I spend a lot of time around kids, but I don’t have any of my own. Instead, I have Dwight. Full name: Dwight K. Schrute (Adam named him. It was a vast improvement over the cat. Her name is Star Trek). I think people might be right when they say if you want kids, you should start with a plant. Keep that alive, get a puppy. Keep that alive, you might be ready for kids. The thing is, I’ve had some plants. None of them have survived. Now I have a dog, and sometimes I don’t think I will survive. This does not bode well for ever having children.

Despite that, Dwight is alive and mostly well. We’ve both survived the past four years, though sometimes barely. I do think having Dwight has taught me a variety of life lessons that make me a better caretaker of small children. These lessons have also made me a better runner, a better wife, a better sleeper, and a better human. Let me explain:

Lessons I Have Learned From Dwight the Dog (Part Brittany Spaniel, Part Australian Shepherd, Full Obnoxious):

1. Child proof does not mean foolproof. Dwight really likes playing with things that make fun noises. This includes pill bottles. We learned early on that he likes to gnaw on the plastic lid of the Tylenol, and shake the bottle around. It was frustrating, but not disastrous. Until he got the lid off. And decided Tylenol is delicious. Which leads to lesson number two:
2. Poison control is friendly and helpful. Even when you call about a dog instead of a human. As it turns out, Tylenol overdoses are serious in humans and dogs. Handy tip: hydrogen peroxide will induce vomiting in a dog. Part B of handy tip: hydrogen peroxide will induce IMMEDIATE vomiting in a dog. Don’t give the dog the hydrogen peroxide until they are in the precise spot you would like them to vomit in. You’re going to thank me for that tip someday.
3. Karma is a bitch. No one likes to be shut up in a house all day alone against their will. If, by necessity, you must do this to your dog one day because you and your spouse have to work double shifts, there is no amount of treats that will save you from your comeuppance. Karma may manifest in the form of the kitchen garbage spread all over the apartment, or a special surprise left in the corner, or every wooden spoon you own being chewed to pieces, leaving you to put all the splinters back together, frantically, as you try to decide if a piece of wood is working its way through your dog’s intestinal tract.
4. People are weird. If you have children, or you have friends who have children, you have witnessed the insane interaction between parents as their children play. That bizarre competitiveness that has them bragging about how their child is the best at crawling or speaking or using the potty. When people get competitive over their pets, it’s a million times weirder. Especially when your own pet is a social misfit that humps old people and harasses small breeds.
5. It’s not fitness, it’s life. There are so many reasons to be in good shape physically, not the least of which is that sometimes dogs run away. They think it’s a fun game, and the world is their playground. As grown humans, we realize the world is not a fun playground, so much as a dangerous place filled with cars and death. When the dog runs away, you have to be ready to give chase. For a good 45 minutes to an hour. You can’t afford to get a stitch in your side. The dog never gets a stitch. By the way, many thanks to the catering crew in that wedding in Greenville, SC in 2008 for cornering my dog near the buffet table. I apologize for the disruption.
6. Puppies aren’t puppies for long. They get bigger. And then bigger, and then bigger. If you feed them too many scraps from the table, they get even bigger. Those things you thought were adorable when they were tiny, like the way Dwight used to curl up on the pillow at night, become absurd, like having a 50-pound dog sleeping on your face. Every day when I get home, Dwight wants to sit on my lap for a bit. Which is adorable, and makes me feel needed, but also uncomfortable, because he’s not exactly small. His bark, which used to be yippy and playful, now sounds kind of menacing. This is helpful for keeping away burglars and the FedEx man, but unnecessarily terrifies our neighbors. I tell you this because these are things you can fix when the dog is a puppy. Clearly, we have completely screwed up and must live with our large, misbehaved, ridiculous mess. Learn from our mistakes.
7. In for a penny, in for a pound. Just like marriage, or parenthood, having a dog is making a commitment that you have no real understanding of until you’re right in the thick of it. At the point of no return. That puppy turns into a dog, and that dog needs medicine, and shots, and food, and exercise. And the longer you have that dog, the more you love that dog, until you’re spending hours researching the health benefits of various dog food brands, and wondering if your dog is suffering from seasonal depression. You find yourself googling how to remove a tick, and looking up doggie daycares for when your work schedule is a little full. You realize that at some point you’ll be carrying that dog down the stairs when arthritis makes it hard for him to walk, and mixing gravy in with his canned food so that he’ll eat. None of this was in the adorable puppy pamphlet, but if you had it to do over, you wouldn’t change a thing.

I love my dog. I don’t bother to get into any of the competitive bragging at the dog park. In fact, I’m usually pretending I don’t know him while giving him the evil eye. This is the dog that ate all the stocking stuffers one year (Handy tip: charcoal also induces vomiting in dogs. Also immediately). This is the dog that humps my grandmother every time he sees her. This is the dog that knocks over small children, and eats Kleenex, and used to chew up furniture legs. The same dog that begs you to take him out, then makes you chase him around the apartment to get a leash on him. He’s a hot mess. But he’s our hot mess. And there’s nothing like having a slobbering idiot around, that relies on you for every little thing, to give you a big kick in the pants toward adulthood.

This is an actual picture of my actual husband.  He is not, contrary to popular belief, actual Batman.  He is a man of many talents.  A renaissance man, if you will.  He is good at many things (fewer than he thinks, but more than most people know). Here is a list of things my husband is good at (I know, so many lists, right? I can’t help it.  Lists are super fun.):

Things My Husband is Good At (Please note: certain things are not on this list, but I can assure you he is good at them; we won’t go into detail here as I think my mother is following this blog and Adam gets embarrassed when I overshare)

1. Building things.  Especially intrinsically useless things, like remote control DeLoreans and lightsabers.  I asked him why he couldn’t just buy a lightsaber, and he told me a real Jedi builds his own.  One time he built me a tiny wire LED Christmas tree.  I still don’t know what to do with it.
2. Playing things.  Especially Call of Duty, especially when he gets to kill Nazi zombies.  He likes it when I play too, but I generally just get shot a lot while he asks me what I am doing.  Sometimes he’s the one that shoots me, because he thinks that’s hysterically funny.  He once told me that we should take up paintball as a hobby, because it’s something we could do together.  He shot me in the neck.  After I was already out.  Yes it was an accident.  No that didn’t make it hurt less.
3. Influencing things.  Our dog’s name is Dwight.  We are the only people who could possibly love him.  As Adam often informs me, Dwight believes he ranks higher than me in our pack, which is why the dog tries to sleep in my spot on the bed, and pull the leash as if he’s the one walking me.  He doesn’t pull any of this nonsense with Adam.  Adam has this power over humans as well, except not for me.  I pull a lot of nonsense with him.  (See number six)
4. Working on things.  Adam works all the time.  He works at the front desk of a spa.  He works at Cal State Northridge.  He works as a superhero at children’s birthday parties.  He works with a stunt group.  He acts.  He works for a couple of theatre companies.  He works out.  He’s pretty much always working.
5. Fixing things.  Adam can fix things in the car that I didn’t even know existed until they broke.  He can fix things I would rather throw away than go to the trouble of fixing.  He always wants to teach me how to fix things too, but I remind him that our relationship is more efficient if we divide the labor.  Then I hide from him.
6. Forgiving things.  Adam knows more about me than anyone and he still wants to live with me, so he spends a lot of time forgiving me.  And sighing, and occasionally rolling his eyes, though he denies it.  He forgives me for not doing dishes, and storing my dirty clothes on the floor, and forgetting everything he told me two minutes ago.  Even though I was totally listening.  I bet he will also forgive me for this blog post!
7. Carrying things.  He’s pretty strong.  He carries heavy things for me.  I carry light things for him though, so it’s teamwork all the way.
8. Remembering things.  He really is good at this, but I have to say sometimes I think he is making things up just because he knows I am good at forgetting things.  I’m on  to you buddy.
9. Saying things.  Often things that make me laugh.  He gave a toast at his brother’s wedding that made his mom cry.  He tells me that he loves me every day, even on days when he has to forgive me a lot.  He used to say “prove it” in response to everything I said to him.  That was kind of annoying and I’m glad he stopped.  When he reads this, he will probably start again.
10. Caring for things.  He can have nice things because he takes care of them.  Except for phones.  He’s always breaking those.  But he’s a good person to give things to if you don’t want them to get broken.  Although, now that I’m thinking about it, he broke my favorite key chain when we were dating in high school and he never fixed it or got me another one.  It had Steve McQueen on it.  Damn, I miss that key chain.

You may have noticed that many of the items on the list work on a deeper, more sentimental and romantic level as well.  He is all of those things too, but that’s not really my thing so I will not be writing about how much I love him and how good and kind and wonderful he is and how lucky I am to have him.  Boring.  I will simply say that while I might not be married to actual Batman, I am certainly married to an actual superhero.  Batadaman.  I hope he comes home from his show soon, because I have a funny story about a stripper that I met today and I’ve been wanting to tell him about it all day.

I have a friend Jill who lives in the middle of nowhere in Idaho. Tonight, she called me from her two-person hot tub where she was drinking a glass of wine.  The connection wasn’t so great, and she explained that this was because she was on a landline and the cord didn’t quite reach all the way to the hot tub.  I found this highly amusing.  First of all, Jill has a landline.  Because she has to, because her cell reception is spotty on her farm out in the middle of nowhere.  Secondly, she had the cord for that landline stretched out to the limit so she could talk to me from the hot tub, while she sipped some wine.  Like a total baller.

I have very few friends whose lives are similar to mine.  But I also have very few whose lives are so totally antithetical to mine as Jill’s.  To illustrate, here is a list of differences between my life and Jill’s life (lists seem to be working for me the last couple of posts):

• Jill has donkeys, one of which is named Gus; I have a spoiled dog named Dwight that sometimes goes to daycare, but gets in trouble because he is socially awkward.  One time, one of the donkeys head-butted Jill and she thought “If I get hurt out here in the donkey barn, no one will know because I live in the middle of nowhere. I will die. Death by donkey.”  I never think that about my dog, but sometimes he embarrasses me by jumping on old people.
• Jill works with special needs children at an elementary school, and she plans events for a restaurant, and she works at a wine bar, and she sometimes plans weddings; I got laid off last month and I nanny. So, yeah.
• Jill eats ketchup on her tacos; I do not. Because that is weird. Recently, the guy at the drive-through gave her strawberry jam instead of ketchup and she didn’t realize until two bites in.  I don’t know if that’s actually worse.  We both agree that as much as we love Taco Bell, eating there is essentially admitting you have hit rock bottom.
• Jill drives probably 20-30 minutes to get to work in the mornings; I drive an hour to get to my nannying job.  Jill travels 20 miles; I travel 11 miles.
• Jill can’t go anywhere near her home without running into people she knows; I can’t go anywhere near my home without running into people I don’t know, speaking Armenian. 
• Jill dated a guy last summer who, in her words, was “like that actor Jonah Hill but if he lost 50 pounds. And his personality.”; I don’t date people, because I’ve been married to the same person for almost nine years.  I love hearing about Jill’s dates, because they range from adorable to absurd.  In exchange, I tell Jill about my husband, who has two degrees in acting pretending, dresses up as Batman and entertains children at birthday parties.
• Jill parks in parking lots, or on curbs, or on some grass, or in a dirt driveway, or wherever the hell she wants; I park in structures that cost $2 every 15 minutes, or on curbs where it’s street cleaning Tuesday from 12-3pm, no parking 2am-6am, permit parking only from 8pm-2am, tow-away zone from 4pm-7pm, 1 hour parking all other times.

This is by no means a comprehensive list.  But you get the picture.  In fact, the photograph above pretty much sums it up.  Jill has DONKEYS.  And other animals.  Like, a farm.  She lives on a farm.  Although, if you think about it, Los Angeles really is kind of a zoo.  So I guess we’ve got that in common.  We’re surrounded by animals, just of a slightly different variety.