Free Gunn's Golden Rules by Tim Gunn, Ada Calhoun

that that’s what’s happening and take a break and try to get over it.
    The same thing goes for pets. I’m a huge dog lover. I grew up with wirehair terriers, an English setter, and the aforementioned sad-sack basset hound, Brandy.
    I love a mutt. I tend to look at purebreds these days a little differently than I used to. They seem to have so many health problems, and then the vet just says, “It’s in the breed.” It’s like royalty who used to inbreed and whose progeny ended up with three eyes.
    Anyway, when babies cry on the plane, I never think it suggests bad parenting. But when dogs bark constantly, I tend to think it’s bad dog-raising.
    I live next door to a loud West Highland terrier that barks all the time. Luckily, I can’t hear it through the wall, but I can from the hallway. That to me doesn’t seem like a happy animal.
    I blamed my sister and her husband for the fact that their yellow Lab barked all the time and couldn’t even sit on command. I had sessions with the dog whenever I was there to try to teach her tricks, but I didn’t visit frequently enough for the training to stick. Ultimately, I realized the dog was in fact quite smart. Her attitude was, I’m not going to sit if I don’t have to!
    When I was a child, we had an English setter that was a real handful. She ran away all the time and would occasionally bite my sister or me. One Thanksgiving Day, my grandmother was stirring gravy, my mother was basting the turkey, and my sister and I were ambling around the kitchen. The dog was missing yet again. Then, suddenly, the dog burst through the screen door with a rabbit carcass and proudly used it to knock over everything in the room.
    “Aw,” I said. “Look, she’s brought food for Thanksgiving!” I was very little.
    Does anyone remember Barbara Woodhouse’s 1982 book
No Bad Dogs: The Woodhouse Way?
We bought it to help us with our terrier Raffles. Within an hour of the book’s purchase it had been devoured—by the dog.
    When I was a child, I took Brandy for obedience training. She was great through the entire thing, but on the day of the exam she sat down and would not budge. I yanked at her so hard I pulled her collar off. Still, she wouldn’t take the exam, and we failed. That meant we couldn’t get the certificate ofcompletion, and I really wanted it, because both our names were on it and I wanted proof that I’d worked hard. So I took her back and did the whole thing again. Once more, she was brilliant all the way through, and then, at the exam, she sat down and wouldn’t show her stuff.
    Well, I bawled my eyes out from disappointment, but eventually I came to realize that she just liked the social activity of it all. Dumb like a fox, she thought:
If I keep failing it, he’ll keep bringing me back!
Well, twice was enough for me. And the truth is, she was impeccably behaved when she wasn’t being tested, so obedience school wasn’t a waste, even if I didn’t get that piece of paper.
    Some people tell me I would be a good parent because I am able to stay so calm even when designers are behaving like sugared-up toddlers all around me. I’m always flattered when people say that to me, especially because I love children, and I like to imagine I’d be good at raising them. But maybe it only seems that way because I’m not actually a parent. With my students, I could walk away and go home at the end of the night to my own cozy apartment. Everyone’s a great parent if they don’t have kids.
    I do feel very protective of children, though, and frequently fear for young people I encounter with parents who tolerate—or, more often, model—insane behavior.
    The scariest instance of this was one day when I saw a mother literally putting her children’s lives at risk.
    I left my dentist’s office in New York’s Greenwich Village and walked west to Sixth Avenue. I waited at a red light as cars passed along. At the corner beside me was a woman with two small children, one of whom