I’ll also add a quick note for those of you (not yet in the comments below, but elsewhere) who cry, “So what! Terrible people are everywhere! It’s the Internet!” You? You are awful, too. R/atheism is a huge community of atheists, and here is an example of a young woman attempting to join it, to get more involved, who is sexualized and mocked for being a girl. Why would she ever want to be a part of any atheist community, if that’s how she’s treated? The next time you look around your atheist events and wonder where all the women are, think of this and know that there are at least some of us who aren’t willing to just accept this culture without trying to change it.

I love that “you are awful, too” bit so much, I’d like to expand on it.

First, to anyone who would dismiss these men’s behavior as the consequence of unbelief, as though [your religion here] automatically bestows upon its practitioners a deep and abiding respect for women: you are awful, too. Because in fact, it’s the consequence of a sexist culture, in which any time a woman shows her face or opens her mouth in public, whatever point she wanted to make stands to be delayed by a referendum on her fuckability. Pretending that some people, your people, good people, live entirely apart from that culture just means you don’t want to do your part to change it.

Similarly, if you’re an atheist whose first response to something like this is, “Don’t blame atheists! Most of us aren’t assholes!” you are awful, too. You’re right–most of us aren’t! And that has nothing to do with the fact that this is happening on an atheist forum–not to mention at atheist conferences–and yet, instead of wondering, “How might I help clean house in this community I care about, which I do not wish to see filled with assholes?” your first instinct is to explain to women why they’re wrong.

Whether there is a sexism problem within the atheist community is really not up for debate. People affected by it have been telling you and telling you and telling you there is a problem. So when you say, “Sexism is not a problem for/by/about atheists,” those of us who have direct experience with sexism hear, “I like things fine the way they are and thus would rather spend my time antagonizing the people who say they’re hurt than the people causing the pain.” And we conclude that you are awful.

Finally, if your solution to sexist abuse on the internet is, “Just don’t let anyone know your gender, or see a picture of you, or ever mention where you live” (as one of the first commenters on Watson’s post suggested), you are so fucking awful, I can’t even. It’s not just that you’re putting all the onus on the targets of hatred to change so that bullies won’t have to, or that you’re conveniently ignoring situations, in almost 20fucking12, where a woman might want to have her picture and contact info on the internet for, I dunno, business reasons? For example? And it’s not even that you’re representing yourself as someone who’s clearly more internet-savvy than the lady blogger in question, but you apparently don’t realize that a highly motivated person can pretty easily discover the identity behind a pseudonym. No, it’s that you’re arguing that abuse of women online would solve itself if only women disappeared from the internet.

Oh, of course that’s not what you’re saying! I know, I know. In the scenario you describe, sexist shitheads would know that there were still women out there–it wouldn’t be as though around half the human race had just vanished!–but they wouldn’t know which specific screen names deserved to have their hotness assessed, their gender mocked, their ideas dismissed, and their bodies threatened. So they wouldn’t even need to bother with all that! PROBLEM SOLVED YOU’RE WELCOME.

Know what, dude who thinks this? You’re probably the awfulest. That’s all.

People who have never eaten out in the U.S. can perhaps be forgiven for assuming that, in addition to plates the size of manhole covers, American restaurants typically have employees whose sole job is to hover over diners, demanding that they finish their food before they’re permitted to leave. But if you are familiar with the concept of a “doggy bag,” then the only excuse for assuming that restaurant portion sizes are directly correlated with American ignorance and/or gluttony is pretty much that you enjoy thinking of Americans as ignorant gluttons.

And I mean, sure, a lot of us are. Some of us, all of the time; probably all of us, some of the time.

But we are also a people who really fucking like our leftovers.

Signed,
A genuine, bona fide obese American who can eat with the best of ‘em, and still often makes multiple meals out of a single restaurant order

Around September 2010, I also turned off comments for the whole site, forever, and said I wasn’t going to check the moderation queue again, which is hands-down one of the most liberating decisions I’ve made in recent years. Until tonight, I’d kept good on my promise not to check the queue. I’m not entirely sure how I ended up with 206 pending comments–most of them spam, of course, but many of them real comments from 2011–in the Shapely Prose queue, since the current template doesn’t even offer comment boxes at the end of posts anymore. But I have changed the template a few times, so maybe some did?

Anyway. Tonight I pop over to the SP dashboard to see what kind of traffic I got on a post that was linked a lot yesterday, while the #mencallmethings campaign was going strong. (This is because I am narcissistic and have too much time on my hands, so save your breath. I know.) And I decide I’m going to skim those 206 pending comments to see how many of them are exactly the kind of thing we were talking about. Wouldn’t it be funny if people were commenting on a long-dormant blog in hopes that somehow, someday, I would still receive their very important messages about how I am ugly, disgusting, stupid, deserving of painful death, etc.?

HILARIOUS, is what that would be.

So yeah, here are some highlights of the last few months, on a blog that’s been closed for over a year. Most of these were on two posts from 2007.

The same 2007 that happened four years ago, just so we’re clear.

“What??? This is bull crap. Fat is a sickness and is horrible. Do double chin looks sexy or healthy? People please loose weight and stop mistreating your body. Start today by eating healthy and start doing some exercise. Sedentary people sadly don’t know how to eat and they eat mostly “crap”, processed “microwaveable” food. Lots of refined sugar and white flours, lots of fried foods. Some people is Fat because a medical condition no matter what they do or don’t. But being fat without a reason is a WORSE sick condition because you don’t realize how bad and ugly is your situation.

Of course there are thin people who eat crap and don’t exercise …. and so what??? Fat people do not eat healthy either don’t lie to your self, you get there by just eating bad and toooo much. Stop hidden behind the “dignity” crap and start by showing some guts and self control and lose weight. Stop being a loser, if being fat is a good and acceptable matter why you feel so depressed and you read books about loving your fat body?????? Don’t destroy your self, please wake up! Even if thin people are eating crap and they are not healthy (as you state as your good excuse to mistreat your fat body) No one can denied that fat people look ugly, sick and destructive (of their own body)”

- “What?” at yourareabadfatperson@repentoruwillperisch.com

“Fat people are fucking disgusting.”

- “Fred Zanford”

“Just put the f**king fork down and think of the Somali children you disgusting pigs.”

- “Weslers”

“all i see is a bunch of fat ass losers bitching because they think they deserve special accommodations for their lack of self control.”

-“John Smith”

“I thought there was going to be a load of bullshit written, but this is good.”

- “G”

The one drawback to all of these lovely spaces is that they’re not as close together as one might hope. When I was planning my theoretical event schedule, I didn’t take venues into consideration, so in practice, my ambition has been thwarted by logistics; so much for making it to both Taussig’s lecture at the History Museum and “Tomorrow’s History” at the Chicago Cultural Center immediately after, for instance. Making matters worse, Saturday was the most difficult day of the festival for me, choice-wise. Between 1 and 2:30, I wanted to see “Lend Me Your (Bionic) Ears” at the Parker School, “Facing Up to the Uncanny Valley” at the Harold Washington Library, Sylvia Nasar at the UIC Forum, and Taussig. I will always have to wonder what might have been, and what might have been, and what might have been. Oh, the humanities! (Look, you knew I had to say that once. Now it’s over.)

Still, what I saw last week was pretty great. On Sunday, Virginia Eubanks’s talk, “A Jane Addams for the Digital Age?” challenged assumptions about the “digital divide” and the role of technology in creating opportunities for poor women. During four years of “participatory research” with women who used the resources at a YMCA in New York’s capitol region, Eubanks found that most already had access to computers and at least the basic skills taught in classes meant to bridge the divide; many were working in “low-wage, high-tech” jobs at call centers, or performing data entry. The problem is, these jobs tend to be temporary, unstable, and unsustainable–and just as troublingly, advances in technology have decreased workers’ privacy and autonomy, created negative impacts on their health and quality of life. Eubanks argued that we need to look at technology as “another site of struggle” and build it around specific social justice goals, instead of assuming that access to computers and skills training will magically create a level playing field. I look forward to reading her book, Digital Dead End: Fighting for Social Justice in the Information Age.

And then there was Laurie Anderson. Holy cow! I took three pages of notes during her conversation with the Steppenwolf Theatre’s Martha Lavey, but what kept going through my head was, “Wow, this woman is just frightfully smart.”

I don’t mean to say she was intimidating or abstruse—in fact, she was a wonderfully accessible and engaging speaker. What flabbered my gast so thoroughly was the way her mind connects disparate sensory elements to create art that operates on multiple levels—a sound leads to an image, which leads to a physical project, for instance. She spoke of using art to evoke desire, “the way perfume works,” creating an image in the mind and an instant sense of longing. And in a move dear to my puppy-loving heart*, Anderson once staged a concert for dogs because she wanted an audience for her music that wasn’t limited by weak human hearing. The axiom that we only use 10 percent of our brains may be false, but Anderson left me feeling as though I use only a small fraction of my senses.

This week, I’m especially excited about Mother Jones editor Clara Jeffery’s interview with David Carr, Rebecca Solnit’s “Technological Wild West” lecture, and “Shakespeare By the Numbers” at the Poetry Foundation, among others. Plus: even more new (to me) auditoriums!

*Murray had surgery on a cherry eye this week, by the way; he’s recovering nicely.

The fourth annual Hyde Park day was an abject failure in terms of my overachiever’s schedule (act surprised), but nevertheless one of the best days I’ve had in a long time.

Since my husband had to take the puppy to obedience class in the car, I made my way to the University of Chicago via public transportation, which took about 90 minutes from my home in Rogers Park. Unfortunately, I had only budgeted slightly more than an hour for the trip, so I missed the presentation on the Mansueto Library, which I had been really excited about; future-of-the-book stuff is right up my alley.  On the bright side, it was a ridiculously gorgeous day, so I found myself a bench outside and read until it was time for the 1:30 tour of the new library.

A little background on me: I am 36 years old and reasonably well-adjusted, yet still enormously and (needless to say) irrationally bitter that my undergrad experiences failed to live up to the promise of the movies.  Once, a friend and I were watching a film set at a small, New England liberal arts college but filmed at my alma mater, the University of Toronto.  The friend, who had gone to a small, New England liberal arts college, looked at a breathtaking shot of an old building covered in multicolored ivy, and sighed, “I wish I’d gone to a school that looked like that.”

“You did!” I yelled. “Whereas I actually went to that school, and it looks nothing like that in real life!”

I mean, of course parts of it, in isolation, look exactly like that, which is why so many movies are filmed on that campus every year. But mostly, it is sprawling and urban and tragically bereft of thoughtful, ruddy-cheeked young men in fisherman sweaters, who spend their days riding bicycles around duck-dotted ponds, occasionally stopping to rest under explosively colored old maples, where they all have the same daydream: about a shy, chubby girl with a kind heart and a terrible attitude showing up with a thermos of hot chocolate. Spiked with whiskey.

I enjoy real life quite a bit, most of the time, but I was deeply, deeply disappointed by it in my college years, is what I’m saying. So these last two gorgeous autumn Sundays, strolling through the Northwestern and University of Chicago campuses, I’ve been beset with that old, familiar, increasingly embarrassing longing for a do-over.

When the 1:30 tour of the Mansueto Library was too packed to accommodate me, I headed across the street to Mandel Hall to grab some lunch before the 2:30 tour. Looking for a place to park myself for a bit, I wandered into a dining room that could easily have been from a movie set: impossibly high ceilings, hand-carved woodwork, oil paintings of old white men along the walls, that sort of thing. And I did something I almost never do, something I haven’t done regularly since I was an undergrad in the early 1990s: I took out a notebook and started writing longhand.

Unfortunately (again), I didn’t stop in time for the 2:30 tour, or the 3:30, or for the Amitav Ghosh interview at 4. (I saw my friend Jill on the way out of that, though, and she said it was wonderful.) I kept writing for hours, finishing up with just enough time to have a cup of tea in the courtyard before The Encyclopedia Show.

In other words, for one afternoon, at 36 years old, I essentially had the college experience I’ve always wanted. (Well, minus the guy in the fisherman sweater, but a big guy in a grey hoodie asking a tiny puppy for kisses is a pretty good alternative, and one of those was waiting for me at home.) I do feel bad about wasting the all-access pass for those few hours, but it was really rather glorious.

And then the Encyclopedia Show! So much fun! From Megan Mercier’s piece about a suburban subdivision as literal uncanny valley to Jamila Wood’s lovely poem about FRIEND, a robot built to assist people with disabilities, it was a fantastic evening. And for the rest of my life, I get to tell people I was once invited to speak on nanotechnology at the University of Chicago. Sort of.

Next up: Laurie Anderson! I will most definitely make sure I leave myself enough time to get to that. See you after the first full week of the festival.

When Shanny first sent me my assignment–”You, Kate Harding, are to write on the theory of GREY GOO!”–I couldn’t begin to imagine what I’d find when I googled those words. I am a former English major who wasn’t even very good at that, let alone science. And while I am the kind of person who hangs out with–even marries–people who read a lot of science fiction, I generally do not.

Since this is a humanities crowd, I assume some of you might be similarly ignorant, so here are the bullet points. The theory of grey goo is one of those technology-run-amok scenarios that’s basically ridiculous but hypothetically possible, and therefore sort of tantalizing to consider. The deal is, scientists are building these tiny, tiny–like, way smaller than a hair’s breadth–robots, which will be able to do stuff like take incredibly detailed pictures inside the human body and make really, really strong building materials. Or something.

But in order for these little, wee robots to build stuff on a human scale, they will also need to be able to build more of themselves as they go along. And they use bits of organic matter as fuel, which is no big deal when they’re working molecule by molecule. But if we somehow lose control of the off switch, these little, wee, self-replicating robots will just go on consuming all the organic matter they can get–like, for example, us–until there’s nothing left on earth but a thick coating of nanorobot sludge. That’s what a guy called K. Eric Drexler described as “Grey goo” in 1986, and the name stuck.

That’s about as far as Wikipedia will take us. And I don’t know about you, but I still found it difficult to conceptualize grey goo after that. So, like any good former English major, I turned to literature for help–specifically, Michael Crichton’s 2002 thriller, Prey.

Prey deals with the early stages of a potential grey goo scenario, so it offers us some useful tips for averting disaster. In the novel, swarms of hungry nanorobots, numbering literally higher than I can count, are defeated through a three-step process:

1. Spray the swarm with isotopes to make it trackable at night, when the tiny robots are… asleep?
2. Track the now-radioactive swarm to its nest–because of course there’s a nest–and bomb the hell out of that.
3. Spray any remaining tiny robots–for instance, the ones that are more-or-less possessing our hero’s workaholic wife–with virus-infected poop water. Seriously. These particular nanorobots are surviving and multiplying on bacteria, which this particular virus (that lives in the scientists’ fermentation tanks) kills, so poop water saves the day. Our hero, Jack, actually yells, “How’d you like a shit shower?!” before he lets it fly.

Cross-posted to the Chicago Humanities Festival blog.

Two weeks ago, my husband, Al, and I brought home a puppy. Important background information: three weeks ago, Al and I did not want anything to do with a puppy. After putting our sweet, old, one-eyed pug/corgi cross, Solomon, to sleep, we planned to adopt another adult mutt. But someone didn’t filter his Petfinder.com search to exclude younger dogs, so we soon learned that there were 11-week-old pug/corgi puppies available at a suburban shelter—including one who looked like, as Al put it when he shoved the picture in my face, “Baby Solly! BABY SOLLY!”

That is the kind of information you can’t just will yourself to unknow. And so I am writing this blog post to the sounds of a 14-week-old pug/corgi puppy (Murray) chomping on a squeaky plush duck with murderous persistence. And I had to skip seeing William Gibson on Sunday, because our obedience class ran from 12-1, which was the whole point of that tangent, apart from indulging my current obsession with the wee beastie.

Fortunately, Murray’s class is in Evanston, so I was still able to make it to The Truth Machine: American Justice and Our Obsession with Lie Detection at 1:30. (Al and Murray will have to go to class without me next week while I head down to Hyde Park.) As I said on Twitter immediately afterwards, I enjoyed Ken Alder’s talk so much, I bought his book, The Lie Detectors, for my Kindle before I even left the auditorium.

Anyone who has even a passing familiarity with the Law & Order television franchise (and I have waaaaay more than that) has long been aware that lie detector technology is too unreliable to be admissible in court. Still, I didn’t realize that, in the 100 years that we’ve been using some iteration of that technology, we’ve pretty much always known it was unreliable. The need for human interpretation of a polygraph’s data creates acres of room for error, and psychologists have been pointing that out since the very beginning.

Why, then, do we remain so enamored of a piece of hardware that, as Alder put it, “promises objectivity but thrives on its opposite”? Essentially, because we want so badly to believe there could be such a thing as a machine that tells us, scientifically and conclusively, when someone is lying. That desire is then fueled by the use of polygraph evidence on TV and in crime novels, in comic books—”Dick Tracy” popularized it in the ’30s—and films and the theater of politics: Alder notes that the 20th century was full of “lie detector moments,” from the Watergate scandal to the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings. These entertainments and performances, he says, are the “natural habitat” of the lie detector—not science or justice.

Much as I wanted to go start reading Alder’s book right after that, I stuck around for Noshir Contractor’s Traces in a Tangled Web talk, and I am so glad I did. I wasn’t entirely sure what the subject was from the description—I saw the phrase “digital traces,” and my mind immediately leapt to worst-case privacy invasion scenarios, the kind of thing I simultaneously wish to learn about and never want to hear about, la la la la. So I was quite torn between that and Shedding Artificial Light on Art History but ultimately let laziness—I was already in the building where Contractor’s talk would take place—decide for me.

Contractor acknowledged that the potential for baddies to exploit our online data footprints (basically, everything we ever do on the web leaves a record) is “frankly, incredibly frightening,” but he was primarily focused on how all that information is also “incredibly useful.” Researchers like himself can now access enormous, previously unimaginable data sets that offer new insights into human social behavior—one of which is that technology may have changed how we communicate, but not so much with whom. The web was supposed to eliminate geographical barriers—and as someone who has “internet friends” (i.e., people I correspond with but have never met) in Europe and Australia, I can certainly attest that it’s made a difference in my life—but the research shows that overall, 75 percent of online communications are between people who live in fairly close proximity. We apparently aren’t looking to the internet to find new people nearly as much as we are to chat with our existing friends.

After that, my brain was too full of new thoughts for me to sit still any longer. I can’t wait for the Hyde Park program next Sunday, though—especially since I’m now a part of it! After my last blog post, Encyclopedia Show co-founder Robbie Q. Telfer e-mailed to ask if I wanted to be among the “stellar hodgepodge of writers, artists, poets, and performers” assembled for this one. I said yes before I could talk myself out of it. Eep! Wish me luck

“I like your ambition, Kate!”

That was a Chicago Humanities Festival employee’s response after seeing a homemade calendar of events I plan to attend: 29 of them, in all, bookended (ha!) by William Gibson in Evanston on October 16 and Umberto Eco downtown on November 13. The fantastic perk of being a guest blogger is an all-access pass to the festival, and I intend to make the most of it—even if I did clearly hear a quiet “Good luck with that, sport” underlying the comment about my ambition. (And it was in an e-mail.)

Every autumn since 2005, when I moved to Rogers Park, I’ve had the same conversation with myself.  It goes like this:

“Hey, Kate, you should go to something at the Humanities Fest this year.”

“Great idea, Kate.  Let’s look at the website and choose a couple of things.”

[looks at website]

“I want to go to everything! And I can only afford, like, two things! WHICH TWO THINGS?”

[brain short circuits]

Then I get distracted and forget about it until two or three days after the festival ends, at which point I kick myself.

This year, though, I can “afford” all the things! The only hard part is choosing between events scheduled at the same time, or back to back and a mile apart from each other.  Do I really want to see Umberto Eco (whom I love, but perhaps my schedule is too author-heavy) or attend the City of the Futurepanel? How do I decide between the sold-out Wikileaks and the First Amendment discussion and Todd Kuiken’s fascinating-sounding lecture on advances in prosthetic technology?

And will I have the energy for either after I’ve already seen two Can’t Misses that morning: Rebecca Solnit (whom I have admired ever since I read her glorious essay “Men Who Explain Things”) and Anthony Grafton on the future of the book? As a writer, a former publishing professional, and an avid reader of both paper and e-books, I’m really excited to hear his ideas.

I know it’s almost certainly unrealistic to believe I will make it to all 29 of the events I put into that calendar, but I swear, I will die—by which I mean “get really tired”—trying. I mean, look at these offerings! The Truth Machine: American Justice and Our Obsession with Lie Detection! Trains of Thought: Lessons from Tokyo! Facing Up to the Uncanny Valley! Mother Jones: New Frontiers in Journalism! It’s like the programming folks read my diary when deciding what topics to include. (Except there’s nothing called “Pile of Corgi Puppies: An Interactive Presentation.”) How could I skip any of them?

In fact, the festival hasn’t even started, and I’m already down to 28 events; I remembered I’m teaching a class at StoryStudio Chicago on the night Jared Diamond is speaking. Stupid employment! But I shall do my very best to milk my golden ticket for all it’s worth.  At the very least, I need to make up for the last six years.

I adopted Solly in May of 2000, when he looked like this:

In the last few years, no one believed me that his face was once black.

My husband, Al, became “Daddy” when he moved in with us in 2006. This was our first Christmas together:

I hate how I’m cackling like a fool in that video, but this dog made me laugh pretty much every day until he got too old and sick to do anything but nuzzle my hand and give the tiniest of tail wags.

And sleep. A lot.

This dog, you guys. This fucking dog.

I’m tempted to write a billion-page eulogy, but you really only need to know a few things.

1) He was the best dog I’ve ever had and might very well hold that distinction for the rest of my life.

This is my serious face.

2) He adored everyone. His tail never stopped.

wagwagwagwagwagwag

3) He was nothing but comedy and love, no matter what happened to him.

One eye down, still happy.

Unfortunately, he was a dog, which means that by age 14, he needed 3 different painkillers to get through the day, and he didn’t see well out of the one eye he had left (after I fell while carrying him down the stairs last spring), and he didn’t hear so well, either, and he shat on the floor in the middle of our housewarming party, and he still liked to be pet, I think, but didn’t really seek it out–after years of being the snuggliest dog that ever snuggled.

And then one day last week it was obviously time, and that was that.

I fucking loved that dog, and I miss him–though really, I’ve been missing him for over a year now–and I am serious when I say it’s entirely possible, even likely, that on my deathbed I will still think he was the best dog I ever had. But at the same time, I am not one to get overly maudlin about these things. He was a member of the family, yes, but one who was only ever expected to live 12-15 years, one I always knew I would see through to an end very much like this. Having lost numerous beloved pets and a close human family member in my life, I do not personally find those two kinds of grief very similar.

Accordingly, I am not the kind of person who needs a long mourning period after the loss of one pet before I can give my heart to another. In fact, taking care of another dog is the best balm I’ve found for this particular wound. This is the first time I’ve had to come home to an empty house after losing a dog–I’ve had two at a time for most of my adult life, so there was always one who still needed me before–and I was going batty after 24 hours. On day two, I went to the shelter where I volunteer and hugged as many dogs as possible, until I stank like hand sanitizer and puppy shit, and I felt a million times better. I am, above all, a Dog Person. I need dog snuggles like my daily medications.

To help me out with that, my friend Molly came over on Sunday with her greyhound, Zia, whom I tolerate even though she’s a super high-strung dog who just can’t get comfortable in a strange environment, as you can see from this picture.

Mind if I sit down?

Molly and I eventually woke her up and took her to the beach, where we got to talking about possible next dogs for Al and me. A retired racing greyhound definitely seemed like a good possibility–both Zia and Molly are terrific ambassadors for greyhound rescue. Molly even has a theory that greyhounds and writers are meant for each other, because we share an affinity for naps and are prone to ignoring our loved ones for long stretches.

Plus, look at her!

Of course, the shelter where I volunteer is also full of cool dogs who need homes, so it was really just a matter of convincing Al to get serious about choosing a new buddy. I was completely ready to go and not too fussy about breed or size. My only requirements had to do with age: I did not want a senior, and I did not want a puppy. I’ve adopted seniors in the past and would recommend it to anyone, but after caring for and losing two old dogs in two years, I need a break from them for a while. As for the puppy rule, I’ve never had one as an adult and could see no good reason to get one when there are so many lovely dogs available who are already housebroken and at least semi-trained.

Besides, as much as I’m looking forward to a younger dog’s energy, I don’t need that drastic a change.

“Right!” said Molly after I laid all that out. “I don’t really understand people who go out and get a puppy immediately after they put an old dog down.”

“Me neither! Like, you know what I need after living so long with a needy, sleepy dog who pees in the house? A needy, sleepy dog who pees in the house and also destroys shoes and gets into the garbage and is terrified of the coffeemaker gurgling.”

We silently congratulated ourselves on being so thoroughly practical about dog ownership that we are immune even to the charms of widdle baby puppy-wuppers. WE WIN AT REALISM. Yay.

Four or five hours later, Al and I were sitting at dinner, idly looking up corgi mixes on Petfinder from our respective phones. (The family that stares at separate tiny screens while eating together, stays together, as I understand it.) I filtered my search for adult dogs only and was thinking, “Well, this one would be OK. That one would be OK. Ooh, that one looks… OK,” when Al shoved his phone in my face.

“Look!” he said. “Baby Solly!”

The picture on the screen was of this little guy:

Look at his 2 little white toes!

And when I say “little,” I mean 11 goddamn weeks old. Hasn’t even finished his first round of shots. Finds that yellow leaf by his foot mysterious and vaguely threatening. Little.

Exactly what neither of us wanted.

We talked it over for about 45 seconds before we decided to send an e-mail asking if he was still available. The next morning, we had a reply: Yes, he’s still here, but we had him at an event yesterday, and there were a ton of inquiries, so…

We filled out an application and e-mailed it back immediately, then got in the car and drove an hour out to the suburbs to meet him, nervously practicing what we’d say if they grilled us on our qualifications as dog owners.

“Does it help to say we’re ready to take him right now if they’ll put us at the top of the pile?” Al asked.

“No! We’re not trying to deal here! We’re trying to demonstrate that we are serious people who understand the commitment we’re making. We don’t want to look like we’re just mindlessly smitten with a puppy who looks like our dead dog.”

“But what if we are?”

“We keep it to ourselves!”

As it turned out, they were so eager to adopt a dog out to experienced owners, we didn’t have to prove anything to them. And of course the puppy didn’t have to do much to prove himself to us.

Seriously, it's a fucking puppy.

We signed the paperwork, paid the adoption fee, and that was that. He’s still at the shelter until Friday, when he’ll go in to be neutered (and have his cherry eye fixed). After that, I’ll pick him up from the vet and bring him–with his tiny, tragic cone of shame–home for good.

We haven’t settled on a name yet, despite much discussion on Facebook; we’ll probably wait until he comes home and see what feels right. So that’s one of the many things that remain uncertain about our future with this little dude. Which beloved household items will he destroy? How much will he whine, and how long will I be able to listen to it before wanting to drive a spike through my ears? How many times a night will I have to get up and stumble outside in my pajamas with him? Is he even a pug/corgi cross like Solly for sure, or are we going to figure out he’s something else when he puts on 60 pounds? Are we qualified to handle this, in fact?

And how many puppy kisses does it take to get to the center of a grown woman and make up for everything else?

The one thing we do know is that he’s our dog now, and we’re going to love him for as long as he sticks around. If he’s half as good a boy as Solly was, that will be no problem at all.

Rest in peace, sweet old friend.