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.

I don't think that the world would be a better place if everyone owned a dog, and I don't think that all relationships between dogs and their owners are good, healthy, or enriching.

Why do I find the fantasy - husband, family, kids - exhausting instead of alluring? Is there something wrong with me? Do I have a life?

Academic achievement was something I'd always sought as a form of reward. Good grades pleased my parents, good grades pleased my teachers; you got them in order to sew up approval.

Happy and alone, you say? Reclusive and merry? How oxymoronic! Pas possible! Alas, the concept is lost on so many.

Around the time I began starving, in the early eighties, the visual image had begun to supplant text as culture's primary mode of communication, a radical change because images work so differently than words: They're immediate, they hit you at levels way beneath intellect, they come fast and furious.

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