Poor door.

There’s this old (or middle-aged maybe? I haven’t looked at her that closely) lady with a poodle in town, and she’s always taking her poodle for walks around campus. When I’m driving near the lakes, I often see her and her poodle out walking, and because the lady is I guess really reluctant to get wet, she always brings an umbrella on her walks, and the poodle has to carry the umbrella in its mouth. The poodle never looks any too thrilled about this. When they are stopped, waiting to cross a road, the poodle puts it down on the ground, and it always seems reluctant to pick it up again when they start walking. I feel sorry for the poodle.

Because I am sometimes sad, I have been assigned to stop noticing that I’m sad, when I’m sad, and instead pay close attention to things that are happening around me. This is a good strategy for not being sad at work, but it does give me other things to worry about. For instance, today I noticed that the lock on the bathroom stalls is bolted in with two bolts that look like eyes, and then a wide piece of metal that looks slightly like an animal face; and now when the door is bolted, if I tilt my head sideways, it looks like a sad-eyed creature is holding the door closed with its mouth. And I keep thinking of the poor poodle with the umbrella and how sorry I am for it, so I feel like I have to pee really really fast in order to minimize its suffering.

Fine, then, human tendency to anthropomorphize! YOU WIN THIS ROUND, but I WILL BE BACK. And I hope you noticed that I DIDN’T CARE AT ALL when my friend fed baby birds to her snakes but in fact thought it was a TOTALLY EXCELLENT STORY. So THERE.