I am shy by nature, a person who's always found something burdensome about human interaction and who probably always will, at least to some degree.

Before you get a dog, you can't quite imagine what living with one might be like; afterward, you can't imagine living any other way.

Cottage cheese is one of our culture's most visible symbols of self-denial; marketed honestly, it would appear in dairy cases with warning labels: this substance is self-punitive; ingest with caution.

American companies spend more than $200 billion each year hacking women's bodies into bits and pieces, urging comparisons between self and other, linking value to air-brushed ideals, and as the girls in my seventh-grade class graduated to high school and beyond, the imagery around us would only grow more specific, more pummeling, more insidious.

All dogs can be guide dogs of a sort, leading us to places we didn't even know we needed or wanted to go.

Fall in love with a dog, and in many ways you enter a new orbit, a universe that features not just new colors but new rituals, new rules, a new way of experiencing attachment.

Dogs are fantasies that don't disappoint.