Gina says Fletch never seems happier than when he’s righteously indignant and the same holds true for Maisy.
Of course, Maisy’s never come up against the unmitigated joy and determination of a little girl named Libby.
Whereas Maisy’s all flinty-eyed and calculating, Libby’s face is wide open and unassuming. If she were a person, she’d be wearing pigtails and overalls. Her friendly demeanor is enhanced by her ears which are extra-floppy and project from her head like a set of bat wings. They flap when she runs. She’ll often try to put them up Doberman-style when she’s outside, but they’re too heavy and they just fold over like she’s wearing a hat.
Libs never looks at us straight-on. Rather she pulls that nose-down, eyes-up business that buries the needle of the cute-o-meter in the red every time. Even though she’s a plush chocolate-caramel brindle, she sports a large white patch on one side of her nose and it’s dotted with freckles. I find it virtually impossible to see her snout without wanting to place a kiss on it.
When we first bring her home, I feel like I’m doing something wrong by loving her, even though she’s the embodiment of happiness and joy. “Do you think Maisy feels like we’re being disloyal?” I ask Fletch again and again.
“I think Maisy wants a cheeseburger and that’s the extent of her cognitive abilities,” he replies. Of course, Fletch feels none of the lingering guilt because he was smitten the first time Libby curled up in his lap. If there’s such a thing as a daddy’s girl, Libby is one of them. We actually have to work on this in training because instead of disciplining her, Fletch apologizes whenever she does something wrong. [Maybe I spoiled the last two, but I’m doing this one right.] “I wouldn’t stress. Libs is going to win Maisy over yet. She’ll come around. Mark my words.”
It takes two months, but Libby does it. She and Maisy are inseparable now and whenever Maisy has a down day, [Which are far less frequent since Libby got here.] Libby’s right there bringing her hot tea, Jell-O, and the latest issue of Star magazine.
Of course, everybody is Libby’s pal and she brings such a sweet energy to the room that we’re able to have doggie playdates for the first time. [Hello, Tracey’s sweet dog Maxie!] Even though Loki and Maisy are lifelong buds, they’ve never quite gotten the hang of entertaining each other. Maisy only likes to tug and Loki prefers to be chased and they’ve always looked to us to provide these services. Libby just wants everyone to be together so she tugs and chases and engages all.
If Maisy could, she’d be the older sibling who taught Libby to smoke. Since she can’t, [No thumbs.] she’s shown Libby how to bed-hog and counter-surf and beg and she’s convinced her that making potty on the living room rug is the next-best thing to relieving herself outdoors.
We have our work cut out for us.
So, we step up our visits with Elaine and buy paper towels in bulk. And offer prayers of thanks to have found such a good bad dog to complete our family.
Reluctant Adult Life Lesson:
If you’re in the midst of a midlife crisis, you could buy a convertible, have an affair, or upgrade your cup size. But you’ll probably be happiest if you save a dog’s life.
C·H·A·P·T·E·R E·L·E·V·E·N
Don’t Blame Mii, Japan
When I was in eighth grade, Japan was the coolest country on the planet. With “Mr. Roboto” on the Walkman, Karate Kid in the Betamax, and our T-shirts embossed with the characters for “storm sewer” and “dishwasher,” [According to Reggie, our Japanese exchange student who, ironically, came to the U.S. to escape Japanese culture.] our nation embraced Japanese culture so much that we even tried sushi. I’m sure our Founding Fathers spun in their graves, all, “Raw fish? Wrapped in seaweed? I’m sorry, did we lose a war or something?”
Much like Australia and our short-lived passion for Men at Work, Vegemite, and all things Crocodile Dundee, Japan’s fallen out of favor. One might think Toyota’s massive PR FAIL is the root of the problem, but that’s just a smoke screen. The real culprit is far more insidious.
I’m talking about the Wii Fit, of course.
If you’re Amish and you’re reading about this device for the first time, [I like your beard.] the Wii Fit is a Japanese gaming system designed to get the player moving. Instead of sitting in a stationary position like for traditional video games, participants have to kick their legs and swing their arms in order to boot on-screen soccer balls and return lobs on the tennis court. (I mean, sure, you could kick a ball and swing a racket in real life, but then you’d have to leave your basement.) To me, the Wii Fit seems like a way to work out without actually having to, you know, work, so naturally I’m all over it.
Like the rest of the nation on the day after Christmas last year, I knock back my eggnog, brush the cookie crumbs off my lap, and quickly hook up the console.
Ha! Right. As someone who never knew the microwave had any setting other than HIGH, this is way outside my pay grade.
Instead, I task Fletch with the setup.
“It’s supposed to be super easy,” I tell him. “All the reviews I’ve read said a thirteen-year-old boy could put this together.”
Three hours, a pint of bourbon, and more anguished cries of, “I need a thirteen-year-old boy!” than our neighbors are comfortable hearing, the system is together.
Everyone’s always going on and on about Wii Bowling and Wii Tennis, but before I can try my hand at either of them, the game wants to assess my Wii Fit age. I’m not thin [At all. AT ALL.] but I’m strong and my balance is such that I can navigate a flight of stairs with a basket of laundry and a stack of Pottery Barn catalogs, vaulting over dog-and-cat-based obstacles, never once spilling my coffee.
I figure the test will more or less reflect my forty-two years. Which it does.
Before adding thirty, thus bringing my Wii Fit age to seventy-two.
Seventy-freaking-two.
That’s when I suspect there could be trouble.
I create a Mii avatar and I start playing. I’m totally fine when the other smug Miis gloat every time I go out of bounds and I’m not disheartened when YOU LOSE flashes across the screen in nine-hundred-point font. Frankly, I’m glad there’s someone out there today going all Tiger Mother because kids need to learn that not everyone gets a medal. Life is unfair and there are winners and losers, regardless of how much overprotective parents attempt to shield their offspring from reality.
One of my friends is an executive at a large corporation and he had to go through sensitivity training in regard to working with Millennials. Basically he spent three days learning that he was required to heap them with praise and give them plenty of respect, whether or not they earned it. To me? This is unreal.
And yet I begin to struggle with reality myself when using the supplemental balance board. Upon determining my BMI, my adorable avatar in her cute dress with her pink cheeks looks as shocked as I do when she swells Violet Beauregarde–style, turning all lumpy and potato-headed, enthusiastically exclaiming, “You’re obese!”
Um… thank you?
The first games I try involve the slalom and ski jumping. I believe my spectacular failures here are less a product of shoddy balance and more an issue of a board resting on a thick carpet. My results are consistently worse on every run, to the point that my Mii drops to her knees and begins pounding her head against the ground. Such is her shame I’m surprised she doesn’t whip out a Hanwei sword and off herself Samurai-style.
So, fine. I’m not making the cut for the 2014 Sochi games anytime soon. I can live with that.
I switch to the balance fitness test and that’s when the machine goes all Regina George. In getting a feel for the sensitive calibration, I biff so many exercises that the Wii notes “balance isn’t my thing” and that maybe I’d “enjoy some nice memory games.”
Argh.
While I have an amazing memory, [Seriously, ask me anything. First grade teacher? Mrs. White. She wore a wig and smelled like denture cream. Next?] I still can’t quite master the Wii con
troller, which gives the impression of being full of a raw, wobbly egg or blobs of mercury. The device is disconcerting and I hate how it feels. Were I born ten years later, I could operate a joystick like it were one of my fingers, but I wasn’t so I can’t. [See also: Why I don’t text. (Autocorrect can do only so much.)] That’s why, despite having razor-sharp recall, I keep selecting the wrong answers. Failing at these tests prompts responses like “Are you usually forgetful?” and “Do you normally have trouble concentrating?”
Too bad the Wii Fit doesn’t measure how hard I can kick a TV stand.
The final insult comes when I try Lotus Focus. The goal of this game is to sit still. That’s it, just sit. Judging from my four gold stars—the Wii’s highest honor—I’m an Olympic medalist in Not Moving.
And that’s when I realize that “Wii Fit” is actually Japanese for “We fit; you fat.”
Japan, if you want to win us back, it’ll take more than reengineered acceleration systems. Unless the Wii Fit stops behaving like it’s starring in Mean Girls II, This Time It’s Asian, it’s over between us forever.
And P.S.? I hear Paul Hogan’s been itching for a comeback.
March 10, 2011
Aw, Japan, I take it all back. I’m sending you the biggest donation I can afford and I’m urging everyone I know to do the same.
I hope that Americans give generously enough to help rebuild your infrastructure… even the bits of it that produce insulting games.
Reluctant Adult Life Lesson:
Just because you don’t like hearing something doesn’t make it not true.
C·H·A·P·T·E·R T·W·E·L·V·E
As Seen On TV
If you want me to buy something, include four magic words on the packaging.
I’m not talking about “age-defying,” “pore-minimizing,” or “lose ten pounds instantly,” even though these are all fine qualities.
For me, the only words that matter are As Seen on TV.
That moniker alone turns me from a savvy consumer to zealous convert in the time it takes to slap-chop an onion. “But I’ve seen this advertised on television!” I’ll say to myself, inspecting the ShamWow or Snuggie on that one weird endcap at Target. “It must be good!”
Despite the rational part of my frontal lobe that reminds me, “Almost everything that’s sold in stores can be seen on TV, yet you didn’t start squealing and throwing Tide in your cart,” my brain stem cannot resist anything that’s hawked by a pitchman, that ends in ninety-nine cents, or has an operator standing by to double my order if I act now.
I assume this is because what As Seen on TV means is there’s an infomercial about the product and I could not love infomercials more. When I used to roll home after the bars closed in college, I’d watch them until dawn because I was powerless to turn them off. A special paintbrush that reaches those hard-to-reach corners? A fruit dehydrator? A buzz-cut Susan Powter urging me to Stop the Insanity? A tonic used to straighten African-American women’s hair that is so nontoxic you can actually eat it? The Principal Secret? Yeah, I was in a college apartment that I wasn’t allowed to paint, I didn’t like dried fruit, I was thin, smooth, and Caucasian, but OMG, yes, yes, yes, yes, and yes! I shall take them all!!
I imagine that because I was young, drunk, and more than a tad stupid, I was the target market for these infomercial makers. They probably lured college students into market research centers disguised as Irish pubs and with banners advertising half-priced drinks. I’m guessing researchers pumped them full of Jameson shots and then monitored exactly which products caused them to lose impulse control first. [I bet no one could resist the Roly Kit storage containers. They’re storage containers! That roll!!]
Of course, as much as I adore infomercials, Fletch hates them. Between the terrible acting and the exaggerated incompetence, he believes infomercials are an insult to his intelligence. This makes me love them even more because watching Fletch get mad is always funny.
“Who can’t crack an egg?” he’ll fume.
“Blankets aren’t that complicated! And it’s just a backwards robe, you idiot!”
“Seriously? They can’t peel a simple cucumber without stabbing themselves? Seriously?”
“Oh, noes! I can’t work this Saran Wrap! Look at my butterfingers! Somebody help me because I’m too stupid to work a strip of plastic!”
We’re at the dinner table eating flank steaks wrapped with spinach, prosciutto, and provolone cheese when an infomercial for the Chef Basket comes on. We’re both instantly mesmerized for entirely different reasons.
“What kind of half-witted moron can’t boil a potato without incident?” he barks.
Ooh, imagine all the potatoes I could cook without incident, I think, immediately kicking into lizard-brain mode.
“Goes right from the pot to the plate… dripping boiling hot water across the kitchen the entire time.”
I’d never have to wash a colander again!
“From draining to straining! There’s no difference! Using two words to say the same thing doesn’t speak to multiple functionalities! That just means the intern who wrote this commercial had a thesaurus.”
It strains and drains? Is magic device!!
“And the bonus RoboStir? Please.”
And the bonus RoboStir! Please!
So enrapt are we with the commercial that neither one of us notices when our eighteen-year-old cat, Jordan, climbs onto the dinner table. As I watch, I hear a quiet om-nom-nom in the near vicinity, but it doesn’t really register because the dogs are eating dinner behind us and my, God! The Chef Basket handles stay cool to the touch! Finally I’ll stop burning my hands whenever I go near the stove!
It’s not until the commercial ends that we realize that the cat’s not only on the table, but she also just ingested the nine-inch loop of butcher’s twine that had held my flank steak together while cooking.
Son of a bitch.
“Did she…” I gasp, lifting my plate to find evidence of the string. “She couldn’t…”
But she had and she did and she’s currently smacking her smug, self-satisfied feline chops as apparently I prepare a particularly appetizing string.
I can’t believe this just happened. I’ve spent the past eighteen years trying to keep this stupid cat away from all things dangling, knowing the havoc it would play on her delicate digestive system. I’m so careful that Christmas ribbon is strictly forbidden in this house, as is tinsel and Easter grass. I won’t even toss used dental floss in the trash. I wait until I’m ready to take out the garbage and then I collect the used bits I’d safely stashed in my nightstand. [I almost always forget to do this on Garbage Day and Fletch won’t go near my nightstand because it’s a huge tangled knot of old floss, headbands, uncapped lip balms, free-range antacids, and those tiny silica packets found in shoe boxes for some odd reason. Fletch calls it my Drawer of Shame.]
Fletch thinks more quickly than I do in a crisis, so while I pace and try to convince the cat to barf (by describing the oysterlike substance I once saw on a subway platform) he consults both the emergency vet and the Internet.
“Good news,” he tells me, hanging up the phone. “This isn’t such a big deal. We don’t have to bring her to the ER. All we need is a tablespoon of Vaseline.”
I run to the medicine cabinet to locate the tub I use for my scaly elbows. I scoop up a handful of goo and return to the kitchen. “Okay, what end do I put this in?”
Fletch gives me a Ped Egg–worthy scowl while I wrestle Jordan into position. “Her mouth, you ninny. You put it in her mouth!”
“Well, I’m sorry,” I scoff. “I’ve never lubed a cat before.”
“You think I have?” [Noted.]
Jordan has always been fairly mellow. She’s been a cranky old lady her whole life, but in a passive, sitting-on-the-front-porch-and-exclaiming-into-her-handkerchief-that-those-hippies-need-a-haircut sort of way, rather than an aggressive, get-back-here-Bobby-Dylan-and-taste-the-blue-steel-of-my-clippers manner. But the minute
I grasp her about the midsection and try to insert a petroleum product in her mouth, oh… here go hell come.
There is screaming and there is slashing and there is crying and I believe the bulk of it is coming from Fletch. I quickly witness that two hundred pounds of husband is no match for six pounds of ancient, irate kitty.
My entreaties that I’m trying to save her fool life are for naught and we continue to struggle with her but I can’t get the Vaseline anywhere near her mouth. I do, however, get it in my mouth, as well as my hair and my ear and all over the counter, which blends nicely with all the blood gushing from fresh claw marks.
“Now what?” I wail. The last thing I want to do is take her to the emergency vet because trying to shove her in a cat carrier is the same exercise in futility as attempting to force petroleum into her piehole.
“The doc says if we can’t get it into her mouth, we put tiny dabs on her paws and she’ll ingest it when she cleans her feet.”
I slather handfuls on her front legs. She bolts away from us, but not before spraying every cabinet, appliance, and window with tiny blobs of Vaseline before escaping to the laundry room where every piece of lint we’ve ever generated clings to her tacky limbs like tiny leg warmers.
“That didn’t work!” I shout.
“What part of ‘dabs’ did you not understand?”
At this point, poor little Jordie’s beyond upset and were she capable of registering her discontent online, we’d be unfriended, unfollowed, and in social media jail. She’d be begging Khloé Kardashian to “retweet if you think cat lubers are douche bags” and pinging Angelina and Brad to adopt her because clearly she’s being raised by savages.
Despite her anger, we have to get this stuff into her. So I rub down her whole front with Vaseline and, to make it more appetizing, follow it with a smear of creamy Danish butter. Then, for good measure, I apply some of the pan drippings from our dinner. She smells like a fine steak house and her fur stands up in glistening chunks and spikes, turning her into the smaller, more cantankerous feline version of Pauly D. before an evening of fist pumping at Karma. All she’s missing is a wee set of Beats by Dr. Dre cans strapped to her melon.
Jeneration X: One Reluctant Adult's Attempt to Unarrest Her Arrested Development Page 11