I look at my dog with no small amount of envy when we go on our morning walks. As is usually the case with dog people, although we do try for a bit of variation now and then, we tend to follow the same route and the walk gets fitted in with the morning schedule at more or less the same time, so we tend to meet the same members of the local canine population in the same place most mornings. Leave 10 minutes late or early, and it's a whole different gang with a whole different set of woofers. Very similar to your kindergarten parents set, everyone knows everyone's dog, worries about them when they are not in the right place at the right time, and exchanges dog educational advice .
What fascinates me is how the dogs interact with each other . Like people, they have their little doggie personalities, and some are a good match, and some are clearly not . Well, like people, I suppose that's fine, and you don't need to be best friends with everyone. You just have to suppress the urges to bite each other in the name of civility if you are a person.
Ella has her stops she makes on her route. She always pauses for a little sniff chat visit with Ken the corgi (above), and although there was a period of unrequited love between Ella and Leon the "I'm sexy and I know it" golden retriever (below), now there is just a quiet being together for a short while each morning, as Leon looks off into the distance with affected disinterest. But there is a reflexive tail wagging he just can't hide. I think Leon might be the one....
There are other houses though at which we cannot call. Ban-chan the guard dog and Fu-chan the blind granny dog both have to be physically restrained when Ella sashays by, and the feeling is clearly mutual. There is also the odd case where one dog likes the other but it is clearly not reciprocated. Ella literally yelps when she sees Caesar the black lab coming in her direction, probably based on a sudden attempted rape when she was but a girl and not aware of these things, but there are times when the reason is not so clear.
So why the envy? Of course we people have all these kinds of relationships. We all have people we love, like and respect, and if we are lucky it's mutual. There are others who, try as we might, we just can't take a liking to. Something in our list of SAMEs and DIFFERENTs is different enough to be a deal breaker. There are others who love us more than we love them, and, the worst case, when we have more love or respect for someone than they feel for us.
What I envy at my age, is that dogs just seem to know in an instant when they meet each other whether this dog is friend or foe. Whether it's instinct, a smell, or a look, a message is conveyed in the split second, just before they meet. It tells them not only "match" or "no match", but also which is the stronger one in the pair. And then they are free to vent their feelings in a cacophony of barking which only stops when they are physically wrenched apart.
Don't get me wrong, I realise dislike can be instantaneous in humans too. A few nights in the ladies toilets of night clubs in Edinburgh will teach anyone that expressing incompatibility in a cacophony of yelping, barking and sometimes even biting is not confined to the canine world either . But in general there is a lot more time, and many a self doubt inspiring red herring involved in the discovery that being involved with certain people gives you more stress than pleasure in the great cost-benefit analysis of life.
I've long had the idea that if someone could invent a device like a memory stick /card reader, into which all our likes and dislikes , prejudices and philosophies, lifestyle preferences, senses of humour and style, sexual orientation and proclivities, whether or not we squeeze the tooth paste tube in the middle or the end, how many children we want, degree of empathy and flexibility, communication style, ways of processing information, how we treat our friends, how we prioritise things, and just general mood for the day could be programmed or read, with a daily update to allow for changes of heart and circumstances, and we could just slot our stick into the other person' s reader (ooh aaar mrs) when we met them and get a compatibility print out, it would save a lot of wasted time and heart ache. You could have options to change the presets according to the joint activity being considered : "business meeting" " joint work project" "chat at the bus stop" "summer romance" " PTA event team" "best friends for life" "workout buddies" "soul mate" "teacher & student" "marriage partner", "Facebook friend" etc etc. There would probably need to be an adapter and a different algorithm for groups, and the task at hand, leader or follower, with leadership style and whether the activity is voluntary or paid as an extra check box.
If we could just swipe our data and get a green light or a red light and agree to abide by the advice given, with no conversation, would there be less misery and depression in the world ?
I can think of a few instances in the past few years where I would have been less hurt and made very different life decisions if I'd had one of these. When we meet new people, I think we choose to see the things we have in common, and the things like about them first in the hope of making a new friend.
People usually show you their best face first, and it's only after you have invested quite a bit of time in the relationship (romantic or platonic ) that they relax enough to show you their true self in all it's glory and vice versa. At this point if all goes well, you still have enough SAMEs on aggregate to forgive or ignore the DIFFERENTs and deepen your friendship, but occasionally a DIFFERENT that has been hidden until now is too big for both or worse, only one of you, and we then have a huge drama of rejection hurt and depression to deal with. Blame gets flung around when no one has really done anything wrong. If you'd just known in advance about the big DIFFERENT, it could all have been avoided.
That's life, you may cry. Perhaps it's getting older or part of the midlife crisis of an gaijin in Japan, but I just don't feel like I have time to waste this kind of thing any more. And I don't like how cynical and wary that makes me sound, when I actually am the biggest softy out. I guess I could just do with an instant soul mate right now.
So in the absence of the machine I need, I'm envious of the simple instinct the dogs possess to sort these issues out in an instant and move on.
But if I had it, would I just then have to face a worse truth: that really there is no one else quite like me??
Maybe better to enjoy the illusion of the possibility of a perfect future?
Sigh. Sorry there's no point if you made if to the end.
More Pimms anyone?
