Quarantine: Fri. 6/5
A quick story.
When I lived in New York, after I finished graduate school, I worked for a time as a personal assistant for the wife of an investment banking CEO. She and the CEO had seven personal assistants. I was the lowest on the totem pole, the only non-career assistant, and I was given all manner of menia jobs. One job I had was turning her scribbled correspondence into neatly typed letters, which I printed on stationery that cost more than my salary. Some of this correspondence was from her Maltese terrier to other dogs on the Upper East Side. The letters were written in the first person, in the dog's voice, and the envelopes were addressed to the dogs. For this and many other tasks, I received $25/hour and a lifetime of cocktail party stories.
Writing the "dog correspondence" is something I've roundly mocked for over twenty years. And yet--all of that was before the existence of Dog Instagram. If you have a dog, and you're the sort of person to make an Instagram account for your dog, writing posts in your dog's voice is not just common, but an unstated requirement. Fine. I go along. I like posting pictures of Farrah and she sometimes has funny things to say.
And yet this took a turn yesterday when I found myself in a group chat on Instagram with a few of Farrah's littermates. Without even making a deliberate choice, I wrote messages to Farrah's littermates as though Farrah herself were writing, following the lead of the other people in the chat, who were writing in the first person in the voices of their doodles. I realized very quickly how absurd it was, yet I continued on, voicing Farrah's recent experiences with trimming matted ears and wading in a creek. I couldn't find a way out of it, since switching to my OWN voice would have been a kind of rebuke, and honestly there's no need for that. I don't even know who these people are. I've never met them. I held their dogs once, during our litter visit last summer, but that's it.
So Farrah kept writing. And I realized--I've become my old boss by becoming part of Dog Instagram. Dog Instagram is an endless, intensified mutation of my post-grad-school job. We are *all* writing dog correspondence now.
When I lived in New York, after I finished graduate school, I worked for a time as a personal assistant for the wife of an investment banking CEO. She and the CEO had seven personal assistants. I was the lowest on the totem pole, the only non-career assistant, and I was given all manner of menia jobs. One job I had was turning her scribbled correspondence into neatly typed letters, which I printed on stationery that cost more than my salary. Some of this correspondence was from her Maltese terrier to other dogs on the Upper East Side. The letters were written in the first person, in the dog's voice, and the envelopes were addressed to the dogs. For this and many other tasks, I received $25/hour and a lifetime of cocktail party stories.
Writing the "dog correspondence" is something I've roundly mocked for over twenty years. And yet--all of that was before the existence of Dog Instagram. If you have a dog, and you're the sort of person to make an Instagram account for your dog, writing posts in your dog's voice is not just common, but an unstated requirement. Fine. I go along. I like posting pictures of Farrah and she sometimes has funny things to say.
And yet this took a turn yesterday when I found myself in a group chat on Instagram with a few of Farrah's littermates. Without even making a deliberate choice, I wrote messages to Farrah's littermates as though Farrah herself were writing, following the lead of the other people in the chat, who were writing in the first person in the voices of their doodles. I realized very quickly how absurd it was, yet I continued on, voicing Farrah's recent experiences with trimming matted ears and wading in a creek. I couldn't find a way out of it, since switching to my OWN voice would have been a kind of rebuke, and honestly there's no need for that. I don't even know who these people are. I've never met them. I held their dogs once, during our litter visit last summer, but that's it.
So Farrah kept writing. And I realized--I've become my old boss by becoming part of Dog Instagram. Dog Instagram is an endless, intensified mutation of my post-grad-school job. We are *all* writing dog correspondence now.
Comments