Sometimes I wish someone had neutered ME

The men in my life don't like that I had my 8 month old puppy neutered.  They think I should have had his ears cropped instead. The way I see it I rescued him from death at a shelter, so  his purpose in life is not to fight (ear cropping is common with fighting dogs) or procreate (contributing to more unwanted puppies being euthanized), it is to live peacefully and happily as my family dog, spoiled and well taken care of.  Thursday he was neutered and by Friday morning he was playing as though nothing at all had occurred.  We had to stop him from running and jumping and rough housing his toys so that he wouldn't reopen his incision.  The most anguish he had was over us leaving him with strangers in a cage.  He slept through the surgery and woke up with a cone attached to his collar.  Now, his raison de'tre is to play, eat, sleep, and be happy.  What could be better than that?  He won't have the sexual desires that frustrate other dogs and human, alike.  He won't risk life and limb getting to a dog in heat (95% of dogs hit by cars are un-neutered male dogs roaming around looking for sex).  He has no idea what a dog in heat is or what it's like to mate with one (he's a virgin) so he'll never miss sex.  At first, the men I know had me feeling sort of like a bad puppy parent.  But then I went to Google (and utilized rational thought) and I realized that Axl, my dog, is better off without his testes.  In fact, I sort of envy him. If someone had neutered me, I wouldn't have put up with all of my past lovers' bs, I wouldn't go through the same annoying motions over and over again with new lovers, and I wouldn't hope to find what doesn't exist.  Instead, I'd be so much more productive, I'd have no pms, and no fear of STD's or unwanted pregnancies. I'd be a perpetually happy, financially secure, and highly educated woman with no unnecessary distractions.
Lol, this is all tongue-in-cheek, of course.  

I went to the beach with my family on Sunday. My uncle is in town visiting us so we all got together for the day. On our way back to our cars to leave I walked down the wrong street and got turned around. When I finally found my way again I saw my cousin, my mom and my two year old niece about a block away from me so I called out to them. My niece jumped down from my mothers arms and screamed my name then started running towards me smiling :) it was the sweetest thing ever. People driving by stopped to watch us running towards one another and her leap into my arms and hug and kiss me, asking me where I'd been and me explaining that I'd gotten lost, lol. As if we hadn't seen each other in years. It was, indeed, a Kodak moment. I live for these moments. That was love in action. I need more of it. In fact, I need a romance (whats new, right?). I'm way overdue for one (one year past due, to be exact). My reserves are just about depleted and theres no gatdamn Romeo in sight. There's been a handful of suitors but none that move me. I've been settling out of boredom, hoping for a spark to fire things up, but no such luck. My cousins birthday is Friday and she wants to go out. I just bought a strapless red dress and a gorgeous gold, drapey necklace full of different sized disks that i plan to wear. I'm hopeful but doubtful that anything worthwhile will occur. In any event, I'll certainly be looking cute.

You know how I know I’m pms’ing? I went to the grocery store the other day (Von’s) to pick up some last minute items for the holiday shindig and the cashier asked me if I wanted to pay 10 cents each for brown paper bags and I became upset and embarrassed because I didn’t know they had stopped using plastic bags.  I told the bagger to just put my groceries back into the basket, un-bagged.  He didn’t even ask me if I wanted help out.  I’m making mountains out of mole hills, son.  A few days prior to that I had gone to Ralph’s grocery store and they asked me if I wanted 3 free reusable shopping bags and that made me happy.   Mole hills are becoming mountains.  Shits crazy.  My dog got super excited when my family arrived, which isn’t unusual except he seemed fixated on my two year old niece, probably because she’s about as low to the ground as he is.  So he kept nipping at her face and I had to grab him up in the collar like “chill dog!” which I felt bad about. And the baby gets all indignant and goes “Him wanna bite me!” But she said it in a “oh HELL no!” way that made everybody laugh.  Everything she says makes everybody laugh, actually.  It’s like we’re all still surprised that she can talk and so well, and that she knows full well what’s going on around her based on her unexpected responses to stuff.  I was happy to have plenty of mouths to feed and was hoping that my buffalo chicken enchiladas (recipe found on Pinterest) were a hit. Otherwise I might’ve been devastated.  This is what pms does to me.  It makes me care about things that I should just brush off and not make a big deal out of, that I wouldn’t give a damn about any other time.  I hate this shit, making me all emo and hostile.  What the hell do I care if people like my free food or not?  Ugh.  Then I hopped on Facebook to catch up on unimportant updates (you know it's bad when you go looking for trouble on Facebook) and became annoyed that this guy I used to like was behaving like an attention whore (the irony, right?), talking about modeling, posting old pics of himself when he was cute and not corny, telling black women we’re beautiful.  Fuck out of here.  All of that was clearly to elicit a string of female replies because he hadn’t been getting many lately.  It’s no wonder though, he’s a bit ridiculous, always with the conspiracy theories, talking about the end of days and how he wants to leave this corrupt country but people aint ready.  Smh.  What a waste of a somewhat pretty face. Then I got slightly upset on Tuesday when Mr. Ed Choppers told me that my friend Paul was in rehab for using bath salts.  She was going on and on and on about him eating her face off which, for some reason, was pissing me off, lol.  I wanted to yell "STFU, B*TCH!" But instead I just forced a smile and listened.  Who the fuck would want to eat her face off?  She looks like Cruella Deville on crack.  Anyway, I’ve got to chill, I know this.  I need to be careful not to let this pms madness get the best of me.  I just need a few good naps and maybe a good read or to watch a romcom and meditate before things get too out of control.

Update: "Heel, Rex!!"

A couple of posts down I mentioned how we'd left our puppy in the backyard while we went to work. Well, my son went home during his lunch break and discovered the yard empty. He looked high and low, he called me, I panicked. I called my mom, she panicked. Within half an hour we'd made a missing puppy report with Animal Control and I'd driven home and broken several traffic laws in the process. But when I turned onto my street I saw my son carrying our puppy across the street from our neighbors' house. Long story short, they put him back in the yard and made him think he was left alone again. Thats when they witnessed him climb our chain link fence, lol. So basically, all this time he's been humoring us by staying in the yard whenever we're home and outside with him. He could've left whenever he felt like it. Smh. He climbed the fence super fast, too. Like he was walking up a wall. This is even more reason for me to hurry up and have the new fence installed.

Emptiness

Despite having a son, a dog, friends, and family, I often have this terrible feeling of emptiness, as though I am alone and without the mental and physical stimulation that human beings need. I live in a decent home on a decent street in a decent town. I have a well-behaved (as puppies go) puppy. I have a well-behaved and easy going, son. So why do I feel like something’s missing? I rarely felt this way with Reg and I can’t stop reminding myself of that. Although, part of me knows that I’m just romanticizing the last year or so of the 15+ years that we spent together, and empty is exactly how I felt a lot of the time I spent with him prior to that. It wasn’t until we moved apart into different residences did I become mentally stimulated by him. We’d go to museums, gourmet pizza parlors, to get ice cream, brownies, breakfast… even a weekend getaway to Pechanga Hotel and Casino on his dime (a one-time event but never forgotten, nonetheless). But those instances weren’t often, which might be why they stand out, and when I think about it we’d just started barbecuing when I bought my house 3 years ago even though it seemed like that was something we'd always done. So I guess what I’m missing and craving is the companionship that I had briefly with him that I cannot get from my well-behaved, easy going son, my well behaved puppy, or my family and friends. 15+ years later and THEN he decided to behave like the man I’d needed him to be all along, after I’d left him. Isn’t that always how it goes, though? Ha. So really I’m not missing him, he reminded me of that when he got on my nerves the last time I tried hanging out with him. There were more bad times to fill the space between those rare and unforgettable good times.  What I’m missing is that brief glimpse I got of what he could’ve been and what I’d always wanted him to be. So for this 4th of July holiday I think I will imagine my life as I’ve dreamt it could be. I am going to fill up my wading pool, clean off my grill myself, and focus on being mindful of the decent things I have all around me, the possibilities for more, and the beauty that often goes overlooked and taken for granted in my life. I suspect the sun will be showing off a bit as it sometimes does in California this time of year and I intend to make note of it this time, soak it all in, let it go ham. I am going to acknowledge how fortunate I am and how much greater I can make things if only I put forth a bit more effort and paid more attention. You know how people always look happier in pictures than they did when the picture was actually taken? All smiles when really they were ambivalent the whole time about where they were, what they were doing and what was around them. They never even noticed until they looked at the big picture.  This isn’t always the case but when it is and you look back at those pictures and you see the things you passed off and didn't fully appreciate, you realize that you actually had a great time and should’ve been more in the moment, appreciating the gift that particular day had brung. Instead, you were too busy being unfocused to realize things were great until it was over.  Or you focus on the "over" part and can't fully enjoy the moment while it's happening and bringing you joy because you're busy worried about when the joy will come to an end. I did that about a week ago while hanging out at a bar with friends.  GREAT time, until I started thinking about going home. 
My life is actually pretty swell when I look back at pictures of it and reminisce.  I'm getting better at being in the moment, though I'm not fully there yet. 

Bad dog, Rex!

This is my favorite Charlie Brown and Snoopy movie, “Snoopy, Come Home.” In it, Snoopy has to escape an overzealous, crazy little girl who takes him in and names him “Rex” then abuses him with love, lol. Scroll to the 29:24 mark to see Snoopy and Woodstock get caught up, spanked, and choked out like a junkyard dog by this nutty little girl :) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mj5Nm4Tf_rs&feature=related When my dog started to act out because he didn’t like being left alone, I was reminded of this movie and joked about spanking him, as well. “Heel, Rex!” Now, one week later I think I am finally getting used to dog ownership. Last week I pondered giving him away because his separation anxiety coupled with my "new responsibility anxiety" was too much for me to deal with. Prior to adopting him, every dog owner we know was a know-it-all dog expert. “Crate-train him,” they said. “Sure, you can leave a dog in the crate all day while you’re at work. He’ll be fine. Dogs love their crates, makes them feel safe and secure. It’s their den.” Why the hell I bothered listening to them is beyond me. A crate is essentially a cage and what sense does it make that a dog would actually enjoy being locked up inside a cage for hours every day, holding his pee and bored out of his wits? That’s irrational thinking and we soon realized that our dog did not like being caged at all. In fact, he hurt himself busting out of that thing on day two of being in it. Day one we came home to find him and everything inside the crate completely trashed. He’d ripped his toys, bedding, and everything else within reach to shreds and was not pleased to have been locked up. So we put him in the bathroom and returned a few hours later only to find he’d trashed the one thing we’d left in there with him – his bed. Then he peed on my carpet (5 times within one week). And every time one of us gets up to go anywhere within the house, he follows. Turning on the TV didn’t help him cope with being alone, neither did leaving him with an article of clothing that had my sons scent on it. He just ripped the scented hoodie to bits. But when we’re with him, caged or not, he’s a good, calm dog. He doesn’t chew on anything that isn’t his, he doesn’t bark, or do anything other than sleep, eat, walk around, and want to be rubbed down. So, since he freaks out whenever we leave him and we have to go to work and make a living, we decided to doggy-proof our backyard and buy him a dog house. He won’t go into the dog house for shit, lol, but he loves the backyard. He runs around as fast as he can, eats grass, rolls in the grass, and plays with whatever he can make a toy out of. Today was the first day we left him in the backyard by himself. He saw me drive off and my son said he scratched at the backdoor for a while wanting to be let in. Then he began to rip up my son’s old boxing gloves that were lying around outside. So now that we know he turns into the Tazmanian Devil when we leave him, there is no way he’s going to remain in my house while we’re gone because if I come home and my house is trashed by a crazy, anxiety-ridden dog, I will beat him like Rex/Snoopy and throw him out into the backyard for good. And I don’t want to do that. I just hope he gets over his separation anxiety fast so we can all stop worrying.

here he is being a good dog. He's 7months old, by the way.