In-your-face good. And yet...

Lately, as the Santa Barbara weather turns even nicer, I'm finding myself in a strange position.  My life is so nearly perfect.  It is almost always approximately 70 degrees here.  There are flowers everywhere.  They make the world not just beautiful, but also really pleasantly fragrant.  School is hard and takes up most of my time, but I am still able to take Ruby to the dog beach almost every day.  Two things I love so much are combined:  the ocean and dogs having fun.  It's so wonderful it's absurd.

But I still cry every day.  When I'm getting ready for school in the morning, it's all I can do to not crawl back into bed and cry myself back to sleep.  When I'm driving, I am always about to pull over and have a good cry on the side of the road.  I am always always pulling it together and going on with the day.  At best, I am numb enough to pretend my life is as good as it actually is.  Much of the time I'm too exhausted to even fake it.  The only things I do with ease are the things that involve caring for Ruby.

This creates something like cognitive dissonance.  The beauty of the day, the blessings in my life, are constant reminders that there is nothing that can be done to make me happy.  There is only one thing that could make me feel okay, and that thing is impossible.  It's like the universe is rubbing it in.

Millie-ism #78

Like most dogs, Millie had a tendency to bark.  (Pugs were, believe it or not, originally bred to be guard dogs for Chinese royalty; they're basically cuddly alarm systems.)  When I shushed her for barking, she learned to bark with her mouth closed, following the letter of the law in order to flaunt the spirit of it.

Breaking the mold.

Millie was endearing.  Most people initially responded to her the way Adreanne did.  I've written about this in a previous post, but when Adreanne first met Millie, she picked up this 5lb puppy, who fit in the palm of your hand, turned her around to look at her from all sides, and said something like "Seriously?  What the hell is this?"  It was certainly true when Millie was a tiny puppy, but it remained true all her life:  she was a bizarre little thing.

Nonetheless, I can think of no one she couldn't and didn't win over.  Not even Zane, who loved to scare her and joked about eating her for lunch.  But she didn't win people over by fitting any mold.  She was no one's idea of what a dog should be.  She was not exactly what anyone wanted her to be (except, perhaps, me).  She did not endear herself to people by being what they wanted her to be but by making people love her freakish silliness.  She said to the world, "Yeah, I'm gonna treat pumpkins and other winter vegetables like aliens.  I'm going to get really really mad at my tail.  I'm going to spend hours licking the furniture.  I'm going to generally be a handful and unlike any dog you'll ever know.  And you will love me not in spite of it but because of it."  There's something to be said for a 20lb dog who took on the world and demanded that it love her (and give her its bananas) just the way she was.