Years ago, I recall laughing derisively at a TV commercial by a company selling a product guaranteed to calm “those annoying itch nerves.”
Itch nerves. I took neuroscience when I was collecting one of my degrees, and I don’t recall ever reading about itch nerves. When I did dissections in my anatomy class, I never gently plucked the itch nerve from among the other sensory nerves found clinging to a muscle.
However, I will say this: on the bottom of my left foot, in the instep area, an annoying itch frequently distracts me from solving the world’s problems. No, it’s not athlete’s foot. I’ve had that scourge and managed to rid myself of it eventually.
So, should I be skeptical about itch nerves? Yes. I am not, though, skeptical—well, as a matter of fact—I’m convinced without reservation that I’m suffering from an attack of the stress nerves.
I don’t worry about much, but when I do worry, it is the kind of shoving and pushing, overstuffed-chair amounts of worry, which then leads to gnawing, clanging stress. For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been worried about finishing projects at work. Then, on top of that, I layered with a spatula, heaps of worry about my upcoming art show. I’ve lost confidence in my creative ability. I’m a Sunday driver of the artists’ community. A bush leaguer, dabbler, putterer. I’m no better than Thomas Kinkade, who I’ve mocked mercilessly in other posts.
And, as if those millstones weren’t enough, I’ve scooped up another couple pounds of worry with a trowel and have slathered it on. My dear little Boston Terrier, Stella, is not well. She’s at the vet right now waiting for results of her blood test. I know she’s ill because she hasn’t been herself for a week or so. I want the vet to find something, anything, any germ or deficiency that can be treated with a pill or a liquid, so that we can begin to mend.
But in the back of my mind, barely bubbling beneath the surface of my consciousness, is this nagging feeling that my stress has infected her. There may be no such thing as stress nerves, but I’m beginning to allow for an infection caused by stress germs.
On top of the stress, now I’m feeling guilty. For as long as I’ve had Stella, I’ve accepted the fact that every sneeze, every whimper and whine transforms me into an overprotective, smothering pet owner. Years ago, when Stella was a puppy, after the umpteenth visit to the vet in one month, I was told, gently, but firmly, that I needed to “stop raising my dog in a bubble.”
Well, I tried. I really did. I didn’t take Stella in on Friday when I first noticed some odd symptoms. I took her in this morning after a bout of uncontrollable shivering. Hers, not mine.
It feels like a dirty little secret, though, this sense that all of my habitual worrying and stress has been transmitted to my dog for years, resulting in a worrywart of a dog. I’ve infected my dog with stress germs. ARRRGH.
Animal whisperers say that dogs can pick up on human emotion. I feel tremendously sorry for Stella. I might as well have left her out in the cold, trapped in a lean-to with a frigid concrete floor, with nothing but a stick to play with.
For her sake, I need to change. And I will work on it this year. That’s what one of my New Year’s resolutions should have been.
Thank goodness my other Boston Terrier, Sally, was already neurotic and stressed when I picked her up from the pound. I didn’t cause that. Of course, no need to pile more on, eh?
It’s a bit embarrassing to know that I’ve sneered at other people and called them, “yokels” and “rubes.” As in, “What, you don’t like risotto?” It’s a silly characterization, I know.
For me, classiness exists on a continuum, as other characteristics do – like greed, love, and open-mindedness. At one end of the classy spectrum sits the individual who believes a good time is attending dog-fighting matches. At the other end you’ll find people who love the opera and understand the foreign languages being sung. And they arrived at the opera in a taxi or limousine, rather than in an exhaust-spewing beater car.
A few things in life keep me from being truly cultivated and classy – and they’re hurdles I can’t easily leap over.
For one, I hate opera. And, no, I wouldn’t enjoy the Anna Nicole opera, either, no matter how much I try to pry my mind open. Operas seem so unnatural, so cartoony. I’m Bugs Bunny digging the banjo, while the Pavarotti character is trying to practice Figaro.
You can’t force a person to be classy. And people simply can’t go against their natures. As soon as I think I have a lot of class, something happens to remind me that I’m a few hundred feet further away from the silver spoon end of the continuum. Like showing up at work with a six-inch tear in the seat of my pants. Like wearing wrinkled clothing because I despise ironing. Like not having a dainty laugh.
If I visited the Queen Mum at her palace, she’d make me use the entrance to the servants’ entrance.
And I wouldn’t blame the royal family for thinking of me as a rube. I guffaw when I think things are funny. When something’s funny, I throw my head back, expose my uvula and laugh loudly. Most of the time I even slap my knee while guffawing. This particular laughing technique is one breath away from eating fried pork rinds and scratching my backside in public.
I’m not sure I’d be laughing much at the royal dinner table, however. Which one of the royal family members is the funny one? It would be a good idea to not seat me next to him or her.
Being fancy at the dinner table would also pose problems. I do love to mix my peas with the mashed potatoes. I think I could hold back from licking the chocolate sauce off the dessert plate, but at the end of the royal dinner I’d be left with all of the silverware gone unused save for one fork. And once or twice, my elbow would rest on the linen tablecloth. My head gets tired and heavy during a rich meal.
Narrow culinary tastes don’t necessarily signal low class, in my opinion. But adults who criticize foods that they’ve never tried, seems to – at least to me. I recall a time in Minneapolis when I was invited to a fancy dinner for my ex’s coworkers. At that time, I considered many of his coworkers to be at the lower end of the classy continuum, primarily because of their narrow culinary experiences and their enthusiastic exclamations of distaste when confronted with unknown foods. Dinner out at the local mall’s fast food Chinese buffet was as adventurous as it got for them.
I’d been out to eat with my ex’s coworkers before, so I was well aware of how picky they were when it came to trying new foods. Anyway, the dinner that evening included calves pancreas. My Dad had introduced me to this food because he liked them sautéed in butter. They weren’t bad. I wouldn’t seek them out or make them a regular part of my diet, but I could eat them without gagging. However, that evening at the restaurant, no one told my ex’s coworkers this particular food item was on the menu.
The pancreas arrived, bathed in a delectable sauce. I watched the group devour them, smacking their lips with delight. Smacking your lips at the dinner table isn’t classy, either. That evening, I discovered this: What you don’t know can move you along the continuum towards classy.
My home isn’t classy and every time I walk in the door it reminds me. It goes beyond an absence of feng shui. Feng shui came to visit once, saw the shelf I made where I’ve assembled various Boston Terrier figurines, collectibles and photos, and ran away. On the way out the door, it tripped over the rug I bought at WalMart. I’ve tried to make my home look classy but I fail every time. It seems as possible as turning Jed Clampitt into Grace Kelly.
The Boston Terrier Shelf
Classy women wear very expensive shoes. I used to have a rule that I’d never buy a pair of shoes that cost under $70-$80 bucks. See, I used the word, bucks. People with class never say bucks. They don’t even talk about their money. In those days of expensive shoe-buying, I believed that the more expensive the shoe, the better it would feel and wear. Perhaps this is so, but the free pair of dressy-casual Keds I recently picked up at a thrift store has made my feet very happy. I realize that “sensible shoes” tend to dance with lower class style, but they don’t pinch and chafe.
Apparently, classy people don’t chew gum. This pronouncement was made by a first date one evening at dinner after he discovered I chew gum. I’m not sure I stand firmly behind that opinion, considering the exchange of dialogue that surrounded it. Pompous Man: “Chewing gum is gross. NO ONE in Europe chews gum.” Me: “No, but they ALL smoke.” Pompous Man: “Yeah? Well, that’s not as bad.” (Lots of hyperbole. Swift end to relationship.)
From what I’ve observed, what most people consider “classy” has more to do with appearance and appearances—the things one can purchase. And that would necessarily mean that people with little discretionary income have as much chance at being classy as a Chia pet. Of course, the corollary to this might be, “You can buy class.” I’m sure we could all come up with more than a few instances where this didn’t turn out to be the case.
It’s time for a new definition of classy. Achieving what most people consider to be classy is too expensive and limiting. The attributes of this new classy won’t include a preference for rich foods, expensive shoes and clothing, fine wines, or a love of the opera. It will have everything to do with living true to your word, walking the talk, examining one’s life and recognizing the shortcomings, and acknowledging that what you do and what you demand others to do should be in harmony.
What does this new classy look like? I’m working on developing it. And I’m going to work on practicing it, too. For a start, it sort of looks like this: If you disagree with a political opponent, you don’t exhort your followers to hate him or her. If you disagree with anyone, your disagreement is civil and respectful, no matter how uncivil or disrespectful that individual happens to be. You can always walk away if the interaction is beyond unpleasant. You apologize when you’ve spoken badly of someone – and not in a tepid way that manages to underline and boldface the initial insult and lie.
And more: If you’ve betrayed your spouse even once, much less three times, you don’t purport to embody a family values lifestyle and also condemn others for their failures in this area. If you’ve lied and deceived others, you don’t denounce others as “liars.” If you’ve lived a lush life, you don’t turn away from those with less and claim that it’s their fault. Or, worse yet, that they don’t exist among us. If you have strong religious beliefs, you don’t sentence unbelievers to a place of flames and misery and claim that God has turned his or her back on them.
This is the new classy. It looks great with a touch of humility, too.
This is the dancing alone time. The sound of one hand clapping. Meals for one. Conversations with dogs. Conversations with oneself.
When I was in my teens and twenties, I could never fully admit to myself that marriage wasn’t in my future. I pushed the knowing deep inside and covered it up with convention and tradition. But it would always push back at me with insistently sharp elbows. And when the knowledge came to the surface and showed its face, it often left me feeling a bit like an oddball.
All around me were young girls/pre-women striving to change their singleness into coupleness. It wasn’t easy to be standing next to them watching their pursuits. But I watched them get married, bought them wedding gifts, and figured out how to at least pretend to enjoy talking about marriage and childbirth.
Even now, at my age, it can be difficult sometimes to comfort myself with Katherine Hepburn’s words, “A woman should always have her own address” and “Sometimes I wonder if men and women really suit each other. Perhaps they should live next door and just visit now and then.” I imagine sitting down with Ms. Hepburn and having a conversation during which she reassures me with those simple declarations. I can also imagine sitting down with Dorothy Parker and hearing her say, “What fresh hell is this?” That resonates, too.
Years past my twenties now, I still feel like an oddball.
The notion of singleness, of marriage not being “natural” to me, arrived in a startling way one summer afternoon in Texas. I was sitting on my parents’ patio with my fiancé, one of a long line of that sort. Engagements were easy for me. The next step was always impossible.
It was a couple of weeks until the wedding and my guts were in turmoil. Fear can do bizarrely physical and mental things to a person. I sat there, pre-wedding day, afraid to admit out loud that I was close to making a hideous mistake in marrying this man. And he was a perfectly decent man, who, sadly, wanted this imperfectly decent woman. My fear grew and then became panic, which suddenly split the physical from the mental. And then, I saw myself above myself looking down, observing me, the one sitting, guts in a turmoil, unable to tell this man to go away and find someone suitable. Before this other body-less self could say, “Hey, what’s up with that cowlick?” I had jumped out of the patio chair and run across the yard, effectively reeling in hovering head and attaching it back onto intact body. In a few days, I would be calling my fiancé and telling him it was over. This experience gave me a clue that marriage might not be in my plans, but more so, it told me that if you want to avoid the body-less head hovering above you, you’d better listen to your inner self.
What is it like to know that your singleness is not a choice but a condition, a thing that is as much a part of you as your personality? It’s not the nunnery type of singleness I’m referring to. That’s a choice, a calling to use your singleness as a form of worship. Plus, all that praying and meditation is so distracting that nuns haven’t the concentration left to long for wedding bells. This other kind of singleness, the one that doesn’t feel like a choice, is as close to your skin as skin itself. It is the thing, like your DNA, that you cannot change.
When I was in my late twenties, after yet another broken engagement, my mom asked me one day, “What would marriage be like for you?” I answered without having to give it much thought. “He’d have to not be there.”
I don’t know what my mother said after that. I’m not sure what she thought by the response. Perhaps she was concerned, but fortunately she didn’t say so. Throughout the engagements and broken engagements what I do remember my parents saying is, “We just want you to be happy.” That’s the hinge point. The door opens and closes on that one pivotal spot.
Over time, I’ve redefined the phrase, “He’d have to not be there.” It means he’d have to have his own address. Simple, I think. Not so possible, however. People love the living together, the waking up together, the almost everything together. What do I love? It might be the things I’ve gotten used to doing alone.
The oddest thing has happened to me over the years I’ve spent single, a great deal of them spent alone. I no longer seem to know what I look like. Peculiar isn’t it? Do we only know our physical self through the eyes of another physical self? I ask Stella, my older Boston Terrier, “Does this skirt look too tight to you?” I read the look in her eyes as, “Less chocolate, more walks with me.”
And I think my social skills have all but evaporated. Could I have a conversation with real people standing in front of me? I have dreadful anxiety over being invited to a social event and inadvertently, without being conscious of it, doing something I only do in private. Like babbling, walking funny, practicing my hip hop dancing and singing about my dogs. I know you thought I meant something else.
I am likely the happiest person you’d ever meet. It might not be apparent given that my introverted nature tends to make me seem withdrawn. For many people, sadly, being alone and being unhappy about it go hand in hand. But because I’m so richly comforted and made whole by gratitude for all I have, I cannot regard my singleness as a burden. I am always reminded, when I look at the news, that others have it so much worse. I have nothing to complain about. The abundance of love and friendship I have reminds me not to scream, “What is wrong with me?!” or “Is there anything more?”
There is no more. It is what it is. A life spent in singleness, dancing alone.
I‘ll often play my Boy George CD and dance wildly in front of my living room’s huge picture window. Alone, with just the Boston Terriers watching. Walk by some time. Perhaps, you’ll get quite a show and think, “She seems happy.” And you’d be right.
And the award for delivering the Most Heartless Conclusion from a Research Study goes to:
Dr. Bruno Chomel and Ben Sun, of the California Department of Public Health, who, in a just published report, claim that pet owners shouldn’t be sleeping with Fido or Fluffy.
The study doesn’t have anything to do with a human’s loss of sleep attributed to bed hogging pets. Rather, it’s about GERMS. The panoply of diseases that pet owners can get from sleeping with their loved ones include: plague (the bubonic kind), pasteurellosis – bacterial infections involving pneumonia, abscesses or even blood infection, MRSA, hookworm, and roundworm. And all along, I’ve been fussy about all the hair I find left on my pillow (theirs, not mine).
They came to their startling and pet unfriendly conclusion after gathering together available research that reported,
Since 1974, multiple cases of plague have been associated with people in the southwestern U.S. who allowed flea-infested cats to sleep with them. (Plague is transmitted by fleas.) In a 2008 outbreak, another study found that people infected with bubonic plague were more likely to share a bed with a dog than uninfected counterparts.
First of all, before you accept the conclusions of any study, whether it’s about the health benefits of pomegranate juice or whether Brutus should be sleeping in his own bed, you’ve got to do some critical thinking. In the case of this No Pets in Bed (NPIB) study, other factors need to be considered. Did Chomel and Sun check to see if those same disease-infested pet bedmates were:
Living in an area of the southwest where fleas are more common than in other areas
Living on ranches or farms with other animals known to carry fleas
People whose pets have never been treated with anti-flea juice
Active members of the Southwest Traveling Flea Circus
I wasn’t able to read their article online because it hasn’t been released yet, but I look forward to it in the February issue of the Journal of Emerging Infectious Diseases®. This particular study will sit alongside others discussing grim topics such as:
Foodborne Illness Acquired in the U.S.: Major Pathogens
Molecular Typing of Protease-Resistant Prion Protein in Transmissable Spongiform Encephalopathies of Small Ruminants
Tick-borne Encephalitis Virus in Wild Rodents in Winter
Reducing Baylisascaris procyonis Roundworm Larvae in Raccoon Latrines
And these authors are worrying about pets in our beds? It seems to me that we’ve got far more serious problems being thrown at us by Mother Nature and her spouse, Father Petri Dish. Why aren’t scientists telling us, in plain English, to stay away from restaurants, goats, rats, and raccoon Port-a-Pottys?
But, because Chomel and Sun found a correlation between diseases and pets sleeping with their owners, they want us to kick our loved ones off the bed. Well, we shouldn’t be sleeping with bed bugs, either, but someone put them in the king size bed at this hotel I stayed in during a recent trip. Heck, I even wrap the remote control in the plastic ice bag so as not to come into contact with unsavory critters but I still catch a cold whenever I travel—alone, without my pet.
Did you know that the remote control is the most germ-infested thing in the hotel room? It surprises me that no one has yet made a movie titled something like, “28 Commercials Later.”
I go to work, ride up on the elevator, and by the time I reach the 6th floor, a legion of germs has hitched a ride up there with me, even though I use my elbow to hit the #6 button and I almost always face the corner, especially if others are riding up with me.
Did you know that the most germy stall in the bathroom is the middle one?
I digress.
To continue with the main topic here… As though making all of us pet bedmates feel itchy all over isn’t enough, Chomel goes on to say:
“In many countries, pets have become substitutes for childbearing and child care, sometimes leading to excessive pet care.”
Now he’s just being downright mean.
Though I may dress my dogs in coats a la Chanel, cheery Christmas sweaters and sweet little sundresses, I’ve never once confused them with a human baby. I can barely keep from gagging when someone calls me Stella or Sally’s mom. (That’s more of an insult to them than it is to me.) As a matter of fact, I’m in a subset of women who completely lack a maternal instinct. Bring a baby to work and I hide out in my cubicle pretending to work on complicated spreadsheets. Bring a puppy in, and, well, I’m warning you, just get out of my way. I’ve never once wanted a baby and the thought of childbearing is more frightening than getting the plague. My dogs are not a substitute for children. Believe me, no child can snore like that.
Today, I find it impossible to comment on the events this past weekend. I leave it to others to do so. Instead, I’ll try to send some much needed endorphins to all and up your serotonin levels.
We need to chill.
Maybe we should all go back to bed.
Return to a state of wonder and innocence.
Let’s all try to get along.
Everyone into the pool (it’s gotta be summer, somewhere).
This Christmas will be bittersweet. The day will always bring back special memories of friends still here and some far away. I’m thankful for being able to spend it with some of my dearest friends. Do they know it’s Christmas? It doesn’t matter. Their presence in my life and in my home brings good cheer year round.
This year, before the year runs out, please consider donating to a pet rescue fund. Sadly, there are hundreds of them. My favorite one, because it brought Beanie into my life, is Mid-America Boston Terrier Rescue. Even the smallest donation will do a lot of good and make you feel better.
Ah, yes. Halloween. That one evening of the year I can dress up my Boston Terriers for Halloween, send them out and use them to get candy from neighbors. Who, after all, could refuse a full-figured Boston Terrier, dressed up as one of the Disheveled Housewives?
Beanie as "The Disheveled Housewife"
Ever since Victoria Stillwell voiced her disapproval over putting dogs in clothes, I’ve been reluctant to pull the cute, little pink and blue summer dress out and make Stella wear it. Ms. Stillwell’s admonition had the effect intended. I feel like a dog abuser when I look at the wardrobe of my two Bostons. I’m even just a tad bit embarrassed during the winter, when out of pure concern for my dogs’ welfare, I squeeze them into their parkas and jackets. I try to justify it then because Bostons have such short tails and I just can’t imagine exposing one’s bare fanny to the world. Playboy bunnies included.
Stella in Her Summer Dress
But no matter how guilty I feel about turning my pups into Madonna or King Tut, I still love doing it. One Halloween past I wrapped Stella in strips of a white sheet. She was the most adorable Mummy I’d ever seen. She glared at me the entire evening but every time I looked at her I laughed.
And, you know, one evening during the year I like to think that the world is just a bit saner and a bit more human because we can all enjoy a belly laugh over a dog dressed up as a nun. That one kills me every time.
Artist, illustrator, writer and owner of two Boston Terriers. Living in Boise, Idaho at the base of the beautiful foothills. My art website is www.snoringdogstudio.com.
