As humans, we always want what we can’t have. We want to be taller, to be richer. We want the person who shows no interest in us, the house we could never afford. We want so, so badly to be Martha Stewart’s friend. And if you’re already Martha Stewart’s friend? You want to be her pet.
In an interview with the Today show this week — which was then written up on her website, marthastewart.com — Stewart talked about how many pets she has (“hundreds and hundreds,” and “those are the pets I know about”), what voices she uses to talk to different ones (a deeper voice with her Chow Chow, Emperor Han, “because he’s a boy dog,” and a higher one for her other Chow Chow, Empress Qin, who is “always there anyway”), and how she treats all of her animals so well that, according to her, lots of her friends would like to finally shuffle off this mortal coil and come back to Earth not as a human but as an animal, who lives and poops outside, and is owned by Martha Stewart.
“Many of my friends want to come back as my pet,” said Stewart, who was wearing her Marc Jacobs grunge shirt. The friends apparently did not clarify which of Stewart’s innumerable pets they’d like to be — one of her two Chow Chows, or two French bulldogs, or three cats, six horses, three donkeys, 13 peacocks, 45 canaries, or one of her many chickens, geese, or ducks. Whichever form they take, I’m sure their life would be enviable.
“I love all of my pets, and I take really good care of them,” Stewart boasted, adding that her pets will never be alone. “I think pets need [their own] pets, which is why I have so many pets, I would never have just one goose; I have to have two geese.”
But imagine, for a moment, all of your wishes came true — that you were suddenly taller, and richer, and Martha Stewart’s friend; and then, lucky you, you died and came back as one of her Persian cats, or a goose. Would you finally be satisfied? Would it finally be enough? Or would you still want more, and more — to be, instead, one of her horses, or one of her Sharpie’d Louboutins, or her absolutely enormous tote bag — your desire vast, unquenchable?
Something to think about.
