Mia and Me: Why My Dog Drove Me Crazy And Why I Miss Her

Mia at our apartment in Chinatown. Washington, D.C.

Mia and I didn't get off to a great start.

I grew up in a house with over-affectionate, lick-lick-lick German Shepherds and Golden Retrievers. When I was dating a very hot Baylor girl (who is now my wife), she expressed that she wanted me to meet her dog. Sure. I would have followed her anywhere.

Mia came into her parent's house in Texas as a part of a pack of animals that included Oliver "who has a weird eye condition" and Suzy "who's totally blind, by the way." They ran for an overflowing dish of food. Mia, a Cocker Spaniel, managed to nudge her way in between the two other huge dogs to eat. My girlfriend (Mimi) invited Mia over and Mia was very excited to see her. Mia took one sniff of me, stared for a moment and then ran back to her dish. I felt slightly snubbed. No licks?

"She likes you," Mimi said.
"I couldn't tell."
"Oh, she scared to death of guys. At least she came up to you."

Almost six years after our initial meeting, I held Mia in my arms at Friendship Animal Hospital as our vet euthanized her. And I held her long after her heart had stopped and the vet had left. I cradled her head which was covered in the tumor that would have strangled her painfully within weeks, if we didn't put her down gently.

Now our house is emptier in her absence. The garbage stays in the can. The tennis balls are packed up in a small bag. No one barks when I go to take a shower. There are no new mystery stains on our couch.

100 Confessions: A Dream Job...as a college student again?

Note: Apologies for not posting. This has been a crazy month of graduate school, work and repeated sicknesses. It would be fair to say my closest mates in the past month have been Halls and Kleenex.

(79) Weird things happen when I sleep. My wife says I steal all the covers (lies, I'm convinced. She throws them my direction). And I've noted some weird dreams, etc.

Last night, I dreamed that I was back in my college newspaper office. I recently visited said location, but to do recruiting for my study-abroad journalism program. And in my dream, I was offered the chance to return their as the student newspaper Editor-in-Chief. Which would (a) be strange because I don't attend the school any longer, (b) be more strange because I would take a fairly severe salary cut, (c) be even more strange because I'll have experience (and soon a degree) that would separate me significantly from a college-age crowd and (d) be a twisted way of reliving some of my favorite memories.

I suppose the place has been on my mind because of my recent visit there. When I was editor in chief of the paper, I did work with some exceptionally talented people. Some of what I was proud of my last year on staff, when I served as Editor-in-Chief, are below. Some seem humble now that I've worked in mainstream journalism three years. But for my campus, journalism (and I mean real journalism) was still a very new thing.

(1) "There's Something About Mary"--this was an opinion piece written by a talented Catholic journalist on how Catholics were at times unfairly treated on campus. Huge response. She illustrated that our paper wasn't going to pull punches.

(2) The Urban Youth Impact spread--it was a mixture of some fabulous photography from our photo editor and a feature length profile on a charity in town that worked with inner-city kids. It really dealt with some of the difficulties, obstacles the organization faced.

(3) The Eating Disorder spread--this was a shared victory between one of our writers who wrote a straight forward article on the proliferation of eating disorders on campus while we had another writer share a first-person piece on her struggle with it. Very powerful stuff.

(4) The expose on central administration and the piece on the gay security guard--these are the two I wrote. And man did I put in some leg work for them. I was down at the courthouse for the lawsuit with the gay security guard (who was fired, ps) and the expose on central admin was a three part series on, essentially, why the organization was messed up. I'm still proud of my work on those.

(5) Gorbachev--the dude came near campus to speak. I'm still proud that I got one of our up-and-coming writers and our photo editor into the press conference. I'm fairly sure it was a first for our campus.

And I would link the article, but the archives are gone. Thus erasing all the work I did. Alas.

100 Confessions: Goths and Ice Skating

(78) For a short amount of time, I operated under the revelation that goths were huge ice skating fans.

Here's the story:

Mimi and I were living in Florida. There's a bit of a shortage of ice skating in Florida. So we found a local place that did it and decided to make a date out of it. So we went to a local diner we'd wanted to try then put on our coats and headed over the ice skating rink. When we got out of the car, I noticed the parking lot was full...but....

It was really odd how many goths were there. They were seated in long lines along the sidewalk, smoking at their car, etc. The were dressed in all black, dark eye shadow (girls and boys alike), facial piercings, bright red lipstick (just girls) and very poky hair. I was really confused. But Mimi and I felt like we learned something new.

Greg: "So goths are really into ice skating..."
Mimi: "I guess its cold so it keeps your makeup from running..."

We opened up the doors to the ice skating rink and were blasted with death metal music. The rink was shut down for a One Night ONLY performance of "Vampires and Ice Cream." They were using a lot of bad words and talking about killing kittens so Mimi and I decided it wasn't for us.

So we didn't get to ice skate. Alas.

100 Confessions: Shame

(77) I don't believe in shame as a tool for motivation. Some leaders seem to think if they make a person feel shamed enough, it'll keep them on the straight and narrow. I'm convinced it just makes them feel shamed, but then I've always preferred the carrot to the stick.

With one exception.

When I first started running the local community group for local middle schoolers and high schoolers, I didn't have a organization credit card. I was just a college kid. So I ended up buying things with my own money and then asking for reinbursement (not a fun system). Usually this wasn't a bad scenario. Well for Christmas one year, I got the kids all T-shirts emblazoned with the name of our community group. They went nuts for them. Unfortunately, they cost $400. So imagine my surprise when I turn in my receipts to the account and then hear that the local church board woman is unwilling to reimburse me. Although the purchase of these T-shirts was approved by my director and by the rest of the staff, she didn't personally feel it was legitimate.

I tried calling her. I tried emailing her. Silence. Well a week before Christmas, I went to her local church and they were holding a Christmas Boutique. There she was with all her friends. So I walked right up in the middle of her friends and said this:

"Hello, Miss C._____. My name's Greg Perreault and I'm the one who works with the local community group. I really need you to reimburse me for the money I spent on the kids so that I can buy Christmas presents for my family."

She flushed bright red, and started stuttering over her words over the intense gaze of her friends. She couldn't sign that form fast enough.

100 Confessions: Copy Editing

(73) I did a brief stint in copy editing at my first newspaper job. It didn't last because I would get crazy stories. Really crazy stories. One reporter would commonly turn in 6000-word stories. The news hole was 600 words. And my job was to make it fit.

I would basically end up rewriting the story. One time the reporter in question covered a local council meeting that was completely a transcription, no journalistic structure in the midst of it. In the middle of the story, I finally found a quotation. There was no attribution and to this day, I have no idea was it's about. But I ended up nearly on the floor.

"She likes to do it. She's so good. I really like the way she does it for me. Let's keep having her do it."

There may have been some reference to lawn-mowing about 1000 words higher. But I had to bring the quote to my editor and say "Look, I know you want a quote for this piece, but what the heck do I do with this?"

Tales from Palm Beach: A Return Video

Mimi and I at Jared and Jennifer Reelitz's wedding, and get to visit some old friends in sunny West Palm Beach, Fla. in the process. This is test run for me to get reintroduced to Final Cut Express. Everything was filmed on a FlipCam.

GopherLink! Paradise Lost: an expose on Palm Beach society. I wonder what folks back home think about this...

Dr. Goodman and his Legacy

It's not often you miss a professor you never had.

I never had Dr. Daniel Goodman as a professor. But since he passed away yesterday at the tender age of 40, he's been on my mind a lot. He left my second semester at my undergraduate school. But I had friends who took his classes and professors who'd worked with him. At my school he was considered a bit controversial, but what set him apart was that as a professor, he demanded greatness and received it as a result. In the process, he remained a good man.

Friends who got "A"s in all their classes would sweat their way through a Goodman class and if they got a "B," they praised the heavens. But his true value wasn't just as an educator. He is the only professor to have received the professor of the year award twice and eventually had the award named for him.

Things with my school didn't work out (which was very likely, to the detriment of my school), and he spent the last several years working at Gardner-Webb University. He leaves behind not just a family, but a legacy of what a good professor can inspire from his students.

My prayers go out to his family. Thank you Dr. Goodman, for what you meant to my school.

100 Confessions: Unfulfilling job 2

(14) I spent another summer selling knives. The summer before I sold womens shoes at Dillards, I was a sales representative for Vector Marketing which sells Cutco.

The way it works is I write down everyone I know who has a family. Then I go sell them knives and get them to give me more people to sell knives to. I was awful.

On my first sales job, I went to the home of some long time friends. To demonstrate how sharp the butchers knife was, I was supposed to slice through a cucumber. Well I sliced it and cut off the top of my thumb as well. After a frantic search for band-aids (they didn't have any) and gauze (that either), we wrapped my thumb in paper towels and masking tape. On the bright side, I did convince them they were sharp knives. And they bought some even if it was just out of pity.

100 Confessions: Unfulfilling job

(13) I once worked a summer selling womens shoes at Dillards. I was the guy forced to creep up on the ladies trying on shoes and forced to ask "can I help you with something?"--a subtle reminder that "hey I work on commission and you're not getting out of here with those Nine West until you let me fetch a couple pairs of shoes for you."

I had some serious adventures while I was there. There was the guy who figured out how to put on a woman's shoe at just the right angle so he could see up her dress. He'd come to the back and bark "thong" occasionally. There was also the former stripper I worked with who was very successful at selling shoes to men for their wives (although I'm convinced that not all the wives were excited to receive six-inch heels).

Somehow I mostly ended up with the old ladies. There was one woman who asked for an open-toe shoe who had toes crossed over each other and look so mangled that they may as well have been through a lawnmower. On that occasion, I remember I actually asked, "Ma'am are you SURE you want an open-toe shoe?" Another time I was putting a shoe on for a woman and while I was putting it on she asked, "Could you rub my bunion while you're down there?" I said no.

Occasionally, I would get to work with a young person though. One time an attractive young lady came in (yes there was flirting) looking for shoes. We looked at a bunch of shoes she wanted to see, but she was becoming frustrated and said, "I really looking for something sexy."
So I asked the question, "So is this for a girl's night out, a party--"
"Church," she said. I tried not show my surprise, but she continued naturally, "I'm in the choir and I have to wear a choir robe."

"So people aren't going to be listening to your voice, they'll be looking at your shoes?"

"Of course."

The upside of my time at Dillards is that I can start stories by saying "While I was working at Dillards selling Womens shoes..."

A year and a half later: the gangrape in West Palm Beach

Can you believe it's already been a year and a half since this:

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. - Mother and son huddled together, battered and beaten, in the bathroom — sobbing, wondering why no one came to help.

Surely the neighbors had heard their screams. The walls are thin, the screen doors flimsy in this violence-plagued housing project on the edge of downtown.

For three hours, the pair say, they endured sheer terror as the 35-year-old Haitian immigrant was raped and sodomized by up to 10 masked teenagers and her 12-year-old son was beaten in another room.

I recently came across this great commentary by Rod Dreher on the subject. That's worth reading.

I had a similar occurrence to Dreher. I was in middle school out in Wellington and kids were pegging me with gumballs (doesn't sound painful, but when they hit you in face, eyes, etc. it really hurts). It was in my English classroom. Ms. Warren saw it and ignored it. That set the stage for the rest of my middle school career because at the moment I realized that I wasn't safe. That whatever happened would be up to me to stop, because the adults were too scared to do anything.

Tales from Palm Beach: Bad Date

Waiting for the bus today, I hit the wayback machine in my head and found myself remembering the cruel cruel days of singlehood (I really don't envy the single) and one of the misadventures I had there.

In my sophomore year of college, I went on a date with a girl I worked with. I use the word "date" loosely since it was one of those ambiguous "let's-go-outs" that just in the end leads to awkwardness and confusion. It was the typical coffee-movie date. Matchstick Men was the movie. No, I don't know what I was thinking.

We were only a little into the movie when my date told me she had to go to the bathroom. I watched her go out and then realized that now I had to go too. So I got up, went into the bathroom and got into one of the stalls. It was then that I had a startling realization:

There were no urinals when I came in here.

I peaked through the crack in the door, and sure enough there was a girl doing her makeup. Yep. I was in the girl's bathroom. Even worse, I was there with my date.

 How am I going to get out of here? I stepped back and tried to formulate a plan. Eventually, I decided I'd wait until it got quiet, rush out of the bathroom and run into the men's bathroom (to wash my hands there instead--I'm an idiot, not a pig.)


When everything was quiet, I opened the door with a squeak and then rushed out toward the entrance. I ran face-first into a young woman whose forehead immediately wrinkled at the sight of me. She looked at me, looked up at the sign, looked at me, looked at the sign. Then she burst out laughing.

I ran past her and hid in the men's bathroom. After a good handwashing and series of self-depricating thoughts, I walked out of the bathroom just as my date was leaving. She had an odd smile on her face, but didn't say anything. We got back to the movie and the movie continued on and still she didn't say anything.

Did I really get away with this?

But I couldn't shake the feeling that something felt wrong. I couldn't put my finger on it at first. I felt my pockets. My cellphone was gone. I looked around my seat and must have muttered, "Where's my cellphone?"

My date responded, "Where do you think you could have left it?"

I had a pretty good idea actually. I leaned back in my chair, shook my head and just sighed. There was no way I could sneak into the ladies' room again. I told her. She burst out laughing, drawing the attention of everyone in the auditorium. At the end of the date, she checked the ladies' room, I checked the men's. Very romantic.

It wasn't my best showing.

Tales from Palm Beach: Sex and Jesus

At the end of each of my youth groups, the kids are sent into different groups (divided by age and gender) to talk about the weeks lesson. The days' lesson was your standard Church stuff: God being all-powerful, etc. I usually don't do this, but I figured I'd go ahead and listen in on the guys' discussion group. A good friend of mine was leading it and I wanted to hear how he was doing.

D-Group Leader: "I really liked what Greg had to say about how big God is. Have you ever watched one of those science programs on the size of the universe? It really is amazing how big they are!"
CJ: "I watched one that said you would live at least a thousand lifetimes before you even reached the next solar system."
Carl: "Did you know humans and dolphins are the only species on earth that enjoy sexual intercourse?"
(Silence)
D-Group Leader: "Wow...Alright, I think we can call it a day."

I was pretty hysterical and had to walk away from the door so I wouldn't give myself up. Good to know the kids are learning a lot.

Tales from Palm Beach: The Lost Ark

So last Friday, during our youth program, we studied the Ten Commandments. Obviously, this raises questions of the notorious Ark of the Covenant, which held the Ten Commandments. I received a question from one of kids: "Where is the Ark now?"

In a regular youth group: "No one knows. After the Babylonian conquest of Israel, all record of the Ark was lost. Many say it ended up in the Egyptian city of Tanis which was swallowed by a sandstorm. Some speculate it ended up in Ethiopia or Egypt, and some even say the Knights Templar took it to France."

In my youth group: "It's currently hidden in a government warehouse in Washington, D.C. following Indiana Jones's rescue of the treasure from the Nazi regime."

Chuckling broke out across the room. There were a few confused faces -- Sometimes I forget that they weren't raised in the 80s.

Tales from Palm Beach: Divorce Mediation

Now that I'm preparing to leave my little Palm Beach Church, I think it necessary to include the things that I will not miss when I'm gone. I will certainly not miss mediating divorces. For some reason, some parents are led to think that I, as a youth director, should be a part of their divorce just because they have a Church-group child. In the past, I have been blind-copied (that's the "bcc" line in your emails for those not tech savvy)numerous scream letters between parents where both are accusing each other of not looking out for the child's best interests, etc.

At one point, I was even sent the legal terms of the custody agreement. I suppose it was sent just in case I needed some light-reading for the evening, or perhaps just want to go ahead and contact the judge on his behalf so I could rant about the mother. I really don't know what he was hoping to happen.

But one family in particular has crossed the hallowed line of "appropriateness" far to often. After repeatedly asking the parents to please leave me out of their divorce, I got yet another email yesterday. Since I have been quite clear that I have not interest in mediating their divorce, I can only assume he would like me to include it on my blog! While not deserved on their part, I've changed their names. Here it is:

Jen:
you did not send me an email on Wm.'s trip to Atlanta as you claim... these are permanent records and you should be able to produce same in court.
I was waiting, just now, for him at school as scheduled every Wednesday during the school year. This is not the first time you have pulled this childish stunt. Your voice mail was at 10:06 PM last night and not received by me until now; Your claim that it is not your responsibility to ensure that I know in time and that you did your part is a hollow, mean spirited claim and is aimed at harassing your son's father and ex-spouse rather than being pro-active. You are out of control. IT IS THE CHILD WHO ULTIMATELY SUFFERS WHEN PARENTS DO NOT ACT RESPONSIBLY. He will soon be of age and time is short. Your manipulations are obvious to everyone.You know full well that on those occasions when you need something you always reach me at work or home. Common courtesy and common sense at some point must prevail. Your thin disguise is not acceptable and will only make a bad situation worse. poor William.
Ted

Tales from Palm Beach: Leader's Meeting

At the beginning of each semester, I hold a leader's meeting for the youth group. Each meeting, I produce an itinerary so they can see physically what things will change and what things we will alter. I have become renowned at the youth group for producing materials which coast the line of professionalism.

At normal youth group, the title for such an itinerary would be "Leader's Meeting 4/4/06" or perhaps, in a more fun team "Leader's Huddle 4/4/06"

At my youth group? "Pimp our Ride 4/4/06"

Tales from Palm Beach: Christmas Program

Over the years, I've amassed a certain amount of embarrassing knowledge working with some kids on Palm Beach:

One Christmas, I went to one of the local churches and was helping the kids get dressed for the year's Christmas Pageant. As I walked out toward the youth building, a group of five girls come screaming out the door. I stepped past them and standing in the lobby was a second-grader named Jeff, with an awkward "I-don't-know-why-those-girls-are-screaming" smile on face.

So I said, "Jeff, what did you do?"
"Well," he said indignantly. "I told them I wasn't wearing any underwear and they didn't believe me..."

Hmph. I had to encourage him, that, for the rest of the Christmas program, he should probably keep his pants on.