Author Archives: Tin Man

Dogs

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For a long time I’ve wanted to get a dog (if I can win Matt over to the idea), but I have a few questions about it.

I wonder if any of my readers could answer the following for me:

(1) What do you do about the dog during the day when you’re at work? Particularly those of you who live in cities like New York? Do you hire a dog walker? Is it easy to find a good one?

(2) Where’s the best place to get a shelter dog in New York City?

(3) How do you get the dog to the vet without a car, if it’s larger than carry-size?

I’d appreciate any insight or advice you all might have.

Thanks!

The Restless Soul in the Bathroom Mirror

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“The Restless Soul in the Bathroom Mirror.”

I’m a sucker for stories of career reinvention through introspection and journaling, and the dollop of Barbara Sher doesn’t hurt, either.

I don’t write in my journal as much as I used to, but pieces like this one make me want to take it up regularly again. I use cheap spiral notebooks for personal journaling — a tip I got from Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones, which I read one summer during college and which really taught me how to write creatively. The cheaper your writing medium, the less pressure you feel to fill it with Great Thoughts, which frees you to write whatever comes into your mind and encounter the thoughts and feelings you didn’t know you had.

Gail Collins Says

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Gail Collins, whose columns I love, wrote the following in the Times a few days ago:

Here’s my thought for the day. The Tea Party people say they’re angry about socialism, but maybe they’re really angry about capitalism. If there’s a sense of being looked down upon, it’s that sense of failure that’s built into a system that assures everyone they can make it to the top, but then reserves the top for only a tiny fraction of the strivers. Capitalism is also a system that lives off of change. When people say this isn’t the America they grew up in, they’re right. Nobody gets to grow old in the America they grew up in.

This is nothing new, of course. There is no logical reason for religious conservatives, the lower middle class, and rich businesspeople to belong to the same political party. It’s a pretty neat trick that people like Dick Armey and Glenn Beck have pulled.