i spent the weekend dogsitting for one of the aft's lobbyists. it was exactly what i needed. i had gotten so desperate for dog affection that dogs had actually started communicating with me.

a week or so into my new job, i started feeling physical signs of anxiety for the first time in my life. nausea, stomach cramping, couldn't stop clicking my pen, horrible nightmares. one day i was walking home from the metro and i thought, god, what i really need right now is to pet a dog. any dog. my neighborhood has one of the highest dog-to-person ratios in the city, and usually there is a veritable dog party going on in a field down the street. on that day, however, there were no dogs. not a single one. the next day, anxious and desperate, again i wished for dogs and saw none. until suddenly a dog and her owner walked up from behind me. when they passed me, the dog (a golden) started walking realllly slow, even though her owner kept saying things like, "come on, we're going to be late!" it kept looking back at me. finally, the owner said, "would you mind just petting my dog? i know she wants you to pet her and i have to get home."

this weekend i was dogsitting two huge dogs in a beautiful bobo house in alexandria. a golden and a yellow lab - claire and jake. sweet, but huge and extremely needy. picture my dog ollie, a cookie- and attention-grubbing westie, but bigger, louder, and more of them. there was also a cat, whose status in the family pet hierarchy is obvious in the lack of imagination given to her name - whiskers. you might as well name her "tongue" or "eyeball."

while i spent much of the weekend trying to get claire to eat something, anything, jake - tubby and unconcerned with his image - ate everything in his bowl and in claire's too. the highlight of the weekend was when i caught jake rummaging around in whisker's litter box, and emerging with a litter-dusted turd. while running to get a paper towel to pick it up with, i made sure he felt good and ashamed of himself, but when i got back the turd was gone.

another gem of a moment was taking the dogs out for a morning walk in the park, still feeling drugged from all the benadryl i'd taken to survive a night in that cathouse. i had the two dogs on two retractable leashes. on the way home jake spotted another lab like himself and, without warning, shot off toward it. i was literally bowled over, landed on my
face, and dragged a foot or so before i let go of the leash. i think i may have gotten whiplash and am considering filing for worker's compensation (this is a union i'm working for after all).

but all in all it was nice and i think i got the dog craving out of my system.

meanwhile, briefly, i had two interesting dreams - in the first, i was lying in bed with ben and another girl, whose boyfriend was in the bathroom. while kissing ben, i moved my hand onto her thigh and then started fingering her. we tried to get her boyfriend to join in, but when he realized what we were doing he made his girlfriend stop and brush her teeth with an electric toothbrush. in the second dream, ben was holding some kind of huge festival for people into bdsm, and he was like their king.