Early in the month, I got a pandemic pup. My partner and I had been watching local shelters and sites like Petfinder with a religious fervor. There were many leads with just as many disappointments; not only were pups in high demand, but with the end of all in-person events, shelters were resorting to online applications, which meant we were competing with the entire Southern California populace. In fact, we were applying to shelters as far down as San Diego.

One early morning I happened to see a dog named Snoop on Petfinder. I went to his shelter’s Instagram, and saw that they were holding their first in-person adoption event on the same morning. On a whim, half awake, we decided to amble out to the car and drive to Rowland Heights to see this dog in person. A couple of hours later we came home with a dog.

It was the kind of happenstance meeting you hope to have with a dog. An old lady was walking him up and down a driveway to get a sense of him. The dog saw my partner, who crouched down to greet him. He jumped up to her knees, took a few pets, then dropped to his belly to ask for belly rubs. Seeing this, the old lady decided that he had chosen us, and generously passed on her de facto right of first refusal.

We changed his name to Biff, after the one Animal Crossing villager that we both had and liked. As far as I can tell, he is the world’s only perfect dog. An affectionate pup with a sensitivity to trucks and anxiety at dog parks, but nothing that rises to the level of trauma. He is content to lay around, to nap with his people, to curl up on their heads.

I wasn’t sure if I would ever get a dog in my lifetime. I had always assumed I was allergic to their dander, the same way I assume I am allergic to all seafood. But my partner, a dog lover all her life, insisted that this be part of our apartment search, and so I finally went and got the allergy test. It turns out I would likely be fine, especially with a mini poodle breed.

One thing I did not anticipate about dog ownership is the complete and total change in brain chemistry. For weeks now, my thoughts have been consumed with this dog: where is he? What is he doing? What is he thinking? What does he want?

Not only that, but suddenly I have been unwittingly inducted into the pet owner enthusiast community. I can read about other people’s dogs and be entertained. I can watch a mediocre movie like the Disney live action remake of Lady and the Tramp and be delighted. A whole field of entertainment that I could take or leave suddenly works on me.

Life with a dog has been, thus far, a revelation. It is far more than I thought it would be. Before camera phones, dogs would be doing hilarious, adorable, and absurd things and no one except their owner would ever really know about it. After camera phones, all of those moments showed the every day delights of pet ownership just a little bit more, but the experience is still a massive iceberg. What I’ve really enjoyed about Biff is the in-between moments that you can’t capture on Instagram. They’re the fleeting, relaxed moments that you can’t record because your phone is out of reach, or you’re not fast enough, or you’re just too lazy: when he tries to jump on the bed but falters on the edge for a second; the perceived expression on his face when you offer him kibble he does not like; when he jumps up to join you on the couch and then drops to his belly. These are the moments that you never see in films with dogs, because you can’t train them, or on Instagram, because you can’t anticipate them. They’re the in-between, quiet moments that make up the majority of the dog owning experience.