Oprah has a best friend named Nate. You know who he is. He decorates everyone’s house in super tasteful yet distressed finishes and textural personal touches and you are like, not only do I want him to decorate my house if he can incorporate taxidermy and paint by numbers, but he should also be my new best friend. Maybe it’s just the editing of editors, but he seems so friendly and nice on tv and would find you these great chairs and would be happy to talk to you when you are stuck in a traffic jam about earthquakes and fundamentalist mormons’ prarie dresses. He has all the personal qualities that were my New Years resolution to have, except mine lasted only until about Jan. 8, and his are just part of his personality as portrayed on tv.

But of course Oprah snagged him first. And if Oprah wants you as a best friend, you go with it, because she is richerful and can have anything she wants. So he decorated all her houses and closets and her other best friend Gail’s house and he is sometimes a charming sidekick on her show. I am not sure if Oprah is a great best friend. I believe she may be somewhat rude, and intimidates people into being her best friend, although she can make up for it by giving you giant diamonds.

I am not really a great best friend, I am sort of mean and not really warm, with a personality more grating than nice and a tendency to start yelling about off topic items. A charisma more repellant than lovable, perhaps more suited to friend of pet dogs. Had I the power to offer up giant diamonds, I could probably have a best friend. With my little internal toolbox of wrong sized drill bits, I don’t really get to have a best friend. Am lucky to have any friends at all. I have friends like Joel Warner who won’t speak to me on the phone. I definitely don’t get a Nate. I’ll just watch him on Oprah and wish he was picking out tiny yet resourceful furniture for my tiny house and it would magically look and feel huge and then he would order cupcakes from this cool shop he knows and we would take the dogs to the beach and not fret about tickets. OF COURSE he would love dog agility and we would hang out at trials together and we would both have cute outfits.

But Nate has bad dogs. Or they used to be bad dogs. Because Oprah used her powers to have Cesar Milan fix them.

I kind of don’t get Cesar Millan. I’ve only seen his show a couple times; he seems to sort of waltz in, wave around his arms and talk about pack leaders and then the dogs are magically good dogs. He lives somewhere in downtown LA in a giant pit filled with horrible fanged pitbulls and dogs with visible tattoos who all get along and rollerskate around skid row with him. I don’t know if he beats the dogs or what, but he seems to have hordes of evil dogs that are transformed instantly. So whatever. His show makes it look like all you have to do is put your leash up high by their ears and tell them you are the pack leader and they’re lovable angels, so I don’t really buy his voodoo method. I tell my dogs all the time I am the pack leader and only Otterpop believes me. Ruby goes and makes a sandwich and Gustavo is too busy running around the backyard with another one of my socks. And Timmy can’t hear. But he is a good dog so i don’t need to tell him.

But one thing he does say is exercise dogs a lot. I am totally down with that. You might not see my dogs and say, wow those are well behaved dogs. You probably would actually not say that. Unless we are just having a really good day or they are completely exhausted. So, to make them even borderline well behaved, I have to run the pants off of them. So do you see why I can’t just stroll around town with them on leashes? Stuff them into a little fenced pen of bark chips with a whole bunch of other dogs? Why they need to go out onto acreage and actually run? Cesar Millan would agree. So would Nate. And probably even Oprah. Although she just hires a dog nanny to run her dogs, or buys them a ranch, or totes them around on a plane where she probably has a dog treadmill.

Hey Nate. Did you even try dog agility?