wine mom

This past weekend my life consisted solely of Survivor and Dooly. As I write this, Dooly is sleeping on his back with his legs in the air. It's the first time I've looked at a dog sleeping in this position and realized it's weird that they don't tip over. It's also my first time seeing Dooly sleep in this position. I wonder whether we can get to 7:45 tomorrow morning without him barking. My alarm goes off at 7:47. There is a photo in my camera roll of slanted light falling over my hand holding a pink tire kong in Cora's living room. My phone had saved it automatically after I'd sent it as a message to Cora, asking her if it was ok for me to use the kong with Dooly. Over the course of the day I kept returning to this accidentally beautiful photo, and I would get sad looking at it. It conveyed contentment and warmth, things you have to pause to experience and soak in and which I felt too tired and strung-out for. It reminded me of when I stayed at Juliette's apartment for Outside Lands and marveled at her roommates' cat stretching out in the sunlight, existing outside of time. "Cats know how to enjoy life," I had texted my mom. In response, she had sent me a paragraph about how a wild cat she'd taken in and raised when she was a child in rural China had gotten pregnant then died during childbirth, thus traumatizing her. There are small luxuries to my current situation: watching the milk settle into my glass of cold brew in the morning, the fridge compartment reserved just for seltzers, having both bacon and smoked salmon in the fridge. Sometimes while in the middle of a deployment or waiting for my tests to finish running I'll sit on the ground and Dooly will run to and curl up in my lap, and I'll think that maybe this my chance to detach from my responsibilities and sit and feel things. But after a minute I get bored of petting Dooly and my tests have finished running anyway. Last night after putting Dooly to bed I started reading my copy of The Idiot that Catherine had borrowed from Claudia then left behind in our apartment when she moved. While reading the first thirty pages, I had the feeling of wanting to cry. Nothing overtly emotional or dramatic was happening, but it reminded me of the small moments of inspiration you get throughout the day that you pocket and forget about and how relatively innocent you were going into college and how old you feel now even though you're still young. I'll have to think about what I was feeling more, especially in relation to what I've been thinking about re-"coming of age" and Worst Person. I recommended the book to Eric and liked the idea of my copy circulating among our friends and becoming part of our little zeitgeist, a la Worst Person and the crossword. The quote in the book's dedication reads: "But the characteristic feature of the ridiculous age I was going through - awkward indeed but by no means infertile - is that we do not consult our intelligence and that the most trivial attributes of other people seem to us to form an inseparable part of their personality. In a world thronged with monsters and with gods, we know little peace of mind. There is hardly a single action we perform in that phase which we would not give anything, in later life, to be able to annul. Whereas what we ought to regret is that we no longer possess the spontaneity which made us perform them. In later life we look at things in a more practical way, in full conformity with the rest of society, but adolescence is the only period in which we learn anything. - Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, volume II: Within a Budding Grove" I'm so tired. I can't wait to go to California on Sunday.