My puppy turned 10 months old a few days ago. I think she might finally be a real dog, or at least it looks like she might turn into one, instead of the weasel/piranha fish hybrid I thought she might be. Cranky as she is, she does like wearing clothes, and I put a few things on her yesterday to see what she might need for winter. (Don’t @ me about the dog clothes, my skinny reduced-fat versions of real dogs get cold in the winter, deal with it.)
She was very amenable to the try-on session. Later, I measured her with a piece of twine and she was more suspicious of that, but she will howl a different tune when her new outfits arrive in a few weeks’ time.
Last week felt crushingly busy, even without any freelance work. If my days feel like a neverending game of whack-a-mole I can’t imagine what parents feel like. Every simple task seems to have fourteen annoying subtasks that need to be addressed before you can consider the main task to be done. Por ejemplo, a million years ago we ordered some curtains for our living room (whack!) and they finally arrived, at which point we had to order the rods (whack!) and some new drapery sheers (whack!) and then this weekend we will actually have to take the old curtains down and install the new ones (whack! whack!).
I don’t know if any of you are nerds who played Myst back in the day, but lately I feel like I’m groping my way through unknown territory, trying to find the stupid key or map or bell or whatever will let me progress to the next thing. Life didn’t feel like this before, and I know this is due to the Endless Today phenomenon, but it is very exhausting.
Tuesday night was the season finale of Million Dollar Listing Los Angeles, a very silly show that we nonetheless have enjoyed for several years. It is mostly in the mold of literally every other Bravo show – rich or at least money-adjacent people saying catty things about people they allegedly are friends with – but you also get to see mansions, most of which are exceedingly tacky.
This season I enjoyed the personalities on MDLA but I found the real estate, and the whole business surrounding it, to be pretty gross – $40 million houses with 22 toilets and two swimming pools in a state besieged by drought and wildfire is fucking gross no matter how much bookfaced Calacatta marble you put in the custom steam shower. People who buy perfectly good houses in need of minor renovations and tear them down to build white concrete boxes featuring quarter-million-dollar kitchens that will never be used are gross.
Sorry! I am not really an “eat the rich” type person, I like rich people and aspire to be one someday (ha), but these people already have six homes that they never use, so why waste more money building another one that will sit empty. Just stay at whatever hotel movie stars hide in after cosmetic surgery!
Anyway: MDLA ended on a pretty upbeat note, with no major fights or drama brewing, and in fact the manufactured drama was in short supply all season. I don’t know if the cast members have lost their taste for it, or the producers sensed humanity’s need for less conflict and more jokes, but it was nice. The final episode featured all of the real estate agents at a party in one of the aforementioned white concrete boxes, and they were all relaxed and weirdly horny (the innuendo game was off the charts) and nobody fought or threw a drink. I hope this doesn’t mean there won’t be another season, but I also don’t know when it will be possible to do things like spend $40,000 on a cocktail party in hopes of getting someone drunk enough to make an offer on an overdeveloped house sitting on a fault line.
In short: watch Million Dollar Listing Los Angeles! I think I’ve definitely convinced you.