I'm taking care of a hairless dog this week named Izzy. Her owner is a friend of a professor that I keep in touch with. She desperately needed a house-sitter at the last minute. I guess I kind of saved the day, because the person who normally watches her pup had some sort of family situation to deal with. It has has been so nice to stay in a cute, clean house with a pretty yard and a ridiculously comfy bed. I feel very at ease. I should probably clean my own place sometime. I came to the realization the other day that my apartment isn't messy, it's striaght-up filthy. I should just bleach the whole place and throw a bunch of crap away. I'm not the slightest bit of a hoarder, in fact quite the contrary, I dont own hardly anything. However, there is just useless crap everywhere like receipts, pay check stubs, tags from shirts I bought a year ago, bobby pins, hair ties, dust bunnies, rat cage bedding, etc. I really need to work on it, I think I'd be a happier person if I were cleaner. I spend most of my at home time on the back porch, and even that isn't tiddy. gaahhh. okay, I'm going to clean ASAP. Niki said she'll help me clean my place if I help her clean hers. God I love the bartering system. I hope we pump up some spice girls or old-school Britney and dance while we scrub. Maybe we should start early and make mimosas and just drink and clean all day 'til we're pooped.
Izzy is so odd. She's so skiddish and shakes all the time and has major tummy problems. Her owner has to cook her chicken to eat. I don't know how to cook anything so I'm thankful that the owner cooked up a bunch of chicken and refrigerated it before I got here. The dog likes me though. I pet her (or rather rub/massage her skin, which was very weird to adjust to) and hold her a ton and talk to her in a baby voice a lot. Animals and kids take to me really quickly, like abnormally quickly. My friend Ana is having trouble getting her new kitten to interact with her, but for some reason the orange-striped Maurice (I suggested that name as a joke, but Ana kept it) came up to me really quickly. The latino children I watch adore me too. The other day we had a fiesta with their parents and the whole time the kids were tugging on my arms and legs begging me to spin them and play dragons. I pretend I'm a fire-breathing dragon and chase them all over the pace. They love it. But picking them up and spinning them 'round and 'round gets so tiring and they all fight over who's turn it is. (Not-to-mention some of the kids are far denser than others). So the other day I just said "here lets all join hands and run around in a circle." It worked well, I'd pretend to get dizzy and fall down and they all came crashing down with me and all the adults would crack up. Then the bottoms of my super cheap-o, velvety thrift store flats came unglued so that both of my shoes looked like big-mouthed puppets. So I had to take them off and next thing I know all the kids have their shoes off too. One of the mom's noticed my broken shoes and came up to me, rubbed my back and in broken English asked me if I was hungry. Her daughter explained that in El Salvador if someone has bad shoes they're probably hungry. Her mom laughed after she asked me that though. Thank God she was kidding, because I felt really embarrassed. (Oh I also ate a ton of meat, which I rarely do and got extremely sick later. Jalepeno, Pork and Hominy soup can really do a girl in who is used to eating crackers, oatmeal and salad to sustain herself. Oh and the chicken tomales probably didn't help either. But good god authethentic Central American food is freakin' incredible and totally worth the 25 trips to the toilet.)
Anyway the point I was trying to get to is that it makes me feel a little ill-at-ease and then obsessively artificially at ease when I'm around kids and animals that like me so quickly. I know that animals and children are acutely aware of any nervousness or bad-nature in a person that they meet. So I try super hard to exude a comforting and comfortable energy. It seems that the animals and youngins would somehow pick up on my insincerity, but maybe the fact that I'm trying so hard to make them feel safe gives me more authenticity than I credit myself. I really do love kids and most animals, so it's not as if I have any other desire than to have fun with them and hope that they like me. Either way, I often feel like I'm far from good-natured and almost wish kids and creatures didn't like me as readily so that my veil of phoniness would be stripped from me and people would question my integrity a little more. I just feel that I'm too obsessed with ingratiating myself into everyone's hearts, even people I'm not crazy about. I don't feel like I ever reveal my real self and instead feed people thoughts and ideas that they want to hear. The worst part is that I'm really good at that. Really good. Like pathological liar good. I often find myself spouting out opinions that are completely contrary to my real beliefs just for fun. I told my conservative Grandmother the other day that I'm extremely disappointed in the Obama administration. That may be very true, but I failed to mention it's because he's not taking enough socialistic action. It's very rare that people get that I'm fake. But the one's that do get that are the people who I know will be my lifelong friends. A pretty Russian girl probably realizes that I'm specifically referring to her and a couple of others. I guess we all have our guises and masks that we change out depending upon the social atmosphere we're situated in...and most of the time it would be highly inappropriate to say my thoughts out loud. I love getting around people that I can be really honest with, it's fun to blurt out absurdities...things which I don't actually think are absurd at all.
