The downstairs neighbor quit her law practice because the two little ones couldn’t be without her (her words), over-coddled into an anxiety disorder (my diagnosis), so now I walk up the stairs past them when she dare go out and hear Yip!YIP!YIP!, close my door YIP!YIP!, cough YIP!YIP!, car drives by YIP!YIP!, any tiny noise or movement, you got it: YIP!YIP!YIIP!YIIIIIP!
Did I mention I work from home? Writing? Love quiet and silence and…quiet?
I love Kim-Kim, Pauline’s exuberant and happy-to-be-alive, delighted-it’s-you Peke, but not many other d.o.g.s. Especially not chiwowhays (sp intentional) whose every little yip says: no one else should exist but mom.
grrrrrrr. Ruff.
But, these small irritations probably blown out of proportion by Sharon’s wise observation that I have my own wish to be blissfully alone on this planet for some hours of the day and my own resentment that I’ve not yet settled into a permanent place. Why not take it out on what anyone (even dog luvahs) would find exquisitely over the top annoying. YIP, indeed. Distract myself from the real discomfort.
BUT! David and I have narrowed the search. Stanford West was never going to be the landing spot, despite it’s awesome proximity to his work. We want Ocean. It’ll be a commute for him, but we think the tradeoffs worth it. Another Cliff Dive in the works! Relief on the horizon.
Meanwhile, Jenn and Polly, my novelistic sisters, live alongside me in the crisises of an unwanted pregnancy from rape, in all their flawed complexity. All everything fades when I open that laptop. I’m too superstitious to say too much more about how it’s going (because then it won’t.) Thanks to Rachel from my Stanford writing group, I’ve clued into the social media stuff around abortion and Planned Parenthood, which confirms one of the several major motivations for writing this particular book.
While I have a mad, driving desire to introduce Respect for opposite passionate beliefs into the mix, I have an equally mad desire to represent our common belief in the very core of our existence as a culture, a country, a democracy, a human race: individual determination. Choice, man.
Which brings me back to yip! yip! I’ll not call the Management office, not bang angrily on her door, not slyly offer dog treats filled with Xanax, not make any (more) secretly snide remarks to their mom (“Oh! they don’t bother me, I just feel bad for them!” ha, ha.) Those little guys don’t act the way I want them to. If it were my choice, they’d be in dog therapy, on dog anti-depressants and my neighbor would be in mom-dog training school. But it’s not MY choice! My choices are many (headphones, um, moving…hey, let’s move to the beach!) but key among them is not to tell her what or how to do it. Unless she asks. Which she won’t.
It’s a flawed argument on both sides, I suppose. Where do we draw the line? How can I believe in a woman’s right to choose, but not believe in a person’s right to choose to own a gun? How can they believe in carrying a gun and/or capital punishment and the “sanctity of life?”
It’s a conversation worth having, but I’ll acknowlege right up front that my particular baggage comes along with me, if you’ll do the same. And that’s the extremely cool thing about writing a novel, the discovery of the complexities of two women with opposing viewpoints on the world and what’s underneath the surface, and then below that layer, and the next and the next.
The fun stuff, now! Drop dead amazing, right?! I want to live there! Pillar Point, Half Moon Bay, CA.
Gail Ansel 