Ode to Bark

I am very white. Obviously I don’t mean in the albino sense (if we’re just referring to skin pigmentation the Irishness of the LR means she takes the cake), but in the existential sense and all that it represents. A quick perusal of the stuff white people like website (creatively named stuffwhitepeoplelike.com , shocking I know) shows me batting about .750. And in the rare instances where I don’t like stuff that white people do, by and large it’s because my laziness trumps my whiteness. I may be really white, but I’m epically lazy. For example, number 27 is marathons and while I like them in theory, in practice Wes Anderson (number 10 on the list) will make a summer multibillion dollar blockbuster before I would ever run a marathon. Not that this is news to anybody, nor should it be. Big deal, I dance with a horrific overbite and like to sleep late and play video games…what’s the point.

Well, moving to Mexico was supposed to beat some of that lazy whiteness out of me. I mean, people are shooting each other. While planning a vacation we are warned to expect men with guns to be around, as private security abounds and tourists in the area we’re going to have been robbed before. Ethnic people, dirty water, Spanish, it should all counterbalance my whiteness. (I suppose we can just ignore that being the only white person around, bottled water, and promising to learn a foreign language are numbers 71,76, and 115 respectively).

Somehow though, not only has my whiteness not dimmed, it has become positively incandescent. How? Well, referring back to stuffwhitepeoplelike.com I point you to item number #53 on the list that currently stands at #130 entries; Dogs. The Notorious D.O.G. has single handedly (pawedly?) made me infinitely whiter. So what follows is a thoroughly incomplete list of ways in which my dog has made me whiter.

• 1. Even other puppy people are amazed at how much we talk about our puppy like a child.
• 2. Friends routinely ask us how our baby is.
• 3. We have taken more pictures of our puppy than I have taken in the rest of my life to the power of 10 (one of them is with him sitting on Santa’s lap. Not only do we treat him like a person, but a goy at that. Oh wait, he has a menorah picture too).
• 4. Our primary communication with friends back in the states consists of said pictures.
• 5. I constantly talk out loud to the Notorious D.O.G. (then again he understands what I’m saying better than most Mexicans).
• 6. I have decided his favorite TV show is Scrubs.
• 7. Sd;f;dgskv (he just jumped on my keyboard and I decided not to delete what he said).
• 8. He got a Christmas stocking.

I’ve always been sort of proud of my whiteness, so I’m not entirely ashamed that living abroad has only amplified it. Now where I live, instead of being generically white, I’m uniquely white. I’d bore you further but I must run, my baby has the hiccups.

This blog has been gang violence free for 71 days.

Body Count: Still 0 (maybe I should go outside more?)