My Dog and her 3 Goals!

Registering for the Blogging201 course brought me face-to-face with one of my pet-peeves – goal-setting.

It isn’t like I haven’t tried setting goals. I have set goals on three occasions in my life, possibly four – but then I lost all peace of mind. Because goal-setting was merely my first step toward a life of bondage, where I’d start spending every waking moment of my life, trying to achieve the goal that I had set for myself. It began to drive me crazy, and so I returned to my calm non-goal-oriented life.

My dog however, is different. She believes in setting goals and then pursuing them with a single-minded determination.

It’s my reading that she has three goals in her life.

Goal 1. Sample everything we ever eat.
She has a process to achieve this, and her process ensures that her success rate is 90%. Her process can be flowcharted with reasonable accuracy, but I resist the urge of reproducing the flowchart here as other dogs might use it to blackmail their owners into parting with their food. It should suffice to say that her process includes close observation, keen sniffing, just-in-time use of the universal begging pose combined with appropriate sound-effects.

Goal 2. Sleep the whole day so that she can woof and whimper all night.
I believe that she was born to fulfill the mission of torturing me by using the sleep-deprivation method, and while wifey doesn’t agree with me, I am inclined to think that my dog is an enemy-agent from a parallel world. She uses every opportunity to catch a nap during the day, and in the night she keeps hopping up and down the bed; wakes me up to find a specific squeaky toy of hers, which during the day got mysteriously squeezed in the space between two tables; and then she makes it squeak the rest of the night!

Goal 3. Make us feel guilty about neglecting her each time we turned our backs.
Believe it or not, it’s not enough that three days out of five I work from home. When I am trying to write a long piece of error-free code, she starts pacing up and down, making funny nasal ooon-ooon sounds, indicating that she’s feeling neglected. When I stop coding, turn to her and ask, “what’s the matter?” she throws me a dirty look, goes to the couch, jumps upon it and settles down for her daytime nap. Fifteen minutes later, she’s back ooon-oooning to get my attention. The cycle goes on and on and on. Until it’s night again, when she starts pursuing Goal 2 above.

As I said, she pursues these goals with such determination that I feel ashamed of my own lackadaisical performance on the goal-setting-and-getting front.

For this particular assignment, I’ve decided to emulate my dog. I’ll keep you posted about my progress (or lack of it,) and hope that I’ll perform a lot better in Blogging201 than I did in the other two courses I took.

Thank you for reading and sharing my misery. Much appreciated.
(I should stop and attend to the dog, who is working toward Goal 3 now.)