my parents are leaving for california in the morning, where pretty much every member of my family except me will be next week. sure, that's only 8 or 9 people, but it still seems like a big family reunion, except they probably won't all be in the same place at once. there was probably some reason why i'm not going along, but i didn't remember they were going at all until the other day when they reminded me.

of course the first thing i'll do is throw a big '80s movie high school house party, with lots of underage drinking & sexual hijinks. oh boy... sex with minors! i never got to do any of that stuff in high school; might as well do it now.

my schedule with definitely be changed, pajama jam or no. i will have dog duties. i will have to feed him, let him outside, & otherwise prevent him from going crazy, developing separation anxiety disorder, or destroying too much property. & this pup is 1/2 my size, so he's not just a handful if he misbehaves: he's an entire armloadful, a squirming armloadful.

don't get me wrong. i like the dog. he's just more demanding than i'm used to. cats are pretty self-sufficient. with leland as long as i fill all the proper receptacles i can be gone for a day or more. he might not like it, but his needs will have been tended to. there won't be feces all over the house, food stolen from the counters, towels torn to shreds then eaten & vomited up, or whatever else might result from a lonely & depressed dog going berzerk.

maybe if i got some lego mindstorms i could build a robot to feed subi at the appropriate times, even one to let him outside & back in again. but even then, even assuming subi didn't eat the robots or otherwise playfully incapacitate them, subi still might go berzerk. hell, if someone built giant lego robots to feed me & let me go to the bathroom for a week, i'd think it was a pretty sweet deal. i could use the time off work.

but no, dogs need attention. they want to be around people all day, like some kind of pr rep, or that kid in school who'd follow you around & was almost impossible to ditch. cats are far less social, which i think is a large part of why i'm a cat person (as they say colloquially. i'm not not some kind of feline/human hybrid, felix sapiens or anything). cats only have need for people when they decide they do.

i also liken it to the differences between men & women. cats & women (in general) are sleek, soft, & mysterious. men & dogs are loud, lumbering, & predictable. now i get along with some guys & even consider some my friends, all dependent on their personalities. but there are women i can't help being attracted to even though i know i don't like their personalities. i'm not saying i want to have sex with housecats or anything (though it would be cool to create felix sapiens, that would be better performed in a lab); there's just something about cats that draws me to them, while i only like some dogs & tolerate others. (a psychiatrist could probably build a career off that comparison, either by writing a self-help book about it or by committing me for writing it.)

oh, it probably won't be so bad playing puppysitter. but i probably won't get much else done. the dog's not allowed in my room because he would the contents of the litterbox, so i can't spend too long on my computer (i can get on my parents', but it has no sound), do lots of video editing, etc. so much for everything i said last week.