
[ 10.10.03] · [ ]
in the middle of last week I found myself tucked into the corner of an incense-scented indian restaurant, eating dinner with five other astronomers (one of whom, like me, has only gotten as far as the baby bachelor degree). they talked about science, graduate school culture and economics, food, travel, and other things. they told stupid jokes and I laughed at them because I love it when dorky scientists tell stupid jokes. before I graduated, that kind of thing -- astronomy dinner conversation in the company of professional academics -- was normal to me, almost enough so that I'd have called it a habit. now that I'm a step (at least) removed from that world, it felt strange, and strangely wonderful, like I'd won a prize without even entering a contest first. I looked around the table at all the astronomers and realized, perhaps a little more slowly than I should have, that my newly-rediscovered novelty was still normal for everyone else in attendance. This is what you do when you're an astronomer: you sit around and talk about astronomy. it's a lovely thing to do, of course. the thought of leaving that world completley behind still makes me cry a little bit now and then. but somehow, before I graduated, it hadn't really occurred to me that I can still choose what I sit around and talk about. the other astronomy majors, though they're currently in temporary limbo like me, have already applied and committed to graduate school. I'm in graduate school, but I haven't committed to anything. I can still pick from a million directions, or at least three or four. I tried to imagine them in turn: me in five years, wearing chalk-dusted pants and sitting in friday's, bitching about the department of education and the salary steps and the way my kids can't seem to bring themselves to do a simple homework assignment. or me in ten years, talking about maybe the latest sim observations or babbling about my postdoctoral work. or me in thirty years, by which point I may finally need glasses, except by then they'll probably fix everything with lasers, gossipping about pulitzer nominations. they all seemed utterly ridiculous. I'm twenty-two. I'm too young to have a thing that I talk about. I might always be too young. it's weird to feel so free and so totally lost at the same time. you know?
[ 4.10.03] · [ ]
too busy to write until the weekend. but, to tide you over, here is the illustrated abridged version of lucie's camera-shyness therapy sessions.
she thinks she can slink past me, but I'm sneaky. right after I snapped this picture, she broke into a skittering run across the floor that ended with her crashing into the table in the next room. what a nutball.
you can't tell from the photograph, but I'm standing inside a tall grove of sunflower plants, attempting to be invisible. I think lucie sort of had me figured out, though. why else would she be giving me such a reproachful look?
(also: doesn't she have awesome ears?)
I think this is my favorite, and of the twenty-five exposures there are only four or so that aren't at least a little bit charming. the first thing I do when I get home from school most days is take lucie out in the driveway (which, as you can see, we're using as a garden) to run around off-leash. it takes her less than three seconds to run between the front fence and the back stairs, but she makes the most of it. sometimes I sprint back and forth with her, even though she hasn't quite gotten the hang of the bit where's she's supposed to run next to me, and not in between my legs.
that little black spot in her mouth is just one of the many special lucie markings. she also has a single colorless toenail. [ 2.10.03] · [ ]
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