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- I am no longer fit for polite society. I don't know how to make my face appear presentable, I don't know how to dress myself, I have no idea if I brushed my teeth this morning. It hurts to pluck my eyebrows so I don't bother. It's nicer to wear my giant sweatpants than any other pants. I talk to my dog using a funny voice. I talk to myself while I work. I don't know what other people like to do anymore. We watched Tiger King together, and then a few of us watched the Michael Jordan documentary, and then we all went off in our own directions. My dog can't handle being alone for any length of time now. Today, being the day before Thanksgiving, my project manager said we could log off at 3. It was still light out and there's no snow on the ground right now, so I decided to ride my bike to the grocery store. I told my dog I'd be back soon but he didn't believe me, and when I got back he'd rubbed his nose raw on something. This is something the puppy does all the time, trying to nose rugs or blankets over his food bowl, but my dog has never done that. I looked around to see what he'd ripped apart, where the scene of the crime was, maybe he'd chewed the trim off one of my bedroom doors - but I found nothing. Later, as I was making dinner, I realized that the fancy Irish butter I got the other day wasn't on the counter anymore. Now, my dog has eaten butter a few times when I've left him, which is very bad of him, but a week or two ago I found some butter that I thought he'd eaten hidden behind the couch. So I looked behind the couch to see if he'd stashed the fancy butter there. He hadn't, but I noticed the blanket on his dog bed was crumpled oddly, and sure enough, there it was - a nearly pristine block of fancy Irish butter, very carefully hidden in a wedge in the bed, underneath the blanket. It had one or two tooth marks in it from when he'd carried it across the room in his dog mouth, but it still had its wrapper mostly on. So my dog rubbed his nose raw trying to cover up his secret treasure. A couple years ago there was that time when the puppy got a new squeaky pink pig toy that my dog loved, and one day, when my dog and I were the only ones in the yard, the brand new squeaky pink pig toy disappeared in an instant, never to be seen again, until this spring when I discovered it slightly sticking out of the ground in one of the flower beds. (A week or two after the pink pig disappeared, the replacement pig nearly disappeared when I went into the garage for five seconds and came out to find my dog hopping out of the garden, nose covered in dirt, a hastily buried pig toy barely visible in the ground.) So my dog has this funny instinct to hide the things he loves the most - butter, and pig toys. Also, as I was saying, the only thing I know how to talk about anymore is what my dog is up to. (Right now he's snoring - he had a very stressful day, because he was left at home alone for 25 minutes, and then we went for a walk and this very mean little kitty charged him multiple times. It was weird, and my dog was shaken to the core.)
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