Wesley grew up with us, its truly difficult for me to imagine home without including him. I live in a house with pink brick and birch trees, I have a sister, a mom, a dad, and a westie. The sound of his chain clanking blended with the common sounds of my home until the day they became so normal I could no longer even hear them.
The thing about Westies is that they don't look like westies without the special haircut, otherwise they look like muts. Wesley was always to big to be a normal westie, he was the husky kind of dog with broad shoulders and a big face, the character of his face reflecting his emotions. To get him to look more like the breed he was born my Mom decided to shave him to help not only with his look but also so he wouldn't get overheated in the hot Georgia summers.
She did it all right, she got the special dog shaving kit with eight different adjustable electric razors, brushs and nail clippers. His grooming supplies outnumbered mine at the time. Setting a blanket out on the deck she gave him his first at home hair cut. I was not there to see the process because I had other things to do than watch my dog get a haircut...but when I got home I wished I had been there to see the process.
He had huge patches of missing fur down his back. Tufts shot up along his sides. One side of his face was cut closer than the other. He looked ridiculas. He looked content.
My family called him Swiss Cheese until his hair grew back, uneven but it did help to cover up the horror of my mother's butchered hair cut. But the thing with being a dog is that he had no idea just how rediculas he looked, he did notice that we were happier when he walked into the room and so he had a special lightness in his step of a creature that knows his existence causes happiness. Once his hair grew out my Mom got his hair cut by a professional and she gave the shaving kit to a neighbor who broke the razor in a matter of weeks. This was probably for the best.
As years passed we remained a one dog family. Then my 16th birthday everything changed.
Waiting for my Mom and sister to get home from the school where my mom worked and my sister attended I noticed they were late and assumed they were getting me a freaking awesome birthday gift. I could not have been more wrong.
When my sister, Haley, finally burst into the door she yelled: "WE HAVE A NEW DOG!!!"
"What?!"
"Mom got a new dog from someone in the school! Her name is Rhea! Come see her!" And with that she darted back out of the door and I followed.
What I saw hesitantly creeping along the yard was not a dog. It was not even pet material. "Mom, It's a gremlin!" I said pointing at the creature who had just darted back into her beige carrying case, "Why did you get it? Is it supposed to be mine? Cause I do NOT want it." (I had hoped for photoshop or camera lenses)
"No. She is not yours. She is the family dog. She's a Pappion," Mom cooed, apparently I was the only one who thought the new addition was totally bizarre looking.
"Tell me you didn't pay for that."
"We saved her." Later I found out that Rhea had belonged to a teacher's father and because the teacher moved in with the parents with her three children under the age of seven and the dog bites they could no longer keep her. So. My mother had adopted without telling anyone a stupid biting gremlin on my birthday.
When my Dad got home he immediately noticed the small crate in the middle of the living room. Wesley took refuge from the creature on the top of the couch. Rhea would not come more than a few feet from the mouth of her cage and that was just to bite our ankles if we got to close to her. My Mom swore the dog was friendly when they were at the teacher's house.
"What the hell is that?" he asked as soon as he walked in.
"Its our new dog!" the three of us said in unison, my voice considerably less exuberant than my mother's and sister's.
"No it isn't," he said, "it's just a dog we're watching for the weekend. When is it getting picked up Sunday?" He sounded worried and unbelieving at the same time.
"No, Dad, they're serious. It's our new dog. Don't worry, I didn't know anything about it either and its my BIRTHDAY!" I was sure everyone had forgotten. To this day I'm still unsure they remembered that little detail.
"What the f*** is it?"
"It's a pappion."
"A what?!"
"A small dog."
"We are not keeping it."
I wish I could say Rhea and Wesley became friends but truth be told they never really liked each other. Wesley tried his best to ignore her and she tried her best to be unignorable. If someone picked Wesley up Rhea would freak out and nip at his hanging ankles and our elbows. Many of Wesley's toys became Rhea's toys, which she would literally pile on our laps before we had even noticed her squirming presence.
There was never a question in my mind that Wesley was by far the superior pet.
April 19, 2010
April 14, 2010
Does my spelling distract you?
Dyslexia. For most people that means that I spell backwards or can't recognize my sixes from my nines, which is only partially true. It also means that when I was learning to read and write (something I did not become respectivly compitant at until the third grade) I had to learn every thing phynetically. Sound it out, they said, take it slow, follow along with your finger. I graduted from 5th grade with a college reading level, above average scores on writing content, and abismall scores mechanical writing. Commas, because they sometimes slip silently into sentances escaped most of my writing. I wrote at the words came into my mind, sometimes slowing my thoughts down to sound out something simple, or-ange, mon-day, sur-face. Sometimes words just arn't spelled like they sound.
People who cannot spell well are seen as stupid, thier ( <-i before e accept after c... except in this case) errors used as a tool to discredit their points. If she can't spell words like chivalry, institutionalized, and chovanism then obviously she knows nothing about "the institusionalized chauvanism found in the door opening ritual which is disguised as chivalry." Look! her spelling isn't even consistant. She spells the same word at least three different ways in the same paragraph. Obviously this is just laziness if not stupidity.
At times it's a matter of trying to missspell a word the correct way so that spellcheck can pick up the word I'm actually trying to spell. Sometimes I have to type four syninims in the word's stead then look on the pull down bar to see if the computer can give me the word I had in my head all along but didn't know how to spell. Sometimes it's a matter of shaming myself by asking someone near me how to spell something that can be found on fourth grade spelling tests. "Um... (incert name)... Excuse me... Please don't laugh but how do you spell cloud?" They will usually either supress thier laugh, patrinizingly spell the word out very slowly just in case I'm so dumb that I'll miss what they said, or my favorate is when the try to help me "it's C-L-owd." I just wish people could say it nutrally, but I guess it's unusual for college freshman who attended an Honor's program for Communicative Arts to ask how to spell two syllibal words.
It's not from lack of trying on anyone's account that I have so much difficulty. My parents read to me every day, had me struggle to read to them, made flash card games we played every sunday and saterday, covered the whole house in Q-cards so I could see how everything is spelled whether I wanted to sit on the C-H-A-I-R chair or pet the D-O-G dog. My parents sent me to a child psycologist who determined that I would need "special help" for my "special issue." He's the one who reassured my worried parents that although their young girl may have a good vocaublary, comprehension, and social skills that didn't mean that there is nothing wrong with her. She could still have dyslexia.
So when someone "corrects" my spelling on my status updates and uses them to tease me, discredit my experiances, my views, my writting, I tend to get a bit upset and post long responses that she hopes that someone reads and is not to distracted by her spelling to switch to the next blog.
(BTW I purposly did not do the rigourous spell checking and reviewing I usually do in order to prove a point.)
People who cannot spell well are seen as stupid, thier ( <-i before e accept after c... except in this case) errors used as a tool to discredit their points. If she can't spell words like chivalry, institutionalized, and chovanism then obviously she knows nothing about "the institusionalized chauvanism found in the door opening ritual which is disguised as chivalry." Look! her spelling isn't even consistant. She spells the same word at least three different ways in the same paragraph. Obviously this is just laziness if not stupidity.
At times it's a matter of trying to missspell a word the correct way so that spellcheck can pick up the word I'm actually trying to spell. Sometimes I have to type four syninims in the word's stead then look on the pull down bar to see if the computer can give me the word I had in my head all along but didn't know how to spell. Sometimes it's a matter of shaming myself by asking someone near me how to spell something that can be found on fourth grade spelling tests. "Um... (incert name)... Excuse me... Please don't laugh but how do you spell cloud?" They will usually either supress thier laugh, patrinizingly spell the word out very slowly just in case I'm so dumb that I'll miss what they said, or my favorate is when the try to help me "it's C-L-owd." I just wish people could say it nutrally, but I guess it's unusual for college freshman who attended an Honor's program for Communicative Arts to ask how to spell two syllibal words.
It's not from lack of trying on anyone's account that I have so much difficulty. My parents read to me every day, had me struggle to read to them, made flash card games we played every sunday and saterday, covered the whole house in Q-cards so I could see how everything is spelled whether I wanted to sit on the C-H-A-I-R chair or pet the D-O-G dog. My parents sent me to a child psycologist who determined that I would need "special help" for my "special issue." He's the one who reassured my worried parents that although their young girl may have a good vocaublary, comprehension, and social skills that didn't mean that there is nothing wrong with her. She could still have dyslexia.
So when someone "corrects" my spelling on my status updates and uses them to tease me, discredit my experiances, my views, my writting, I tend to get a bit upset and post long responses that she hopes that someone reads and is not to distracted by her spelling to switch to the next blog.
(BTW I purposly did not do the rigourous spell checking and reviewing I usually do in order to prove a point.)
April 2, 2010
To a good dog (Part two: Growing up)
As I stood looking down on this adorable clumsy mess of a dog from my safe perch on the arm of the couch screaming from what my parents interpreted at delight but in all actuality was horror the naming process began.
"How about something less gay," My Dad suggested democratically.
"MARSHMALLOW!" I yelled, thinking of it as a sure improvement. In third grade I'm not sure I fully grasped my Dad's meaning of gay, to me it was still in the sense of "Geoffry the Giraffe is happy and Gay."
"Well then," said my Mom, "What could you live with?"
"Wesley." He said. "Wesley the westy."
As a family we took Wesley on his first walk. My parents did not plan incredibly well for this so we were without a leash, bowl, or collar. But because it had recently snowed he wasn't able to get very far. He just hopped into piles of the white stuff and rolled around until we had to capture him and put his small shaking form by the heating vent to warm up.
Even though we lacked most amenities that make owning a dog possible what we did have was the crate he came in, which became his room. Unlike alot of dogs who hate their cage, Wesley loved his. My Mom put a pillow wrapped in a flese green plaid blanket in it that was better than the one on my bed at the time. When we didn't know where he was we looked here, he was usually asleep or lying on his back with his ears at odd angles.
The next year almost exactly the house was sold and we were spending a week with my grandparents. Wesley came along with us, his crate surrounded by bags upon bags of our stuff, Christmas presents hidden among the luggage.
My Grana was pretty much done with dogs ever since the last English Setter died about ten years earlier. My Mom met Bob, the dog, right before he passed. He placed his head on his lap to be pet and as he walked away a string of pink slime connected his drooping mouth to my Mom's knees from across the room.
My Grana was in no way ready to have a one year old puppy at the house at this point but I give her credit for not killing him in the week we stayed. My PopPop though was ecstatic to have a dog in the house again. He thought we did a terrible job naming him though and re-named him Spencer. To this day my PopPop still calls Wesley Spencer.
Even though we lacked most amenities that make owning a dog possible what we did have was the crate he came in, which became his room. Unlike alot of dogs who hate their cage, Wesley loved his. My Mom put a pillow wrapped in a flese green plaid blanket in it that was better than the one on my bed at the time. When we didn't know where he was we looked here, he was usually asleep or lying on his back with his ears at odd angles.
The next year almost exactly the house was sold and we were spending a week with my grandparents. Wesley came along with us, his crate surrounded by bags upon bags of our stuff, Christmas presents hidden among the luggage.
My Grana was pretty much done with dogs ever since the last English Setter died about ten years earlier. My Mom met Bob, the dog, right before he passed. He placed his head on his lap to be pet and as he walked away a string of pink slime connected his drooping mouth to my Mom's knees from across the room.
My Grana was in no way ready to have a one year old puppy at the house at this point but I give her credit for not killing him in the week we stayed. My PopPop though was ecstatic to have a dog in the house again. He thought we did a terrible job naming him though and re-named him Spencer. To this day my PopPop still calls Wesley Spencer.
To a good dog (Part one - The Great and Pathetic Plot)
My family got Wesley about a year or two after the death of the previous dog, Cassidy, who to be honest I don't remember very well. I saw a picture of a west highland white terrier in one of my mother's magazines. His eyes were shiny, his coat perfectly white, there was a curious and friendly tilt in his head. I was resolved that this would be my family's next dog, and this time he would be mine.
My plan was that if I visibly and pathetically longed for a furry companion (specifically this furry companion) then my parents would take pity on my poor soul and give in. Assigning myself "longing duty" for at least seven minutes a day I would wait until my family was up and about and sit visibly on the couch holding the advertisement with the westy on it staring into those sympathetic black dog eyes of his.
Christmas eve finally rolled around, being what i did not know then as my last Christmas eve in that home, state and region, the weather must have known so it provided us with a picturesque rare Delaware snow of about half a foot. Usually, due to being fairly surrounded by water Delaware mostly just ices into a frozen dangerous 9th Circle of hell. I knew I had to get the dog tomorrow or not at all so all day I was a jittery mess, waiting until a special package came for me.
My Dad was off buying his contribution to our gifts (he insists that once a year we get a toy, not just a kit, book, or sweater but a toy like a remote helicopter which he bought me for my 17th Christmas or the pooping rain deer he got me last holiday). It was late, the snow still falling on the two magnolia's in the front yard, when he finally got back. He came in through the back door as my Mom was pretending Santa wouldn't come this year because we were bad children, so naturally my sister and I were in the front room trying to convince her otherwise.
"Look what I brought!" my Dad yelled from the kitchen as a white slipper waddled into the living room after reliving himself in the hall. A red bow marking the puppy as a gift.
Screaming I jumped on the couch so he couldn't touch my legs, I had been terrified of dogs ever since I was attacked by a white Shepard two years earlier. I thought I had gotten over my fears...Apparently I was wrong.
My plan was that if I visibly and pathetically longed for a furry companion (specifically this furry companion) then my parents would take pity on my poor soul and give in. Assigning myself "longing duty" for at least seven minutes a day I would wait until my family was up and about and sit visibly on the couch holding the advertisement with the westy on it staring into those sympathetic black dog eyes of his.
Christmas eve finally rolled around, being what i did not know then as my last Christmas eve in that home, state and region, the weather must have known so it provided us with a picturesque rare Delaware snow of about half a foot. Usually, due to being fairly surrounded by water Delaware mostly just ices into a frozen dangerous 9th Circle of hell. I knew I had to get the dog tomorrow or not at all so all day I was a jittery mess, waiting until a special package came for me.
My Dad was off buying his contribution to our gifts (he insists that once a year we get a toy, not just a kit, book, or sweater but a toy like a remote helicopter which he bought me for my 17th Christmas or the pooping rain deer he got me last holiday). It was late, the snow still falling on the two magnolia's in the front yard, when he finally got back. He came in through the back door as my Mom was pretending Santa wouldn't come this year because we were bad children, so naturally my sister and I were in the front room trying to convince her otherwise.
"Look what I brought!" my Dad yelled from the kitchen as a white slipper waddled into the living room after reliving himself in the hall. A red bow marking the puppy as a gift.
Screaming I jumped on the couch so he couldn't touch my legs, I had been terrified of dogs ever since I was attacked by a white Shepard two years earlier. I thought I had gotten over my fears...Apparently I was wrong.
February 21, 2010
If My Vagina Could Talk it would say "That's what she said."
For the past few years I have been longing to play one of two parts on stage 1. Lady M in a full production. 2. Be part of the Vagina Monologues. I like playing the part of strong women, I can't help it, I am a woman, I am strong, it's only natural.
This semester acting dream numero two come true when I was cast in the Athens Vagina Monologues (by Eve Ensler). I would get to do the Intro to the Show and introduce and preform in I was There In the Room.
To be honest, before I became part of the show I considered my self a feminist but a shy one, a feminist who hated to wear bikini's, not because of fear of objectification but out of fear that I would not even be worth that. I would stand in front of the mirror examining myself in my bathing suit looking at my thighs, my arms, my belly, even my feet were not above my scorn. I even HATED wearing flip flops because of a large scar on my toe (it's not from anything epic...I lost a fight with a low lying hotel refrigerator when I was 10). I even thought my vagina was gross, not because of anything it was or did or looked-but because it existed.
There is something about getting down on all fours in front of an audience of 200, though, and trying to look my own powderbox in a full length mirror (I was wearing pants, no vagayjays were exposed during the making /preforming of the show) illustrating the difficulty of even seeing my "down theres" that made me forget everything I thought about it. The more I listened to the other women preform pieces where they talk about the wonder of their mushmellows, their awe of their VAs, and their acceptance of their coochisnortchers the more I became aware that my Gladis Seagalman is a part of me, deserving as much respect, tenderness, and acceptance as any other part of me.
This show changed me. I never knew it would have this effect on my life when I was in tenth grade trying to figure out what exactly the show was about. Now three years later, I walked on stage declaring that consita's deserve both awe and reverence. They sacrifice themselves to push us into the world.
I was not the only one the show changed. But that's their story and not mine to tell. I can only say this-
If my vagina got dressed it would wear a folded plaid bandanna and a t-shirt with a peace sign on it.
If my vagina could talk it would say "That's what she said."
Fight violence against women, fight when it comes from the world, your friends, neighbors, media, strangers, and especially yourself. Keep fighting until the violence stops.
This semester acting dream numero two come true when I was cast in the Athens Vagina Monologues (by Eve Ensler). I would get to do the Intro to the Show and introduce and preform in I was There In the Room.
To be honest, before I became part of the show I considered my self a feminist but a shy one, a feminist who hated to wear bikini's, not because of fear of objectification but out of fear that I would not even be worth that. I would stand in front of the mirror examining myself in my bathing suit looking at my thighs, my arms, my belly, even my feet were not above my scorn. I even HATED wearing flip flops because of a large scar on my toe (it's not from anything epic...I lost a fight with a low lying hotel refrigerator when I was 10). I even thought my vagina was gross, not because of anything it was or did or looked-but because it existed.
There is something about getting down on all fours in front of an audience of 200, though, and trying to look my own powderbox in a full length mirror (I was wearing pants, no vagayjays were exposed during the making /preforming of the show) illustrating the difficulty of even seeing my "down theres" that made me forget everything I thought about it. The more I listened to the other women preform pieces where they talk about the wonder of their mushmellows, their awe of their VAs, and their acceptance of their coochisnortchers the more I became aware that my Gladis Seagalman is a part of me, deserving as much respect, tenderness, and acceptance as any other part of me.
This show changed me. I never knew it would have this effect on my life when I was in tenth grade trying to figure out what exactly the show was about. Now three years later, I walked on stage declaring that consita's deserve both awe and reverence. They sacrifice themselves to push us into the world.
I was not the only one the show changed. But that's their story and not mine to tell. I can only say this-
If my vagina got dressed it would wear a folded plaid bandanna and a t-shirt with a peace sign on it.
If my vagina could talk it would say "That's what she said."
Fight violence against women, fight when it comes from the world, your friends, neighbors, media, strangers, and especially yourself. Keep fighting until the violence stops.
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