Dogs, Babies, Fluff Salad
Dogs Babies Fluff Salad
Dogs, Babies, Fluff Salad
How’s your pandemic stress level? You doing ok? You googling “dogs protecting babies” and watching an hour of Youtube home dog/baby vids? Yeah? Me too! Did that lead you down a rabbit hole of breed specific dogs and scenarios like, “Cavapoo and newborn snuggling in a duvet” which, when you type it out, seems real real creepy?
You sending friends pics of things like this and reevaluating your previously narrow definition of a salad having to have vegetables? Are you sending her a different marshmallow-based salad recipe everyday until she calls to say, “Everything okay?”
Oh! Are you wildly purchasing jute rope in different colors and ordering books from the library on macrame because you think it’s something that might calm you down? Did your preteen look at the jute pile on your nightstand and say, “Really? You’re gonna sit there tying knots?” And then did you think, “I don’t even like macrame,” but it was too late because you had already said you were going to make those dust-collecting, hanging plant holders and you have to role model “trying new things” to your housebound family?
Do you randomly throughout the day look up the polling to see who’s leading for a House district you don’t even live in? Are you like, “Dear god, please let Elaine Luria be ahead of Scott Thomas in Virginia Beach, even though I live three hours from there?”
Are you overly invested in the minutiae of your neighborhood, like, “Is it me, or is the patch of grass by the pool VERY dry? Is anyone else seeing this?” Do you walk the dog there everyday, as if you’re pointing it out to your dog so she’ll agree with you? “Yep, it’s dry alright. Not a leaf to pee on in sight!” Do you give your dog knowing glances, like, “If I didn’t have so much going on I would water this?”
Are you considering ordering a case of pears to do a deep dive into “English pear clafouti” because the pictures of it on Pinterest are frankly so seductive you actually blush. But, lord of the rings, it’s like you feel like a teenager again every time you look at that clafouti! And even to type ‘clafouti’ so many times feels super dirty?
Did you tear up a little when your guy on Jeopardy broke his 5 game winning streak? And were you like, “But I was just getting to know Kevin Walsh, a story analyst from New Jersey, and now he’s gone!” Are goodbyes to people on TV you’ll never meet even harder now?
Are you trying to meditate to actually calm down and then getting annoyed thinking, “What on earth qualifies someone to make a guided meditation recording besides just being a whiny British man and saying, “Leave everything that doesn’t serve you behind.” And are you like, “Really? Just like that? Leave it all behind? Right. Right-eo, chap! Off it goes!” And are you so sick of “sending the light to your toes”? Areyou pretty sure maybe it’s worth it to pay for a meditation app if they will guarantee they won’t say that one specific thing? Because I have tried to send the light to my toes and it does not make me stop thinking about Elaine Luria and Scott Thomas.
Do you have a mantra you repeat in the middle of the night when you wake up thinking you’ve already overslept for an 8 a.m. meeting but it’s 5 a.m. and now you’re wide awake? Is your mantra, “I am in control. I am safe. I am guided”? Do you repeat it over and over and just as you’re calming down do you suddenly start to consider that “guided’ means something different and that maybe you got it off of a free meditation site that was really a Christian cult? Do you lie awake thinking, “If I’ve said this over and over again am I still Jewish? Did god hear and am I out? And just who is in control of this cult? And what do they have to offer?” Cause maybe at this point are you willing to hear them out?
The good news if you’re doing any or all of those things you are perfectly normal. Perfectly in control. Perfectly safe. Perfectly guided.