Good questions: Why is my dog barking?

As a dog owner, I am often asked why my dog is barking her fluffy little head off. One time some neighbors called me late at night just to ask me that very question, except instead of asking, they were telling. And what they were telling me was that they were going to call the police. Another time, they did! Being responsible for other living things is so exciting! I have made a checklist of reasons dogs bark (in my experience), and I'm going to share it with you, so the next time your dog is barking you can go down it like I do in my head, which is not terrifying or anxiety inducing at all.

"I am your dog and I am barking because...

...that shadow is shaped like a bird I saw one time.
...there is an axe murderer in our house.
...the neighbor is sitting out on his patio and sometimes he gives me treats.
...I found a snake in the lawn. It's poisonous.
...I'm showing this deer what's what.
...this deer is showing me what's what.
...OoOh yeah. It's a migratory goose, and it's landing in our yard.
...I heard a dog bark.
...hobo in the attic
...mailman. Always. How long must I be denied?
...a dog went for a walk past our house. How long must I be denied?
...the ups guy threw a package at our doorstep from 35 feet away. His terror is only somewhat satisfying.
...someone is currently breaking into our car.
...a rabbit is eating your squash
...there is an axe murderer in our house, freel this time.
...the moon....exists."

A brief update.

It's been a while since Molly stopped by to stare at you with her soulful eyes and whine at you until you feed her, and so: an update.

Molly has been keeping busy this winter, in spite of the fact that I, her terrible owner, have refused to put out a space heater for her to hog and she honestly feels like giving up on life every second except when a pillow falls off my bed. For reasons that REMAIN UNCLEAR every human pillow is more comfortable for a dog to lie on than a dog bed made for a dog. But I digress.

She has lately taken up a sport, or so she tells me. The rules of dog sports are a little obscure (run, run, RUN, stop, RUN), but she did make it clear that the prize was "MOR FUD, U GIV." When I said that no food would be made available after a recent win, she replied with a cryptic "NO WORRYS, MEATSTICK."

Here she is, being escorted to her podium by two men who are not imbuing this moment with the dignity and quiet admiration it deserves:

Molly copy

 

Meanwhile, I am reading Tana French's latest murder mystery, as well as the Pevear/Volokhonsky translation of War and Peace, and someday soon I will write a post about these things.  

 

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'Broken Harbour' by Tana French
Broken Harbor by Tana French

Unmentioned.

People never seem to talk about the worst part of pet ownership. I'm not talking about the poop on your floor or that day you have to say goodbye. No. I'm talking about the day you find your adorable pet has killed something cute and small in a totally brutal way. Molly is the Robespierre of dogs, because all I ever find in my yard are decapitated animals. 

Squirrels.

Squirrel

Rabbits.

Bunny

Mice.

Mouse

Birds.

Bird

Where are the heads?! Every time I watch a nature documentary, I see a lion starting its disgusting chow-down with the belly meat. It is so logical! That's where all the fat is! But every time Molly kills something, the head is the first thing to go. I don't know, maybe she's looking for a brain?

Friend, can you picture yourself shoveling the bottom half of a squirrel into your neighbors' yard while they're out at church, because the trash doesn't get picked up for four more days?* 

 You're not ready for a pet.

 

*Don't worry. My yard backs up to a natural area. My neighbors are lucky that way.

 

I Can't Believe I Forgot to Tell You About "Beginners"

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This was my favorite movie I've seen in a while. Not least because one of the main characters is Arthur, the Subtitled Dog. It sounds so gross and twee to have a "talking" dog, but the movie is so ultimately heart-breaking (not a spoiler, I swear) that the touches of whimsy feel necessary. It's basically about a man (Oliver!) coming to terms with the way his father, a gay man, chose to live (and love) over the course of his life. Ewan McGregor, you guys!

Here is Arthur, though, the real star:

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"The darkness is about to swallow us if we don't do something drastic," he says, near the beginning of the movie.

Molly tells me this all the time, second-hand stunt queen that she is.

Molly's 2012 Resolutions

MOLLY

Someone recently asked me if Molly had resolutions for 2012, and I was like: well, of course! Here I transcribe some things she told me.

-MOR RATS

Rats

Molly has these mice from Ikea. They are the only toys she has ever loved. In 2012, she wants a room to be filled with them, so that she might walk in there and bask in their presence. Wait...that's not a resolution, that's a...

-CONSOLIDATE POWER; TURN MASTERS AGAINST EACH OTHER

Wait, what?

-EAT MOR TRASH WITOUT THROWIN UP

That's more like it. I mean, if she's going to keep eating all of my trash the least she could do is to not force me to clean it up after she regurgitates it on the carpet.

-STOP SNORS

Ever since we revoked Molly's invitation to sleep in our room, she's been really paranoid about her snoring. And with good reason. She sounds like a freight train rolling into a station. In hell.

-STOP BEIN CREEP

It is really creepy when my boyfriend and I are making out and Molly comes over to stare at us while violently wagging the lower half of her body and generally drawing attention to herself.

-CACH DEERS

She's been so close! (Not really.)

Molly Recommends: Archeology

MOLLY

Today, I walked away from a plate of delicious spicy hummus for 5 minutes and when I came back, that plate was as clean as if I'd washed it and NO ONE was in the room. Was it magic? Am I living among magicians and mages?

No.

There was a more sinister explanation: it turns out that The Squirrel Invasion (TM) has begun. They're making their home in the walls, from where they sneak out on all sorts of secret sabotage missions against the hummus-eating faction of this household. Molly saw them! She told me so.

She also told me she's been reading the Amelia Peabody mysteries, and that they are delightful, in much the same way as I Capture the Castle was delightful. Just a lovely bit of fluff if you need such a thing in the middle of winter. They're parodies of the type of adventure novel that was popular in the late 19th century, and they're set mostly in Victorian England and Egypt. You know Molly loves a good parasol. The main characters are archeologists digging up the Valley of the Kings and getting into it with mummies and criminals (as you do, when you're a Victorian archeologist or a character on Scooby Doo). Personally, I have been reading non-fiction (1491!). Nothing like the decimation of the native peoples of the Americas to brighten your winter. There have been so many fascinating discoveries both in archeology and anthropology that have revolutionized our understanding of the civi...wait, wait, don't go.

Anyway, I'm off to tie Molly up and cover her in nuts and honey. The Squirrels (TM) will never be able to resist. I'm going to be hiding in the laundry closet with a sharp knife in one hand and a heavy bit of wood in the other. Don't be nervous Molly! I've done this before, in my dreams.

Happy Blogday!

Today is the blog's officially official first birthday. It's been a whole year since I was in China on a business trip with my dad, reading The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, when I decided PEOPLE NEED TO KNOW WHAT I THINK. Born of boredom! Maintained out of the need for continuous attention! I love you, blog! In one year I have:

-Read more than 40 books (by my not-very-accurate count).

-Written about 26 books.

-Pimped my dog out for internet traffic 6 times.

-Made loving fun of Anthropologie 3 times.

-Read the NYTimes book review 2 times ( sad face!).

I have also finished a draft of my thesis and realized that I need to rewrite the whole thing! Things around here are pretty thrilling. Next year: more books! Maybe a little fiction written by yours truly (more on this later)! More Molly! Even if she doesn't want to.

Photo (1) Photo (2)

Pictures courtesy of Chandler!

I got so angry I had to lie down.

Scene: A small room in the process of being redecorated, due to excessive boredom on the part of its owner.

Participants: One woman, one dog (hers). Dog is excitable, barks at random intervals for no discernible reason, except possibly malice. The woman is easily startled.

Result: One dropped, broken picture frame.

Ironic: Picture is of dog. 

Progress report: I am almost done with The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

Molly Recommends: Ambition

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Some exciting news for nerds everywhere who have been hypnotized by George R R Martin (like Molly: so sad…all she does is sit in front of a stack of his books, whimpering): A Dance With Dragons (and yes, I DID cringe while writing that, it’s not a great title) has a publication date. July of this very year! Between now and then, Molly plans to totally earn her enormous indulgence by reading some Important Books:

She WILL get to The Unbearable Lightness of Being

She WILL buy and read In Other Rooms Other Wonders, because once, she sat in a bookstore and read the first ten pages of that and it was luminous and delicious and available on Kindle.

She WILL read all the books from my MFA reading list. She never quite seems to get around to the stage and screen texts, because she secretly hates The Theatre, but she understands that this is stupid and makes exceptions for Shakespeare and Martin McDonagh.

She WILL finish Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand.

She WILL get The Emigrants back from my father and read it.

She WILL continue to listen to PD James’s and Tana French’s excellent mysteries, because nothing else gets one through a long car ride in such style.

She WILL, once again, try to read Swann’s Way. Her yearly exercise in futility and boredom is once again upon us. One of these years though, she’s totally going to GET IT and just read right through to the end without nodding off every three lines.

Molly’s recently done a little bit of obsessive, frantic googling online research to figure out when the next book in Martin’s series comes out, and discovered that many people have been complaining about the fact that it has taken George R R Martin like six years to finish a thousand page plus book. And by complaining, I mean hurling fiery words of hatred like “you’re old and fat and you need to finish this series before you die”. These people need to stop. First of all, look at him:

Grrm

People are yelling at a teddy-bear-person, and Molly, for one, is not ok with that. She could bite someone’s face off! Or bark a lot and cower behind her Ana! Whichever! Secondly, George is clearly a writer with ambitions and talent that transcend his much-maligned genre. Molly has the sense that he wants to write something of lasting quality, rather than a disposable book that will have been totally forgotten in a year, displaced by whatever stale iteration of boy-with-magic-sword somebody comes up with next. And that kind of thing takes time. Which Molly is happy to wait.

  Grrm2

Seriously, come on.

 

Molly Recommends

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2011. Ok. Yes.

Molly has made a list of resolutions: in the New Year, there will be no more cage-matches with raccoons that end in torn-out whiskers, or eating frozen deer poop, or gleefully spreading bathroom trash all over the house. Molly will be five in March (probably), which we are all excited about, because we keep hoping age will mellow her out, despite all evidence to the contrary. She’s looking forward to sharing a NY apartment with me sometime this year (fingers crossed); just her, some humans, eighty pounds of dog hair a week, a rat or two, and incessant whining and barking. Exciting!

Recently, I took Molly’s doggy-bank (a real object that exists) to the Coinstar machine, and while I warmed my hands at a trashcan fire with the other hobos, it counted out a whopping forty-four dollars, which were returned to me in the form of an Amazon gift-card. God forbid I donate it to a worthy cause, or give the change to the Salvation Army Santa standing two feet from the machine, looking me over with his gimlet eye. I mean, take your bell and stuff it, right?

Because of our book-buying freeze, Molly couldn’t immediately blow it all on books, as is her wont. Instead she’s making a list of how she wants to spend it when the long winter of our discontent is over. What I’m saying is, if you have something amazing you think Molly (ahem) should read, I’d like to know.

My residency is next week, and Molly’s agreed to help me express how I feel about 2011 right now:

Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck

What is this?

Molly Recommends

Mollyrecommends

Happy almost-Halloween from Molly, you guys.

We weren’t going to do anything dressing-up-wise for Halloween, but then Molly was staring at herself in the mirror and realized that she kind of looks like a bear.

  Grizzly-bear (1)

Right?

So that wraps up the costuming portion of this post! It’s the thought that counts. We Googled bear-ears, came across a website we won’t link to, and stopped. Some fetishes seem a lot like inside jokes. Suffice it to say that we were never sexually traumatized while holding a teddy bear, and we’re thankful for that on the regular.

Anyway, Halloween is always a stressful night for Molly, because every time a child steps on our planet property, Molly feels it necessary to let said child know that he or she is not welcome by barking until he or she drops dead from old age. I wish there was a way to let her know how ineffectual her barking is, like maybe have an intervention where a series of strangers just drop a cold beverage on her head whenever she barks.

  Sad-teddy-bear-1a
 

Oh, is the idea of doggie-abuse making you sad? Just picture her as a person who I’ve locked in my house who yells “SCREW YOU” 46 times every time a person walks by the window she is so generously allowed to spend her day in front of. Did you picture it? RIGHT? I am Norman Bates and Molly is Mother.

Molly isn’t a huge fan of creepy books, so she really had to rack her little brain to think up some Halloween-themed recommendations beyond Poe, Lovecraft, Stephen King, or anything written by a Scandinavian (Let the Right One In is actually a children’s movie in Norway). She decided to go with a recent bestseller, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell, as well as Johannes Cabal the Necromancer, and The Walking Dead comic books, ahead of their being turned into a hopefully-awesome zombie series on AMC.

Molly would like to leave you all with this: zombie squirrels. Would anyone notice?

Molly Recommends

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Absurdly, another month has passed. Molly has book recommendations for the beginning of fall. She wanted to tell you to read Milton’s Paradise Lost because it is about the FALL of man. Get it?

I shot that down because puns are basically the second lowest form of humor after imitation, which is what we do every month when Molly imitates a book critic. Too high.

Molly is excited for fall because she suspects that now that the horrifying heat of summer is gone, I will once again take her out on the greenways so she can whine every time she sees a dog every thirty seconds. Soon it will be winter and her hopes will have been utterly crushed.  Don’t think that I enjoy this, you guys. I’m a good person and not even that crazy.

In October, Molly and I will be driving down to Florida again, and, presumably, at some point we’ll be driving back. We might also go down to the Dominican Republic. Just kidding! Only I will do that. And then in November we’ll be up in New York. Kidding again! Oh, Molly, don’t look so sad.

Oh, right, that’s just how your face is. 

Just like mine is fixed in a slight sneer. Don’t take it personally, person who just expressed an opinion in front of me!

A lightweight list for those of you doing lots of travelling, as Molly and I are:

-Anything from PG Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster series. Or his Hot Water.

-Molly loves a good mystery, and Cara Black’s Aimee Leduc series is pretty great if you’ve ever wished you were in Paris watching someone get murdered. Molly reads for the atmosphere more than the mystery.

- Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett’s Good Omens is good, sacrilegious fun.

-Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana is about espionage and vacuum cleaners. Molly found it terrifying. It’s also legitimately literary, so you don’t even have to hide it on a Kindle or feel ashamed when the guy on the plane next to you is reading something by Jhumpa Lahiri. You can be all "Ooooh, aren’t you special, guy? A book by a brilliant woman. What are you, some kind of feminist? Big deal. See what I’m reading? Fidel had mild objections to this."

 

Molly Recommends

Mollyrecommends
 

I could hardly believe it when I realized that it's been a whole month since my dog made some book recommendations. Since it's almost my birthday, Molly would like you all to read Thomas Mann’s “Death in Venice”, “The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis” by Jose Saramago, and “Chronicle of a Death Foretold” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. I see that she’s trying to bring me down during my b-day week, and I guess all I can say is that if my breath smelled like a corpse all the time, I’d be a bitter, old bitch too. Why not “The Death of Ivan Ilych”, Molly, or “Death in the Andes”? I mean, Mann over Tolstoy? Really?

But let's be real for a second: mortality is depressing to think about. When I feel sad, I like to just look at Molly and think "You'll probably die first." It's all about perspective, you know?

Bonus: I tried to think of a way to celebrate my birthday, pictorially, by pimping out Molly's picture, but I didn't want to do something banal like put her in a birthday hat. My original idea, which I shared with my brother and with Chandler, was to stick some bunny ears and baby legs on her with Paint, because in real life, if I had a baby with a dog's head and bunny ears, I would be totally into that and think it was cute squared until the scientists took it away from me and put it in an institution where they later developed a dog-human hybrid slave-species (the Anubians) that eventually takes over the world. No one that was sober agreed.

So then I started having this dream of dressing her up as something better than a dog that likes to eat its own butt all the time continually every minute of the day. I have decided that every year from now on (read: never again) I will dress her as a literary character. And so, I present a photo shoot with Shermoll Holmes.

  Shermoll Holmes
 

Happy birthday to me.

 

 

Molly Recommends

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A regular feature in which my dog recommends a book or two. What's that? Oh, how can a dog recommend a book (that's ridiculous!)?

I'm glad you asked, so I can tell you that you ask too many goddamn questions. Suffice it to say that Molly's overwhelming cuteness, her shnugglewussity if you will, deserves an outlet. And this is the least creepy one I could think of. The last thing any of us want is for my dog to have to wear a bunny costume in this hot, hot weather.

And I'M SORRY I don't have Photoshop.

This time around Molly is recommending Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, a novel which she considers to be a mean, hilarious classic, and Yasunari Kawabata's Snow Country, which is a melancholy meditation on wasted love. She thinks these are two flavors that would taste better together. She's probably wrong. She once ate a box of cookies. 

No...the actual box.