My Opinion

I just interviewed a man who told me that Bigfoot was trying to molest his dog and so he punched him in the stomach.

I don’t care if tomorrow Vanity Fair asks me to interview Leonardo DiCaprio. On a yacht. And halfway through the interview he proposes to me. Nothing will ever beat today’s interview.

1. This morning every sock that came out of the dryer had a match. This never happens. I am absolutely certain my excitement levels for the rest of the day will never reach what I felt when that happened.

2. I am trying to string lights around my deck and in the process have now broken five strands of lights. Essentially, I’ve spent my life savings on deck lights and the result has been a deck covered in shattered glass. This is annoying. What’s more annoying is that talking about my deck lights has become my new favorite conversation. I had a half hour discussion with my mom about them this morning.

3. This morning when Rosie wouldn’t stop barking at two fluffy Malteses walking by our house, I went storming from my bedroom and into the living room to yell at her. After a thorough verbal lashing, she quieted. Then, as I started to leave the room, she barked once towards me. I then turned on heel and without thinking about it yelled at her not to talk back to me. Seriously.

So I don’t typically link to things I write professionally on this blog. Mostly because I’m guessing all four of you readers (hey Rosie!) don’t care all that much about dining options in Charlotte.

However, in what can only be described as a total coup, my editor has allowed me to start writing columns for our publication. Basically this is a free for all. For my first one (linked here) I wrote about my thoughts on random Charlotte people. So far, one very angry reader has referred to me as “small minded” for this one.

For my second one I’ll be writing about the time I accidentally got a massage at a whorehouse. Can’t wait to hear the reader response on that.

Anyway, I’ll link to them here sometimes on the off chance you guys aren’t spending your days perusing my magazine’s web site hoping to read something with my byline.

I spent today at a fashion shoot for the magazine where I work. It was our fall fashion feature for the September issue and the shoot started at 7 a.m. this morning in an old dairy barn in South Carolina. Rosie accompanied me to the shoot and for the first several hours was a pleasant companion. She sniffed around the Louboutins and licked the model’s fallen make up off the floor.

Then came the third shot. It was to take place in a field, a short drive away from the barn. Rosie climbed into the car and we all headed off. When we got out of the car I put Rosie down without a leash, as we were in the middle of a pasture in the middle of nowhere. The second her paws hit the ground though Rosie took off at a full sprint down the hill. I looked ahead to see what she was running for. Standing in the middle of a field on the other side of a fence was a huge, white horse. And Rosie was running at full speed towards it, barking at the top of her lungs.

The thing about Rosie is if you run after her, she thinks it’s a fun chase game. So, often, the only way to get her to come to you is to run the opposite direction. This feels completely counterintuitive, but it often works.

Not this time. This time as I called and ran horizontally to Rosie, she blatantly ignored me, still charging for the horse until she was at its feet and barking and snarling up at it. Unsurprisingly, the horse didn’t take particularly kindly to what I can only assume it thought was a barking guinea pig at its feet.

The horse dipped its head down biting at Rosie and began stamping its feet. Rosie’s barking slowed and she started backing up. Then, two other horses came running out of the woods, headed for Rosie. At this point, Rosie went into full retreat mode, now yelping as if she’d been mortally wounded and running as fast as she could towards me and out of the pasture. I, who was by now certain I was going to witness my dachshund being stomped to death by horses, had climbed through the fence and was running down the pasture. In a dress and sandals, mind you.

And so, Rosie was running towards me yelping with three horses hot on her trail and I was running towards Rosie panicking and screaming her name. Due to the grass being taller than her, the run back was proving to be slower than Rosie would prefer as she kept tripping and rolling in the grass. One of the horses had its head down about six inches from her, clearly unhappy with her loud yelping. Rosie, in all of her infinite wisdom, decided to turn around and bark again at that horse. At which point I finally made it to the scene of the action and put myself between Rosie and the horses and chased Rosie out of the fence to where our intern and stylist were waiting.

I then climbed back out of the fence as the art director asked me if I was going to cry and the model told me she’d been praying the entire time. I grabbed Rosie, whose wagging tail indicated she thought the entire thing had been a fairly fun way to spend a Thursday morning.

This is why my career as a fashion editor will likely never go beyond its current status. Because you just know Anna Wintour never says “Well, there was that one time at a fashion shoot when I had to chase my dachshund away from stampeding horses…”

Yesterday was a strange day. First, I went to a kind of random guy’s house to interview him for an article I’m writing. He lived in what appeared to quite literally be the middle of nowhere. About ten miles before I got to his house, my cell phone stopped getting service (this is both because he lived in the middle of nowhere and because AT&T has cell phone service that should be relegated to 1997). Anyway, his house was tucked back in the woods on several acres with a large BEWARE OF DOG sign in front.

As I pulled in, I imagined what people’s responses would be after he murdered me and fed me to his dog. I figured most would be something along the lines of “I thought Sarah was relatively intelligent. I was obviously wrong.”

Then I met him. He was quite nice, but also about 6’5”. At 5’10” I usually feel like I could take most people if it came down to it. I didn’t think that about him.

Then we went into his house where I sat in his study complete with snake skins, a boar’s head, and various guns and bows and arrows on the walls. Oh, and also on the walls, were strange candle alters. Then we talked about Big Foot and UFOs and I noticed he had blood smeared on his pants.

Really just a typical afternoon at work.

Then, last night I went to see the movie Inception. It’s good. Just like everyone else in the entire universe seems to be saying. It also is the kind of movie you actually feel tense after watching because for 2.5 hours straight your mind has been blown.

After the movie, I was driving two of my friends back to my house where their cars were parked when, just as we were turning down my street, we saw a man beating a woman who was curled up on the side of the road. It was midnight, but they were on a busy street. I stopped the car and called 911.

Me stopping the car resulted in a lot of yelling from my friends who were concerned the guy was going to shoot us. And then yelling from me that I wasn’t going to leave a woman on the side of the road being beaten. In fact, for a moment, our yells drowned out the man who was screaming at her.

After explaining the situation to the 911 operator, we waited. The woman stood up and started yelling back at the man. It was clearly a domestic dispute of some sort, it was just taking place on the side of the street. He was pushing her, but she was standing up by now so we felt a little better. She was also yelling at him that we’d probably called the police. We watched them for about 15 minutes. We also watched two police cars drive by and barely brake. Eventually, we lost sight of them as we circled the block. The police never came.

And so, around 12:30, when I crawled into bed, I was nervous about UFOs, concerned about the concept of dreams versus reality, worried about the woman, and furious with the police.

Falling asleep last night was not the easiest feat.