April 2015 | In Some Places

I’m getting ready to head home for a friend’s wedding so I’m going through the list of items to haul from the US. Stuff for our dog Roxie far outweigh anything I’m picking up for Ryan and me.

Our pup may be a bit too spoiled. By Ryan, more specifically, but I must admit to going out of my way to spend money on items that make Roxie happy. I’m considering hoarding and purchasing double or triple of everything in case something breaks and isn’t available in Kyrgyzstan. Here are some of our favorites.

Kong Wubba Friend

It’s crazy that I’ve spent Saturday afternoons mending fifteen stuffed animal toys that ripped at the seams. Roxie likes to gut her stuffed animals, and even though she’s not super rough with them, they’re always ripping.

We dropped $30 on this stuffed animal (oh, Korean imported pet products), but it’s been with us for two months now without any mending. Plus, one looks just like Roxie, which is an adorable plus.

Nylabone Dura Chew

I was really hesitant about something made of plastic and infused with meat flavor.

However, Roxie has guarding issues and usually stresses over protecting things like rawhides and bones. For some reason, she doesn’t do that with Nylabones. In fact, she brings them over to let us hold them while she chews them, which is both cute and demanding. We’ve tried different flavors and Roxie’s favorite is the regular chicken.

Petstages Dogwood Stick

A stick is like Christmas for Roxie, which is a bummer because then we have to take it away. Apparently dogs really aren’t supposed to chew on wood. I was thrilled when I found this replacement – it’s supposed to smell like wood but not splinter and cause injuries. It’s not as thrilling as a stick to Roxie, but I think it comes pretty close.

Petsafe Pet Hands-Free Leash

I may look like a goober using this, but when I’m out with Roxie and trying to train her with treats and listen to an audiobook and be aware of our surroundings, it’s nice to have her tethered to me. This leash is adjustable too, meaning when we’re out in the middle of nowhere I can let her have a long lead and change it when we’re downtown.

Freedom No-Pull Harness

When we adopted her we were alerted that Roxie is a slipper – she can miraculously back her way out of many harnesses. She also thinks she’s a husky running the Iditarod when we walk, pulling us along. We are in never-ending, ongoing leash training, but this no-pull harness helps a lot.

We had a different harness that only clipped on the front but Roxie started to walk crookedly because it pulled her to the side. This one gives us the option to hook both to the front and the back or just to the back like a normal harness, and it’s really hard for her to back out of.

Kong ZoomGroom

The shedding! How is it that Roxie loses four times the amount of fur it looks like she has, and is still a fuzzball? We used to use some knockoff of a furminator but it took forever and then we realized it was giving Roxie a rash. The ZoomGroom is really gentle and seems to act like a magnet to pull hair out. It’s really messy though – fur just goes flying when we brush her.

Kong Wobbler Dog Food & Treat Dispenser

Roxie is a scaredy, so she hated this at first. She didn’t understand the toy and would just whine and get frustrated that the food wasn’t miraculously appearing. It took some training.

We had to reward her with treats for walking towards it, then for nudging it a little, then for nudging it a lot. Finally she figured out how to knock it the right way to get something out and get rewarded on her own. Now it occupies her at occasional meal times and is nice for days when she didn’t get as much attention as she might have liked.

It says something that I just donated half of my clothes but plan on packing this stuff for our international move.

Any favorite pet products we should know about?

A Link-Up with Treasure Tromp

All right, all right, I was just trying to be friendly. I was just trying to be friendly. That’s what they all say. The feign of innocence. The pretense of Samaritan impulses. In her mind she spits in his face. She spits in all of the faces of the strange men on city streets who torture her with their stares. but on her face is the same, slight smile.

-Zambreno

I picked up Green Girl after reading Bad Feminist by Roxanne Gay. In Bad Feminist, Gay wrote an essay on Green Girl, and with that suggestion I started the short novel on my vacation to Cheongsando. Perhaps it was not the right setting for such reading; as soon as I started reading, I felt pretty uncomfortable.

Immediately when we meet Ruth there is such a sense of such self-consciousness and drama. The opening line is “The pull, the blood, the cry. The agony of becoming.” The book is narrated by Ruth’s mother, it seems, though she’s not present in the story but narrates third-person seeing Ruth’s experience as an American living in London.

Ruth is a perfume saleswoman at a large department store she calls “Horrids”, which is a pretty accurate assessment of what it feels like to be in a giant department store. The book revolves around Ruth’s experiences, decisions, and thoughts. Ruth’s self-consciousness left me feeling so awkward, mostly, I think, due to the fact that it’s something I could identify with and didn’t really want to recall.

At times the novel reminded me of a lot of my writing when I was younger, riddled with vague statements leading to deeper meaning. However, I felt it was intentional, like the voice of Ruth herself was coming through, and lent itself to the characterization of Ruth.

She is impressionable. Yet she does not leave an impression. She is like a ghost, a non-thing.

-Zambreno

I can’t decide if the book was good, but I certainly left it feeling like something about my experience had been captured even though I didn’t really want it to be. It was discomfiting. At one point, the narrator states:

I am reminded of the Barbie dolls that I played with as a young girl. I would perform the cruelest acts on my lovelies. I would behead them. I would cut off their hair to make them look like Ken. I would sentence their bodies to various torture machines. Perhaps writing for me is an extension of playing with those dolls. Ruth is my doll. I crave to give birth to her and to commit unspeakable acts of violence against her. I feel twinges of joy at her suffering.

-Zambreno

Ruth is suffering, but there is a greater message to be had: many women feel the same way. I think the book captured the feeling of displacement and misunderstanding and artificiality that we’ve maybe all experienced at one time or another in our lives. And even though I was uncomfortable, there is some good in that.

I think we ought to read only the kind of books that wound and stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with a blow on the head, what are we reading it for? So that it will make us happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need the books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea inside us. That is my belief.

–Kafka

“Her fingers begin furiously tapping out a text message while walking. She is a concert pianist manufacturing false sentiments. A novelist of nothing new.”

“What does she want to be? A green girl doesn’t like to consider this question. She already is. She is waiting around to be discovered just for being herself.”

“What is with young women and exclamation points and smiley faces! So afraid of appearing somber, always wanting to appear light and happy and sparkling, even when they are dying inside. Not ever being able to escape the mask that smiles.”

“She just acts. She just reacts.”

“Being a girl is like always being a tourist, always conscious of yourself, always seeing yourself as if from the outside.”