Puppies and strangers

We got a puppy last weekend, and her name is Frederica. (We call her Freddy.) And yes, she is named after Nietzsche--I always said I would get a dog and name it after Nietzsche, because he thought women were dogs and so naming a dog in his honor seemed fitting.

Anyway, Freddy is an adorable black lab puppy. My parents got her a bright pink harness (yes dogs wear walking harnesses now, it's a thing), so even though she has a boy's name everyone knows she's a girl. We get stopped on the street all the time by people who want to meet Freddy; I don't know what it's like to have a baby but I'm pretty sure puppies draw a bigger crowd. I've talked to more strangers this week than I have in the past 6 months.

Today, Josh and I were walking with Freddy down a suburban street, and a young  African-American woman passed by. She said: "Hey! What an adorable black bitch!" When Josh and I hesitated (because she is a bitch, but how does one reply to that?), the woman laughed. "I mean me!" she said. "I would never call your dog a bitch. She's a cute puppy, though."

Getting a dog was worth it, if only for this one interaction. I'm still laughing.

it's simpler, in fact, not to want to be free

"But to try and find out what Americans mean is almost impossible because there are so many things they do not want to face. And not only the Negro thing which is simply the most obvious and perhaps the simplest example, but on the level of private life which is after all where we have to get to in order to write about anything and also the level we have to get to in order to live, it seems to me that the myth, the illusion, that this is a free country, for example, is disastrous. Let me point out to you that freedom is not something that anybody can be given; freedom is something people take and people are as free as they want to be. One hasn't got to have an enormous military machine in order to be unfree when it's simpler to be asleep, when it's simpler to be apathetic, when it's simpler, in fact, not to want to be free, to think that something else is more important."

—James Baldwin, Notes for a Hypothetical Novel

Julia 1, Julia 2, Julia 3...

As I've mentioned before, I get a lot of misdirected email, most of it written in German, for other women with my name. When these emails appear to be from real people, I will write back and let them know they have the wrong address. Sometimes they reply to say thank you, sometimes I never hear from them again.

Today, I got an amazing response from someone at a German think tank who had sent me (thinking I was a different me) a report on food trends. (I didn't know food trends were reported on by think tanks, but the word snackification appears in the otherwise very German table of contents, which made me inexplicably pleased). I told her that she had the wrong email address and she replied: "Okay. Thank you for letting me know. Would you give me the right one?"

I briefly enjoyed the idea that there could be some kind of contact directory accessible to all people with the same name, where we all know how to reach each other should there be any confusion. It would be so wonderful: all Joe Smiths in the world would know about all the other Joe Smiths! You could ask any one of them to help you find the one you're looking for! I imagined asking this misguided person exactly which Julia she was trying to contact, thumbing through the directory—in my imagination this directory is one of those old rolodexes you can actually thumb through—and ah ha! There's Julia #4591, in Frankfurt, the one who indulges in occassional snackification.

Alas, I was forced to concede that while we share the same name, that other Julia remain as unknown to me as any other person I've never met.