Dog training is substantially harder than you might imagine. By substantially harder I mean there are certain things that I hate spending time on because I'm bad at them and dog training is one of those things. I get frustrated by the cycle of Dot looking at me for guidance and me not knowing how to translate my objectives into woof. For her part, she is incredibly quick on the uptake. While I gave my dog free roam of my house in Omaha Dan objected to Dot jumping on his bed when he moved in. Within three days she recognized his bed as a no-fly zone and never had another issue. Yet when it comes to cat food I could rig a shotgun at the edge of the food bowl and she would pad right up, ears pinned back, and take the buckshot right to the skull. And I get frustrated because I know it's me. When I took some computer programming classes in college one of the professors had a saying. "Garbage in, garbage out," meaning that if you told the computer to do something stupid, it would. Dogs are apparently computers. That poop.

My frustration comes out of a weird place as well. Like everything else in life I've cultivated a dichotomous temperament. I can sit on the phone at work all day and have somebody scream at me over something trivial while maintaining the demeanor of a monk with a butterfly landing on his wrinkled Indian finger. Yes, if you're wondering, all monks looks like Gandhi in my head. And if I hear "Shaolin monks" I'm already thinking about the Wu Tang Clan. If I struggle with something that I should easily be able to take care of or something that I think I should excel at, it's an instant blind rage. It's always been that way only slightly more embarrassing. When I was younger, and if I'm being honest even occasionally now, if I go completely postal I just cry. It's the weirdest reaction ever and usually ends with me laughing because I feel rage bubbling up out of the top of my head...and then I'm crying. Big crocodile tears. Even though there are some neurons that obviously aren't connected properly the ones that are able to recognize "This is weird" still blast chemicals between each other, and after a minute or two of crying I just start laughing. The feeling of terminal frustration pervades for awhile after. Even know I get a flashback of the feeling. Something like a searing heat through all of my muscles coupled with big, gasping breaths. In that moment there isn't enough oxygen in all of the world to make me feel whatever the word is for sufficiently oxygenated. And when I laugh it takes me outside of myself. I can see myself standing there stitched together with dental floss. The seam is uneven and bits of stuffing hang out of the gaps between the thread while empty spaces occupy yet other ones. Overall I look like a sketch from Tim Burton's early years but I'm not ashamed of the quality. This is how I've put myself together and I've done the best that I could.