A Toddler’s Guide to Dog Ownership, Part I

Start the day by sneaking up on one or more of your sleeping dogs and yelling, “Wake up!” as you jump on top of him. Without skipping a beat, show your mother that everything’s on the level by patting the dog gently on the head and looking into his sad, tired eyes and repeating, “Aw, you’re a good girl,” over and over.

When your breakfast of a pancake slathered with butter is ready, insist on walking around the entire house with it, despite certain urgings from someone in the kitchen to please eat the damn thing or put it on the kitchen counter. Offer it to one of your dogs by very nearly ramming it into her mouth. When the dog actually shows the nerve to try and eat it, use the pancake to beat her about the head and shoulders while shouting, “No! No! No!” Sing the theme song from the show Dora the Explorer sixty seven times to drown out the din of battle. If possible, work in a few original verses about pooping in the potty and your undying love for the yogurt smoothie product, Danimals.

Discover that one or both of your dogs has eaten the pancake you left on the coffee table so that you could ram twenty seven CDs into the five-CD changer. Lose your mind to the tune of relieving yourself on the carpet, or ideally a piece of leather furniture. Run a hysterical circuit around the house, simultaneously chasing your dogs if possible, screaming, “I want that pancake!” until one of the dogs turns tail to face you and barks as loudly as possible right in your face. Escalate your hysterics until NASA calls to find out if they can use your grand mal seizure to power the next Space Shuttle flight.

Insist on a Band Aid. “A Dora one,” sob to your mother, and point to a half dozen places on your face where you think the noise from that one unconscionable bark may have broken the skin. By the time you’re dressed and ready for preschool, wonder why your mother hasn’t yet called the vet to make an appointment for euthanizing the offending dog. Adjust your Dora Band Aid forty two times to adequately cover one gaping wound after another. When asked in the car why you think your dog barked at you like that, pretend you’ve suddenly lost your hearing for a few minutes before answering, “I have poop.” Affirm to yourself that tomorrow those mutts are in a lot of trouble. Instead of butter, you're asking for a billy club to go on your pancake.

To Norm: We Hardly Knew Ye

Whenever my friend Richie’s dog entered the room, I liked to shout, “Norm!” as if we were all at Cheers, trying to avoid talking to Cliff at all costs. About a year later, Richie and his family of humans and animals ran off to South Dakota, leaving us to wonder how a ski bum from Jersey would fair in the prairie. As the most wholesome family we know, I missed them all, especially Norm, the dog with one ear up and one ear slightly down. The German Shepard-ish mutt Richie referred lovingly to as “Fatty,” as in marijuana cigarette, because that’s how mellow you could count on Norm to be at any given moment.

And if Normy was mellow, he was also trustworthy. You could trust him with your cat, your furniture, your newborn baby girl. The only thing you couldn’t trust Norm with was your garbage, but that was only if you left it out on the ground, and so his neighbors, understanding Norm’s predisposition toward dogitude, hung their garbage bags up on their fence posts, for example. It was no big thing; it was Norm, roaming the neighborhood—very slowly in his later years—the neighbors calling out his name as if they were all at an outdoor, block-long installation of Cheers. I could pet that guy until I lost all feeling in my hands.

We received a postcard today with Richie’s return address on the envelope. On it was a black and white picture of Norm, gently kissing Richie’s daughter, Jessie, perhaps on the day she was born. The caption read, “Norman, 1993-2007. A very good boy.”

Indeed you were, buddy. Thanks for being our friend.

An Open Letter to Jeremy Piven

Dear Jeremy,

When I found you at MySpace, I was delighted. You are my favorite actor, the male counterpart to Parker Posey, my favorite female actor, and Alexis Arquette, my favorite transgendered actor. (Not that I know of any other transgendered actors, but let’s not let that get in the way of the fact that no one else on the planet could have pulled off so successfully one of the most important roles in modern cinema: George in The Wedding Singer.)

Jeremy, you are the saucy chick’s Vince Vaughn, an edgy John Cusak without entering the Tom Sizemore zone. As far as we know, you’ve never frolicked with Fleiss, and really that’s all we need: The illusion that you’ve kept your Ben Franklins to yourself, unlike a certain member of Sly and the family Sheen. I’ve loved you since the movie One Crazy Summer; the fact that you were about to carry male pattern baldness over the threshold well before your thirties didn’t bother me. There’s no shame in your game, no combover, no foul. Besides, hair is for horses—and Ted McGinley. Not necessarily in that order, though, right, Anthony Edwards?

I saw what appeared to be a home movie featuring other celebs at your MySpace page, and with a tagline like, “It is really me,” I figured it had to really be you. Number of friends: three hundred and change; not so few that you seemed exclusionary, not so many that my “add to friends” request would, as Walter Sobchak would say, "die face down in the muck." I clicked the “Add to friends” link and waited. Please hold.

[Cue the Muzak version of Lady From Ipanema.]

A month later, I sent another request, thinking that either you’ve been too busy to field the first one, or you’re kind of up your own ass about your friends list.

OK, I see the women posting images to your comments page. These are either photographs or artist’s renderings of pendulous breasts peeking from behind a tattered leather bikini top. Or maybe a fine young woman is looking back at you over her shoulder, pouting from, no doubt, the kind of discomfort that wearing a gold satin thong can burden a girl with. She’s a trouper, though; she’s blowing you a kiss from across the Interwebs nonetheless, and says that she is, despite her hectic nude photo shoot schedule, “Just stopping by to show your page some luv.”

Jeremy, I cannot in good conscience do these things to woo you to accept my request. It’s not that my breasts aren’t giant. They are. In fact, the only reason I cannot send you a picture right now is because I loaned my leather bikini top to the circus. What with the colder temperatures that the Midwest endured this winter, the standard big top just wasn’t cutting it, and I couldn’t stand the thought of all those clowns and elephants suffering through their performances. I can, however, offer you a few tidbits about me, hoping that they’ll persuade you to befriend me, even if it’s the kind of friendship that people commit to when they know they will never actually have to meet.

For several years, I lived in a two bedroom bungalow in Judd Nelson’s left nostril, and have since moved into a 2,200 square foot duplex behind Jon Bon Jovi’s porcelain veneers. Times are good. No stranger to how valuable real estate is these days, I myself have decided to sublet the space in between two of my incisors to a family of five from Toledo. They keep to themselves and are taking good care of the place, the only source of tension being that the man of the house works construction, and insists on warming up his diesel truck for at least a half hour every morning at five. Yeah, it’s a hemi.

Also no stranger to life’s difficulties, I did find squatters camping out in one of my facial pores, and conventional wisdom says that for every one of these moochers you find, there are ten more you don’t. My fear is that the word’s out about my skin; I should just call my accountant and get it over with. What with tax day coming up and all, maybe I can take a hefty deduction for providing shelter for those in need. I’ve always wanted to be a philanthropist; perhaps this is a good excuse to practice acts of kindness and avoid dermabrasion at the same time. I think this may be the win-win situation we’ve all been looking for, don’t you? (Note to self: Ask Edward James Olmos if he's got a few vacant pores just in case he, too, is into the charity thing.)

So, Jeremy Piven, if that is in fact your real name, where’s the love, bro? Click the Add to Friends button today; I'll be passing it (for the third time), much like the dutchie, to the left hand side.

Your wannabe friend,
Jody Reale

Karl and the Amazing Technicolor Eyebrow

I don’t usually encourage having houseguests, but for Alex's friend, Karl, I make exceptions. Karl will sleep anywhere. Karl makes the least amount of dirty laundry possible. As the father of two, Karl knows that waking a sleeping child is an offense that’s right up there with replacing my regular coffee not with Folger’s Crystals, but with ground glass, which is what I’ll do to whomever comes close to waking Sophie mid-naptime. (Jeff, I’m looking right at you, buddy.)

Thanks to the way they acted at my wedding, I have baggage about most of my husband’s friends; this is not the case with Karl, and in fact, Karl is the person responsible for keeping me from catching the next plane to Oh, Fuck Thisville during the category five shitstorm that was the last hour of our reception. But what I like most about Karl is that, unlike a lot of us, Karl doesn’t mind telling the truth on himself.

During his last visit, Karl and Alex came home from their ritual night out of drinking too much to stand in the kitchen catching up and making peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. Karl was taking a pretty good ribbing over the XXXL cycling jersey he tried on that day that turned out to be a few too many Xs too small. “I’ve been eating too much ice cream,” he confessed, smiling. And here's a tidbit: Karl has hair growing out of his nose. "Not out of my nostrils, mind you," he said, but out of the top of his nose. "What the hell is that all about?" He said, shrugging. Karl said he could eat, no kidding, a gallon of ice cream at one sitting. “I’m still fast on a bike, though,” he shook his finger. And Alex and I joined in the chorus we’ve heard a hundred times when he said, “I’m a former New York State champion in three disciplines of cycling.”

When I consider that Alex actually hears criticisms that come from his friends’ mouths, but is deaf to the ones that come out of mine, I suppose we really should entertain more often. “Al, you’re getting crumbs and jelly in the peanut butter,” Karl said, cleaning things up, “and crumbs and peanut butter in the jelly!” He said this not as if he was discovering three great tastes that taste great together, but with a healthy amount of disgust.

“He’s been blaming that on me for years.” I told Karl, who told me he doesn’t know how Alex and I have been married for six years without a violent incident to speak of. And that’s when Alex pulled up his shirt and slapped his belly. “Jody’s a lucky girl,” he said, “there aren’t that many guys approaching forty with a flat stomach.”

Please cue the floodgates.

When Karl and I had exhausted ourselves listing every shortcoming Alex had, including the habit of mouth breathing all night at a volume that has me taking cover from the plane crash that’s happening in our back yard, and being that guy at the end of the bar who talks a little too much about Stevie Ray Vaughn, we took a deep breath and tackled my favorite subject: Alex’s renegade eyebrows.

I didn’t have to start first; Karl jumped right in. “And dude,” I think he began, “what is with your eyebrow hairs?” Just as Karl was about to call him “Lloyd Fucking Bridges” I lunged, and plucked one from its root, which wasn’t that hard, considering that I was able to wrap it around my wrist a few times before he even saw it coming. Karl and I marveled at it for a moment before I scavenged the junk drawer for the tape measure. I taped the hair to a piece of paper and squinted. “Two and three eighths inches!” I squealed. Alex came out of the bathroom with a Band Aid over his eye, pouting up a storm. We posted on the refrigerator it and its measurements, its turn ons and turn offs, and it remains there today. And if that isn’t a testament to unconditional love on everyone’s part, I don’t know what is.

So if you’re ever invited over for dinner at our house, and you find a hair in your soup or salad, the kind of hair that’s the stuff upon which Steven King novels are based, check the fridge. Lately I’m obsessed with thinking of ways to make it useful. Tonight I’m considering fashioning it, in a weird new version of origami, into the shape of the Virgin Mary and selling it on eBay. But I’m not sure I want to part with it; it comforts me in that, if I ever need a ride to the hospital in the middle of the night, it can either drive me there or watch the baby while I’m gone. Or I might decide to use it as a paintbrush for the outside of our house. I joke.
“Someday, you won’t have my eyebrow hair to kick around anymore,” Alex said, and sadly, I know that’s true. I think I spotted it making eyes at one of Karl’s giant bnose hairs, scheming in its little eyebrow brain about starting a master race of body hair that someday takes over the world.

One of Those Days

I'm having one of those days. I say that becuase I've just looked over four of the many e-mails I've sent today, and they start with the word "Great" and end with an exclamation point. It's during these days that I ask myself who I am.
Am I really the gal who sends a half dozen e-mails that are friendly enough to belong to someone with superfresh breath and a clean car? I could be, since I caught myself earlier thinking things like, "Tax time is the right time to save for retirement," "Luck favors the prepared," and "Can't lives on Won't Street."
Yes, today I'm considering drinking enough water; I will call my mom before she calls me. I will take the dogs not just for the walk that they want, but for the walk they deserve, damn the temperature. I'm remaining firmly unapologetic that I'm going to indulge in the guilty pleasure of writing for most of the day, and I'm going to make progress.
Without going as far as baking an apple pie, I will Do Things Right today, because I can. I'm having one of those days. What a relief.

I’m Typing As Fast As I Can

I’ve got Big Ideas®, and unfortunately, that’s my whole problem. Take this blog for example. It’s new because the last platform I was using was bumming me out with its limitations and the learning curve involved in getting it to do some little extra things. I wanted to take my blog and, as Emeril would say, “Kick it up a notch,” and so in the tradition of everything old becoming new again, I revived my plain old HTML Web site from four years ago and opened a Blogger account. Because that’s what I need in my life: Another distraction.

Then I decided, hey! I’m going to post my “best-of” journal entries dating back to my 1200 baud modem! And I’m going to finish those entries I began during the Clinton Administration and post those! Where’s my Big Chief Tablet? I’ve got to rework those family portraits I drew in Kindergarten to at least include the mole on my dad’s nose; as someone who’s heard him say a million times that he likes that mole because it holds his glasses in place, I know that it just isn’t him without it.

And then thank God I had the good sense to talk myself down. No, I said. Stop. Put the “new” in New Media and move on. Forget the old stuff; go forward, ever forward, you moron. I did let myself off the hook a little, because this is what happens when we live in a culture where our good old-fashioned albums are “digitally re-mastered” on CD, and black and white movies are colorized. This is what happens when we have the technology to make things better, stronger, faster, or at least little, yellow, different. Do you see what happens, Larry?

And so here’s to new beginnings. Again. This marks my third online do-over in a handful of years, and by golly, the chances are pretty good that I’ll be as slow executing my Big Ideas® for this effort as all the others, but I really am kind of busy. Tonight I promised my daughter that I would mount a production of Yentl starring myself and one of our dogs during dinner. I’ve been rehearsing all day, and I just can’t seem to nail the part where I announce in a golf-whisper, “Ladies and gentlemen, tonight the part of Avigdor will be played by Lou the Blue Heeler,” and then make the sounds of the grumbling and groaning audience. (After all, they bought tickets just so that they could see Mandy Patinkin. No offense, Lou. )

Until the next time you visit—if you do visit—please know that I’ll be typing as fast as I can, which is actually pretty fast if you take into account the fact that I stop every now and then to wonder, seriously, where is my Big Chief Tablet?

MySpace: The (Next) Final Frontier

I am Time’s Person of the Year. And so are you. In fact, just about everyone is, except my dad and David Sedaris, who are both totally uninterested—and maybe even against—the electronic revolution that is the Internet. Personally, I’m thrilled, since I plan on adding the honor to my resume.
Lev Grossman, Time’s magazine and technology writer and book critic explains, “For seizing the reins of the global media, for founding and framing the new digital democracy, for working for nothing and beating the pros at their own game, Time's Person of the Year for 2006 is you." As someone who’s been publishing one thing or another on the Web since 1999, I can’t decide if I think it’s about damn time, or if this is the laziest thing Big Media has done since failing to fact check James Frey’s A Million Little Pieces. I am certain, though, that sites like Wikipedia, YouTube and MySpace have irreversibly warmed the digital globe, and you can drive your Vaseline-powered car all you like. We’re still in big trouble.
My own digital climate warmed to what I refuse to call the blogosphere with the advent of companies like Blogger and MoveableType. Although I also refused, until now, to use any of the available technologies to post my own content to the Web, and insisted on banging out my own bad HTML, I was delighted to watch other undiscovered writers use fledgling but leading edge technologies to reach an audience that wouldn’t have otherwise found such deserving talent. And even though I think that the term “social networks” sounds like something that requires a prescription antibiotic salve, and even though I’d rather adopt Jerry Falwell’s philosophies on reproductive rights than hear someone use the term “Web 2.0” again, and even though the simple act of asking if someone blogs triggers my gag reflex a little, I found myself at a reception for the winners of a certain contest, unable to stop my mouth from forming the words, “Do you have a blog?”
Don’t get me wrong; I’d rather talk to a writer face to face than read something he’s written about himself, although writers don’t always love talking to me—sometimes I’m a little too, “Gosh, isn’t it great that we’re all writers and stuff?” The way they push me away from them after I’ve taken both their hands in mine and swayed back and forth singing "Dahoo Foress" with more enthusiasm than Cindy Lou Who reminds me of why VH1 will never film the series Behind the Book.
For the most part, writers are content—-no, compelled—-to sit very quietly in front of either a computer or a pad of paper until blind, in part doing their work, and in part reveling in the simple fact that they’re doing something that no one else wants any part of. For most of us, solitary confinement is not the price of being a writer; it’s a perk. I’m smack dab in the middle of Myers’ and Briggs’ introvert/extrovert designation, and so minutes after meeting a writer I’ve always wanted to meet, I make a hasty retreat to my computer so that I can write something about how Tom Robbins’ eyes were so red that I’m surprised he could read through them, or how I almost actually burst into tears after Alice Walker threw my event program back at me and spat, “I’m not signing this.”
As someone who knows that I’m going to have to actually speak in front of and meet other people to “press the flesh” once my own book is out, I see the newest wave of the electronic revolution for what it is: A way of reaching out without going out. I admit also to the mildly embarrassing trait of being a bloghound because blogs aren’t just instantly gratifying literature in a hurry, they are literature afflicted with a combination of ADD, narcissistic personality disorder and maybe a dash of Alzheimer’s. Considering that I married someone with the same qualities, it’s no wonder why I’m drawn to them.
And now, to add to that list of my more unfortunate qualities, I’m spellbound by yet another meeting place on the Web that I never intended to even drive by in the first place. On the scale of embarrassing traits, I’ve done something that registers between having hemorrhoids and owning a Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch CD. For the record, I don’t have hemorrhoids or a Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch CD. Anymore. I do, however, love my MySpace.com account a little too much.
At the reception where I met some writers who were like me, and some writers who were more like writers, I asked someone about his blog. As it turns out, he’s got one, at his MySpace.com page. William L. Bryan looked normal and nice enough and all, and so I thought that maybe I should give this MySpace movement a chance too, totally forgetting that making assumptions about what the nice, normal guy’s doing is always how the nice, normal girl in the movie ends up on heroin while the roomful of men crowded around her chant, “Ass to ass!” (Bonus points if you can name the movie that goes with the quote.)
The up side is that I have a whole new avenue for avoiding work. The down side is that I suppose I’m going to have to start using “friend” as a verb and “add” as a noun, while trying to decide who my favorite Pussycat Doll is. It appears that when someone accepts my invitation of friendship, I’m supposed to leave a comment on my new friend’s page, including a giant graphic of my boobs that says, “Thanks for the add!” This I cannot do.
It’s not that I don’t appreciate giant ads animated with graphics and colors that hurt my eyes. I do. I also adore messages that command me to CliCk HERE for ~~~<3 tEeN <3~~~**pR0n**!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! It’s just that I will be busy for a while fighting this uneasy feeling that I should start combing Craigslist for a ride to Burning Man and considering—I just said consider, let’s not go crazy—joining a colony of people with “alternative lifestyles.”
I do have the sudden urge to glue my caps lock key into their “on” position, so that you’ll know HOW SERIOUS I AM WHEN I E-MAIL YOU!!!!!!!!!!!! And, if you haven’t noticed, be forewarned that I plan on ending each sentence with at least a dozen exclamation points—OR MORE IF YOU’VE POSTED A BLOG ENTRY THAT HAS ANGERED ME!!!!!!!!!! But when I’m joking, you’ll know it, by God, because of the failsafe measures provided by the smiley emoticon followed by everyone’s favorite acronym: LOL.
But first I need to get my shit together because, if nothing else, I’m still completely confused about who I am. What kind of a MySpace person am I? Do I look like I’m taking myself too seriously? Am I taking myself seriously enough? Am I the attention-whoring, comment-mongering, look-how-many-friends-I-have MySpace user? Or do I plan to populate my friends list with celebrities who are not really talking to me when they post bulletins that sound like they’re talking to me? (And damn, Jeremy Piven, why do you have to be such a dick about your friends list?) There are inanimate entities here: Books, magazines and events to invite to this MLM, pyramid scheme-type of friendship building. There are the garage bands, the comedians, even though I will probably not see any of them live in concert anytime soon. Do I want to add them anyway? Or am I the kind of user who will end up using her MySpace community solely to schlep something?
I don’t suppose it matters right this second. Maybe, as Sally Field mewed a long, long time ago, you will like me, really like me. After all, I am Time’s Person of the Year. Or maybe you won’t like me, but you are in my extended network. I’m pretty sure.