Breakdown

So I am one of those dog owners who do not like dogs in the bed at night. I don't know if I'm in the majority here, but there's something more smelly, a little more cringe-worthy about a dog in bed, even if she is 9 pounds and excellently groomed. I have no problem with cats in bed, even though they often have poopy-assholes and dig claws into toes in the middle of the night. It's a double standard that has no standard to begin with, since I haven't owned a cat since I was ten.

But now I have a dog and as of this week, Russ is in San Francisco. I've always been good at staying alone -- the sink goes from full with dishes to gleaming and obsessively empty and our stove, splattered brown from our out of control latte machine, goes back to white. If Russ never went away, I think it's safe to say that our house would never be clean. He's the most wonderful guy, and not exactly dirty, but things have a way of piling up when he's at home. One of his alter ego names is "The Piler." He makes piles and instead of taking care of the piles, he gets distracted and goes on to pile something else until there are hundreds of little Russ-piles all over the house. If he is the piler, I am "the dismantler." I slowly work my way through all these piles when he's gone. Because when he's home, I'm much more interested in him than doing dishes or taking apart huge piles of wood screws or photos of Yosemite, and so, nothing much gets done until he goes away on a field trip. It's a cleaning cycle that somehow works for us, sort of like the life cycle of butterflies. Eventually they're light and colorful and fluttery, but they spend much of their lives as fat slugs lounging on a tree branch.

So last night, Tanya went to bed in her her house, which is a small crate with a poofy blue pillow that she loves to hump and bite. It's her best friend and ho. By 7:00 this morning, she jumped up into bed with me and I didn't tell her to get down. So she slept on our bed, directly on our sheets. I fell asleep, feeling a little bit uneasy about what kind of precedent this was setting, but she's such a little radiator and so calming that after a while, I didn't care.

But now, as the night is winding down, I'm trying to decide -- in bed or not in bed?