
Three Chihuahuas Meet Behind Owner's Back
I have three chihuahuas, and I have accepted that they are running a small organization out of my living room. I am not on the board. I am, at best, the can opener.

“A confessional column written from the chihuahua's perspective, documenting the household's actual daily schedule as she understands it, with brief annotations from the human.”

I have three chihuahuas, and I have accepted that they are running a small organization out of my living room. I am not on the board. I am, at best, the can opener.

Owning a chihuahua means saying things out loud that, in any other context, would earn you a referral to a professional with a clipboard. A field guide.
My six-pound chihuahua beats me at the shell game every single time. I hide the treat. I know where it is. I still lose, because my own face keeps snitching on me to a dog.
I did not plan to eat my chihuahua's treats. Nobody plans this. But with forty-one varieties in the pantry and a dog who grades everything a 10, a man gets curious. A field report, against my better judgment.

Police approached a car they figured held an impaired driver. The most impaired individual on the scene turned out to be the twelve-pound chihuahua. I am not making this up.

A confessional inventory of the fourteen specific behaviors my chihuahua gets away with on a daily basis that would, from any larger dog, produce a household intervention.

A confessional column on the first work-day separation with a new chihuahua, the destruction that followed, and the structured plan I should have run before I left for the office.

A confessional column on the four-hundred dollars of training books and obedience classes that ultimately revealed it was the human, not the chihuahua, who needed the training all along.

A confessional column on the chihuahua grooming kit I assembled after five years of buying the wrong tools, the items that survived the audit, and the small drawer they live in now.

A field-tested list of activities I do with my chihuahua that look unhinged to neighbors and are, on the dog's account, the structural highlights of her week.

A confessional column on the year I treated my chihuahua's sock-stealing as a personality flaw, the trainer's diagnosis (it was me), and the small calm fix that followed.

A field report on the night the fire alarm went off at 2 a.m., the four minutes that revealed the household's unpreparedness, and the calm one-page plan that now lives by the door.