pressures, stresses, and motivations....a realization

pressure, stress, motivation issues…these are things that i hear my humans talk about, and it got me to thinking about my own pressures, stresses, and motivation issues. let’s start with the fact that i haven’t blogged in months, seven months to be specific.

gosh, it’s snowing again today. i think it was snowing the last time i blogged, maybe there’s a connection there….i bet you can find a website somewhere that proves that snowing causes dogs to do things…but that’s another post…

pressure. pressure to succeed. pressure to perform. pressure to be someone you’re not. i found a cool song by queen (weird, no women, hmmm) called under pressure that seems to capture much of what my understanding is of the human experience of living under pressure. i like the part of the song where it says,

Can't we give ourselves one more chance
Why can't we give love that one more chance
Why can't we give love give love give love give love
give love give love give love give love give love
'Cause love's such an old fashioned word
And love dares you to care for
The people on the edge of the night
And loves dares you to change our way of
Caring about ourselves
This is our last dance
This is our last dance
This is ourselves
Under pressure
Under pressure
Pressure

well aside from the depressing part about being our last dance, i like the focus on love. i also like the repetition in the song. it’s simple. love is something that humans don’t always do so well. we dogs are good at love. we have to be really hurt, a lot, many times over for us to give up on love, and even after bad stuff, we still manage to provide a lot of love.

stress seems to come from the pressure that humans experience. i watch my humans do different things to “relieve” their stresses. my boy human, anthony, whose hair is finally achieving a nice dog like coat appearance on his head, likes to play video games. he has several different machines for this, and he can spend hours in front of the tv playing these games. they often have pitches that bother my ears, and i would rather he just watch tv because he has to hold this black thing in his hands, and he doesn’t listen very well to my commands to THROW ME THE BALL when he’s playing these games. i do expect the moment i see my humans parked on the couch that they should THROW ME THE BALL.

of course, watching tv isn’t an automatic assurance that my humans will start THROWiNG ME THE BALL, as i have found in eliza, my girl human. she watches a show called friends. i’ve come to recognize this one by certain lines of dialogue. she doesn’t seem to ever tire of watching the same episode. i’ve watched the one where ross says rachel’s name at ross’ wedding more times than i can count. so despite the fact that she’ll watch hours of tv, she sometimes doesn’t THROW ME THE BALL. she holds the ball in her fingers and crinkles her face at me, she usually adds something about the ball being stinky and wet, which i just don’t get, the BALL smells great; it’s a great combination of so many wonderful smells.

my bigger humans, andy and petra, do different things to relieve their stress, most that i won’t mention here as i’ve been learning about tv ratings, and they definitely engage in some non g rating stuff, but much of those behaviors seems to be tied to love, and as i’ve already mentioned, i approve of love. andy and petra do sometimes play something on the computers called age of empires. they, especially, petra seems to delight in making buildings and destroying other buildings.

but getting back to me and my pressures, stresses, and motivation issues, i’ve been feeling a lot of pressure to be an interesting blogger, ever since i overheard andy tell petra that one of his co-workers was reading my blog. yikes. i know i’ve invited folks to read, and it was easy at the beginning, but then well, my silence speaks volumes, don’t you think? let’s just remember that i’m a dog, and well, i’m really good at herding sheep, chasing balls, smelling things, eating, loving, and barking. blogging is something i think i feel a little, as petra would put it, insecure about how i measure up to other bloggers.

in terms of stress, it’s totally tied to amount of pack contact for me. when i’m home alone, i do get lonely and stressed that maybe my humans aren’t ever coming home. i worry about my humans when they’re gone. i like them to be close by.

i don’t seem to have issues around pressure to perform when it comes to dog stuff. i will sit, lie down, bring my humans the ball, hold still, as long as they want me to. in fact the more they interact with me, the lower my stress.

apparently, this summer, the loneliness or the stress was getting to me because petra and andy said i was doing something ‘neurotic.’ i would go to one part of the fence in the backyard, bark, trot along a specific line, and go to another part of the fence and bark there, then i would repeat this. apparently, i was doing this quite repetitively, and petra and andy crinkled their faces at me, similar to how eliza does it, and well, that worried me. to be honest, i can’t even explain why i was doing this. i do know that soon after this, there were more toys in the back yard, very cool was a ball filled with peanut butter and dog cookies.

so finally, my thoughts on motivation. i know that as i worried about what people would think about my blog, i stopped blogging. so worry or pressure got in the way of my wanting to do something, which i think petra would say is pretty basic in psychological terms, she talks like that a lot, you get used to it. it’s not so bad when she’s scratching me behind my ears and talking that way.

so, all this has helped me to realize that snow motivates me to write. that’s simple and logical. now, i just need to figure out how to motivate my humans to give me more food in my bowl that smells like the things i smell in the kitchen and not just the little crunchy balls that i get.