This is Doug, who will soon be MY DOG. He’s basically the best–very stupid, very sweet–and I suggest you not be surprised if from here on out my blog is entirely overrun by photos of Doug dressed in vintage showgirl outfits.

But in all actuality–what am I even supposed to put on this blog anymore? I spend my days writing three to five pages of the novel, then working away at my paying gigs, then scooting about town or streaming Netflix TV, and I find that these are just the dullest endeavors, all dry silly topics that I don’t have much energy to write about. (E.g., today I decided that the working title of my novel is too goth, and that I should change it to Girls Like Me, until I realized that this title wasn’t a brilliant genius invention but the words I was at that moment staring at on the cover of Aryn Kyle’s book. Very blog-worthy! Also I have a cold and my right eye keeps tearing up.) But soon I’ll have dog cosseting to factor into the daily equation! Clearly dog anything wins hands-down as best Internet material.

So, Doug: we pick him up in a week or two. Until then I’ll be sucking on many a zinc lozenge and staring at a blinking cursor and coming up with mediocre working titles.

Anyway, trying to unbias my thoughts before the two visits. Equal opportunity dog employer. Have a notebook with some interview questions. (“What is your idea of perfect happiness?” “Which historical figure do you most identify with?”)

I’m especially excited to see the suburbs in which the foster families reside, first La Mirada, then Torrance. Spending 3.5 years in an LA suburb (and reading a fair amount of Pynchon) has made me fond of them, or at least highly interested. I recently read (and recommend to you, dear reader) DJ Waldie’s Holy Land, about the tract homes of the South Bay suburbs. Yes, he can be a but dramatic, but I still love what Waldie’s doing — more people should be writing about LA. Everybody should be writing about LA.

Waldie also delineates the main function of LA-writing as we know it thus far: to hate on the city. Even a century ago the writing on LA was “caustic” — a city to suspect, not one to embrace. I like that Wim Wenders says that “Los Angeles is about stories and fiction and dreams” (sounding like Herzog there!), but like even better what Richard Schickel says: “Face it. Los Angeles is an incredibly unstable place.”

And it’s this — LA’s unreality, instability, and the way it squirms from definition — that I like about the place. As Waldie says, LA is not the only city that promised immigrants “the chance to be radically inauthentic (softened to a positive sounding ‘re-invention’)” (so good!). And yet it’s the city most often maligned for once being “an imperfect paradise and is now a perfect hell.”

It all just makes for a very interesting place. And a big place! I think we’ll be logging more than two hours in the car today, from Hollywood to Whittier to the South Bay and back again. I’ll of course report back on The Doge interview process. Stay tuned.

But the cooking thing kicked into high gear recently when I became the very last person on earth to discover The Smitten Kitchen. Such good recipes! I’ve cooked maybe ten things from the site, and the real winners are the ones that require maybe 15 minutes of prep. work. She has this one Indian dish that is like magic. How can some cheap potatoes and old cumin turn out so good? Well, here it is, and here it is.

Indian Spiced Cauliflower and Potatoes
Gourmet, February 2004

1 (1 3/4-lb) head cauliflower, cut into 3/4-inch-wide florets
1 1/4 lb Yukon Gold potatoes, peeled and cut into 1/2-inch cubes
5 tablespoons vegetable oil
1/2 teaspoon cumin seeds
3/4 teaspoon salt
1 medium onion, finely chopped
2 garlic cloves, finely chopped
2 teaspoons minced fresh jalapeño, including seeds
2 teaspoons minced peeled fresh ginger
1 teaspoon ground cumin
1/2 teaspoon ground coriander
1/4 teaspoon turmeric
1/4 teaspoon cayenne
1/2 cup water

Accompaniment: lemon wedges

Put oven rack in upper third of oven and place a shallow baking pan on rack. Preheat oven to 475°F.

Toss cauliflower and potatoes together in a bowl with 3 tablespoons oil, cumin seeds, and 1/4 teaspoon salt. Spread in hot baking pan and roast, stirring occasionally, until cauliflower is tender and browned in spots and potatoes are just tender, about 20 minutes.

While vegetables are roasting, cook onion, garlic, jalapeño, and ginger in remaining 2 tablespoons oil in a 12-inch heavy skillet over moderate heat, stirring frequently, until very soft and beginning to turn golden, 8 to 10 minutes. Add ground cumin, coriander, turmeric, cayenne, and remaining 1/2 teaspoon salt and cook, stirring constantly, 2 minutes. Stir in water, scraping up any brown bits from bottom of skillet, then stir in roasted vegetables. Cook, covered, stirring occasionally, 5 minutes.

Makes 4 side-dish servings.

Right now I’m making granola for Christmas presents. I’m going to put them in little jars and wrap ribbon and twine around them and, knowing me, they’ll look really sorry, which will hopefully win some points.

Here is a recipe for A Dangerous Method, the movie I saw this week:

• Take broth of Wikipedia entry
• Julienne Keira Knightly’s chin and saute in Michael Fassbender’s teeny eyeglasses
• Sprinkle with famous quotes (“If only Americans knew, we are bringing them the plague!”)
• Stir in reduction of belt straps
• Remove any subtle character development
• Serve with Edwardian dresses, for appearances

After all that, a man who looked like Charles Bronson, cowboy hat and all, rolled up to the house. (I felt rather stupid having worried about windexing the mirrors.) His greyhound was ADORABLE, and lent perspective re: having something akin to a mini horse winding around our apartment. We sat down and learned far too much about the breed (cue the gastrointestinal details), but still love them, especially how they twist to rest their heads on small pillows and look up at you just so.

So sometime after January 1 they’ll match us with two or three greyhounds and we’ll have to decide on one. This seems like a most difficult task: how do you choose? I’d like to think it will be obvious (you always hear about these mystical connections between people and dogs at the pound, but I think that people just say that so they feel better about the dogs left behind), but what if it’s not, and what if all three are equally charming? I guess D & I could flip a coin, or take them all.

Now I’m waiting for the rice cooker to finish with the jasmine rice. I made chana masala, but I added a zucchini to it, since I feel bad when I go a whole day with nary a bite of green. Sometimes I think about how hard it is to juggle all the boring facets of a healthy life — eating right, sleeping well, excercising, sleeping well, socializing — but then I realize that’s the entire basis of #firstworldproblems. LE SIGH.

Reminds me of one of my favorite songs, by The Byrds:

Speaking of Minnesota, I just sold a pair of bookcases to a really nice couple from there who recently moved to LA. Why do Midwesterners in LA depress me? Probably because they’re aspiring actors and are moving into studio apartments and have sneakers with holes in them and weird bellbottom jeans. Anyway! I’m always paranoid before I sell furniture on C-list, and end up reading far too much into the email responses. I got one that said “here’s my phone number, but you better not be a spammer or I’ll make sure you die a slow and painful death” — so that one was off the list! And then the ones that are like one-sentence “WHEN CAN I PICK UP THE SLVES” make me pause as well. And even when I settled on the nice Minnesota couple, I dragged the shelves out to the building staircase and closed and locked my apartment door, just in case they ended up being serial killers! I always feel stupid afterward when the nice single moms and nervous couples drive off in their Surburbans, but you never know, now do you? Well, maybe you do know, but can’t help my sheepish paranoia.

D and I have been talking about adopting a rescued dog for a while — mostly as “oh my god, this moment sitting in the kitchen watching Pee Wee Herman cartoons would be so much better WITH A DOG!” — so, with the end of holiday travel in sight, I filled out an adoption form with a retired racing greyhound rescue.

It took me a while to warm up to the idea. “Greyhounds looks soooo weird!” Or rather: “Greyhounds look soooo much like me!” They’re sort of alien looking, like lanky ancient beasts. The King James Bible lists the greyhound as one of the four things that are “comely in going,” next to a lion, a king, and a goat. (That’s Proverbs 30:29-31. Thanks, Wikipedia.) I’m not comely in going, but I do have a particularly long body type, and I’m sensitive about becoming one of those dog owner who looks like her dog.

Just add wig.

But former racer greyhounds are perfect for our lifestyle. They’re good in apartments; they sleep 18-20 hours a day; they don’t bark or nag or do dumb little dog things. Plus we would get the added benefit of knowing we’re rescuing a dog that had a pretty bizarre, possibly unhappy existence up to that point. (They also are fun to dress up.) So, a man from the rescue place will  check out our apartment, answer our questions, and let a real live greyhound mince around our place for an hour or two.

I’ll obviously update more as the adoption process continues, but we’re definitely hoping, post-New Year, to have a dog that enjoys the occasional Iwerks caper, who will possibly roo when Mr. Pin Cushion Man makes his appearance.

I experience this specifically with writing. For example: I was on a kind of high heading back to Baltimore this October, feeling good about my writing projects and where I was in life—and then, possibly due to all the MFA talk about how hard it is to write, about how difficult it is to get recognition, about how scary it is to do this, I started feeling badly about my own work. This lasted for a fair while, even through a spate of good writing news. No need to get into it, except to say that my thoughts revolved around the doubt portion of that “Middle Years” saw: “We work in the dark—we do what we can—we give what we have. Our doubt is our passion and our passion is our task. The rest is the madness of art.”

The slump was especially unnerving because I had just that fall resurfaced from a “feeling badly” period. My fixation that time was unoriginality, spawned by an incident from this summer. In essence: I wrote a story last year and modeled its structure on a piece I vividly recalled reading, but that I couldn’t find. We were often directed to other pieces for structuring aids (I believe Alice recommended Nabokov’s “Reunions” to every student in my graduating class), so I mapped out the story’s structure and saw how it fit with my piece, and then away I wrote.

Skip to months later: going through papers after moving to my new place, I found the story I had been looking for, reread it, and was shocked: the story was so similar to mine, right down to how the shape and nature of the flashbacks. This wouldn’t have unnerved me if a journal hadn’t accepted my story months earlier, and if the proofs weren’t at the printer that very moment. After days of tearing my hair out—am I such a fraud? Is this copyright infringement? Should I tell the journal to stop the presses??—friends talked me down from the hysterical ledge. Of course the truth is that the stories are different, and that my anxiety was spurned less by plagiarism concerns than by inquiries into the nature of creativity (and, of course, by dumb self-doubt). To what degree are the things we create “inspired” by other works? Are ideas only ever slight adjustments of other ideas? Are we bound to imitate the things we love? A friend once said that there are only seven basic stories that have ever been told, and that we simply tell them over and over. Is it just a matter of how we retell these same stories?

Ick, enough whining. We writer types are so sensitive! Well, I can’t say I’ll ever not worry about these things, but I do have good news to report (although, for many of you, this is not new news): I signed with an agent to represent my novel! Now I just have to finish the novel, and try not to worry myself into states again.

In that vein, I decided that I would try my hand at making select gifts this year. I looked up a few of the less intimidating Martha Stewart crafts and went at it. I’m here to report that my success has been: middling! I can’t detail specifics so as not to give away any surprises, but let’s just say that I’m impatient and messy and have rather poor eyesight, and the gifts sort of reflect that. Let’s hope that the ultimate results are charming, and special, and not just cheap.*

In other news, I saw Martha Marcy May Marlene. I actually saw it more than a month ago, but I’ve been thinking about it recently because, as the “best of 2011″ lists roll out, I think that MMMM might be the best new movie I’ve seen this year. Of course, I maybe have seen eight new movies, which isn’t much to choose from, but MMMM is a solid one, totally haunting.  Kind of reminded me of a sixties/early seventies Bergman movie, but maybe just because Elizabeth Olsen looks so Swedish? Last year my hands-down favorite new movie was Toy Story 3.

OH SPEAKING OF: Isn’t the college-age Andy from Toy Story 3 the spitting image of J.D. McCoy from Friday Night Lights?

*My memory of this is vague, but apparently when I was little I used to gift my family random objects unearthed from my room. Like: Merry Christmas. Here is a dusty paperweight! And you get an odd-shaped rock! I don’t think I’ll ever live this down.

Famous women with hair uniforms: