Original Dog

Last week, I presented a paper at a conference on TV and Feminism called Console-ing Passions. Let me say first that this was an awesome conference that was also sort of insane simply because of the level of obsession with television and the sheer magnitude of the words (many of them arguably made-up words, like "informationalize") collectively used to justify that obsession. There were at least six papers presented just on Mad Men. I attended one presentation on the TV show Hoarders called "Between Clutter and Catastrophe: Traumatic Economies of Dirt and Disorder on Hoarders." I was convinced by another paper that I need to start watching Kimora: Life in the Fab Lane as soon as possible.

Anyway. The point of mentioning this conference is that the person who introduced me for some reason read my entire biography from the Bitch website, a bio that includes a statement about embroidering in my free time. What the bio says is that I embroider portraits of dogs, but the moderator announced, "In her free time, she embroiders portraits of her dog." Now, there's a difference between embroidering portraits of dogs and embroidering only portraits of my dog, and I believe it is a profound one. I got a mental picture of myself sitting on a series of doilies in a small room, the walls behind me completely obscured by embroidered portraits of my dog. My dog eating. My dog frolicking with a small red ball. My dog wearing a bonnet. My dog playing poker. You get the picture.

I guess the lesson here is that I need to get a little more professional with my professional bio, and leave embroidery out of it entirely. That said, at the conference reception, the woman who presented the Hoarders paper approached me over the cheese tray and was like, "I have a German Shepard! Do you embroider other dogs?" So the upside here is that I might get a commission out of this embarrassment.

The day after I came home from the conference, I had to say goodbye to my dog, Oscar. I'm not going to say much more about it, but it was sad and awful and totally necessary. His was the first portrait I ever did, and probably still my favorite.