Is Owning A Dog The New Promise Ring?

I know the idea of owning a dog with your significant other as a demonstration of commitment and a precursor to having kids is nothing new. But if you're not really a dog person, are you telling the world that you can't commit? Jennifer Aniston (bless her broken heart) was on David Letterman last night promoting her new movie Marley and Me. So Dave asks her if she owns any dogs of her own, and she enthusiastically tells him that not only does she own a dog, she has two.

I know it's awful to say, but as soon as the words come out of her mouth, I thought, not only is this girl ready to commit to someone, she's downright desperate for commitment. Two dogs, after all, for a single girl who travels half the year filming mediocre comedies? Suspicious. If she's not trying to send a message there, I don't know who is. So she goes on to tell everyone that dogs are wonderful pets (like it's some new kind of concept) and she can't get over how you are it for them, and that they are just so unconditionally loving -like nothing she's ever experienced. So just when I'm thinking, oh dear god, she's going to start crying, Jen takes a hard turn toward metaphoric meltdown. Looking pitifully at his guest, Dave ever-so-delicately hits the nail on the head, "Pets are so good, but they always break your heart." At the sound of "heartbreak," Ms. Heartbreak twitches in her seat and bounces her top crossed leg wildly in the air like the failed results of a lie detector test.

"It's a very simple story, really," Jen told Dave. "This husband and wife and..."

"And they have three children, right?"

"That's right, Dave," she said.

"Well, have you ever thought about getting married and having three children?"

"Well, sure, Dave. But I wouldn't say that the film planted that seed in my head by any means."

And in a completely kind are-you-sure-you're-okay kind of way, Dave leans over to his twittering guest and tells her that pets are so good, but they always break your heart. To which she answered, "There's no relationship like a dog, and then they don't live as long as they should. Ya know? You just have to say goodbye way too soon."

Don't live as long as they should? DON'T LIVE AS LONG AS THEY SHOULD?! Dang lady, the only thing that could top the fact that that was a completely bizarre, out-of-nowhere, depressing thing to say is the fact that you clearly spoiled the end of the movie (not that I was going to see it in the first place... but c'mon). Thanks, a lot.

From there, the interview is a serious of flutters and twits from Jennifer Aniston and a short clip of her "acting" like herself in the new movie. At the end of it all, I debated who she made more uncomfortable: Dave who was sitting next to her, or me with my creepy dying-to-commit dog theory. Before I spin off on some cleb-obsessed, Perez Hilton rant, let me get back to the point here: a dog as the new promise ring. Based on my conclusions, the more dogs a person owns, the more commit-able they are.

Come to think of it, I once dated a guy in college who secretly kept a puppy in the dorms, though it was technically against the school's policy. Needless to say, I wasn't ready for the full-blown relationship thing, and he turned out to be a serial monogomist. Another friend of mine has been in a relationship for almost four years. She basically refuses to talk about marrying the guy, but begs him every night to let her buy a puppy and obsesses over all the places they could take it together.

There aren't really hard-drawn lines in this theory here, but I suppose it makes sense that I'm both single and dog-less at the moment. Then again, I've never been much of a dog lover...

My State of Being Convinced

I shot awake at 4:30 a.m. last Thursday, for no reason at all, and lay in bed waiting for the sensor spotlight outside the front door to shut off. I routinely imagine a burglar barging through the glass front door, all the while knowing it was probably a squirrel that set it off. When the light switched off again, I focused on the sound of footsteps in the room above my head. Dr. Thomas Fraser III, I imagined, clambering around for the first cigarette of the day. A man at the mercy of medical emergencies, he is no stranger to 4 a.m.

When you start your day in the wee hours like that, 1 p.m. can feel like the twilight zone. I dreaded that surreal feeling, and debated whether to try to sleep again or get a jump-start on my day. One by one, lists and ambitions and frustrations of the day crept into my head until I swam in an impossible sea of to-dos. Without exhaustion to put my mind to rest, I threw the covers off and woke up to the icebox known as my basement apartment.

At a loss for what to do with my morning, I figured that I would jump in the shower and head to work sooner than planned. There, I could sit at my computer with a hot cup of coffee and write for a few hours before anyone else arrived. I really hadn’t written anything in weeks, which apparently drives this writer to the brink of 4 a.m. insanity.

Though it sounded like a good plan, in reality I moseyed around the apartment for an hour and a half. When I had listened to the same Headline News loop a third and final time, I left for the office. For the first time in the history of any job, I was the first employee to arrive. They are all going to think something’s wrong with me, I thought. Once inside I cranked the heater, brewed a knock-your-socks-off pot of coffee, and sat down at my computer. By then it was 7:30. I had just enough time to check my email and type a sentence when my early bird coworker bounced through the door.

“Is everything all right?” she asked. Just like I knew she would. Everything was fine, I told her, and though she suggested a few scenarios with her eyebrows raised, she guessed nowhere near my real worry.

Three hours later I found myself sitting in her office, confessing. I’ve been called a lot of things in my day, but private isn’t one of them. It’s like clockwork, I explained to her. Every so often --and I’m not even sure how often, just that it’s happened before, I get this unbelievably anxious-restless feeling. I can barely recognize that it’s happening at first, only that I become entirely preoccupied with questioning myself about the tantalizing direction of my 25-year old existence. Before I know it I’m analyzing how well I’m contributing to the things I’m passionate about (fashion, writing, politics, design, art…) in my life.

Then I scrutinize, criticize, bully, and beat myself up in comparison to the people I admire. How will I ever get there? How am I living for the things that I love? Am I surrounding myself with people who inspire me or merely fill empty space? Is my job, is my lifestyle too safe? Am I taking the necessary risks to be the artist I hope to become? Have I exposed myself to the right environments, the right people? When will I dare to chase my impossible dreams? And when will I know the time is right? …Am I doing enough? …Am I doing anything at all? And the questions keep coming…

It’s almost like a creative state of heat –a desperate, insecure, fragmented search for reassurance. This state of mind is like a pothole on the path to envisioning my dreams, designed to trip me up and throw me off course (ironically, the same state of mind has the ability to wake me from my dreams at 4 a.m.). For several nauseating days, I go through the motions of working, eating, and sleeping, while my mind wallows in a self-depreciating muck. It is a test against my worst fears of failure. My mind tries my body with restless nights, and for a moment, doubt paralyzes every artistic bone in my body.

Thinking back on the times I’ve felt this way, it’s been onset by a long, creative dry spell, that’s finally relieved by my obsession with a new idea, perspective or project. The return to sobriety after that makes me feel more focused and alive than before. On the other side of this intoxicating insecurity is a burst of confidence in myself, and I think that’s called conviction.

CON–VIC–TION [kuhn-vik-shuhn] –noun. An unshakable belief in something without need for proof or evidence. Lindsey's state of convincing herself that she can save enough money to move to New York and get a job in the publishing industry.

Conviction must be what separates creative minds that succeed from creative minds that fade into envy and once-was. I think an artist’s misguided conviction can be misinterpreted as egotism, vanity, or pride –when, in fact, it is the most important tool for survival. What do artists have if not the tools to convince the world of their worth? And where would the conviction be without the confidence to persuade them self? As jewelry designer, Robert Lee Morris, once said, “It’s good to see that kind of conviction [in a young artist], because you’re going to need a lot of it.”

I had a lot of questions to answer for myself last week, so maybe it makes sense that my coworker thought that something was wrong. I can tell you this: to an artist, even if nothing is wrong, it can take a whole lot of conviction to believe that you are right.

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