Category Archives: behavior

When in doubt, apply otters.

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There are big blocks of time that it feels like I don’t remember.

I say “feels like” because I know that in reality, you can’t ever remember everything that’s happened to you because that’s not how the brain works. Long-term memory kind of acts like a card catalog in a library. You go to the catalog with a subject in mind – ie: “summer camp”, and that’s like giving your brain-meats the Dewey Decimal Number for what you’re trying to remember. Your brain-meat then acts as librarian, taking that card and running up and down its stacks at lightening speed (or slightly slower for some of us…heh), pulling memories of that thing from the shelves for you to inspect.

In other words, long-term memory isn’t a constant loop of all the moments of your life being played over and over again, just waiting for you to hit “pause” on the one you want to access at that particular moment.

Think what life would be like if that WAS how it worked, by the way. I imagine it would be like the worst possible case of ADHD ever. You’d never be able to get anything done because your brain would constantly be like “Hey remember that one time, at band camp? And Aunt Mildred’s dog? And Easter morning, 1978? And the day you were born, and the 47th time you skinned your knee falling off your bike, and the drive to the cemetery when Grandpa died, and the smell of the lake at night and how your first kiss felt and smoking weed behind the gym between classes and the words to that song from 3rd grade music class and and and…”, but multiplied by literally all the moments of your entire life.

That sounds kind of horrible. I’m pretty glad it doesn’t work that way, now that I think about it.

I should probably take this opportunity to point out that I’m an accountant, by the way, NOT a neurologist. This may actually not be AT ALL how memory works. I didn’t even finish college and I’m also prone to making shit up, so…probably don’t use me as an academic citation on your fancy brain science term paper or whatever. Show-off.

ANYWAY.

So, it feels like there are these chunks of time that I can’t remember, and sometimes it bothers me. When it bothers me, I start actively trying to recall things from my childhood in order to prove to myself that no, I was NOT in fact just beamed down from the Mothership. Except, then I start worrying about how maybe aliens have the technology to basically pre-populate our brains with just enough memories to make us think that yes, we DID in fact have childhoods and that the idea of being beamed down from the Mothership is preposterous, now be a good drone, keep incubating those trillions of bacteria and stop questioning reality. And really, THAT’S a can of worms I can’t even really handle on a GOOD day, so that’s when I usually start just looking up pictures of baby otters online instead. Two or three good baby otter video clips will put me right back on track.

otters

I would literally pay for this experience.

Well, as on-track as I ever get, anyway.

I may need a Poké-vention

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Last weekend we were at a gaming event with some friends. Almost all of them had downloaded the Pokémon Go app and were happily spending their down-time between actual card games walking around hunting Pokémon. One friend especially, Geoff, was pretty obsessed. He clocked something like three miles of walking over the course of the day, all in the name of catching electronic critters. I had a couple conversations with people about how the game worked just out of general interest, and I MIGHT at one point have said “if my phone wasn’t such a piece of crap I’d download the game and try it”, but aside from that I didn’t think too much of it and had pretty much forgotten about it by the time we got home on Saturday evening.

Wednesday morning, Mark walked into the kitchen and held his phone out for me to look at. It showed a little picture of a guy on a bright green map with roads traced in grey and a cheerful blue sky full of puffy white clouds on the horizon.

“REALLY?” I asked, rolling my eyes. The map he was showing me was the main Pokémon Go screen. He had downloaded the game and installed it onto his phone.

“YES! Where’s your phone? I’ll download it on yours too!”

“It won’t work, I don’t have enough memory,” I hedged, and busied myself with making breakfast.

“Sure you do, I’ll clear your cache. See? TONS of memory freed up!” He held the phone out to show me, beaming. As I stuttered out protests about how I didn’t know what Pokémon even WAS or what the point of the game was aside from walking around picking things up, he was tapping away happily and downloading the app. Clearly this was going to happen no matter what I said. Knowing that my phone is a temperamental little shitbox, I figured that the app wouldn’t even open once it was downloaded or would crash catastrophically, thus giving me an out for deleting it and retaining what minuscule shreds of adult-ness I could desperately grasp at.

Not so much, it turns out.

The phone DID run the app, so after breakfast I set up my little character. Mark took off down the driveway to see if he could find any Pokémon but I stayed inside, drinking my tea and generally not paying that much attention to my phone at all.

Then the phone buzzed. I looked down and it said something about a wild Charmander appearing. After a few botched attempts, I managed to catch the Charmander, to much fanfare from my phone.

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Cute, right?

“Well, that’s nice,” I thought, and then shut the app off so that I could go get ready for work. Mark came back just about then, looking forlorn.

“I walked all the way to the corner and back and I didn’t find ANYTHING,” he said.

At that point I felt the beginnings of something start to unfurl in the dark recesses of my lizard brain.

“Oh, really? That’s funny because I didn’t even move from my chair but a Charmander popped up and I caught it,” I said smugly. He looked slightly affronted, but then HIS phone buzzed and he was distracted by catching some kind of critter of his own.

Since Wednesday morning I’ve developed a bit of an addiction problem. I can’t stop playing this stupid game.

On the drive to work yesterday and today, I pulled over at almost every single rest stop / turn-out / lay-by on the side of the road to see if there were any Pokémon hanging around.

I read something about certain types of Pokémon only showing up in their specific environments in the real world, so I went out of my way to drive to the beach this morning and sit there for five minutes hoping some kind of water Pokémon would appear.

Last night it was 85 degrees and about 90% humidity but Mark and I walked the dog over a mile out to the end of our road (where there is a conveniently located Poké Stop, it turns out) and back, just in the name of finding more Pokémon.

I have already caught myself several times today pre-planning my errand-running route tomorrow in order to maximize time that I can explore known Pokémon-laden territory.

I don’t even know what the fuck any of these animals are, what they do, which ones are rare, how to battle with them or ANYTHING, seriously…but it doesn’t matter because they’re out there and I WANT THEM. And not only do I want them, but I want more, bigger and better ones than my Husband has. I’m generally not that competitive of a person, but apparently when it comes to building menageries of imaginary animals, I MUST BE QUEEN.

It’s totally weird.

(And it’s basically all Geoff’s fault.)

Quit hittin’ yerself

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This morning I caught myself being a judgemental jerk about something I saw online and it got me thinking.

As I read the thing that set me off, I was initially thinking, ‘This is terrible. How does this person not see that this is terrible?’. That led me to wondering whether the author was just supremely self-confident and literally gave no fucks about what anyone thought of what they wrote, or if perhaps they were that rare type of person who is truly naive to the fact that they may not actually be any good at the thing they’re trying to do.

At that point, I realized a couple things.

First, it dawned on me that I am, in fact, deeply jealous of most confident people. People who go through life doing what they want to do and not worrying about how it looks to anyone else tend to annoy me because that’s how I would like to be. It’s like the whole teenage girl phenomena of hating the pretty girls because they’re pretty, you know? We tend to resent people who have the things or traits we want for ourselves. And yes, I absolutely understand that jealousy is an enormous waste of energy, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to shut off.

Second, and far more importantly, I realized that I am the asshole that I am most afraid of. I am not just the loudest one running myself down but in fact often the ONLY one running myself down. I talk myself out of all kinds of things because I worry that I’ll be seen as ridiculous / pathetic / unskilled / a failure, but it’s really only ME that will repeatedly tell me that I’m any of those things anyway. My husband doesn’t do that, my parents don’t do that, my friends don’t do that…hell, most random strangers don’t even do that. It’s pretty much just me.

I’m in an abusive relationship with my own mind, basically.

Soooo…yeah. There’s that. Leaving the situation doesn’t really feel like a viable option currently (and I am grateful every day that that’s the case, trust me), so I guess that means I have to learn how to not be that asshole to myself anymore.

If anybody has any tips on how to go about that, feel free to lay ’em on me.

stevecrop

“Look, I can keep listening to you but it’s going to cost more peanuts. Chipmunk therapy ain’t free.” – Steve the Chipmunk, MD

mystery peaches

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Last night I dreamed that I was at a grocery store. I ended up in the produce section, in front of a display of peaches. I carefully selected five of them, sniffing each one to make sure it was at peak peachy-ness, then placing them gently into a plastic bag. I don’t remember paying for them in the dream, but I’m pretty sure that can’t be held against me in a court of law, so NYEH NYEH, dream grocery store! I DO WHAT I WANT.

Anyway.

So I had this bag of perfect peaches and I was super happy about it. I was kind of half wandering / half floating through the parking lot of the store when I noticed there was a car with the trunk left open, bags of groceries sitting unattended within. I looked around and didn’t see anyone who seemed to be obviously responsible for said car and groceries, so I slid over and deposited my bag of perfect peaches into one of the grocery bags.

Except, as I was doing that, the parking lot turned into someone’s kitchen and the trunk of the car turned into the crisper drawer in the refrigerator in said kitchen (because dreams are bizarre). It was very certainly not my home and not my fridge, and I knew that at the time. I tucked the bag of peaches into the drawer and felt immensely satisfied about the fact that the person who came home and looked in the fridge later would find a bag of surprise peaches and spend several minutes standing there thinking, “but I didn’t BUY peaches, did I? No, I definitely didn’t. I don’t think. Do I even like peaches? Should I EAT these mystery peaches? I don’t know where they came from. What if they kill me?”  It was like I was getting great glee from someone else’s potential befuddlement and worry, which is kind of funny on the surface, but really kind of fucked up if you start thinking about it.

peach

Sidenote: peach pits have always creeped me out. There are way too many tiny places bugs could live in a peach pit. Also, today is all about me ruining peaches for everyone, apparently. Sorry, peach farmers.

This morning in an attempt to make myself feel better about clearly being a total asshole in my dream, I took to teh Googles to look up what it means to dream about sneakily inserting peaches into someone else’s fridge. As you can imagine, that particular text string didn’t yield anything useful. But, I DID find a section about peaches in an online dream dictionary which, if anything, made the whole situation more confusing:

“To see a peach in your dream represents pleasure and joy. You take pleasure in the simple things in life. The dream may also imply that something in your life is just “peachy” and going well. Alternatively, a peach may be indicative of virginity, lust and sensuality. Consider how it may be a metaphor for your sweetheart or loved one.”

Ok, so I was trying to give someone else pleasure and joy, but sneakily rather than outright? That actually kind of sounds like me, to be fair. Although, in the dream I was also finding amusement in the fact that the (metaphorical) pleasure and joy I was giving was somehow going to scare or worry the recipient in some way. Also, if the peach is a metaphor for my loved one, I was happy to give him away.

So basically what I’m getting from this is that I’m a gastronomic sociopath who possibly also wants to pimp her husband out to strangers.

But that’s not even the weird part, because then there was THIS:

“Dreaming of wiping melted chocolate off of a wrinkly peach relates to having someone completely dependent on you or having to take care of someone.”

FIRST OF ALL, that seems incredibly specific. Like maybe the author had a super uncomfortable dream about wiping chocolate off a wrinkly peach at some point and tried to make themselves feel better by adding it to the dictionary so that it would seem like a common thing that a lot of people dream about.

Second, you cannot say something like ‘wiping melted chocolate off of a wrinkly peach’ to someone with an overactive imagination like mine without it going to some VERY weird places.

Places I really didn’t ever need to go and would like to forget the routes to.

Have you gotten there yet? I bet you have. I’M SO SORRY.

But I’m also laughing hysterically at the thought. So maybe the dream dictionary wasn’t so far off after all…

Vindication is sweet, especially when it comes from unexpected sources…like random 14 year old girls.

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I think I’ve talked before about how my office-mate listens to the Margaritaville XM radio station on his computer all day, every day…and I don’t mean on his headphones, either.
The station is a mix of Jimmy Buffett originals, him doing covers, other people doing covers of HIS stuff, reggae, country…basically anything vaguely beach-themed. Which doesn’t sound that bad in theory, right? I don’t mind reggae or country. Hell, I actually LIKE some of Jimmy Buffett’s music.

What I DON’T like is not having any control over what I’m listening to for eight hours a day. After a while it becomes like an audio version of waterboarding. I am literally incapable of tuning noises, especially voices, out a lot of the time. Fighting with my brain to focus and get things done when I’m constantly distracted by background noise (especially ones that annoy me) quickly becomes exhausting.

Also, with this station it’s not like you hear a song once on a Monday and then don’t hear it again until Thursday or something. No, this is the same maybe 40 songs over and over, day in and day out. A lot of them are covers, so you might actually hear three different versions of the same song done by various artists over the course of the day. That’s just completely eye-twitch-inducing in my book. The only defense I have is to put my headphones in and listen to my own music or to white noise tracks…otherwise I am stuck listening to this fucking Margaritaville station for seriously 40 hours a week because I’m too “nice” to kick up a fuss and make him shut his music off.

So this afternoon when I happened to have removed my headphones briefly, I heard office-mate’s 14 year old daughter, (who is coming to work with him all this week (which is an entirely different rant that I’d like to write but I won’t)), pipe up with the following:

“Dad, don’t you get sick of this station? I mean, it’s just the same songs over and over again.”

…I kind of wanted to hug her. Finally, FINALLY, proof that I’m not just being a spoiled asshole (in this regard, anyway. There are plenty of other areas where I’m sure I could be proven to be a definite spoiled asshole), and that I’m not imagining the repetitious nature of the radio station.

SUCK ON THAT, RADIO MARGARITAVILLE.
noperadio

 

Remember

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Let’s face it, the world has been pretty extra fucked up lately. The 24 hour news cycle only serves to exacerbate things, and social media is never so busy as when there’s a tragedy or a polarizing debate. You have to be pretty determined in order to not hear any news or opinion over the course of a whole day.

There are some people who thrive on this constant stream of information, these depictions and descriptions of sometimes downright terrible stuff. They enjoy reading, if not participating in, debate and they would much rather be connected to what’s going on than disconnected. There are others who don’t get so actively involved. They see things and just take them in stride. Or maybe it’s that they know their limits and can walk away when they need to. Perhaps they’re even detached and ambivalent – just observing what goes on in the world around them without ever getting “sucked in”.

Then there’s people like me. As much as it often pains me to admit it, I’m sensitive.

Being sensitive wasn’t considered a good thing in our family when I was a kid. My people are an exceedingly undemonstrative people and I had to learn to at least fake toughness, if not actually toughen up. I tend to feel things very deeply and they stick with me for a long time. I cry ridiculously easily. I get over-stimulated by conditions and situations that a lot of friends and acquaintances often don’t even notice, let alone get bothered by. These traits all work at direct odds with that toughness I was taught to cultivate growing up, which leads to a near-perpetual cycle of me beating myself up over getting upset, then trying to fake normalcy, then getting overwhelmed and getting upset, etc.

There are situations, people and things in life that I’ve finally learned to just avoid if at all possible because of the mental fuckery that I know will result if I don’t…but sometimes…

…sometimes I can’t help myself. Sometimes the lure of doing the “normal” thing is too strong. Or, sometimes I know damn well a thing is going to set me off but I care enough about it that I keep subjecting myself to it anyway.

This is what’s been happening with me since Sunday, frankly. I knew as soon as I heard about the shooting in Orlando that I should just back away from social media and let information slowly trickle down to me from my short bursts of NPR exposure during my daily commutes. I knew I should make the conscious decision to not read certain peoples’ posts for a certain amount of time. But I couldn’t look away…I didn’t WANT to look away. I wanted to sit down every gay-hater, every racist, every Islamophobe, every 2nd Amendment spouting gun-nut, and every person who kept sharing that UTTER BULLSHIT post about Wounded Knee and how actually THAT was the worst mass shooting in U.S. history (you know, because it’s a fucking competition) and how it was actually a perfect argument for OMG MOAR GUNS (I’m not even anti-gun, but I am so, SO fucking anti-revisionist-history), and try to make them understand that the arguments they were making just didn’t hold water. Or at least to make MYSELF understand why people can believe such things.

By yesterday afternoon I was DEEPLY angry. I started snapping myself with rubber bands to try and bring myself back to the present, back to what I needed to get done (which, I know, that’s not exactly an A+coping strategy, but I was working with what I had in the situation). Unsurprisingly, it didn’t really work and I started getting That Feeling…the one I half-jokingly call ‘circling the drain’. It’s basically the realization that I’m rushing headlong toward a panic attack if I don’t wise up and get the fuck out of the situation I’m in. I knew that my husband was going to be away for most of the evening and I didn’t want to ask him to cancel his plans (even though I know he would have, had I asked, because he’s awesome), so I reached out to a friend. We met up for ice cream and, as we often do, ended up laughing, telling stories and completely losing track of time. It was 9pm by the time I got home.

And I felt better. SO much better.

It didn’t cure my depression. It didn’t make me an optimist who thinks the world isn’t going to hell in a hand-basket. But it DID help me side-step the imbroglio of anger and sadness. It was respite from the near-constant barrage of awfulness I had been subjecting myself to, and it reminded me of just how lucky I am. Lucky not just for the wonderful people in my life, but lucky to have a life full stop.

The people at Pulse were celebrating Pride. They were celebrating being alive, right before someone stepped in and took it all away. Mourn them, absolutely. Be angry, and rightly fucking so. Fight this culture of hate and bigotry with not just your words but with your deeds and your votes.

And in the midst of all that, try to remember how lucky we are to still be here. Try to remember to live.

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Love is love.

bad brain days

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It’s difficult to explain a bad brain day to a non-depressed person. They usually want to know what went wrong, what caused you to have a bad day. The thing is, I can’t usually answer that question.

I mean, yes…some days go to shit for very specific reasons that you can point directly to. And lots of days just kind of bob along in that nebulous area between “ok” and “not ok”.

But when you’re dealing with depression there are also these days that are just…bad. The things you normally get done with no problem become an epic struggle. Stuff that usually amuses you or cheers you up just serves to remind you of how fucking miserable you are. It could be perfect weather, your spouse could make you the best breakfast, you could have the most traffic-free commute to work while all your favorite songs played on the radio…and the day would still be shit, because your brain just isn’t cooperating.

Hence, bad brain day.

Today was one of those days for me.  I woke up in a fine mood, had a nice breakfast with my husband and my dog, got ready for work, and everything was copacetic. I was fine for about the first hour of work and then it just hit me out of nowhere.

First I was annoyed by someone not responding to an email in a timely fashion. Which, that seems semi-reasonable at first glance but the degree of my annoyance was WAY disproportionate to the importance of the issue the email dealt with. Like, if emails were gambling and I was mad about losing money, I was in the “I just lost $200” range when really the email was only worth about $5.75. Which made more sense in my head, but whatever.

Then I started berating myself for being mad about the email, followed swiftly by berating myself for berating myself (I KNOW…welcome to my world). Within minutes things had snowballed to the point where I was hiding in the bathroom because I couldn’t stop myself from crying.

What was I actually crying about? Existing, basically. That’s about as close as I can come to an honest explanation. It’s not even that I don’t WANT to exist. I do! I like existing! BEING ALIVE IS RAD! It’s just that sometimes it hurts simply to exist, let alone actually get anything done or have any kind of meaningful interactions with the world.

On days like this about the best I can do is let myself have a crying jag or two (or ten, ugh), try to get on with what needs doing afterward, and hope that tomorrow my brain gets back with the program.

How do YOU describe your bad brain days, your down days, your hide-in-the-bathroom-at-work days to others? Do you have some kind of code word or phrase you use to clue your loved ones in to the fact that you’re in a bad place? Talk to me, Goose.

Err…Geese, I guess, since there’s more than one of you…

Brain Weasel Fight Club Practice…uhh…Club

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I really like making people laugh. That moment when someone goes from just politely listening to actually laughing, their whole face lights up and for a short time they radiate waves of happiness. In turn, my brain sucks up that radiating happiness like a sponge. It’s like something inside of me throws the doors wide open and is all “HELLO GOOD FEELS, I HAVE BEEN EAGERLY AWAITING YOU. PLEASE COME IN, I HAVE PREPARED REFRESHMENTS”, and it just feels really, really good.

Maybe that makes me a psychic vampire or something? I don’t know. I’ve been called worse, I guess.

Anyway.

The thing about depression is that it lies. Not just once in a while, but constantly. Even on my good days, it’s still there. It’s either just not lying as loudly as on the bad days, or maybe my inner Lying Cat is awake and reminding me of what the depression is doing.

sagalyingcat

Lying Cat is a character in the graphic novel series “Saga” written by Brian K. Vaughan and drawn by Fiona Staples. It’s really, REALLY good and you should read it.

This often makes it quite difficult to trust that what I think is funny in my head will a) come out as funny when I say or type it, and b) that the audience I’m addressing will see it as funny. Comedy is subjective, after all. One woman’s Ferris Bueller is another woman’s…Wolf Blitzer.

Or something.

You know what I mean.

So basically, I spend a lot of time with a blank page in front of me, berating myself for not writing anything on it because nothing is ever good enough. This is completely fucking counterproductive, because the only way to get better at a thing is to PRACTICE. Every day that I let this blank page intimidate me into slinking off into non-writing land is an opportunity to practice that I’m losing out on.

And granted, some days  I just…can’t. Either I’m busy or I’m just truly lacking the spoons to string words together meaningfully…whatever. Shit happens. You wouldn’t try to practice playing the clarinet if you had bronchitis and couldn’t breathe well (I’m assuming. I’ve never actually played the clarinet. CLARINETS, HOW DO THEY WORK?!), and I’m not going to try to practice writing on days when it feels like my fucking brain is dissolving and getting ready to leak out my ears. But I feel like maybe I need to start making myself practice even when I don’t feel exactly “on”, when I don’t have a funny story in the chamber all ready to fire…and yes, even when my brain is trying to tell me that nobody wants to read a single word I could possibly type in this space.

Because honestly, it’s not just writing practice. It’s fight practice. It’s shadow-boxing with the smaller, more docile brain weasels so that I’m a little better prepared when those big sweaty Ivan Drago type brain weasels inevitably roll up wanting to pummel me and steal my lunch money.

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My husband will be so proud I remembered a character’s name from one of the terrible movies he’s made me watch!

So bear with me if I start posting boring shit about like, my house plants, the weather, or my obsession with Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. It can’t be all cookie licking and floor poops all of the time, y’know?

rituals (and consequences)

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There are certain things that must be done. Rituals, if you will. Certain things have their places, certain activities have a specific order they’re best done in, and some steps on the way to a destination are non-negotiable.

For instance, I have a bedtime routine that involves checking the bed for spiders.

Part of it stems from the fact that I intensely dislike being personally near spiders. Notice I don’t say “I hate spiders”, because I don’t. I totally respect spiders’ places in the ecosystem and I admire their innate engineering instincts.

I just don’t want the creep little fuckers to touch me. Ever.

So, when I go to bed at night, one of my rituals is to check the bed for spiders. I flip the blankets and top sheet off the bed, I shake the pillows, I shake the blankets and sheet, then I put it all back together again. If my husband has already gotten into bed, I’m ok with assuming he’s already gone through this process for me. If I’m the first one to bed, though…everything gets shaken.

The other night, after having gone through the whole shake-and-make process and kind of laughing at myself the whole time, I pulled out my notebook to scribble down my thoughts about it so that I could remember to blog about it later on. The note went something like this:

“Must shake out pillows and blankets before getting into bed because spiders. Problem could be solved by just making bed in morning but what if the spiders get into the bed while I’m gone to work? Better to leave bed unmade then thoroughly check for spiders whilst making it right before getting into it. Fresh bed is safe bed.”

Then, because I realized just how incredibly bonkers it looked having been committed to paper, I actually wrote the following postscript:

spidercray

Yes Internet, I know I spelled Hughes wrong. It was late and dark and I’m nuts. Don’t judge.

Satisfied that I had effectively put things into context for anyone who might come across my notebook in the case of my untimely demise, I then put the notebook away, picked up my Kindle…

…and felt a disconcerting tickle on my left arm. Glancing down was like a slow motion horror movie and confirmed what I already instinctively knew:

SPIDER. ON. MY. ARM.

Making a sound somewhere between a steam whistle and a bagpipe, I flung my arm away from my body as though it wasn’t connected and I could somehow fling it and the spider riding on it across the room if I just put enough effort into it. The Kindle went flying, the dog jumped up and started barking, and somewhere along the way I managed to partially squash the spider.

Yes, sorry spider-lovers…a spider WAS harmed in the making of this story. It probably had a thousand creepy 8-legged babies before I killed it though, and they’ll probably all come to avenge its death some night when I least expect it (OH GOD NEVER SLEEPING AGAIN, JESUS FUCK).

After several seconds of hyperventilating I managed to regain control of my faculties and go back to reading my Kindle, but I’ve been rethinking my spider-checking ritual ever since. I mean, clearly either I wasn’t vigilant enough in my shake-and-make routine, or we’ve got some kind of special breed of ninja spiders of doom living in our apartment.

I bet they came in on the grapes.

SHIT.

 

steve

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We have this neighbor named Steve.

Well, Steve might not actually BE his name, but that’s what we call him.

He also technically might be a “her” rather than a “him”. It’s hard to tell, honestly…

…because Steve is a chipmunk.

The Steve Saga started back last summer. Our actual human neighbor, Gary, has his mailbox affixed to this antique standing scale. One day last summer I was walking Junior, Professional Harsher of Mellows, down our road. As we rounded the corner by Gary’s mailbox, a chipmunk came barreling out of the underbrush growing along the edge of the lawn and dove straight under the platform part of the scale that the mailbox is attached to.

Ever since then, Junior has been OBSESSED with the platform. He let up over the winter while the chipmunk was hibernating, but this spring when things started thawing out, Junie was right back at it – sniffing, digging and making tiny angry Wookie noises every time he got near the platform.

Mark decided the chipmunk needed a name a few weeks back, so he started referring to him as Steve.

It wouldn’t have been a problem if not for the fact that I have this terrible habit of talking to the dog while I walk him. Not just general guidance like “good boy” and “no, don’t eat poop”, but often fairly extensive one-sided conversations.

I mean, Junie never actually answers me BACK, so that’s a step in the right direction, but it’s still probably somewhat disconcerting for the neighbors to look out their windows at 7am and see me wandering around mumbling in a sing-songy voice about how Steve’s not home and can’t take your call right now but if you leave your name and a brief message…

…yeah.

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“Do veef nuff mek mah mouf wook faf?” – Steve the chipmunk