Human nature. Canine corollary.

Audrey was so happy to see me when I arrived at my parents' house on Wednesday. She was jumping up in the air and wiggling around and wiggling while jumping in the air. She reminded me of the heyday of David Lee Roth. I took her out for a walk, and she just kept jumping up and wanting to be held and yipping and yelping and lolling her little tongue. She sure is nuts about me all of a sudden. This is the longest she's been without me since I got her last summer, and she loves me more than ever apparently. Maybe she had to fear losing me to realize I was so awfully great. Maybe she had to live in the absence of me for a week or so, eventually coming to believe that I might never be coming back, before she realized how awesomely well I treat her. Maybe. If so, she's practically a person. And that's something I've suspected all along.

I know it's sort of old hat theory-wise, but it's really true. No one ever seems to like you very much when they can see you every day and have access to your attention and affection. Even when they really, really like you, they can't help but take you for granted when they get everything they want from you and all the time. This really jostles any notions I might have had about how real and meaningful relationships can ever be sustained. I guess at some point you have to matriculate out of one thing into another. But then maybe you just both have to keep mum about the fact that anything has changed. You both have to pretend it's just as fancy and excellent as maybe you thought it was when it first kicked off. And you have to block it out of your mind that things settling into normalcy is, by design, less exciting than the fever pitch of the early giddy stages of crush and blush and fluster. You have to tell yourself it's better because it's more grown-up. More evolved. What separates us from the beasts. And you have to outwardly look down on other people who think being single is so great. Perhaps. But let's not forget that this is all emanating from an observation I made about my dog.

Yeah, yeah. Absence makes the heart grow fonder. You only want what you can't have. Don't know what you've got until it's gone (that's a Cinderella reference, yo). Popular culture makes my case for me. And if all of this is true, I suppose it only makes sense that you can only really be deeply in love with anyone when you're sitting there in a room by yourself tearfully reviewing the pictures you have of that one barbecue you went to together that weekend before it all turned to shit. For all intents and purposes, Valentine's Day should be a night of quiet, solo reflection and contemplations of suicide. And I guess, for a lot of people, that's exactly what it is. Wow, the more I think about this, the more it sounds like science!