Dog days

Today I received a call from the library where I've been interviewing and occasionally working over the last few months, and they offered me a position which I heartily accepted. The reality being that at this point I would have taken a job chucking pig slop into buckets if offered, so the decision wasn't really all that hard or dramatic like when one of those people on Deal or No Deal has to decide whether to keep the money or open another briefcase. (How this show is an hour is beyond me and probably indicative of some sort of moral decay or deep intellectual malaise on the part of the viewing audience).

The saddest part about getting a FT job is that this blog was originally about the trials and tribulations of a young and talented individual scouring the job market to find his true calling, only to discover that he was not young or talented and that the job market had no real interest in his calls, and that when it did take his calls it would often say things like, "Oh, I would go out with you, but I'm washing my hair that night or I don't date co-workers...Michelle." And other such things which makes someone feel unloved. The blog having been at its inception kind of like an episode of Lassie, if Lassie had been a human being in his late twenties with a graduate degree in "things you're probably going to wish you hadn't spent money on when you see how much these loans are costing" (presumably this degree would acquire some sort of acronym or initialism) which is to say this blog is nothing like the show Lassie.
Acronym you pronounce the whole word. Like AWOL, An initialism is something like E.P.A. in which the letters are pronounced individually and not as a full word, except on the Simpson's movie.
Apologies for the above, but I've dogs on my mind as we've been staying with my sister-in-law (presumably she and her husband will visit us for the law suite as she's thinking of getting a degree in environmental law) and her husband who have a corgie puppy. Corgies (sp) are small dogs that have their tail removed by a rubber band at birth, which just seems cruel, and who enjoy herding sheep and peoples ankles. The one thing that this author noted while sitting outside with this pup and his brother-in law was the immense amount of attention that said dog/owner received from members of the opposite sex. I had long believed, not being a pet owner myself, that this was just another trope offered up by movies and was not grounded in reality. However, no less than five hundred women stopped by to pet the pup and ask questions about him (note: the dog is a female but everyone immediately assumes all dogs are male, which would obviously cause problems for breeding purposes: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vE-IPRlUhGg (Everyone also asks permission to pet the dog, and one rather inebriated woman, threw up her arms and said, "Ah a chichuah" (sp, I know, but I dislike them too much to check) with gusto that none of us saw fit to gently point out that the corgie looks nothing like the dog from the taco bell commercials. Said woman then trying to suffocate the dog in her cleavage.

My conclusion being at the end of the day, that if you are a single male past the age of twenty two or so, cruising bars is an obscene waste of time when you could just buy a puppy and sit on a street corner for an hour and get a thousand times the attention you'd ever get from a girl in a bar, who as noted before, would probably just be looking for a handsomer guy than yrs. truly, but will not overlook your amazingly cute puppy. Anyhow, perhaps this trope has been so overdone by the media that everyone is aware of it, but the stunning truth of this banal cliche was made clear today.

I don't know why the people at the Human Society haven't caught onto this idea yet. Instead of showing pictures of sad-eyed cats who need a home, they should have pictures up of a guy with his brand new pet surrounded by a bevy of women who are ooohing and ahhhing in ways that communicate both a love of the animal and perhaps an interest in such a caring owner. These ahhs would be complex. Sidenote: The interesting part is also that the owner gains credence by having older women stop by to admire the pet as well, which gives the added bonus of making the owner not appear creepy or needy in any way because he isn't just talking to the cute girls but the older women as well and just has a general and loving interest in his pet. Side side note: The particular owner of this dog, my brother-in-law, does not exploit any of these things and is an extraordinarily happily married man. But one would actually be engaged in some sort of intellectual tom-foolery to not notice the advantages of having a dog for the owner and pet.

And the real plus side of this whole pet-owning thing is that it becomes a mutually beneficial relationship in which the dog receives food, shelter, and love from all the single men who should be purchasing them. And, in the end, one can see these single men developing all sorts of good dog-owning habits like participating more in their community, and finding themselves genuinely interested in what the old women are saying, and maybe finding that they like both owning a dog, but also being interested in someone/thing else's well-being. Thus, preparing them to be a better spouse/husband for those very same women that they are hoping to attract. Anyhow, I'd better stop blogging soon and set to work on these posters for the humane society because I think we can really change the world with this idea. A dog for every single man!