What is good about having a pet?
Everything. Truly. It’s also the greenest of flags, because it demonstrates empathy and the ability/willingness to care for someone other than one’s self.
Pets are the gift God gave us to handle the darkness of the world. They’re pure light. Pure love. Pure joy. They adore us because they’re incapable of seeing our faults. They live to cuddle and play and protect us and get us outside and to sniff and pee and to take naps and make us laugh. The only single flaw of a pet is that they don’t live long enough. That’d be my only beef with a higher power — we should be born and bonded to a baby pet, grow up together, grow old together, and die together. That should be the way of things. It isn’t, which is heartbreakingly cruel…but I suppose learning that is the act of growing up, so I guess that’s another thing that you can add to the list of what those furry, four-legged miracles do for us: they teach us how to lose what we love and survive it. Puppies and kittens are magic for that.
So, what’s good about having a pet? Everything.
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I had a really good Sunday. Whew! Got up on time, which was a nice and cozy 8am. Finished the laundry left over from the day before, took care of the dogs, and then watched most of the football game. The Niners won, though it was far more exciting than it should have been. Maybe messy is the better word. It was messy. This team this year is…messy.
Posted tomorrow’s podcast (a corker of a one on Hitchcock’s The Wrong Man), ate a late lunch, watched the Warriors game—they, in contrast to the Warriors, are so good this year! Even though the game followed much the same narrative…it got way more interesting than it should have—took the pups on nighttime walks, and then spent the rest of the evening doing my second read-through of The Taming of the Shrew, which is a revelation after doing the first, super close-reading and then following that up by watching a performance of it. This time around, I’m actually getting stuff!
A full day, and yet it seems like it was over in a flash. But that’s how it goes in the wintertime, I guess.
Night night.