I'm A Dog

I have said to people on any number of occasions that a dog will ultimately eat whatever you give it, provided you wait the dog out. The dog may want the good stuff in a can, but he'll eat the cheap dry stuff if that's all he sees in the bowl for long enough. No dog will starve out of principle, it seems to me. Now, I never have been met with agreement on that. Dog owner or not, people will chuckle at my naivete and set me straight on the nature of a dog. I'm used to that on most subjects.

I am like the dog that I envision in that ultimately I will compromise. In a truly equal scenario, I will eat what I have when I am hungry enough. There is no value in upholding my standards of food, as if I had any to speak of. I start off eating the things I have that I like, and if I don't wind up getting more of that in time, I'll start eating the things that aren't too bad but entail a lot of work, and then I'll eat the terrible stuff. It's just a matter of time.

In a different kind of situation, I will also cave. Some of my writing is a fair example. Scripts that I am working on never really are the victim of compromise, but the other stuff is. Early in the day, when writing stuff for Twitter or for this blog, I'll have a very high standard, and I'll stick to it for a good while. That starts to waver sometime after midnight. By three in the morning, I still wouldn't dream of failing to complete my self-assigned quotas, but the level of quality that gets me there is considerably diminished.

What I don't know how I like is the respective outcomes of my best efforts and my mediocre ones. If I have eight prepared items of any kind that I put out in a day, I have no idea which ones will yield a response and which ones will not. Sometimes the ones I felt best about get what I wanted for them, and sometimes they will march out and wither in the face of ignominious silence. Big words probably doom many of them.

Often enough, the ones I settled on when I was tired, short of time or otherwise at less than my best are the ones that people like. I'll be puzzled and slightly dismayed at how that reflects on my judgment, but I'll be glad. I don't know how to proceed with the knowledge that effort and excellence as I perceive them are at best infrequently responsible for success. I guess it's not in my power to improve my lot by doing things differently any more than it is in the power of the dog.