I have a dog now and I can't be sad ever again
I regret to inform you that the perfect dog exists and she is mine.
I’d like to tell you about Cornelia. First off, she’s perfect. Look at those ears. Those eyes. THAT FACE. She was born on January 20, 2021. She has only known the pandemic world. Yet she is pure, untraumatized. Everything in her blessed world can be promptly sorted into the following trichotomy: toy to play with and chew, food to lick and eat, or living creature to give her attention. Fair enough, honestly.
She is extremely well-adjusted, a testament to what you’re paying for when you get a dog from a credible breeder. She adores people, especially jumping up on them or using them as chinrests. She will retrieve a toy and then flop onto your lap in whatever position makes it easiest to chew her toy. Her favorite game is having someone tap on the floor on each side of their legs as she jumps to follow. She kind of knows how to fetch, except she’ll get distracted halfway through and lay down with her toy instead. She is more intently focused when she chews a bully stick than I have ever been intently focused on anything in my life. Yesterday, she learned how to shake paws and today she learned how to spin on command. She is a genius in my eyes. Her most common target of barking is her own reflection, which she huffs at a few times, takes a lap, then returns to stare down. Cornelia is mostly fine with other dogs, but is usually more interested in their owners, which I personally feel is the dog version of the problematic woman who “can only be friends with men” because “women are crazy and dramatic.” Similarly, Cornelia mainly wants to be friends with people and not other dogs. We’re working to unpack that.
For several years of my life, I was… dog-neutral. I grew up with a cat, and while I liked dogs, my response to people who made loving dogs their whole personality was to dig my heels in and be decidedly neutral. Corgis have been my favorite breed since high school, originating from my fascination with the UK and the Royal Family, but also… look at them. They’re so damn low to the ground and long. Not threateningly tiny and spiteful, but not big and intimidating or too heavy to scoop into your arms and carry like a baby. They are friendly and outgoing, and because they’re herding dogs they have the instinct to make sure you’re all together. How cute is that! I will admit that loving corgis is a little cheugy, but part of growing up is accepting that everyone is a little cheugy and that is okay. To pretend otherwise is lying to yourself. But anyways wow, the difference between the words a dog and my dog is steep. Cornelia is perfect and I now understand the impulse that parents have to show everyone a picture of their baby and talk about how perfect their kid is.
While my dog is not my whole personality, she has reoriented my daily routines and become central to all my planning. She has her own Instagram account, which I’ve been told by a few people is surprising. “There’s a certain type of person who makes an Instagram for their dog, and you just don’t fit.” Ok, but have you seen her? Also, I’ve arrived at the conclusion that pet influencer is the optimal type of influencer because you can still get free stuff but you don’t have to commodify your identity and shred your privacy. Please follow us and help me spoil Cornelia without bankrupting myself. You can also find her gracing my Twitter, in between my miscellaneous thoughts and me tagging the authors of articles I’m fond of in the hopes that they acknowledge my existence and we somehow become friends.
Cornelia came home to me, her humble servant, on May 16, 2021. I was nervous that she’d be upset and jolted having been extracted from her previous home with the breeder and her NINE siblings. Instead, she did not cry once. I suspect she’s been waiting for the day she could have all the attention for a while now. I am glad I can give that to her.
Prior to welcoming the queen to her new abode, I had read this article by Elizabeth Bruenig for NYTimes Opinion on motherhood. I’m sorry to all the mothers of human children for drawing this comparison, and dog parenthood is nowhere near as testing, but this line really resonated with me, a 23-year-old now responsible for a perfect dog’s life:
What I didn’t understand — couldn’t have, at the time — was that deserting yourself for another person really is a relief. My days began to unfold according to her schedule, that weird rhythm of newborns, and the worries I entertained were better than the ones that came before: more concrete, more vital, less tethered to the claustrophobic confines of my own skull.
I am a prolifically anxious person, and living with the corn dog (unplanned nickname but it really works out) has alleviated so much of it, at least for now. So much of life is complicated and fraught. I don’t know that I will ever not be wondering if that thing I said three weeks ago sounded dumb or rude, or if everyone secretly and justifiably hates me, or if the world is just pure shit and we’re not meant to be happy in it. Caring for Cornelia has absolutely been a relief and set a tone for my days that makes everything brighter.
Loving humans is beautiful but it’s also, at least in my experience, sometimes heavy and hard to navigate. People will disappoint you, they will change, they will leave. That’s a part of the deal. Cornelia is stuck with me, and though I sometimes wish I could sit her down and have a conversation (I always want to ask dogs about their decisions, like ma’am why is this leaf more interesting than that one? Why did this piece of carpet seem like a better pee spot than your potty pad, literally directly adjacent? Explain these zoomies to me.), I am also aware that part of the joy is that she remains so clearly unknowable. No talking back, no poorly chosen words that sting years after they are said. Dogs are also just so happy. Their world is small and pretty simple, and they look at you every day with the most wholesome joy in their eyes. They don’t withhold their love for you, they don’t play hard to get or try to obfuscate what they want or need. Cornelia is wholly open to this world and all the string cheese available in it, and I admire her deeply for that.
For the first week, a thought that popped into my head constantly was “Who let me do this?” I felt like someone was going to show up at my door and say, “Thanks for keeping her for me! Great experiment, she’s coming home now.” Not to suggest that I didn’t have agency the past 23 years of my life, but the decision to commit to owning and loving this dog for her life feels on a different scale and much more of my own choice. Several of my friends joked that their obsession with Cornelia was akin to me being the first among our friends to have a baby. I feel too young to have a dog, it feels like some marker of responsibility I don’t deserve. Having lived a relatively conventional life, post-graduation has been a departure from the well-outlined plans of K-12 and four-year college in terms of feeling like there are clear next steps. It remains exceedingly challenging to tease out what is post-graduation existential crisis and what is living-through-a-pandemic existential crisis. To some degree, I must admit that Cornelia is a combination of a serotonin grab (extremely successful serotonin grab, mind you) and a grab for certainty, agency, and a sense of moving forward in a time when all the days blur together and many of the goals and plans that held me together before feel increasingly pointless and futile. Pre-pandemic I was so reliant on planning for the future as a way to stay motivated, to drag myself out of sadness or lethargy. What is forward now, though?
The concept of “forward” is one I am still unraveling in my own head. “Moving forward” echoes through our lives as various forms of the teleological progress narrative, the belief that the story we’re living in is a story that follows a path, that must inherently improve over time, heading towards an inevitable endpoint. In history, it’s the perceived inexorable march towards a better society, as though history isn’t just a pile of facts and events we’ve fashioned into a tolerable story. In economics, it’s the neoliberal push for unmitigated growth at the expense of people and our planet and the belief that we can just keep doing that. In our personal lives, it’s the accepted narrative of what life is supposed to be—go to school, go to college, get a job, get married, hit career milestones, buy a house, retire. I can see it implicitly in myself even as I try to extricate my self-worth and perception of time and the future from the teleological progress narrative. I see it when I’m talking to someone about their love life mishaps and I say, “when you find the person you marry,” like it’s an inevitable plot point already encoded into their fate. I feel it when I am asked again in a job interview to explain my career path and plans and I rattle off the polished story I formulated when writing personal statements that has become the framing that I follow when I think about what I want to do next. Life isn’t a clean, clear-cut linear path, it’s just a pile of things that make you who you are. To buy into any one narrative excludes at least some of the multitudes you contain.
Following traditional milestones is not an incorrect way to live (there are very few incorrect ways to live), but the expectation that hangs over everyone and the conceptualization of this path as a straight line stigmatizes and leaves out a lot of people while pressuring even those who are able to hit those markers to hit them “on schedule.” I really liked how Rainesford Stauffer dissected this concern of “behindness” in her essay “The Obsession with “Getting Ahead” in Your Twenties Is Failing Young People,” and spoiler alert, dear reader. It always comes back to capitalism:
But why do we need these measuring sticks, these timekeepers on our worth and how we grow and who we become? We don’t. Capitalism does. Capitalism does the measuring, and how capitalism defines behindness—there’s always someone ahead of you, and opting out of this race means you’ve quit—defines how we think about young adulthood, and timelines, and how we exist within them… We aren’t meant to get ahead. The goal is to keep us running.
I regret to inform you that I do not have a solution for late-stage capitalism. It is important to recognize how it shapes our understandings of ourselves, each other, and the world, and it takes a lot of discipline and true imagination to envision what our world could look like outside of it. The race is not mandatory. There don’t have to be losers and winners.
While we’re doling out crushing news, I also regret to inform you that the perfect dog has been taken and she is mine and mine forever. I shared this essay by Saeed Jones a few months ago, but it resonates more now that I too have a dog, in particular this part:
Months later, as Caesar snores on the couch behind me, I’m still learning that joy isn’t a right any more than grief. Our losses and gains are simply realities that act upon us regardless of whether or not we feel we deserve them, though it certainly helps to act with intention. To overly obsess about what we think we deserve only ensures that we will dampen the happiness and prolong the hurt. And anyway, Caesar doesn’t give a hoot about my existential crisis. He just knows I’m home.
There isn’t an objective “deserve” and there isn’t a perfect time for anything. Forward doesn’t come with conditions or standards to meet. There isn’t a specified order and spacing for us to do anything. Find joy where you can (within reason). If you have the means, the time, and space, I highly recommend finding your own animal best friend. I don’t know what comes next on the winding, not at all straightforward non-path that is life and human existence, but I am so infinitely, constantly, relentlessly grateful that I get to experience it with Cornelia.