So last night I dreamt that I visited my old lab and my former boss was standing in the hallway eating dates. Her funding had been cut in half so she was carrying folders of grant applications under one arm. When she saw me she smiled like she knew something I didn't and asked, "How's it going?"
We walked silently down to her office, and she periodically spit date pits into a cup, like it was tobacco juice. "So," when we finally stopped outside her door, "When are you getting back into a program?"
I knew she was asking if I was going to stop wasting my life and go back to school. I felt like I might cry or hit her but instead I just said, "Why would you even ask me that?"
"Come on," she started, "we all know you just gave up."
"Just because I didn't follow the tenure track you think I'm a failure? " I sputtered.
She opened her mouth but I cut her off. "For your information, I'm very happy in my position. I'm making a difference."
"Are you?" she asked. "Well," and she paused to spit a final pit into the cup and set it down. "I guess that's that isn't it?"
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
Preparing for the Bahamas
This really happened though it could easily have been a nightmare.
The day after Thanksgiving, I was lying on the treatment table at the Silver Springs Medical Spa in North Vancouver while an esthetician ripped the hairs out of my lower body. I had not worked with this girl before and her accent was confounding me.
In the course of chit chat one sentence in particular eluded me and after asking her to repeat herself three times my natural Canadian politeness kicked in so I just nodded and smiled. My other natural instinct, namely obsessiveness, continued to work on the translation problem until I realized that one of the keywords used was "Brazilian".
I spent the next twenty minutes using my yogic breathing to combat not just the awareness of my healthy Celtic hair roots leaving my body, but avoiding any ill-advised calculation of the pain to shaft diameter ratio given how much beefier the hair north of my thighs is compared to anywhere else.
I still have no idea what she asked, but perhaps the barrier of my underwear was sufficient to communicate what my words might not - ie please leave me covered. In any case, I left with most of the arctic circle intact.
I drove home to begin the easier part of prepping for the Bahamas: packing a suitcase.
The day after Thanksgiving, I was lying on the treatment table at the Silver Springs Medical Spa in North Vancouver while an esthetician ripped the hairs out of my lower body. I had not worked with this girl before and her accent was confounding me.
In the course of chit chat one sentence in particular eluded me and after asking her to repeat herself three times my natural Canadian politeness kicked in so I just nodded and smiled. My other natural instinct, namely obsessiveness, continued to work on the translation problem until I realized that one of the keywords used was "Brazilian".
I spent the next twenty minutes using my yogic breathing to combat not just the awareness of my healthy Celtic hair roots leaving my body, but avoiding any ill-advised calculation of the pain to shaft diameter ratio given how much beefier the hair north of my thighs is compared to anywhere else.
I still have no idea what she asked, but perhaps the barrier of my underwear was sufficient to communicate what my words might not - ie please leave me covered. In any case, I left with most of the arctic circle intact.
I drove home to begin the easier part of prepping for the Bahamas: packing a suitcase.
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
tropical storm in Seattle
I wake to rain pounding the windows, wind whipping the house. I half-expect to open my curtains to see palms trees thrashing the pre-dawn air, open my slider to hear the crashing surf. It feels just like the last week I spent in the Bahamas.
Everyone said it was unusually cold that week, at least ten degrees cooler than normal. Which was somewhat comforting since the only thing I kept wishing while there was that it was at least ten degrees warmer. Well that and... will those $*#%!$-ing bugs stop BITING me?
I sit in my Seattle bed and reminisce by scratching. There are more noseum bites on my arms, legs, and torso - even my feet and fingers - than there is tanned skin. If I was a calomine lotion girl, I'd just pour thirty of the melted strawberry ice cream bottles into a bathtub and crawl inside. As it is I have used up a whole tube of hydrocortisone cream and am getting set to crack a new one.
Thunder rumbles in the distance while I look at the steady glow of my one am (1254 to be precise) clock radio, and this almost finally breaks the spell. The frequent windstorms in Bahamas lacked thunder, but that didn't stop them from shaking down power lines; the power in our hotel went out so often that I never actually got a chance to set the flashing just-woken LCD of the ancient clock radio on the nightstand to the correct time. Instead I'd click the shutter on my camera, press play, and mentally adjust the timestamp by three hours.
But here I am, in the middle of the night, awake, mentally adjusting the glowing numbers on the clock as if it will anchor me, feeling my dreams fade. It's exactly like every night on my just-ended tropical vacation. I had a lovely time but it was cold, itchy, and I couldn't sleep.
Everyone said it was unusually cold that week, at least ten degrees cooler than normal. Which was somewhat comforting since the only thing I kept wishing while there was that it was at least ten degrees warmer. Well that and... will those $*#%!$-ing bugs stop BITING me?
I sit in my Seattle bed and reminisce by scratching. There are more noseum bites on my arms, legs, and torso - even my feet and fingers - than there is tanned skin. If I was a calomine lotion girl, I'd just pour thirty of the melted strawberry ice cream bottles into a bathtub and crawl inside. As it is I have used up a whole tube of hydrocortisone cream and am getting set to crack a new one.
Thunder rumbles in the distance while I look at the steady glow of my one am (1254 to be precise) clock radio, and this almost finally breaks the spell. The frequent windstorms in Bahamas lacked thunder, but that didn't stop them from shaking down power lines; the power in our hotel went out so often that I never actually got a chance to set the flashing just-woken LCD of the ancient clock radio on the nightstand to the correct time. Instead I'd click the shutter on my camera, press play, and mentally adjust the timestamp by three hours.
But here I am, in the middle of the night, awake, mentally adjusting the glowing numbers on the clock as if it will anchor me, feeling my dreams fade. It's exactly like every night on my just-ended tropical vacation. I had a lovely time but it was cold, itchy, and I couldn't sleep.
Monday, November 29, 2010
Christmas in November and Hell on Earth
I went up to Squamish BC this weekend to see the fam - it's hard for us to find a time in December that works for everyone so we this year we're doing Christmas the weekend of US thanksgiving. Really nice hotel room on the local golf course, portable pre-lit tree, brunch in the hotel in the morning, a trip to my sister's construction job site in the afternoon, and fish and chips takeout for dinner. Then we opened presents. What could be more traditional?
Really it has been delightful. It snowed fairly heavily this week, and the entire Sea to Sky corridor, on which Squamish is one of several possible way stations, is set right inside a mountain range. The sight of Santa himself driving his sleigh across the alpenglow couldn't make this more seasonal and festive.
Last night I dreamt I was on a boarding school university campus. I was married to a man; my husband and I were taking different degrees so I'd see him between classes. He was in the dorm for early risers. As I was on my way back from a really late night film class, I ran across him in a narrow bed waking from sleep. He took off his trunks under the covers and tossed them at me. "Is that an invitation?" I asked. He replied sarcastically but in the affirmative.
I went to get ready and ran across an old girlfriend. She showed me her six-pack from recent workouts and at the graze of my hand across her bare stomach I felt like I was melting and drowning. We made out; it was hot and very risky, right in the middle of the morning in a building full of my colleagues. Creeping back to my dorm I spotted my old boss seated in an open air lecture within line of sight of where I had just been. We made eye contact and even though I couldn't tell if she had seen me, I flushed with guilt. She leaned over to someone else in my department and whispered.
Of course when I got back to my husband's dorm room he was already up and gone. I wondered whether I should try to explain where I'd been.
Next door was the fiction library building. I walked in through the glass door, which streamed with condensation from the exhalations of all the people already inside meeting the winter cold outside, and pulled a book off the shelf at random. It turned out to be a handwritten account of the end of the world, illustrated by pictures of tunnels going to hell.
"The entrances were set in pairs and threes across a great wall, under a fiery sunset. There was an enormous communal wailing and the rank smell and bitter taste of sulfur as we drew closer to the rippled mouths of earth. People hung back, afraid, but each in turn in the vast line of humanity, pushed forward by the frightened masses behind them, was sucked through one of these holes like a straw, feet-first, so that we could see the horror on their faces as they left us."
Next to this book was a first edition copy of The Cat in The Hat.
Really it has been delightful. It snowed fairly heavily this week, and the entire Sea to Sky corridor, on which Squamish is one of several possible way stations, is set right inside a mountain range. The sight of Santa himself driving his sleigh across the alpenglow couldn't make this more seasonal and festive.
Last night I dreamt I was on a boarding school university campus. I was married to a man; my husband and I were taking different degrees so I'd see him between classes. He was in the dorm for early risers. As I was on my way back from a really late night film class, I ran across him in a narrow bed waking from sleep. He took off his trunks under the covers and tossed them at me. "Is that an invitation?" I asked. He replied sarcastically but in the affirmative.
I went to get ready and ran across an old girlfriend. She showed me her six-pack from recent workouts and at the graze of my hand across her bare stomach I felt like I was melting and drowning. We made out; it was hot and very risky, right in the middle of the morning in a building full of my colleagues. Creeping back to my dorm I spotted my old boss seated in an open air lecture within line of sight of where I had just been. We made eye contact and even though I couldn't tell if she had seen me, I flushed with guilt. She leaned over to someone else in my department and whispered.
Of course when I got back to my husband's dorm room he was already up and gone. I wondered whether I should try to explain where I'd been.
Next door was the fiction library building. I walked in through the glass door, which streamed with condensation from the exhalations of all the people already inside meeting the winter cold outside, and pulled a book off the shelf at random. It turned out to be a handwritten account of the end of the world, illustrated by pictures of tunnels going to hell.
"The entrances were set in pairs and threes across a great wall, under a fiery sunset. There was an enormous communal wailing and the rank smell and bitter taste of sulfur as we drew closer to the rippled mouths of earth. People hung back, afraid, but each in turn in the vast line of humanity, pushed forward by the frightened masses behind them, was sucked through one of these holes like a straw, feet-first, so that we could see the horror on their faces as they left us."
Next to this book was a first edition copy of The Cat in The Hat.
Thursday, November 25, 2010
Workday redux
I woke at 6am having dreamt I did all the things I plan to do today at work. Of course the dream also had pirates and an international alien drug running conspiracy... NOT. And.... REALLY?!?!?!
Apparently it's not bad enough that instead of sleeping cozily through a snow day with my arms wrapped around a hot beverage and/or person :D, I'm working on Thanksgiving. Now I get to do my work twice.
There was a lot more drama in my dream than I expect in reality. I think there will be an N of 2 in my building today and the other person will likely be the security guard. In my dream the halls were decked with scientists doing experiments and drinking. FTR the reason there is no public service effort to propagate the Don't Drink and Do Science message, is because there is no real need for it.
There was also a creek that ran through my building and I was constantly moving my lab around to different buildings on campus in order to avoid the thugs that were hunting me down.
I shouldn't complain though. Really. In fact that was in my dream. I had a conversation right before waking with a postdoc that works down the hall. I explained to her that I was channeling gratitude.
Then I caught a glimpse of a man dressed all in black sneaking down the hallway, ninja-style. So I excused myself and moved my microscope to another room.
Happy US Thanksgiving!!! Today I am thankful that I am not really the target of an international gang of science poachers.
Apparently it's not bad enough that instead of sleeping cozily through a snow day with my arms wrapped around a hot beverage and/or person :D, I'm working on Thanksgiving. Now I get to do my work twice.
There was a lot more drama in my dream than I expect in reality. I think there will be an N of 2 in my building today and the other person will likely be the security guard. In my dream the halls were decked with scientists doing experiments and drinking. FTR the reason there is no public service effort to propagate the Don't Drink and Do Science message, is because there is no real need for it.
There was also a creek that ran through my building and I was constantly moving my lab around to different buildings on campus in order to avoid the thugs that were hunting me down.
I shouldn't complain though. Really. In fact that was in my dream. I had a conversation right before waking with a postdoc that works down the hall. I explained to her that I was channeling gratitude.
Then I caught a glimpse of a man dressed all in black sneaking down the hallway, ninja-style. So I excused myself and moved my microscope to another room.
Happy US Thanksgiving!!! Today I am thankful that I am not really the target of an international gang of science poachers.
Monday, November 15, 2010
Dream in four acts
I had a dream in several acts, like a Shakespearean play or - if that's too lofty - a tv series. The same characters reappeared in subsequent dreams and the conversation and plot referred to earlier events.
I slept fitfully last night, which normally would result in me getting up extra early. But I've got a headache that drugs can't touch so the thing I most wanted to do every time I woke up in the night was go back to sleep.
I dreamt that I was dating a guy in my dance class. In reality this is someone who is good looking, sweet-natured, a terrific dancer, and also someone in whom I have no erotic or romantic interest. In the dream neither one of us were dancers. We met in a library that was in the middle of shifting from the Dewey decimal system to the Robot intervention system. Every time I went to look up a book it had been declassified by one system but was not yet in the new system; essentially it was in library cataloging limbo. We bonded over being human in a confusing and digital age.
The library became our shared condo and also a lecture hall; two of the our fellow classmates - a short curly-haired blonde and a tall silent redhead - also lived in the library. We slept in the master bedroom which was also where the rare books collection was housed; they slept in the study. In the daytime, various professors stood at the door to the library to give lectures that virtually no one could hear or see because the acoustics in the library absorbed rather than reflected sound, and because the book stacks obscured almost any clear line of sight. We diligently sat on couches and took notes anyway. There was a lot of whispered "What did he say?"
I woke up to a blinding headache, and exhaustion so profound it seemed impossible to go foraging for drugs. I knew there were none in the house, but I suspected there were some in my car. Instead I went to the bathroom and drank water straight from the faucet, then stumbled back to bed.
My boyfriend and I moved into a one-bedroom house in the suburbs with our library roommates. We slept in the master and they slept in the living room. There was a sun room with lots of plants at the back of the house. None of us were in college anymore. The roommates worked together waitressing at a local diner and my boyfriend was in construction. I taught at the local high school. But we went to night classes at the local university together sometimes, not as official registrants, but just to sit in the back row and listen.
In class one night we met an amateur filmmaker who doing a documentary on relationships. He wanted me to discuss how my lesbian marriage had been different than my current straight relationship. I declined but gave him permission to interview my roommates.
The redhead was too shy but the curly-haired blonde loved being in front a camera; she had all kinds of opinions and as she talked about how sad it was that my boyfriend and I never seemed to have sex I realized she was jealous and would take my place in a heartbeat given half a chance. I knew he wasn't interested in her but wondered what kind of damage she could do by continuing to live in our space.
I woke up to the same blinding headache and the same series of judgement calls: yes, in excruciating pain, no not willing to put on clothes and go to my car, yes thirsty, no not willing to get a glass from the kitchen, and now unconscious.
We were having lunch on the patio with my boyfriend's family and friends around a big white plastic picnic table. My roommate's comments were still bothering me and I realized that I had never had sex with my boyfriend and that since we moved into the house we barely touched anymore - there was no privacy. So I took his hand, and when he looked at me, I kissed his forehead, eyebrows, cheeks, lips; his expression was pleasant surprise, and then we kissed for real. Under the table where no one could see, I shifted my leg so it was against his crotch and pressed, heard him make a sharp intake and then release a moan into my kiss. I moved against him again. I wondered how the people around us felt and then I got lost in the slow, delicious seduction and stopped caring.
I wondered why I had waited so long.
I woke and slept again and this time I was living in my childhood home with at least fifteen other people, some family and friends. I was single. The roommates and their partners shared my sister's old bedroom, I was in my own room, thankfully alone. The bathroom she and I used to share was still full of all the things I own now; I realized that I had failed to clean it for company. I waited impatiently through three other people's showers and discovered dildos and vibrators and lingerie still sitting out in plain sight.
I went down to breakfast. The small kitchen was stuffed with people and the stove had so many things going on it seemed like pots were sitting on top of pans. I cooked an egg for myself and somehow destroyed two of someone else's eggs that were sharing the same pan. I apologized, and tried to replace them. It took five eggs to recreate their original breakfast because I'd drop the egg, or over cook it, or break the yolk. The last egg to be rejected, gushed blood on opening. I wasn't hungry after that so I gave them my egg instead.
I am awake for good now and ambulatory so it's off to the car for drugs, off to the kitchen for a glass of water, and maybe a quick check to make sure my bathroom would not be unfit for company.
I slept fitfully last night, which normally would result in me getting up extra early. But I've got a headache that drugs can't touch so the thing I most wanted to do every time I woke up in the night was go back to sleep.
I dreamt that I was dating a guy in my dance class. In reality this is someone who is good looking, sweet-natured, a terrific dancer, and also someone in whom I have no erotic or romantic interest. In the dream neither one of us were dancers. We met in a library that was in the middle of shifting from the Dewey decimal system to the Robot intervention system. Every time I went to look up a book it had been declassified by one system but was not yet in the new system; essentially it was in library cataloging limbo. We bonded over being human in a confusing and digital age.
The library became our shared condo and also a lecture hall; two of the our fellow classmates - a short curly-haired blonde and a tall silent redhead - also lived in the library. We slept in the master bedroom which was also where the rare books collection was housed; they slept in the study. In the daytime, various professors stood at the door to the library to give lectures that virtually no one could hear or see because the acoustics in the library absorbed rather than reflected sound, and because the book stacks obscured almost any clear line of sight. We diligently sat on couches and took notes anyway. There was a lot of whispered "What did he say?"
I woke up to a blinding headache, and exhaustion so profound it seemed impossible to go foraging for drugs. I knew there were none in the house, but I suspected there were some in my car. Instead I went to the bathroom and drank water straight from the faucet, then stumbled back to bed.
My boyfriend and I moved into a one-bedroom house in the suburbs with our library roommates. We slept in the master and they slept in the living room. There was a sun room with lots of plants at the back of the house. None of us were in college anymore. The roommates worked together waitressing at a local diner and my boyfriend was in construction. I taught at the local high school. But we went to night classes at the local university together sometimes, not as official registrants, but just to sit in the back row and listen.
In class one night we met an amateur filmmaker who doing a documentary on relationships. He wanted me to discuss how my lesbian marriage had been different than my current straight relationship. I declined but gave him permission to interview my roommates.
The redhead was too shy but the curly-haired blonde loved being in front a camera; she had all kinds of opinions and as she talked about how sad it was that my boyfriend and I never seemed to have sex I realized she was jealous and would take my place in a heartbeat given half a chance. I knew he wasn't interested in her but wondered what kind of damage she could do by continuing to live in our space.
I woke up to the same blinding headache and the same series of judgement calls: yes, in excruciating pain, no not willing to put on clothes and go to my car, yes thirsty, no not willing to get a glass from the kitchen, and now unconscious.
We were having lunch on the patio with my boyfriend's family and friends around a big white plastic picnic table. My roommate's comments were still bothering me and I realized that I had never had sex with my boyfriend and that since we moved into the house we barely touched anymore - there was no privacy. So I took his hand, and when he looked at me, I kissed his forehead, eyebrows, cheeks, lips; his expression was pleasant surprise, and then we kissed for real. Under the table where no one could see, I shifted my leg so it was against his crotch and pressed, heard him make a sharp intake and then release a moan into my kiss. I moved against him again. I wondered how the people around us felt and then I got lost in the slow, delicious seduction and stopped caring.
I wondered why I had waited so long.
I woke and slept again and this time I was living in my childhood home with at least fifteen other people, some family and friends. I was single. The roommates and their partners shared my sister's old bedroom, I was in my own room, thankfully alone. The bathroom she and I used to share was still full of all the things I own now; I realized that I had failed to clean it for company. I waited impatiently through three other people's showers and discovered dildos and vibrators and lingerie still sitting out in plain sight.
I went down to breakfast. The small kitchen was stuffed with people and the stove had so many things going on it seemed like pots were sitting on top of pans. I cooked an egg for myself and somehow destroyed two of someone else's eggs that were sharing the same pan. I apologized, and tried to replace them. It took five eggs to recreate their original breakfast because I'd drop the egg, or over cook it, or break the yolk. The last egg to be rejected, gushed blood on opening. I wasn't hungry after that so I gave them my egg instead.
I am awake for good now and ambulatory so it's off to the car for drugs, off to the kitchen for a glass of water, and maybe a quick check to make sure my bathroom would not be unfit for company.
Sunday, November 14, 2010
Bicycle freeway hangover
I was keeping up with traffic on I-5 on my bicycle and two other bikers passed me going really fast on the right; they must have been going 70. We were approaching an off-ramp and one of them drifted into the exit lane; at the last minute she swerved to get back on the freeway and lost control. Her bicycle somersaulted, and she slid face-down across the pavement for what seemed like a Very Long Time. The Metro bus behind her skidded to a stop just inches from her head.
I ditched my bike and went running towards her; I saw her traveling companion, also running. He had been riding slightly ahead of her when she fell off her bike so he was still fairly far away. He was talking on a cell as he ran. I got there first, yelled over my shoulder, "Did you call 911? She needs an an ambulance." He was still talking on his cell, but nodded, mouthed 'yes'.
I flipped her over. She had a lot of bruises and abrasians. One of her eye socket was broken; her eye rolled around inside like a blue and white marble. The impact had knocked off her helmet but she was conscious. And talking. "I got to get my bike," she said, struggling to sit. "Sorry I'm in your way, I'll be out of here right away."
"You need to stay down for a minute," I told her. "You fell and we're going to have someone look at you and make sure you are OK."
"I'm fine, I just need to stand up," she said.
I picked her up and laid her on the blue velvet couch attached to the front of the bus. "Just stay here for a second and catch your breath, OK?" At first she struggled against me and tried to stand again but she was too weak. A second later, as her friend pulled up, panting and out of breath, she collapsed and started shaking and crying. I pulled her close and gently smoothed her hair. "It's all right," I said. "The shock is wearing off so you're going to be emotional."
"It hurts," she said, sobbing. "My face."
"Close your eyes," I said. "You gave yourself a black eye and that will help it feel better." I didn't really know if that was true but I wanted her to stay calm. The bus had been nearly empty so apart from two old ladies and the bus driver, there was just me and the other biker. "She needs ice." I looked around. The off-ramp led to a small shopping complex but all the stores were shuttered and covered in graffiti.
"I'm going to go see what I can find," I told the woman's friend. I sprinted across seven lanes of traffic, and crawled up a steep embankment. At the top was a decrepit plywood barrier about eight feel tall topped by razor wire. I kicked it till I had made a decent sized hold and crawled through. On the other side, trash-and-broken-glass-strewn streets, dusty straw-colored grass, and old brick apartment high rises, speckled with cracked or shattered windows. No stores anywhere. Children ran screaming across yellow lawns, kicking balls, spilling into the streets indiscriminately. I saw no adults and no cars.
"Hello?" I walked down the sidewalk till I got to the first building. At my knock, the door swung wide. To get to the apartment on the main floor I had to climb a pile of books and squeeze through a small louvered window. But on the other side, the apartment was clean, bright, simply furnished. Sun streamed through a kitchen window. A woman in a short brown dress smiled at me and profferred a glass of orange juice.
"I just need ice, actually. Thanks though. Do you have any?"
The woman held the glass outstretched a little further. "You really should drink this; it's good for you. What are you doing out there all by yourself?" Her tone was like a kindergarten teacher, so convincing and disconcerting that I wanted to look myself up and down, reassure myself that I really was five foot six.
"There was an accident," I said. "On the freeway. A woman hit her head and I need to keep the swelling down till the ambulance arrives."
The woman's brow crinkled momentarily then she smiled and shook her head at me. "You kids have such elaborate games. But that's a little grisly; maybe you should play dress-up or tag instead."
Behind me, three children around 8 came pelting through the door and started talking all at once. "Mama, mama, there's a hole in the fence. And a loud noise. And Sarah went through it and we couldn't stop her. And a cat followed her."
The woman's face turned ashy; she collapsed and lay unmoving on the floor. The kids turned to me. "Can you help us get Sarah back?"
I followed them to the fence and squeezed through the hole I had made. From the top of the hill I could see a little blond girl, maybe six, almost at the bottom, headed right for traffic. "Hey!" I screamed, running downhill. "Stop." She kept moving. I caught up to her just as she had crossed the first painted lane; a car rocketed by and honked in the next lane over as I pulled her back to the shoulder. Bent down, out of breath. Took her face in my hands and said, "Don't. Do. That. Ever."
She stared at me blankly. I heard another siren wailing in the distance. The three other kids stood huddled next to the hole in their fence.
I woke up in a sweat. My phone had four text messages all within the last two minutes. Chirp chirp. Now five.
My head hurts from the ill-advised vodka shot I chased some wine and cocktails with last night. I am feeling very New Year's Resolution Ish - deciding again to quit drinking. Not that I remember doing anything extreme. I just don't know that at 39 I need to wake up feeling this iffy about consciousness.
So, if you'll excuse me, I've got a date with a gallon of water and possibly a fried egg.
I ditched my bike and went running towards her; I saw her traveling companion, also running. He had been riding slightly ahead of her when she fell off her bike so he was still fairly far away. He was talking on a cell as he ran. I got there first, yelled over my shoulder, "Did you call 911? She needs an an ambulance." He was still talking on his cell, but nodded, mouthed 'yes'.
I flipped her over. She had a lot of bruises and abrasians. One of her eye socket was broken; her eye rolled around inside like a blue and white marble. The impact had knocked off her helmet but she was conscious. And talking. "I got to get my bike," she said, struggling to sit. "Sorry I'm in your way, I'll be out of here right away."
"You need to stay down for a minute," I told her. "You fell and we're going to have someone look at you and make sure you are OK."
"I'm fine, I just need to stand up," she said.
I picked her up and laid her on the blue velvet couch attached to the front of the bus. "Just stay here for a second and catch your breath, OK?" At first she struggled against me and tried to stand again but she was too weak. A second later, as her friend pulled up, panting and out of breath, she collapsed and started shaking and crying. I pulled her close and gently smoothed her hair. "It's all right," I said. "The shock is wearing off so you're going to be emotional."
"It hurts," she said, sobbing. "My face."
"Close your eyes," I said. "You gave yourself a black eye and that will help it feel better." I didn't really know if that was true but I wanted her to stay calm. The bus had been nearly empty so apart from two old ladies and the bus driver, there was just me and the other biker. "She needs ice." I looked around. The off-ramp led to a small shopping complex but all the stores were shuttered and covered in graffiti.
"I'm going to go see what I can find," I told the woman's friend. I sprinted across seven lanes of traffic, and crawled up a steep embankment. At the top was a decrepit plywood barrier about eight feel tall topped by razor wire. I kicked it till I had made a decent sized hold and crawled through. On the other side, trash-and-broken-glass-strewn streets, dusty straw-colored grass, and old brick apartment high rises, speckled with cracked or shattered windows. No stores anywhere. Children ran screaming across yellow lawns, kicking balls, spilling into the streets indiscriminately. I saw no adults and no cars.
"Hello?" I walked down the sidewalk till I got to the first building. At my knock, the door swung wide. To get to the apartment on the main floor I had to climb a pile of books and squeeze through a small louvered window. But on the other side, the apartment was clean, bright, simply furnished. Sun streamed through a kitchen window. A woman in a short brown dress smiled at me and profferred a glass of orange juice.
"I just need ice, actually. Thanks though. Do you have any?"
The woman held the glass outstretched a little further. "You really should drink this; it's good for you. What are you doing out there all by yourself?" Her tone was like a kindergarten teacher, so convincing and disconcerting that I wanted to look myself up and down, reassure myself that I really was five foot six.
"There was an accident," I said. "On the freeway. A woman hit her head and I need to keep the swelling down till the ambulance arrives."
The woman's brow crinkled momentarily then she smiled and shook her head at me. "You kids have such elaborate games. But that's a little grisly; maybe you should play dress-up or tag instead."
Behind me, three children around 8 came pelting through the door and started talking all at once. "Mama, mama, there's a hole in the fence. And a loud noise. And Sarah went through it and we couldn't stop her. And a cat followed her."
The woman's face turned ashy; she collapsed and lay unmoving on the floor. The kids turned to me. "Can you help us get Sarah back?"
I followed them to the fence and squeezed through the hole I had made. From the top of the hill I could see a little blond girl, maybe six, almost at the bottom, headed right for traffic. "Hey!" I screamed, running downhill. "Stop." She kept moving. I caught up to her just as she had crossed the first painted lane; a car rocketed by and honked in the next lane over as I pulled her back to the shoulder. Bent down, out of breath. Took her face in my hands and said, "Don't. Do. That. Ever."
She stared at me blankly. I heard another siren wailing in the distance. The three other kids stood huddled next to the hole in their fence.
I woke up in a sweat. My phone had four text messages all within the last two minutes. Chirp chirp. Now five.
My head hurts from the ill-advised vodka shot I chased some wine and cocktails with last night. I am feeling very New Year's Resolution Ish - deciding again to quit drinking. Not that I remember doing anything extreme. I just don't know that at 39 I need to wake up feeling this iffy about consciousness.
So, if you'll excuse me, I've got a date with a gallon of water and possibly a fried egg.
Thursday, November 11, 2010
Daylight Savings Hangover
I know I know... it's been four days since we "fell back". But I'm still suffering from jet lag.
Saturday I was in Vancouver having a truly fabulous day with my sister. The St. Regis hotel downtown where we crash-landed that evening has recently had a facelift, so it is stylish and clean, with prices still at come-back-to-me-affordable. The single tiny 100-year-old elevator, big enough for three only if you met on CL in casual encounters or are already good friends, doesn't look a day over 21.
A reminder about daylight savings time was posted on the elevator wall and thanks to my compulsive reading habit, I took that information in about twelve times before midnight.
Of course that didn't last till morning. Luckily, a friend I was scheduled to meet that afternoon reminded by email not to come too early.
Monday and Tuesday, I changed clocks at work. And still, yesterday when I got to the lab, I felt disoriented the entire day because the time was consistently one hour earlier than I expected.
This morning I woke to my alarm at 715 feeling exhausted; being woken is unpleasant and rare for me - generally I sleep till I wake at 8, and am at work on time without electronic or digital assistance. But this morning at 8 I've got to be at the gym to meet my trainer; clearly sleeping The Natural Way (TM) would not have cut it.
Showering and dressing did nothing to make me feel less tired. My last duty every morning before leaving the house, is to feed the cats. And there, standing by the kitty bowls, I chanced to glimpse the microwave LCD which glowed a very clear 6:27 AM.
My bedroom is not on daylight savings time.
There's no way for me to regain that extra precious hour of sleep; I'm not a napper. Instead, it's blogging and laundry.
And no, I don't remember my dreams particularly. I bet they were a lot more interesting and less annoying than real life.
Saturday I was in Vancouver having a truly fabulous day with my sister. The St. Regis hotel downtown where we crash-landed that evening has recently had a facelift, so it is stylish and clean, with prices still at come-back-to-me-affordable. The single tiny 100-year-old elevator, big enough for three only if you met on CL in casual encounters or are already good friends, doesn't look a day over 21.
A reminder about daylight savings time was posted on the elevator wall and thanks to my compulsive reading habit, I took that information in about twelve times before midnight.
Of course that didn't last till morning. Luckily, a friend I was scheduled to meet that afternoon reminded by email not to come too early.
Monday and Tuesday, I changed clocks at work. And still, yesterday when I got to the lab, I felt disoriented the entire day because the time was consistently one hour earlier than I expected.
This morning I woke to my alarm at 715 feeling exhausted; being woken is unpleasant and rare for me - generally I sleep till I wake at 8, and am at work on time without electronic or digital assistance. But this morning at 8 I've got to be at the gym to meet my trainer; clearly sleeping The Natural Way (TM) would not have cut it.
Showering and dressing did nothing to make me feel less tired. My last duty every morning before leaving the house, is to feed the cats. And there, standing by the kitty bowls, I chanced to glimpse the microwave LCD which glowed a very clear 6:27 AM.
My bedroom is not on daylight savings time.
There's no way for me to regain that extra precious hour of sleep; I'm not a napper. Instead, it's blogging and laundry.
And no, I don't remember my dreams particularly. I bet they were a lot more interesting and less annoying than real life.
Sunday, November 7, 2010
Sometimes my brain is a little bit literal
Yesterday I drove up to Vancouver to spend the day with my sister. We had a rather lovely spa/sushi/drinks/shopping/shopping/shopping/drinks/dancing/drinks/dancing/crash-at-lovely-hotel evening. Before bed we surfed the internet for locations for our family Christmas-in-November.
In my dream I was in Vancouver with my sister eating/drinking/partying and then we went back to the hotel to meet my parents.
Sheeeeeeeeeeesh.
True, the dream had some surreal bits but of course I cannot remember them.
In my dream I was in Vancouver with my sister eating/drinking/partying and then we went back to the hotel to meet my parents.
Sheeeeeeeeeeesh.
True, the dream had some surreal bits but of course I cannot remember them.
Friday, November 5, 2010
free-fall and self-arrest
I woke up this morning feeling like an elephant was sitting on my chest.
In my dream my mom was cleaning my room. I walked into the bedroom and caught her spraying pesticide between the sheets. "I was just trying to keep the bugs down," she said.
"That's toxic, you can't do that," I said. "Your room is a disaster," she said. She picked a pile of clothes off the bed and set it on a dresser. "Stop." She picked a gum wrapper from the floor and tsk'd. I chased her from the room, but she kept coming back.
Finally, "Get out," I said. "Get out now, I mean it."
And she left.
When I wake, as if in concert with the flat light outside my window, I can feel myself slipping into a grey emotion, sliding down some glacier graphline with a y axis of receding happiness. I put out a mental ice-axe, lean into it hard, and stop halfway down the icy incline to look around.
The clouds are not depressing, they are soft and romantic. I am not lonely, I am socially unfettered. It's Friday, and my first stop before work will be the gym. If I can't live in a sunny place I can stoke my metabolism until something starts shining from the inside.
In my dream my mom was cleaning my room. I walked into the bedroom and caught her spraying pesticide between the sheets. "I was just trying to keep the bugs down," she said.
"That's toxic, you can't do that," I said. "Your room is a disaster," she said. She picked a pile of clothes off the bed and set it on a dresser. "Stop." She picked a gum wrapper from the floor and tsk'd. I chased her from the room, but she kept coming back.
Finally, "Get out," I said. "Get out now, I mean it."
And she left.
When I wake, as if in concert with the flat light outside my window, I can feel myself slipping into a grey emotion, sliding down some glacier graphline with a y axis of receding happiness. I put out a mental ice-axe, lean into it hard, and stop halfway down the icy incline to look around.
The clouds are not depressing, they are soft and romantic. I am not lonely, I am socially unfettered. It's Friday, and my first stop before work will be the gym. If I can't live in a sunny place I can stoke my metabolism until something starts shining from the inside.
Sunday, October 31, 2010
The commercials on CNN are AWESOME
I don't actually think CNN has commercials, does it?
I don't know; I don't have cable but I'm thinking no.
Anyway, in my dream CNN goes to a commercial break and this gorgeous brunette begins talking about how hard it is to find compromise about serious issues in relationships. Other than the eye candy, it's a very sober scene, muted background music, her expression slightly sorrowful, much like a mormon advertisement. And then...
"Take diet soda," she says. "For years, Sam and I had the worst fights about it. But then Diet Dr. Pepper came along. Now we live in harmony again." She smiles brilliantly, holds up a can and takes a sip. The camera pans to a large marble-topped black desk. A tall black leather chair is facing the window and slowly it turns around, as it has done in countless movies...
to reveal an equally gorgeous blonde, her right hand wrapped around a sweating soda can. The camera zooms in to show her long lacquered nails - black with white dice spots - framing the Dr. Pepper logo. Then zooms back out to show her perfect white smile and just enough cleavage stuffed into a tight fitting jean jacket. "Were you expecting someone else?" she smiles, flirtatiously.
Diet Dr. Pepper: $0.75- $1.25 depending on the vending machine. Lesbian ads on mainstream cable? Priceless.
I don't know; I don't have cable but I'm thinking no.
Anyway, in my dream CNN goes to a commercial break and this gorgeous brunette begins talking about how hard it is to find compromise about serious issues in relationships. Other than the eye candy, it's a very sober scene, muted background music, her expression slightly sorrowful, much like a mormon advertisement. And then...
"Take diet soda," she says. "For years, Sam and I had the worst fights about it. But then Diet Dr. Pepper came along. Now we live in harmony again." She smiles brilliantly, holds up a can and takes a sip. The camera pans to a large marble-topped black desk. A tall black leather chair is facing the window and slowly it turns around, as it has done in countless movies...
to reveal an equally gorgeous blonde, her right hand wrapped around a sweating soda can. The camera zooms in to show her long lacquered nails - black with white dice spots - framing the Dr. Pepper logo. Then zooms back out to show her perfect white smile and just enough cleavage stuffed into a tight fitting jean jacket. "Were you expecting someone else?" she smiles, flirtatiously.
Diet Dr. Pepper: $0.75- $1.25 depending on the vending machine. Lesbian ads on mainstream cable? Priceless.
Saturday, October 30, 2010
This is not a dream
It's more like a vision.
I woke up and in the foggy predawn of consciousness where I have all my great ideas (and all the bad ones too but bear with me), I realized that very soon we are going to have personalized medicine that includes brain scans so we can biofeedback our own learning.
This might be a bunch of crap but then again maybe it's brilliant. That's the problem with the pre-awake ideas. Many of them are genuinely awesome but they all feel exactly the same in that moment of encountering them consciously and groggily for the first time.
So generally I write these things down, and then I sit on them for a bit to see whether they are going to make friends with conscious reality.
I wonder if people who do really stupid, crazy or unconscionable things are just like me except they don't bother with a waiting period.
Anyway I have somehow lost the seventeen notebooks I keep by the bed in case of early morning idea emergencies - I still have twenty-three pens but writing on my hand was impractical in this case (the idea "drink more water" is hand-compatible; complex near-future technology visions not so much). So I went to the computer to record it in this forum instead. The advantage being that if I'm right, maybe I'll be able to work out some legal argument to part of the patent rights down the road (more likely I'll just have bragging rights but that seems valuable too).
In any case, here's the intellectual wake upon which this particular notion was found surfing: I went to David Sedaris' book reading last night. Two impressive things: the man is even funnier in person. I've enjoyed his books but last night I laughed till I almost peed my pants which I didn't expect. His humor is unique and well-timed on the page but it is also intensely sad so I don't often laugh out loud.
Somehow the comic timing of a live performance mitigates that, allows the absurdity more space to be both tragic and hysterical - and in a public space it is easier to fall down the laughing side of the mountain. Everyone else is laughing at the mental image of an eviscerated man's lungs being used to create the wings in a human sculpture known as a "blood angel" so...
Before I go on, let me say that I know of no other person who can make the most honorable, appealing and interesting character in a story be a gerbil wearing a bikini.
The other thing, which everyone who saw the show will remember forever, is that WHILE HE WAS READING, at least twice, David Sedaris grabbed a notebook and jotted something down. Without a break in his breathing, timing, or focus. I have never seen anything like it.
When asked what he'd written, they were notes for two memory-anecdotes he'd realized he wanted to tell later on.
Which brings me to memory. Unless you are a multi-tasking genius with an over-active intellect, that would only possible if you had done something so often you could literally do it in your sleep. I'm going to hazard a guess the first option above is actually true; but it is also certain that David Sedaris has written, pondered, re-written, read aloud and come to know his own words so well that speaking at least some of the word series is now in his muscle memory.
The very first thing that happened when I woke up this morning was that I started playing the movie of the choreography we learned in last week's salsa class in my head. It is the next best thing to muscle memory. It's also how I memorize public lectures if I don't have a space in which to actually pace and practise delivery aloud.
And I had this vision of the parts of my brain that are learning dance lighting up and all the connections and firing going on. And then I thought we already have (fairly crude but constantly improving) ways to look at this electrical activity, and a rudimentary understanding of what it means when this part of the brain fires versus that one.
And then I realized that barring a complete global economic collapse or environmental disaster (both likely IMO BTW), we are going to have personalized medicine that - in addition to having all the genetic personalized biomarker testing and annotation you could want - will also have brain biofeedback.
We are a completely self-absorbed, diy, gadget-hungry, consumer society. Mood rings were the crude forerunners. Now we have heart moniters, to get us in "the fat-burning zone" and pedometers to make sure we're walking 5000 steps a day and on amazon you can buy a device that mildly electrocutes you in order to discern your percent body fat. It just makes sense - in fact in the first light of dawn seemed inevitable - that in the not at all distant future we'll have brain scanners that allow us to track and change how we learn.
I've been awake long enough to know this is not a crackhead idea. I think it's solid. I think I may need a patent attorney. And you heard it here first...
I'm off to go dance. And then I think I need to buy another notebook.
I woke up and in the foggy predawn of consciousness where I have all my great ideas (and all the bad ones too but bear with me), I realized that very soon we are going to have personalized medicine that includes brain scans so we can biofeedback our own learning.
This might be a bunch of crap but then again maybe it's brilliant. That's the problem with the pre-awake ideas. Many of them are genuinely awesome but they all feel exactly the same in that moment of encountering them consciously and groggily for the first time.
So generally I write these things down, and then I sit on them for a bit to see whether they are going to make friends with conscious reality.
I wonder if people who do really stupid, crazy or unconscionable things are just like me except they don't bother with a waiting period.
Anyway I have somehow lost the seventeen notebooks I keep by the bed in case of early morning idea emergencies - I still have twenty-three pens but writing on my hand was impractical in this case (the idea "drink more water" is hand-compatible; complex near-future technology visions not so much). So I went to the computer to record it in this forum instead. The advantage being that if I'm right, maybe I'll be able to work out some legal argument to part of the patent rights down the road (more likely I'll just have bragging rights but that seems valuable too).
In any case, here's the intellectual wake upon which this particular notion was found surfing: I went to David Sedaris' book reading last night. Two impressive things: the man is even funnier in person. I've enjoyed his books but last night I laughed till I almost peed my pants which I didn't expect. His humor is unique and well-timed on the page but it is also intensely sad so I don't often laugh out loud.
Somehow the comic timing of a live performance mitigates that, allows the absurdity more space to be both tragic and hysterical - and in a public space it is easier to fall down the laughing side of the mountain. Everyone else is laughing at the mental image of an eviscerated man's lungs being used to create the wings in a human sculpture known as a "blood angel" so...
Before I go on, let me say that I know of no other person who can make the most honorable, appealing and interesting character in a story be a gerbil wearing a bikini.
The other thing, which everyone who saw the show will remember forever, is that WHILE HE WAS READING, at least twice, David Sedaris grabbed a notebook and jotted something down. Without a break in his breathing, timing, or focus. I have never seen anything like it.
When asked what he'd written, they were notes for two memory-anecdotes he'd realized he wanted to tell later on.
Which brings me to memory. Unless you are a multi-tasking genius with an over-active intellect, that would only possible if you had done something so often you could literally do it in your sleep. I'm going to hazard a guess the first option above is actually true; but it is also certain that David Sedaris has written, pondered, re-written, read aloud and come to know his own words so well that speaking at least some of the word series is now in his muscle memory.
The very first thing that happened when I woke up this morning was that I started playing the movie of the choreography we learned in last week's salsa class in my head. It is the next best thing to muscle memory. It's also how I memorize public lectures if I don't have a space in which to actually pace and practise delivery aloud.
And I had this vision of the parts of my brain that are learning dance lighting up and all the connections and firing going on. And then I thought we already have (fairly crude but constantly improving) ways to look at this electrical activity, and a rudimentary understanding of what it means when this part of the brain fires versus that one.
And then I realized that barring a complete global economic collapse or environmental disaster (both likely IMO BTW), we are going to have personalized medicine that - in addition to having all the genetic personalized biomarker testing and annotation you could want - will also have brain biofeedback.
We are a completely self-absorbed, diy, gadget-hungry, consumer society. Mood rings were the crude forerunners. Now we have heart moniters, to get us in "the fat-burning zone" and pedometers to make sure we're walking 5000 steps a day and on amazon you can buy a device that mildly electrocutes you in order to discern your percent body fat. It just makes sense - in fact in the first light of dawn seemed inevitable - that in the not at all distant future we'll have brain scanners that allow us to track and change how we learn.
I've been awake long enough to know this is not a crackhead idea. I think it's solid. I think I may need a patent attorney. And you heard it here first...
I'm off to go dance. And then I think I need to buy another notebook.
Wednesday, October 27, 2010
Not sleeping = not dreaming
I've been home for three hours which is like an eternity at the moment since the house is dark, my wife's asleep, the cats are napping, I've become allergic to television, and I've left my laptop at work so I have to surf the internet on an ancient emac in a drafty office.
The plan was to go to bed early because I've got to be at work early and I want to get to the gym before that and it behooves me to be unconscious Right Now and instead... my brain Will Not Go To Sleep.
I have read all the previously unread archives of best-of-CL. I have written twelve emails setting up partner dance dates. I have pondered deep philosophical questions and allowed myself a minor existential crisis. I have promised myself I will eat less chocolate, drink more water, and take up meditation. I have surfed all the casual encounters mw4w ads and played the take a shot of vodka every time there's an ad with that picture of that woman with breasts so huge that I seriously wonder if she tips over when she stands up game and it is often enough that I should have cirrhosis of the liver and yet somehow I am Still Awake.
Please, if there is a benevolent being running the universe, send me some sleepiness, or failing that, a drug mule trafficking some decent narcotics. If you know me and are reading this, you can also text me something outrageous. I'm up so... why not?
In the meantime, I'm off to lie on my bed and stare at the ceiling.
The plan was to go to bed early because I've got to be at work early and I want to get to the gym before that and it behooves me to be unconscious Right Now and instead... my brain Will Not Go To Sleep.
I have read all the previously unread archives of best-of-CL. I have written twelve emails setting up partner dance dates. I have pondered deep philosophical questions and allowed myself a minor existential crisis. I have promised myself I will eat less chocolate, drink more water, and take up meditation. I have surfed all the casual encounters mw4w ads and played the take a shot of vodka every time there's an ad with that picture of that woman with breasts so huge that I seriously wonder if she tips over when she stands up game and it is often enough that I should have cirrhosis of the liver and yet somehow I am Still Awake.
Please, if there is a benevolent being running the universe, send me some sleepiness, or failing that, a drug mule trafficking some decent narcotics. If you know me and are reading this, you can also text me something outrageous. I'm up so... why not?
In the meantime, I'm off to lie on my bed and stare at the ceiling.
Wednesday, October 20, 2010
History lesson
I was on a partner game show like Jeopardy and my partner refused to answer the Holocaust category questions and wanted me to go straight to the Poland category.
The thing about waking up at 9 after waking up at 4 and falling back to sleep is that the realization that you are dehydrated does not magically resolve itself in your sleep.
When I go out drinking with my soccer team I really need to remember that I've been running around for ninety minutes and DRINK WATER.
The thing about waking up at 9 after waking up at 4 and falling back to sleep is that the realization that you are dehydrated does not magically resolve itself in your sleep.
When I go out drinking with my soccer team I really need to remember that I've been running around for ninety minutes and DRINK WATER.
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
The Dr. Hil Show
I was a therapist for four straight married couples on a reality show lasting three months; I'd been hired to replace a famous tv therapist, Jill Sherman, who'd been hit by a car midway through the series, and was still in traction.
Jill and I had been good friends since high school and she recommended me despite my lack of psychological credentials; the studio hired me out of desperation, and because Jill had a lot of clout but probably at least in equal measure because someone in marketing realized that having a molecular biologist step in as a therapist would allow them to bill it as an even more lurid social experiment than group marital counseling.
I'd see each couple for fifteen minutes - seven minutes each person, more or less - then the next couple would come up on stage. But all the couples watched each other from the audience, as did the camera, and there was a group discussion at the end where couples could comment on what had come up in the sessions they'd observed.
My dream was a single session long. The third couple consisted of a tall, dark-haired, mild-mannered man and his voluptuous, long-haired, sarcastic wife. I said I wanted to ask them each the same question and see where it went: what is the one thing bothering you most in your relationship. Though I wasn't supposed to harbor such feelings, I secretly disliked the woman, found her abrasive, and felt a little sorry for the guy.
I asked the woman first. She said it was that her husband gave her specific instructions for how to be seductive. This immediately sparked a heated argument, where he became defensive and said she misrepresented what he said. Predictably she expressed anger and derision, but I felt she was actually very hurt, so I calmed them both down and then went back to her.
I pressed the wife on how that made her feel. She turned into a small grey and white cat, with typewritten phrases on her white flanks like "insecure" and "armored". I stroked her, told her she was safe, and asked her again. The text changed to "lonely" and "I feel inadequate".
The husband, who I had been expecting to melt with tenderness at his wife's unaccustomed vulnerability, instead became aggressive and sarcastic, echoing the behaviour he'd always disparaged in his wife. It was shocking to see; I felt as if his true nature had been revealed and I was disgusted.
Luckily we had spent so much time on the cat transformation that there was no time for him; I said we had to move on. I put Christine, the catwife, up on a high shelf, and reassured everyone that I was a scientist and knew she would transition back to human form in about twenty minutes, when she began feeling safe again.
There are identifiable real events behind this dream reality show concept: I flew home yesterday from New York City and there were 31 channels of HDTV on demand, of which 28 were reality shows.
I saw three episodes of a show about compulsive hoarders on A&E, caught two seconds of at least sixteen cooking shows, watched weather forecasts, plaintiffs and defendants in three different TV court rooms, Teen Moms debating adoption and prom dresses, and last but by no means least, five different straight couples being shepherded through houses in Toronto by a squeaky-voiced Canadian agent - this show, called Property Virgins easily embodies the most eggregious use of a sexual term to lure viewers into watching people discuss dry paint, which is to say that I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Before leaving New York, I had lunch with a friend who said I would make a great therapist; I've been giving it a lot of thought since waking. Most importantly, I'm wondering what the chances are that my clients would metamorphose into animals in the course of a session and whether it does only take twenty minutes to transition back.
Jill and I had been good friends since high school and she recommended me despite my lack of psychological credentials; the studio hired me out of desperation, and because Jill had a lot of clout but probably at least in equal measure because someone in marketing realized that having a molecular biologist step in as a therapist would allow them to bill it as an even more lurid social experiment than group marital counseling.
I'd see each couple for fifteen minutes - seven minutes each person, more or less - then the next couple would come up on stage. But all the couples watched each other from the audience, as did the camera, and there was a group discussion at the end where couples could comment on what had come up in the sessions they'd observed.
My dream was a single session long. The third couple consisted of a tall, dark-haired, mild-mannered man and his voluptuous, long-haired, sarcastic wife. I said I wanted to ask them each the same question and see where it went: what is the one thing bothering you most in your relationship. Though I wasn't supposed to harbor such feelings, I secretly disliked the woman, found her abrasive, and felt a little sorry for the guy.
I asked the woman first. She said it was that her husband gave her specific instructions for how to be seductive. This immediately sparked a heated argument, where he became defensive and said she misrepresented what he said. Predictably she expressed anger and derision, but I felt she was actually very hurt, so I calmed them both down and then went back to her.
I pressed the wife on how that made her feel. She turned into a small grey and white cat, with typewritten phrases on her white flanks like "insecure" and "armored". I stroked her, told her she was safe, and asked her again. The text changed to "lonely" and "I feel inadequate".
The husband, who I had been expecting to melt with tenderness at his wife's unaccustomed vulnerability, instead became aggressive and sarcastic, echoing the behaviour he'd always disparaged in his wife. It was shocking to see; I felt as if his true nature had been revealed and I was disgusted.
Luckily we had spent so much time on the cat transformation that there was no time for him; I said we had to move on. I put Christine, the catwife, up on a high shelf, and reassured everyone that I was a scientist and knew she would transition back to human form in about twenty minutes, when she began feeling safe again.
There are identifiable real events behind this dream reality show concept: I flew home yesterday from New York City and there were 31 channels of HDTV on demand, of which 28 were reality shows.
I saw three episodes of a show about compulsive hoarders on A&E, caught two seconds of at least sixteen cooking shows, watched weather forecasts, plaintiffs and defendants in three different TV court rooms, Teen Moms debating adoption and prom dresses, and last but by no means least, five different straight couples being shepherded through houses in Toronto by a squeaky-voiced Canadian agent - this show, called Property Virgins easily embodies the most eggregious use of a sexual term to lure viewers into watching people discuss dry paint, which is to say that I thoroughly enjoyed it.
Before leaving New York, I had lunch with a friend who said I would make a great therapist; I've been giving it a lot of thought since waking. Most importantly, I'm wondering what the chances are that my clients would metamorphose into animals in the course of a session and whether it does only take twenty minutes to transition back.
Sunday, October 10, 2010
Wormhole in the spacetime continuum
Angelina lives in a crappy apartment in LA, scraping together a living as the writer for the online gossip tabloid, I Spy. Her photography counterparts stalk minor and/or ageing celebrities in various states of normalcy and it's Angie's job to come up with the slightly seedy or lurid byline.
Her boyfriend is a real estate agent in California. It might not need to be said that he has fallen on hard times. However it is worth saying that he has fallen back into the bottle, and stopped going to AA meetings. His contribution to rent is inconsistent, as is his appearance at her crappy LA apartment. What prevents Angelina from tossing him out, apart from a nearly paralyzing inability to face conflict? Sober, he's a fantastic lover. Drunk? A 230 pound snoring couch-hog.
Everything changes for her when one day, smoking a cigarette on her balcony and trying to find some way to make a plumber's-butt shot of Ruth McLanahan (aka Blanche Devereaux on the Golden Girls) into anything more than a tasteless "before her stroke" statement, a muscle-stimulating 180 volt lip curler appears in thin air at waist height and drops to the ground in front of her.
Over the next week this happens three more times; she is present for only one other - a plastic necklace of muted pastel beads. Two items arrive at night while she is sleeping and she wakes to find a single scuffed black boot, size 187 (rough equivalent men's size 9), and a package of rice milk crackers with an expiration date in 2031.
Despite her celebrity connections, many of Angie's friends are nerds and it isn't long before several of them have come up with the Wormhole Theory of How Things Appear On Angie's Balcony. They also hypothesize about the names and functions of the items, based on a wide array of experimentation, hand-waving, passionate intellectual conversation, and google searches. The lip curler, luckily, came in a box with instructions, otherwise it's hard to be certain what body parts might have ended up in a six hour state of shock-induced spasm. Converting the current into something pluggable-into-a-wall to confirm the efficiency of the device took two MIT graduates and a soldering iron but it works exactly as advertised. The most compelling support for the wormhole 25-years-into-the-future theory is isotope testing performed by a grad student at UCLA.
If this were a Hollywood film, the military would have descended on Angelina's apartment by now in order to study how to turn the source of 25 years-in-the-future objects into a weapon. But this is my dream, and instead Angie becomes a minor celebrity gracing the cover of I Want To Believe, a glossy specializing in the paranormal, alongside her sober-that-day-recently-coiffed boyfriend. Someone else writes the byline for that interview; she lands a paid daily blog about the objects that arrive on her balcony and then makes enough money selling them on ebay that she could move out of her apartment if she wanted to. She doesn't.
Normally I don't nap in the middle of the afternoon. Dozed off for a five minute shuteye at three and woke up at exactly 420, having presumably passed through the middle of area 51.
Her boyfriend is a real estate agent in California. It might not need to be said that he has fallen on hard times. However it is worth saying that he has fallen back into the bottle, and stopped going to AA meetings. His contribution to rent is inconsistent, as is his appearance at her crappy LA apartment. What prevents Angelina from tossing him out, apart from a nearly paralyzing inability to face conflict? Sober, he's a fantastic lover. Drunk? A 230 pound snoring couch-hog.
Everything changes for her when one day, smoking a cigarette on her balcony and trying to find some way to make a plumber's-butt shot of Ruth McLanahan (aka Blanche Devereaux on the Golden Girls) into anything more than a tasteless "before her stroke" statement, a muscle-stimulating 180 volt lip curler appears in thin air at waist height and drops to the ground in front of her.
Over the next week this happens three more times; she is present for only one other - a plastic necklace of muted pastel beads. Two items arrive at night while she is sleeping and she wakes to find a single scuffed black boot, size 187 (rough equivalent men's size 9), and a package of rice milk crackers with an expiration date in 2031.
Despite her celebrity connections, many of Angie's friends are nerds and it isn't long before several of them have come up with the Wormhole Theory of How Things Appear On Angie's Balcony. They also hypothesize about the names and functions of the items, based on a wide array of experimentation, hand-waving, passionate intellectual conversation, and google searches. The lip curler, luckily, came in a box with instructions, otherwise it's hard to be certain what body parts might have ended up in a six hour state of shock-induced spasm. Converting the current into something pluggable-into-a-wall to confirm the efficiency of the device took two MIT graduates and a soldering iron but it works exactly as advertised. The most compelling support for the wormhole 25-years-into-the-future theory is isotope testing performed by a grad student at UCLA.
If this were a Hollywood film, the military would have descended on Angelina's apartment by now in order to study how to turn the source of 25 years-in-the-future objects into a weapon. But this is my dream, and instead Angie becomes a minor celebrity gracing the cover of I Want To Believe, a glossy specializing in the paranormal, alongside her sober-that-day-recently-coiffed boyfriend. Someone else writes the byline for that interview; she lands a paid daily blog about the objects that arrive on her balcony and then makes enough money selling them on ebay that she could move out of her apartment if she wanted to. She doesn't.
Normally I don't nap in the middle of the afternoon. Dozed off for a five minute shuteye at three and woke up at exactly 420, having presumably passed through the middle of area 51.
Morning in Brooklyn
The only thing I remember about last night's dream session is that I could taste colors and smell textures. All morning I've wandered through farmer's markets and community gardens with my Brooklyn boyfriends and hunted down the aromas from flowers and fruit that made my blood itch and my fingers vibrate.
I've had this kind of sensual cross-wiring, known as synaesthesia, before. When I was eight, running a temperature of 104, I couldn't look at my father's beard, or be covered with coarsely woven blankets; the warp and weft of the blanket, the intertwined strands of his dark hair, created a dischordant and nauseating vibration under my skin, especially my torso and fingers. Texture came in units of violence.
According to wikipedia, synesthesia isn't all that rare and comes in a lot of flavors; often people with one of its many forms have no idea that their experience isn't universal. For instance, I strongly related to two of them:
both ordinal linguistic personification, in which numbers and letters have specific personalities - as long as I've been able to count that high, the number nine is a slinky, slightly untrustworthy but intriguing woman - late 20s, tall, long dark hair and eyes, wearing a revealing dark brown polyester dress and scoping for secrets; other numbers embody different features,
and also number form synesthesia where dates and seasons have precise locations on a visual map. The year is an oval racetrack, and July and August occupy almost the entire length of one of the long sides, whereas September through June are crowded around the remaining space, getting smaller as they approach December, larger on the other side. December is halfway through the other long side, and is the seam point where the track comes together; New Year's Eve is a narrow point through which time squeezes in order to enter January.
Synaesthesia forms are notable for being both idiosyncratic, and stable. I can't remember living without my yearmap and I was an adult before I wondered why the months weren't all the same size. Possibly I took this for granted because it just makes sense: my map echoes both my school year (summer unaturally lengthened, the remainder of the year compressed) and the light cycle - growing up in northern Canada, the days are very long in midsummer, shortest at the end of December. I wonder, if I'd grown up near the equator, whether my map would be round, with months more evenly spaced.
My time map has century blocks that lie sideways and progress left to right, where each decade is an angled row of bricks coming up from bottom left to top right. Occupying the majority of the space slightly to the left of center is the only complete century: the 1900s. Notable bricks are colored rather than being the usual cinderblock grey - 1941 and 1946 are blue, for my parents' birthdays. My birthyear, 1971, in brown, my sister's, 1972, in yellow. Before 1900 is a straggling stone wall, a collection of dates I know about from history, set in order but incomplete, with entire rows missing, a ruins. The newest century lies on the other side of the 1999-2000 divide; the bricks are brand new, salmon colored and uniform, but only a handful of rows thick. To the right is empty space waiting to be developed.
It's breakfast time on a Sunday in Brooklyn, and the wizard in the kitchen is doing something magical with butter, free range eggs, shitake mushrooms, baby italian eggplant, and a bowl full of variegated green tomatoes. The morning smells beautiful.
I've had this kind of sensual cross-wiring, known as synaesthesia, before. When I was eight, running a temperature of 104, I couldn't look at my father's beard, or be covered with coarsely woven blankets; the warp and weft of the blanket, the intertwined strands of his dark hair, created a dischordant and nauseating vibration under my skin, especially my torso and fingers. Texture came in units of violence.
According to wikipedia, synesthesia isn't all that rare and comes in a lot of flavors; often people with one of its many forms have no idea that their experience isn't universal. For instance, I strongly related to two of them:
both ordinal linguistic personification, in which numbers and letters have specific personalities - as long as I've been able to count that high, the number nine is a slinky, slightly untrustworthy but intriguing woman - late 20s, tall, long dark hair and eyes, wearing a revealing dark brown polyester dress and scoping for secrets; other numbers embody different features,
and also number form synesthesia where dates and seasons have precise locations on a visual map. The year is an oval racetrack, and July and August occupy almost the entire length of one of the long sides, whereas September through June are crowded around the remaining space, getting smaller as they approach December, larger on the other side. December is halfway through the other long side, and is the seam point where the track comes together; New Year's Eve is a narrow point through which time squeezes in order to enter January.
Synaesthesia forms are notable for being both idiosyncratic, and stable. I can't remember living without my yearmap and I was an adult before I wondered why the months weren't all the same size. Possibly I took this for granted because it just makes sense: my map echoes both my school year (summer unaturally lengthened, the remainder of the year compressed) and the light cycle - growing up in northern Canada, the days are very long in midsummer, shortest at the end of December. I wonder, if I'd grown up near the equator, whether my map would be round, with months more evenly spaced.
My time map has century blocks that lie sideways and progress left to right, where each decade is an angled row of bricks coming up from bottom left to top right. Occupying the majority of the space slightly to the left of center is the only complete century: the 1900s. Notable bricks are colored rather than being the usual cinderblock grey - 1941 and 1946 are blue, for my parents' birthdays. My birthyear, 1971, in brown, my sister's, 1972, in yellow. Before 1900 is a straggling stone wall, a collection of dates I know about from history, set in order but incomplete, with entire rows missing, a ruins. The newest century lies on the other side of the 1999-2000 divide; the bricks are brand new, salmon colored and uniform, but only a handful of rows thick. To the right is empty space waiting to be developed.
It's breakfast time on a Sunday in Brooklyn, and the wizard in the kitchen is doing something magical with butter, free range eggs, shitake mushrooms, baby italian eggplant, and a bowl full of variegated green tomatoes. The morning smells beautiful.
Sunday, September 26, 2010
Madonna
These lyrics from two different songs are running simultaneously in my head:
Like a virgin, touched for the very first time
Just like a dream you are not what you seem
Intro:
I woke this morning to my wife pulling the gun case out from under the bed; she is going to the shooting range today with a friend from work. She went to "ladies night" last night with the same person and another friend. I was grateful, actually, for the firearms diversion, as I'd been having a very awkward and graphic dream about virgins.
You could say I had my own ladies night out last night, population of two, which was so much fun it seemed like a dream, but was real, was not awkward, and would have been entirely PG-rated if not for the band itself. I can honestly say I've never been to a concert where I left feeling like I'd just had sex without even being touched.
My date with the XX:
I went with a good friend to see The XX at the Paramount on Pine street last night. They're British, and have been touring for several years, but at least as far as Seattle is concerned, they're at that sweet spot of rising fame: a solid medium size fan base, and then a healthy inevitable word-of-mouth growth potential; most people recognize their music from the radio, but not everyone knows their name. Yet.
I'd never been to the Paramount before and it is stunning. Broad entryways, ornate freizes and gilding, sweeping staircases, a completely unapologetic recreation of the olde, grande days of theater. But the equipment is brand new; on either side of the stage, an elegant line of at least 20 speakers arches its way up the wall, diminishing in size as they ascend to the ceiling.
The place was packed by the time the two cover bands were done and then The Show began. Three figures rhythmically backlit in blinding white light in perfect time to a mesmerizing percussion sequence followed by what might be the song that has gotten the most radio play: Crystallized. The next song softly backlit by a cherry-red glow so intense I could taste candy from my childhood. After that, VCR, a dreamy blue song with roving spotlights. Purple song. Green and blue under-the-sea songs that evoked mermaids and sirens. A song with greenish-gray swirling tornadoes - or UFOs touching down in a postapocalyptic dreamscape - and another lit by reflections from twirling disco balls that was like drowning in surreal starlight.
The visuals, clearly, were riveting, set off by the understated, husky, and perfectly complementary voices of the male and female lead singers. But then: an intermittent, deliberate, teasing thump of low frequency sound waves that you could feel in your chest, a compression like a grenade going off, or like falling in love. If they had pumped in the exhaust from aromatic candles, it couldn't have been more perfect. It wasn't a concert, it was a full-scale seduction.
That's right: I'm in unrequited love with a band. When, late in the evening, they confessed that they were coming to the end of the tour and needed to go home for a bit: a collective and heartfelt "noooooo" from the audience. Oh, sadness. Come back again soon, "The XX". An entire city of concert-goers pine for your return.
Now the virgins:
I dreamt about a girl who wanted to have a threesome with me and another guy. The biggest problem - for me - was they were both virgins. It took hours just to get past nervous talking to the point where I was kissing her, kissing him, directing her to kiss him. And we were all still just standing around in the hallway of my house fully clothed.
I was living with my dad in a house by the waterfront in DC; he had gone to the train station to pick up some friends. It was late. I had been out at a singles mixer and had managed to come home with the two people least equipped to have a relationship with themselves never mind a menage-a-anything.
The girl was blonde, nerdy, curly hair, thin, talked a mile a minute, mostly nervous questions, and sat on the edge of furniture with the tiniest sliver of her ass, as if ready for flight. Not my type really. The guy was tall, dark hair, super quiet. Other than the dark hair, again, not my type.
I found their attention and vulnerability, respectively, endearing. The action finally began when after several hours of talking about the theoretics of sex and sexuality I got impatient and said, "look; it's not something you talk about. It's something you DO," and offered to demonstrate french kissing. Though I wasn't filled with desire for either one of them, I enjoyed being in charge and pushing them a little.
I steered everyone through my open bedroom door onto the bed, using my lips to guide the girl, my hands on the guy's belt, and started getting naked. No sooner had the guy's pants come off then he disappeared. I never saw him again, though based on the state in which he'd left I imagined it was either to the bathroom for some personal time or to avoid having something happen that he would consider embarassing (or more likely both). The girl stayed at first but just as I'd de-knickered her, there was a knock at the door. She dove to the floor as if taking cover from a grenade.
It was my dad. He wandered in oblivious to the unfolding drama; the girl cowered at the side of the bed using her fingers as fig leaves. As he talked, he bent down to tie his shoe. The train was delayed he said, so he'd come home to grab his laptop so he'd have something to do, and he was heading out again, just wanted to touch base. I felt enormous tenderness for him in that moment, and gratitude for the easy, nonjudgemental relationship we had.
He left, and I turned back to the girl. In under five seconds she had managed to put all her clothes back on. She perched now on the end of the bed in jeans and a soft blue and brown cableknit sweater. She had a flashlight in one hand. Would it be OK if she just asked questions? Internally I groaned. Of course, I said, what would you like to know?
The first thing she wanted to do was look at me naked in detail, which seemed bizarre to me since we had pretty much all the same equipment. I obliged, lay back on the bed and assumed the missionary position, while she traced my body with the thin beam of her flashlight. She acted both fascinated and slightly horrified at what she saw, peeking out at some of it from between her long, thin fingers.
Extended mix:
It's not a huge stretch to understand the clinical nature of my end-of-dream exam. I went to my doctor's office on Thursday for a routine physical. The nurse took five minutes to check my pulse, blood pressure, medical history, and discuss menopause. Then I sat in a silly gown for forty minutes waiting for the main event.
Doc came in finally, checked my ear/nose/throat and then put me in stirrups. Just as I thought I was home free, the doc finished up with an external pelvic and said, "hmmm". While "oops" during surgery probably wins the award for the word you most don't want to hear while prone in a medical setting, "hmmm" isn't that great, either.
Had I ever noticed that the right side of my uterus was firmer than the other? No, I had not. I had however been working out a lot lately. No, says doc, it's asymmetrical. Maybe I've been working out the right side harder, I suggested. Made doc laugh, which is kind of gratifying. But she shook her head no. That would be really hard to accomplish. Maybe I'm just that talented? Again, no.
So instead of putting me in the queue for a 3-weeks-wait for ultrasound, she ordered one the next day.
Friday noon, another day in a silly gown, first a pelvic exam exactly like in the movies and TV shows when the main character is pregnant -- only instead of a baby's heartbeat we're hunting for.... Tumors! This is followed by an abdomenal, also external, and honestly my favourite part of the whole thing: I get to see the negative space created by my bladder, gallbladder, kidneys and various giant blood vessels. Finally it's time for the Dildo of Ultrasound*.
*I give full credit to Julia Sweeney, of SNL Adrogynous Pat fame, who coined the term "Dildo of Radiation" in her heartbreaking and hilarious sendup of being treated for cervical cancer which she performed at LA's Uncabaret; excerpts from this series appear in one my favourite episodes of This American Life.
I can't say it was an unpleasant experience, although there's something surreal about falling asleep for a moment while the very sweet and maternal nurse uses a piece of warm plastic to navigate your insides, and writes medical abbreviations like "transverse view" on a swirling digital Rorschack blot in which she claims to be able to see your ovaries.
Just saying.
This morning, an email notification from Group Health: I have lab & test results! Just sign in! To see them! Doc had also ordered bloodwork as part of my physical, and a screen for a biomarker associated with uterine cancer.
The good news? My cholesterol has dropped twenty points in the last five years. All my other values have dropped too, with the exception of triglycerides, which stayed stubbornly the same. From which I conclude that working out a lot more can help, but it's not a magic spell that wards off regular consumption of bacon or the fact that I have been known to disappear a pound of steak in a single sitting.
My ultrasound result is in too: several fibroid tumors are sharing my girl parts, ranging in size from tiny to less tiny. Conclusion by the medical establishment: I have an enlarged fibroid uterus. Whatever that means. I google. It isn't uncommon and 99% of fibroid tumors remain benign. Most likely I'll just be monitered; occasionally biopsies are done to rule out sarcoma and in rare cases people have their fibroids surgically removed - or even need a hysterectomy - but generally it's to deal with symptoms I don't have.
I await my doctor's final say on Monday - hopefully by then the biomarker results will be in - but for now I'm going with the nonsurgical wait and see version of my future.
And breakfast. I've had a late, busy night and the tumors are hungry.
Like a virgin, touched for the very first time
Just like a dream you are not what you seem
Intro:
I woke this morning to my wife pulling the gun case out from under the bed; she is going to the shooting range today with a friend from work. She went to "ladies night" last night with the same person and another friend. I was grateful, actually, for the firearms diversion, as I'd been having a very awkward and graphic dream about virgins.
You could say I had my own ladies night out last night, population of two, which was so much fun it seemed like a dream, but was real, was not awkward, and would have been entirely PG-rated if not for the band itself. I can honestly say I've never been to a concert where I left feeling like I'd just had sex without even being touched.
My date with the XX:
I went with a good friend to see The XX at the Paramount on Pine street last night. They're British, and have been touring for several years, but at least as far as Seattle is concerned, they're at that sweet spot of rising fame: a solid medium size fan base, and then a healthy inevitable word-of-mouth growth potential; most people recognize their music from the radio, but not everyone knows their name. Yet.
I'd never been to the Paramount before and it is stunning. Broad entryways, ornate freizes and gilding, sweeping staircases, a completely unapologetic recreation of the olde, grande days of theater. But the equipment is brand new; on either side of the stage, an elegant line of at least 20 speakers arches its way up the wall, diminishing in size as they ascend to the ceiling.
The place was packed by the time the two cover bands were done and then The Show began. Three figures rhythmically backlit in blinding white light in perfect time to a mesmerizing percussion sequence followed by what might be the song that has gotten the most radio play: Crystallized. The next song softly backlit by a cherry-red glow so intense I could taste candy from my childhood. After that, VCR, a dreamy blue song with roving spotlights. Purple song. Green and blue under-the-sea songs that evoked mermaids and sirens. A song with greenish-gray swirling tornadoes - or UFOs touching down in a postapocalyptic dreamscape - and another lit by reflections from twirling disco balls that was like drowning in surreal starlight.
The visuals, clearly, were riveting, set off by the understated, husky, and perfectly complementary voices of the male and female lead singers. But then: an intermittent, deliberate, teasing thump of low frequency sound waves that you could feel in your chest, a compression like a grenade going off, or like falling in love. If they had pumped in the exhaust from aromatic candles, it couldn't have been more perfect. It wasn't a concert, it was a full-scale seduction.
That's right: I'm in unrequited love with a band. When, late in the evening, they confessed that they were coming to the end of the tour and needed to go home for a bit: a collective and heartfelt "noooooo" from the audience. Oh, sadness. Come back again soon, "The XX". An entire city of concert-goers pine for your return.
Now the virgins:
I dreamt about a girl who wanted to have a threesome with me and another guy. The biggest problem - for me - was they were both virgins. It took hours just to get past nervous talking to the point where I was kissing her, kissing him, directing her to kiss him. And we were all still just standing around in the hallway of my house fully clothed.
I was living with my dad in a house by the waterfront in DC; he had gone to the train station to pick up some friends. It was late. I had been out at a singles mixer and had managed to come home with the two people least equipped to have a relationship with themselves never mind a menage-a-anything.
The girl was blonde, nerdy, curly hair, thin, talked a mile a minute, mostly nervous questions, and sat on the edge of furniture with the tiniest sliver of her ass, as if ready for flight. Not my type really. The guy was tall, dark hair, super quiet. Other than the dark hair, again, not my type.
I found their attention and vulnerability, respectively, endearing. The action finally began when after several hours of talking about the theoretics of sex and sexuality I got impatient and said, "look; it's not something you talk about. It's something you DO," and offered to demonstrate french kissing. Though I wasn't filled with desire for either one of them, I enjoyed being in charge and pushing them a little.
I steered everyone through my open bedroom door onto the bed, using my lips to guide the girl, my hands on the guy's belt, and started getting naked. No sooner had the guy's pants come off then he disappeared. I never saw him again, though based on the state in which he'd left I imagined it was either to the bathroom for some personal time or to avoid having something happen that he would consider embarassing (or more likely both). The girl stayed at first but just as I'd de-knickered her, there was a knock at the door. She dove to the floor as if taking cover from a grenade.
It was my dad. He wandered in oblivious to the unfolding drama; the girl cowered at the side of the bed using her fingers as fig leaves. As he talked, he bent down to tie his shoe. The train was delayed he said, so he'd come home to grab his laptop so he'd have something to do, and he was heading out again, just wanted to touch base. I felt enormous tenderness for him in that moment, and gratitude for the easy, nonjudgemental relationship we had.
He left, and I turned back to the girl. In under five seconds she had managed to put all her clothes back on. She perched now on the end of the bed in jeans and a soft blue and brown cableknit sweater. She had a flashlight in one hand. Would it be OK if she just asked questions? Internally I groaned. Of course, I said, what would you like to know?
The first thing she wanted to do was look at me naked in detail, which seemed bizarre to me since we had pretty much all the same equipment. I obliged, lay back on the bed and assumed the missionary position, while she traced my body with the thin beam of her flashlight. She acted both fascinated and slightly horrified at what she saw, peeking out at some of it from between her long, thin fingers.
Extended mix:
It's not a huge stretch to understand the clinical nature of my end-of-dream exam. I went to my doctor's office on Thursday for a routine physical. The nurse took five minutes to check my pulse, blood pressure, medical history, and discuss menopause. Then I sat in a silly gown for forty minutes waiting for the main event.
Doc came in finally, checked my ear/nose/throat and then put me in stirrups. Just as I thought I was home free, the doc finished up with an external pelvic and said, "hmmm". While "oops" during surgery probably wins the award for the word you most don't want to hear while prone in a medical setting, "hmmm" isn't that great, either.
Had I ever noticed that the right side of my uterus was firmer than the other? No, I had not. I had however been working out a lot lately. No, says doc, it's asymmetrical. Maybe I've been working out the right side harder, I suggested. Made doc laugh, which is kind of gratifying. But she shook her head no. That would be really hard to accomplish. Maybe I'm just that talented? Again, no.
So instead of putting me in the queue for a 3-weeks-wait for ultrasound, she ordered one the next day.
Friday noon, another day in a silly gown, first a pelvic exam exactly like in the movies and TV shows when the main character is pregnant -- only instead of a baby's heartbeat we're hunting for.... Tumors! This is followed by an abdomenal, also external, and honestly my favourite part of the whole thing: I get to see the negative space created by my bladder, gallbladder, kidneys and various giant blood vessels. Finally it's time for the Dildo of Ultrasound*.
*I give full credit to Julia Sweeney, of SNL Adrogynous Pat fame, who coined the term "Dildo of Radiation" in her heartbreaking and hilarious sendup of being treated for cervical cancer which she performed at LA's Uncabaret; excerpts from this series appear in one my favourite episodes of This American Life.
I can't say it was an unpleasant experience, although there's something surreal about falling asleep for a moment while the very sweet and maternal nurse uses a piece of warm plastic to navigate your insides, and writes medical abbreviations like "transverse view" on a swirling digital Rorschack blot in which she claims to be able to see your ovaries.
Just saying.
This morning, an email notification from Group Health: I have lab & test results! Just sign in! To see them! Doc had also ordered bloodwork as part of my physical, and a screen for a biomarker associated with uterine cancer.
The good news? My cholesterol has dropped twenty points in the last five years. All my other values have dropped too, with the exception of triglycerides, which stayed stubbornly the same. From which I conclude that working out a lot more can help, but it's not a magic spell that wards off regular consumption of bacon or the fact that I have been known to disappear a pound of steak in a single sitting.
My ultrasound result is in too: several fibroid tumors are sharing my girl parts, ranging in size from tiny to less tiny. Conclusion by the medical establishment: I have an enlarged fibroid uterus. Whatever that means. I google. It isn't uncommon and 99% of fibroid tumors remain benign. Most likely I'll just be monitered; occasionally biopsies are done to rule out sarcoma and in rare cases people have their fibroids surgically removed - or even need a hysterectomy - but generally it's to deal with symptoms I don't have.
I await my doctor's final say on Monday - hopefully by then the biomarker results will be in - but for now I'm going with the nonsurgical wait and see version of my future.
And breakfast. I've had a late, busy night and the tumors are hungry.
Saturday, September 25, 2010
You know you're working too much when
I dreamt I was driving a lab chair down the street.
OK honestly it didn't start that way. The way dreams often begin with a more plausible scenario before taking a turn for the bizarre, I was driving my red Ford Focus down Western Ave toward the ferry terminal. I was supposed to catch the clipper to Victoria with my sister who was riding shotgun with a friend. I could see the grey BMW a few car lengths ahead to my left. Traffic was nose to bumper, inching along and we had only forty minutes before sailing. Considering we were less than a block from our destination, this seems like a plenty of time, right up until you are trying to park in Seattle traffic on a Saturday when the sun is actually out.
My cousin pulled over. My sister hopped out, waved her thanks, closed the door. I saw her heading up the pedestrian walkway to the dock. My lane inched forward half a foot and stopped again. Just as despair was setting in, I spotted a Shell station with an adjacent, high-vacancy parking lot. A seriously tiny sign advertised "parking $5". The lot was literally only two thirds full; possibly no one else's brain was prepared to accept the existence of cheap, close, ferry parking. A bright pink UFO landing in the middle of the roadway would have been no less unprecedented.
I turned right into the small, fenced entryway, and then realized I would have to drive all the way into the Shell convenience store. I thought, damn, this is barely wide enough for my lab chair. And just like that, I was driving a six-legged office chair with light green upholstery, steering it with my feet, which left my hands free to open the door.
I still had a sense of disbelief when the Shell attendant smiled, leaned over the counter and took my proffered five dollar bill. "Normally it's all corporate parking," she said, her voice barely more than a conspiratorial whisper. She had loosely curled red hair, freckles, pale milky skin. She smelled like strawberries. "It's a promotion; they want to generate consumer goodwill." They had my warm fuzzy feelings now, for sure. Not that I fueled the Office Buddy 2000 all that often, but still. I might be more likely to buy my Coke and gummy bears from Shell convenience stores when taking office chair road trips.
She took the motorcycle helmet I had been wearing for safety, and held open the door as I foot-pedaled the chair out into the parking lot. Number 76, she said, pointing to an empty spot.
I thanked her.
Just before waking, I remembered that I'd had a noon meeting at work that I had organized. Had I gone? I couldn't remember; I didn't think so. I was supposed to bring lunch. Nothing like waking at 5am with the thought: oh thank god I didn't really forget to order pizza.
OK honestly it didn't start that way. The way dreams often begin with a more plausible scenario before taking a turn for the bizarre, I was driving my red Ford Focus down Western Ave toward the ferry terminal. I was supposed to catch the clipper to Victoria with my sister who was riding shotgun with a friend. I could see the grey BMW a few car lengths ahead to my left. Traffic was nose to bumper, inching along and we had only forty minutes before sailing. Considering we were less than a block from our destination, this seems like a plenty of time, right up until you are trying to park in Seattle traffic on a Saturday when the sun is actually out.
My cousin pulled over. My sister hopped out, waved her thanks, closed the door. I saw her heading up the pedestrian walkway to the dock. My lane inched forward half a foot and stopped again. Just as despair was setting in, I spotted a Shell station with an adjacent, high-vacancy parking lot. A seriously tiny sign advertised "parking $5". The lot was literally only two thirds full; possibly no one else's brain was prepared to accept the existence of cheap, close, ferry parking. A bright pink UFO landing in the middle of the roadway would have been no less unprecedented.
I turned right into the small, fenced entryway, and then realized I would have to drive all the way into the Shell convenience store. I thought, damn, this is barely wide enough for my lab chair. And just like that, I was driving a six-legged office chair with light green upholstery, steering it with my feet, which left my hands free to open the door.
I still had a sense of disbelief when the Shell attendant smiled, leaned over the counter and took my proffered five dollar bill. "Normally it's all corporate parking," she said, her voice barely more than a conspiratorial whisper. She had loosely curled red hair, freckles, pale milky skin. She smelled like strawberries. "It's a promotion; they want to generate consumer goodwill." They had my warm fuzzy feelings now, for sure. Not that I fueled the Office Buddy 2000 all that often, but still. I might be more likely to buy my Coke and gummy bears from Shell convenience stores when taking office chair road trips.
She took the motorcycle helmet I had been wearing for safety, and held open the door as I foot-pedaled the chair out into the parking lot. Number 76, she said, pointing to an empty spot.
I thanked her.
Just before waking, I remembered that I'd had a noon meeting at work that I had organized. Had I gone? I couldn't remember; I didn't think so. I was supposed to bring lunch. Nothing like waking at 5am with the thought: oh thank god I didn't really forget to order pizza.
Sunday, September 19, 2010
Midnightmare
The phone rang at 4am, startling me into a panicked race across the house to get the handset. I hate waking up in the middle of the night; I came instantly awake, heart racing and jittery, a chemically induced feeling like caffeine coursing through my body.
"Hello?"
"Dr. Zimmerman's office?"
Even half-asleep with my heart beating like a gerbil, I knew my confusion was rational, and that this was not a dream. "Pardon?"
"Sorry wrong number." Click.
Who calls a doctor's office at 4am?
Then I realized my wife wasn't home yet from dancing at the clubs. Usually when she goes out, she gets home at two. I called, texted, no answer. Her favourite club, Neighbors, is open till four. I convinced myself to wait another hour or two before getting seriously worried. Fell asleep with the phone in hand.
Woke up into the blue half-dark. My room seemed huge. There was the sound of surf. Out the sliding glass doors, it sounded like rather than a hot tub, it was the ocean. Called my wife's cell. Got a man's voice so heavily accented with spanish that I could barely understand it. Talking in the background suggested two or three others nearby; my mental image was ruffians, motel room. My best english translation would be: "we have all her things; you have the money?"
"What are you talking about?" Bad reply. Shit. I felt immediately sick to my stomach scared. Once before, my wife's cell disappeared in a bar. When she called it, the obviously drunk woman who answered said she'd rescued the phone after my wife had abandoned it, and that she was holding it hostage for someone better suited to take care of it.
Of course at the time that happened, my wife was standing next to me, yelling into the house cordless handset at the woman who had answered but refused to return her cell phone. Point: there are crazy people in the world.
I tried a different tack, "What do you want?". Got an answer that I literally could not parse at all, and then the man hung up on me. I called back and he didn't answer. Called again, no answer. So I dialed 911. I was crying by the time the operator asked me "What's your emergency?"
I told her, my voice high and unnatural, that my wife was out unusually late, and when I tried to call her cell, a man I didn't know had answered and seemed to be in the process of selling the phone and possibly other personal effects to someone else.
And at that moment, two things happened: 1. my wife walked in the door with a couple of friends in tow, laughing and disheveled. 2. my wife was a super skinny blonde whom I had never seen before.
I woke up, relieved. Just a dream.
Then. Looked at the clock. 607am. Checked the driveway. Nothing. Texted. Called. No answer. Left my best worried-but-not-trying-to-overreact voicemail and went back to bed. Did not fall asleep. Called a few more times without leaving messages. Lay awake.
623am the house phone rang. My wife had left her phone in the car when she went out and hadn't gotten my texts or voicemail till now. She would be home in twenty minutes.
Slept again. I do not remember about what.
"Hello?"
"Dr. Zimmerman's office?"
Even half-asleep with my heart beating like a gerbil, I knew my confusion was rational, and that this was not a dream. "Pardon?"
"Sorry wrong number." Click.
Who calls a doctor's office at 4am?
Then I realized my wife wasn't home yet from dancing at the clubs. Usually when she goes out, she gets home at two. I called, texted, no answer. Her favourite club, Neighbors, is open till four. I convinced myself to wait another hour or two before getting seriously worried. Fell asleep with the phone in hand.
Woke up into the blue half-dark. My room seemed huge. There was the sound of surf. Out the sliding glass doors, it sounded like rather than a hot tub, it was the ocean. Called my wife's cell. Got a man's voice so heavily accented with spanish that I could barely understand it. Talking in the background suggested two or three others nearby; my mental image was ruffians, motel room. My best english translation would be: "we have all her things; you have the money?"
"What are you talking about?" Bad reply. Shit. I felt immediately sick to my stomach scared. Once before, my wife's cell disappeared in a bar. When she called it, the obviously drunk woman who answered said she'd rescued the phone after my wife had abandoned it, and that she was holding it hostage for someone better suited to take care of it.
Of course at the time that happened, my wife was standing next to me, yelling into the house cordless handset at the woman who had answered but refused to return her cell phone. Point: there are crazy people in the world.
I tried a different tack, "What do you want?". Got an answer that I literally could not parse at all, and then the man hung up on me. I called back and he didn't answer. Called again, no answer. So I dialed 911. I was crying by the time the operator asked me "What's your emergency?"
I told her, my voice high and unnatural, that my wife was out unusually late, and when I tried to call her cell, a man I didn't know had answered and seemed to be in the process of selling the phone and possibly other personal effects to someone else.
And at that moment, two things happened: 1. my wife walked in the door with a couple of friends in tow, laughing and disheveled. 2. my wife was a super skinny blonde whom I had never seen before.
I woke up, relieved. Just a dream.
Then. Looked at the clock. 607am. Checked the driveway. Nothing. Texted. Called. No answer. Left my best worried-but-not-trying-to-overreact voicemail and went back to bed. Did not fall asleep. Called a few more times without leaving messages. Lay awake.
623am the house phone rang. My wife had left her phone in the car when she went out and hadn't gotten my texts or voicemail till now. She would be home in twenty minutes.
Slept again. I do not remember about what.
Saturday, September 18, 2010
Wednesday
I had a series of dreams like a set of nested Ukranian dolls, where I kept waking up in my house only to find myself in another dream.
Wednesday, September 15, 2010
Night in the Laboratory
Does it count as a dream when you're tired enough that you could be asleep?
I'm training on a brand new piece of equipment at work; started a trial at 3 that should have been done by 530. Naturally instead it took till 5 before I was even ready to begin the run, at which point the machine began spraying bleach all over the place; I was thoroughly misted from chest to face and then spent forty minutes hunting down the teeny tiny screwdriver needed to redirect the errant diverter. On the plus side my eyeballs have never been cleaner.
My friend Gretchen who religiously wears goggles and a lab coat would have said "I told you so" if she wasn't so nice. After I got the situation under some semblance of control, I stopped by Wednesday Night Beers, the social group over which Gretchen has benignly and excellently presided for over a decade. This week our merry band met at Ravenna's Third Place Books.
I restored my blood sugar to operating levels with chicken confit, virtuously declined an alcoholic beverage though I Really Needed One, and have now returned to the scene of the crime. My desk looks like a mad scientist was murdered here.
I'm training on a brand new piece of equipment at work; started a trial at 3 that should have been done by 530. Naturally instead it took till 5 before I was even ready to begin the run, at which point the machine began spraying bleach all over the place; I was thoroughly misted from chest to face and then spent forty minutes hunting down the teeny tiny screwdriver needed to redirect the errant diverter. On the plus side my eyeballs have never been cleaner.
My friend Gretchen who religiously wears goggles and a lab coat would have said "I told you so" if she wasn't so nice. After I got the situation under some semblance of control, I stopped by Wednesday Night Beers, the social group over which Gretchen has benignly and excellently presided for over a decade. This week our merry band met at Ravenna's Third Place Books.
I restored my blood sugar to operating levels with chicken confit, virtuously declined an alcoholic beverage though I Really Needed One, and have now returned to the scene of the crime. My desk looks like a mad scientist was murdered here.
Monday, September 13, 2010
Free: one treehouse. Not running. You pick up. Reply to 1950210878@craigslist.org
I was working on world peace with an Israeli commando named Sid. We drove through the streets of town in a Hummer. He said a lot of things that seemed wise. I wish I could remember a single one.
My headache is back with a vengeance. Again I have neglected to drink enough water. Again the angry gorrillas in my neck. I think going to the gym inadvisable under these circumstances.
Before the commando I was living in a defective treehouse; the nails that held it together were coming out on the side that faced a fence but the house was totally intact on the other side, that faced the parking lot; I knew I had to fix it or give up, but I couldn't bring myself to take it down. My guy friends were dropping in with the kind of advice you'd give for car trouble.
I ended up in an auto store, looking at the parts they'd recommended: carburetor; spark plugs. I described the situation to the white-haired clerk and he shook his head. "There's no hope," he said. "That thing is toast." According to him, once a treehouse was on the decline, repairs just made it worse; you just had to accept it and move on.
A long-ago ex-boyfriend happened to be my next visitor and I mentioned this to him. He nodded, gave a half-smile, breathed in; I waited expectantly. It was a completely familiar experience. He had always seemed calm and comforting when confronted with intractable problems.
He'd breathe, nod, smile, and then take a long time to say something that either was an utterly generic platitude or sometimes a complete non sequitur. At the time I found it infuriating, but in the dream it was kind of endearing.
After a very long pause, he said, "I'm sorry."
He turned into a guy friend I used to work with; he started pulling ropes and banging on the sides of the treehouse. As the structure slowly toppled I yelled, "What the hell are you doing? I didn't ask you to bring it down!"
He shrugged, made a guy apology - that mysterious combination of genuine yet totally un-guilty that as a girl I will never, ever understand. "Sorry," SHRUG, "I thought that was what you needed."
I walked around and around the fallen treehouse, pressed my palms together and rubbed them anxiously, while an army of frantic gerbils raced on stationary wheels in my brain.
Maybe I could get some burly friends to push it back up. Maybe I could buy extra wood and nail it back together stronger. Maybe I could live on it sideways.
I woke up to drymouth and the familiar pulsing in my head. I think I should be taking recreational drugs and drinking a lot more at this rate. My dad has a saying about wishing he'd been at the party the night before to refer to this hungover-for-no-reason feeling.
It's grey outside. It's 8am. If I drink a shit ton of water in the next fifteen minutes with more drugs maybe I'll feel good enough to drag myself to the gym.
My headache is back with a vengeance. Again I have neglected to drink enough water. Again the angry gorrillas in my neck. I think going to the gym inadvisable under these circumstances.
Before the commando I was living in a defective treehouse; the nails that held it together were coming out on the side that faced a fence but the house was totally intact on the other side, that faced the parking lot; I knew I had to fix it or give up, but I couldn't bring myself to take it down. My guy friends were dropping in with the kind of advice you'd give for car trouble.
I ended up in an auto store, looking at the parts they'd recommended: carburetor; spark plugs. I described the situation to the white-haired clerk and he shook his head. "There's no hope," he said. "That thing is toast." According to him, once a treehouse was on the decline, repairs just made it worse; you just had to accept it and move on.
A long-ago ex-boyfriend happened to be my next visitor and I mentioned this to him. He nodded, gave a half-smile, breathed in; I waited expectantly. It was a completely familiar experience. He had always seemed calm and comforting when confronted with intractable problems.
He'd breathe, nod, smile, and then take a long time to say something that either was an utterly generic platitude or sometimes a complete non sequitur. At the time I found it infuriating, but in the dream it was kind of endearing.
After a very long pause, he said, "I'm sorry."
He turned into a guy friend I used to work with; he started pulling ropes and banging on the sides of the treehouse. As the structure slowly toppled I yelled, "What the hell are you doing? I didn't ask you to bring it down!"
He shrugged, made a guy apology - that mysterious combination of genuine yet totally un-guilty that as a girl I will never, ever understand. "Sorry," SHRUG, "I thought that was what you needed."
I walked around and around the fallen treehouse, pressed my palms together and rubbed them anxiously, while an army of frantic gerbils raced on stationary wheels in my brain.
Maybe I could get some burly friends to push it back up. Maybe I could buy extra wood and nail it back together stronger. Maybe I could live on it sideways.
I woke up to drymouth and the familiar pulsing in my head. I think I should be taking recreational drugs and drinking a lot more at this rate. My dad has a saying about wishing he'd been at the party the night before to refer to this hungover-for-no-reason feeling.
It's grey outside. It's 8am. If I drink a shit ton of water in the next fifteen minutes with more drugs maybe I'll feel good enough to drag myself to the gym.
Cheating
It's one AM and I haven't slept, hence have no dreams to blog about. I've just finished reading the best book I've read in a long-ass time: Zoe Whittall's "Holding Still For As Long As Possible". I love when a book is so good that I have to read it straight through. That hasn't happened in a while.
So here I am, gorged on lit, with ambitions of waking at 630 in order to make it to the 1. gym, 2. emissions test, 3. work to start four separate experiments and 4. all before lab meeting at noon.
I think my permanent sense of failure stems from chronically unrealistic expectations.
What I'm wishing is that life was more like art. The thing about really good books that is also true about great paintings, photographs and sculptures, is that they are True. They are life cubed. Reality on steroids. Zoe's take on the queer texting generation is seductive and irresistable because it gathers all these specific, accurate details and makes them seem romantic, vivid and interesting. Art is Life Concentrate, Extra Pulp, with Added Calcium (TM).
The truth is that life only feels that way when you're in love, starting a new job, a religious zealot, or enlightened (and I'm not interested in getting into an argument about whether those last two are the same things; but FTR, I don't believe they are). It's not impossible to live every day with a sense of romance and adventure or even just more run-of-the-mill peaceful joy - but it's hard. I know only a handful of people who can pull it off on an even semi-regular basis. I love them dearly. I'm not one of them.
Bedtime. Possibly you'll hear from me on the flipside.
PS Gratitude, I am convinced, is the antidote to boredom and cynicism. Today I'm f-ing grateful that I found my phone. It had fallen under the bed. I'm 39 but half my friends are 20-something which means I've become an honorary member of the generation that doesn't understand why you would hand-write letters. I love you, battery-hogging Samsung flip phone with your sim card full of social contacts' phone numbers. I promise not to drop you in a toilet bowl when drunk, nor leave you on a bench at the next salsa dance. I will plug you into my car charger religiously on my commute to work, and carry you more often in that dorky leather protective carry case rather than jammed into the same pocket as my housekeys and nail clippers. Amen.
So here I am, gorged on lit, with ambitions of waking at 630 in order to make it to the 1. gym, 2. emissions test, 3. work to start four separate experiments and 4. all before lab meeting at noon.
I think my permanent sense of failure stems from chronically unrealistic expectations.
What I'm wishing is that life was more like art. The thing about really good books that is also true about great paintings, photographs and sculptures, is that they are True. They are life cubed. Reality on steroids. Zoe's take on the queer texting generation is seductive and irresistable because it gathers all these specific, accurate details and makes them seem romantic, vivid and interesting. Art is Life Concentrate, Extra Pulp, with Added Calcium (TM).
The truth is that life only feels that way when you're in love, starting a new job, a religious zealot, or enlightened (and I'm not interested in getting into an argument about whether those last two are the same things; but FTR, I don't believe they are). It's not impossible to live every day with a sense of romance and adventure or even just more run-of-the-mill peaceful joy - but it's hard. I know only a handful of people who can pull it off on an even semi-regular basis. I love them dearly. I'm not one of them.
Bedtime. Possibly you'll hear from me on the flipside.
PS Gratitude, I am convinced, is the antidote to boredom and cynicism. Today I'm f-ing grateful that I found my phone. It had fallen under the bed. I'm 39 but half my friends are 20-something which means I've become an honorary member of the generation that doesn't understand why you would hand-write letters. I love you, battery-hogging Samsung flip phone with your sim card full of social contacts' phone numbers. I promise not to drop you in a toilet bowl when drunk, nor leave you on a bench at the next salsa dance. I will plug you into my car charger religiously on my commute to work, and carry you more often in that dorky leather protective carry case rather than jammed into the same pocket as my housekeys and nail clippers. Amen.
Sunday, September 12, 2010
Rerun
I am in love with a buddhist nun. I think I have listened to Pema Chodron's audiobook Getting Unstuck more times than I have fingers and toes. A chief concept in this series of lecture recordings is a Tibetan word called "shen-pa", which translates as attachment but really is more about how we get stuck in knee-jerk reactions to uncomfortable emotional triggers. It's the basis of addiction and judgement, of ego and longing and buddhists believe it underlies universal human suffering.
Letting go of shenpa is about finding out how to experience and enjoy the world exactly as it is in every moment. That seems simple but if you try it for a whole day or even a few minutes, it can be profound to recognize that it is actually next to impossible. It's also, interestingly, not the same thing as resignation. Many buddhists are activists; what they train in is in seeing the world with clarity and compassion, which makes it easier, actually, to effect change.
For me, the concept of shenpa dovetails with a "win-win" negotiating strategy I first read in the book Getting to Yes. Rather than setting yourself up as an adversary in conflict - say peace talks, or commerce - you invite the other party to find the most mutually beneficial way forward. This requires setting aside preconceived notions about how to meet your needs. The premise is that most problems can be solved in many ways; if you go into the negotiation focused on interests rather than a particular position, you can come up with solutions that satisfy everyone.
Which is the scenic route to my current circumstance. I woke up into a "shenpa attack" - a feeling of panic and dread that seemed to precede consciousness. And though I could feel the pressure of all the dreams I'd had pushing against my eyelids, trying to get out, I couldn't remember anything.
You might think this is going somewhere didactic or anecdotal about how I solved the "problem" of forgetfulness or got "unstuck" from my anxiety but really I have no point; it's just what I was thinking about when I first woke up and started writing.
Nonetheless it is true that I have nothing to report from last night's dream festival. Instead I post this dream, from a few weeks before the blog began, when I woke into a similar state of panic but actually did remember what I was experiencing beforehand.
8/22/2010
Which is the scenic route to my current circumstance. I woke up into a "shenpa attack" - a feeling of panic and dread that seemed to precede consciousness. And though I could feel the pressure of all the dreams I'd had pushing against my eyelids, trying to get out, I couldn't remember anything.
You might think this is going somewhere didactic or anecdotal about how I solved the "problem" of forgetfulness or got "unstuck" from my anxiety but really I have no point; it's just what I was thinking about when I first woke up and started writing.
Nonetheless it is true that I have nothing to report from last night's dream festival. Instead I post this dream, from a few weeks before the blog began, when I woke into a similar state of panic but actually did remember what I was experiencing beforehand.
8/22/2010
My neighbor’s tv woke me. At first, in the 5am dark I was so confused and wracked with guilt I put my ear to the soft glow of my laptop battery status light, thinking the noise might be coming from inside there, that my computer had failed to put itself to sleep, that I had left some youtube clip running. Then I remembered cracking my window before bed to let in some air. Actually it was my wife who did this.
I had been dreaming that ice cream is too expensive. A lot of other things happened first of course, including meeting up with a friend from high school in a giant warehouse that was New York city after driving a robot on stilts through the underground subway system and never finding the right elevator floor to take me to good parking on the lower east side, but the take home message was that soft serve, even gourmet and hand dipped in chocolate, should not come to six dollars.
The receipt was a two page zine written by the artist-turned-cone-operator with elaborate math on the cover indicating that she had given me a two dollar discount. She had been friendly, informative, and respectful. I hesitated for so long over my visa receipt trying to decide if I should tip that I woke up.
The receipt was a two page zine written by the artist-turned-cone-operator with elaborate math on the cover indicating that she had given me a two dollar discount. She had been friendly, informative, and respectful. I hesitated for so long over my visa receipt trying to decide if I should tip that I woke up.
Art imitates life. Last night my wife went for a walk with me. It cost nearly eight dollars for us each to have one scoop of Baskin Robbins in waffle cones. Butter Pecan (for me). Hawaiian chocolate (for her). I wasn’t sure what made the chocolate Hawaaian other than the presence of macadamia nuts.
I also spent some significant dream time trying to find my therapist, thinking about what I would say to him, speed walking in a sweat through long corridors that ended up not containing his office. I also spent time in a classroom, and more time in transit agonizing about the homework, not being sure if I should work out a quadrilateral equation or write a philosophical treatise. At one point I was the instructor which was worse because I could not remember if I had prepared a lecture or not.
My room is cold now. I drank some water, and peed. I shut the window.
Maybe I’ll sleep.
Saturday, September 11, 2010
I could have danced all night
Last night I took a lot of drugs and went dancing. After I got home, I dreamt that I got home and took a lot of drugs after going dancing. Sometimes my dreams are incredibly derivative.
It's going to be a whole weekend of dancing - but not club dancing. Partner dancing - mostly salsa, my chief passion for the last four years. And the drugs are painkillers. All of which takes the plot in a far less lurid and entertaining direction than you might have hoped.
In any case, I started last night at East Hall in the Oddfellow's building with an on2 salsa class taught by Troy and Jorjet, the visiting instructors this weekend at Century Ballroom. Today at noon I take three on1 salsa classes in the U District with another visiting salsa dancer, Eli Torres.
There are classes in both venues on Sunday that I'd love to take but I have podcasting to do on location - EdwardT and I are going to a restaurant on Bainbridge Island to talk about food.
Otherwise I'd just dance all day and night. I think. My headache from Thursday night is still here 36h later. Too stubborn to miss class last night, I tanked up on my favourite painkillers, advil and tylenol, which took the pain down a notch, but left me pretty loopy and dizzy.
It's been years since I routinely had multi-day headaches. I suspect a combination of dehydration (clue-in: perpetual dry mouth and pee the color of yellow Gatorade), caffeine overdose (I've started my day three times this week with hot chocolate instead of protein), and sinus congestion combined with the barometric pressure, aka I-fucking-hate-that-that-it's-overcast-every-day-now. I'm carrying the tension of ten angry gorrillas in my neck and shoulders for some reason; maybe the gorrillas are just mad that the sun went away.
When I nearly clocked one of my favourite leads - who also happens to be the owner of the Ballroom - in the face with a stray elbow, I knew I wasn't on my best game. Then I walked down the hall to the bathroom on a break and noticed that I probably wouldn't pass your standard highway checkpoint sobriety test. For a dance that involves multiple spins and at least a modicum of balance, being able to walk in a straight line probably should be a pre-requisite
My medicated compromise wasn't a total bust: at the social dance after class, one of the leads compared dancing with me to driving a Mercedes. Apparently even on my bad days I'm still good by some people's standards. To temper any inflation of my ego, I got to see the real pros dance: watching Troy perform was sheer delight, especially since I had just caught the last fifteen minutes of Singing in the Rain, down the hall at Century's new free movie series, View and Chew. Turns out there really isn't that much difference between Gene Kelly tap dancing in a 1950s musical and elite salsa dancers doing solo footwork. Basically it's all "shines" with roots that stretch back to Africa.
I got home after the dance and dreamt I was getting home after dancing, only home was the condo where I grew up. It was no shrine to the past; more like a frat flop house, with half a dozen roommates coming and going at all hours.
I rolled into the place at 1 am and spent the next hour fielding calls and texts from salsa friends asking me to come out and dance. I begged off because I had a headache. Even in my dream I was popping little brown and white pills like candy. My roommates were consuming far more interesting recreational chemicals, ones that have acronyms and nicknames but also come with a risk of permanent brain damage. My drugs of choice primarily target internal organs, and isn't that what liver transplants are for?
The coolest part was that there was a pool out back. This would have been both awesome and pretty incongruous in reality, given that my neighbourhood was largely lower middle class and a pool of any size would have consumed the entire footprint of the back yard. It also seems like a waste, considering that even in my dream there wasn't a drop of sun in which to laze around poolside. I feel the same way about hotels with pools; it makes me sad when I don't swim in them.
Time for getting up now. And showering. And more drugs. So I can keep on dancin'.
Some dance videos for your weekend:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ejSQnAOORg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmCpOKtN8ME
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZn4-BvJxr8
It's going to be a whole weekend of dancing - but not club dancing. Partner dancing - mostly salsa, my chief passion for the last four years. And the drugs are painkillers. All of which takes the plot in a far less lurid and entertaining direction than you might have hoped.
In any case, I started last night at East Hall in the Oddfellow's building with an on2 salsa class taught by Troy and Jorjet, the visiting instructors this weekend at Century Ballroom. Today at noon I take three on1 salsa classes in the U District with another visiting salsa dancer, Eli Torres.
There are classes in both venues on Sunday that I'd love to take but I have podcasting to do on location - EdwardT and I are going to a restaurant on Bainbridge Island to talk about food.
Otherwise I'd just dance all day and night. I think. My headache from Thursday night is still here 36h later. Too stubborn to miss class last night, I tanked up on my favourite painkillers, advil and tylenol, which took the pain down a notch, but left me pretty loopy and dizzy.
It's been years since I routinely had multi-day headaches. I suspect a combination of dehydration (clue-in: perpetual dry mouth and pee the color of yellow Gatorade), caffeine overdose (I've started my day three times this week with hot chocolate instead of protein), and sinus congestion combined with the barometric pressure, aka I-fucking-hate-that-that-it's-overcast-every-day-now. I'm carrying the tension of ten angry gorrillas in my neck and shoulders for some reason; maybe the gorrillas are just mad that the sun went away.
When I nearly clocked one of my favourite leads - who also happens to be the owner of the Ballroom - in the face with a stray elbow, I knew I wasn't on my best game. Then I walked down the hall to the bathroom on a break and noticed that I probably wouldn't pass your standard highway checkpoint sobriety test. For a dance that involves multiple spins and at least a modicum of balance, being able to walk in a straight line probably should be a pre-requisite
My medicated compromise wasn't a total bust: at the social dance after class, one of the leads compared dancing with me to driving a Mercedes. Apparently even on my bad days I'm still good by some people's standards. To temper any inflation of my ego, I got to see the real pros dance: watching Troy perform was sheer delight, especially since I had just caught the last fifteen minutes of Singing in the Rain, down the hall at Century's new free movie series, View and Chew. Turns out there really isn't that much difference between Gene Kelly tap dancing in a 1950s musical and elite salsa dancers doing solo footwork. Basically it's all "shines" with roots that stretch back to Africa.
I got home after the dance and dreamt I was getting home after dancing, only home was the condo where I grew up. It was no shrine to the past; more like a frat flop house, with half a dozen roommates coming and going at all hours.
I rolled into the place at 1 am and spent the next hour fielding calls and texts from salsa friends asking me to come out and dance. I begged off because I had a headache. Even in my dream I was popping little brown and white pills like candy. My roommates were consuming far more interesting recreational chemicals, ones that have acronyms and nicknames but also come with a risk of permanent brain damage. My drugs of choice primarily target internal organs, and isn't that what liver transplants are for?
The coolest part was that there was a pool out back. This would have been both awesome and pretty incongruous in reality, given that my neighbourhood was largely lower middle class and a pool of any size would have consumed the entire footprint of the back yard. It also seems like a waste, considering that even in my dream there wasn't a drop of sun in which to laze around poolside. I feel the same way about hotels with pools; it makes me sad when I don't swim in them.
Time for getting up now. And showering. And more drugs. So I can keep on dancin'.
Some dance videos for your weekend:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ejSQnAOORg
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmCpOKtN8ME
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZn4-BvJxr8
Friday, September 10, 2010
Movie night
The March of the Penguins is a documentary about birds, right? No. It's an epic tale of romance and horror.
I watched the movie last night with my wife and then I developed the sort of headache that makes you wonder whether some of the charming early pseudo-scientific methods for curing depression might be worth the risk of partial brain damage. Anyone with a tiny drill and an eagerness to make pressure-escaping holes in my head would have been welcome in my home last night.
In one of my subsequent migraine-induced dreams I was on the back of a motorcycle behind a woman that I knew well and loved but whose relationship to me was so complicated I had no name for it; she was like a mother and a wife but bore no resemblance to anyone I know in reality. Riding "bitch", the entirely inadequate equivalent to "shotgun" in a car, is uncommon for me; generally I do the driving.
We were on a paved road on a street bike (for the uninitiated this term is used to distinguish it from "off-road" or "dirt"). We began in the city in normal traffic but within minutes we were riding through dusty canyons, the only vehicles around us were other bikes and although the road stayed paved, it began to undulate, requiring the reflexes and skills of a dirt bike track racer. And then the jumps started. There were arrows painted on the landing surfaces like you might find in a video game that told my riding partner what angle to set the tire.
My biker woman gamely posted and flexed and banked and I moved with her. Just as I was remarking to myself how well she was doing, how confident and trusting I felt, the road narrowed, and split, and we had to choose from a confusing array of skinny asphalt tracks that ran through a sage-and-cactus landscape. Bikers whizzed all around us on different paths, though I noticed that many of them had stayed on a larger parallel road that didn't take them through the heart of the desert.
She turned left and right at angled intersections, and we curved and straightened, curved and straightened, slaloming like champions. But no sooner could I breathe again, start to relax, then the tracks became an impossible-to-predict tangle heading downhill very fast, and suddenly we were going down a severly steep embankment that ended in a giant uplifted lip.
We sailed through the air over silver-green stunted shrubs, to her, "ooooh, shiiiit." From the air I could see we were rejoining the main road. Then the ground came rushing towards us, and she pulled the handlebars as hard as she could in the complicated pattern suggested by the landing arrow and I thought we were going to make it and then I knew we weren't and
I was riding shotgun in a minivan with my labmates on the way to a soccer game. We were on a huge, multi-lane part of the autobahn, passing through a seemingly endless tunnel. To our right, keeping pace a half-car-length ahead was an SUV packed with people. I kept staring at this woman in the back seat, who, like her other two benchmates, was facing out. I felt certain I knew her, and then as overhead lights threw stripes of yellow glare over the rear window, I recognized my soccer captain. My entire team was on the way to the game. I waved frantically until she saw me, smiled, and made an elaborate hand gesture to indicate she would meet us at
speeding through europe from Germany to France on a train with a tall, beautiful woman, skin the color of peanut butter, long black hair, huge black-kholed eyes fringed by enormous lashes. I am telling her what I think of my sister's new housemate, when really all I want is to push this woman up against the velveteen back of the seat and kiss her, find out how she tastes; instead we stand, walk toward the door between cars, which whooshes open, and we step into
a vast white room, reminiscent of the scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey where I inevitably fall asleep so that even after seven viewings, I'm unsure what happens.
I am seated next to the woman from the train, on a huge rectangular table or maybe it's a couch, in any case it's big enough to sleep ten or serve forty, and all the room's contents are so white and the lighting so oblique that only the faintest hints of gray shadow delineate where the geometrically spaced squares that could be stools or tables or decorative posts end and the floor/wall/space begins
I am talking but my words are swallowed into the room, as if all the air has been sucked out; they float in space, with only the occasional deflection of the gravity wells between bodies to guide them; all that's left of human conversation is a whisper, words like the shadows cast by the ambiguous furnishings
So I kiss her after all, hard, and the air comes back, and the lights angle down so there are inky black shadows on the ground and the furniture is a dazzling enamel white and she pulls back, looks at me with a half-smile; I lace my hands behind her head and pull her into me again, and when I relax for a second, our lips part, and she says, "Took you long enough."
And then we get to the part of the dream that woke me up and made me so sick at heart that I went back to sleep and tried not to write it down or think about it really. When I woke up it was still there, just as vivid, and I knew it wouldn't go away until I had written it all down.
The dream is in third person now, I am not me but the omniscient Me that has no ego, only observes, and the dream camera pans to the back of the room so the table/couch/bed where the beautiful train woman and I are lying down, talking, kissing recedes, becomes as incidental to the plot and the action as a decorative plant.
The corner of the room where the camera settles is vivid with color and slick, like a cartoonish caricature of reality. In sharp focus is a fat, balding man, sweating profusely in a Victorian style suit; he is squatting on the ground, rocking back and forth on his heels. He is facing a baby bird. The lining of his glossy black coat is red satin. There is blood on his hands. The baby bird is not much shorter than the man, but weak and half-dead from hunger. It gazes at him with desperate need and expectation. There is blood dripping from its beak.
The man speaks to the bird, alternately in a sickly sweet simulation of love and then in a cajoling sarcastic tone but it's all senseless, english words strung randomly together with no apparent meaning. He seems clearly insane but his eyes glitter with malevolent intelligence. The presence of evil is strong; it smells of rotting flesh.
The man cuts another strip from a heap of meat on the ground behind him and tosses it to the baby bird. He laughs as the bird swallows and then comes back, angling his head up in the universal avian infant sign for "more".
The man reaches for a bucket and stands, towering now over the baby. He pours a trickle of pitch-dark liquid into the upturned throat of the bird, then tips the bucket further till the liquid is a torrent and the baby is filling right to the brim. The camera is directly overhead, so the world is the mouth of the bird and you can see the fleshy ridges of its throat, the frothy swirling of the liquid. Red splashes overflow onto the ground and the baby is stock still, unable to move or breathe, while the toxic whirlpool settles into every part of its body.
The man steps back, sets the bucket down, becomes still, waiting. The bird lowers its head, its eyes coming to rest on the mutilated, drained bodies of its parents discarded on the ground just behind where the man was sitting. A switch of recognition flips in its tiny reptilian brain and the baby opens its beak in horror, convulsing as if poisoned, and emits a terrible endless wrenching wail of grief and despair.
After that dream I did finally sleep again. There was a castle made of white moonstone that glowed at night, and a woman who was half elf, half vampire, so she could only come outside in the moonlight; she wore a white lace gown and wandered bored and aloof through a garden with luminous jewels for flowers. The castle became a fortress and I was on a mission to get inside. I found a secret entrance, I solved the riddle of the password and the door swung open.
I woke, feeling like the the right side of my face and eye sockets were visibly pulsing.
I wrote.
My headache seems bearable now and I'm late for work.
I need a shower.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1IPrx-zC1Y&feature=related
I watched the movie last night with my wife and then I developed the sort of headache that makes you wonder whether some of the charming early pseudo-scientific methods for curing depression might be worth the risk of partial brain damage. Anyone with a tiny drill and an eagerness to make pressure-escaping holes in my head would have been welcome in my home last night.
In one of my subsequent migraine-induced dreams I was on the back of a motorcycle behind a woman that I knew well and loved but whose relationship to me was so complicated I had no name for it; she was like a mother and a wife but bore no resemblance to anyone I know in reality. Riding "bitch", the entirely inadequate equivalent to "shotgun" in a car, is uncommon for me; generally I do the driving.
We were on a paved road on a street bike (for the uninitiated this term is used to distinguish it from "off-road" or "dirt"). We began in the city in normal traffic but within minutes we were riding through dusty canyons, the only vehicles around us were other bikes and although the road stayed paved, it began to undulate, requiring the reflexes and skills of a dirt bike track racer. And then the jumps started. There were arrows painted on the landing surfaces like you might find in a video game that told my riding partner what angle to set the tire.
My biker woman gamely posted and flexed and banked and I moved with her. Just as I was remarking to myself how well she was doing, how confident and trusting I felt, the road narrowed, and split, and we had to choose from a confusing array of skinny asphalt tracks that ran through a sage-and-cactus landscape. Bikers whizzed all around us on different paths, though I noticed that many of them had stayed on a larger parallel road that didn't take them through the heart of the desert.
She turned left and right at angled intersections, and we curved and straightened, curved and straightened, slaloming like champions. But no sooner could I breathe again, start to relax, then the tracks became an impossible-to-predict tangle heading downhill very fast, and suddenly we were going down a severly steep embankment that ended in a giant uplifted lip.
We sailed through the air over silver-green stunted shrubs, to her, "ooooh, shiiiit." From the air I could see we were rejoining the main road. Then the ground came rushing towards us, and she pulled the handlebars as hard as she could in the complicated pattern suggested by the landing arrow and I thought we were going to make it and then I knew we weren't and
I was riding shotgun in a minivan with my labmates on the way to a soccer game. We were on a huge, multi-lane part of the autobahn, passing through a seemingly endless tunnel. To our right, keeping pace a half-car-length ahead was an SUV packed with people. I kept staring at this woman in the back seat, who, like her other two benchmates, was facing out. I felt certain I knew her, and then as overhead lights threw stripes of yellow glare over the rear window, I recognized my soccer captain. My entire team was on the way to the game. I waved frantically until she saw me, smiled, and made an elaborate hand gesture to indicate she would meet us at
speeding through europe from Germany to France on a train with a tall, beautiful woman, skin the color of peanut butter, long black hair, huge black-kholed eyes fringed by enormous lashes. I am telling her what I think of my sister's new housemate, when really all I want is to push this woman up against the velveteen back of the seat and kiss her, find out how she tastes; instead we stand, walk toward the door between cars, which whooshes open, and we step into
a vast white room, reminiscent of the scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey where I inevitably fall asleep so that even after seven viewings, I'm unsure what happens.
I am seated next to the woman from the train, on a huge rectangular table or maybe it's a couch, in any case it's big enough to sleep ten or serve forty, and all the room's contents are so white and the lighting so oblique that only the faintest hints of gray shadow delineate where the geometrically spaced squares that could be stools or tables or decorative posts end and the floor/wall/space begins
I am talking but my words are swallowed into the room, as if all the air has been sucked out; they float in space, with only the occasional deflection of the gravity wells between bodies to guide them; all that's left of human conversation is a whisper, words like the shadows cast by the ambiguous furnishings
So I kiss her after all, hard, and the air comes back, and the lights angle down so there are inky black shadows on the ground and the furniture is a dazzling enamel white and she pulls back, looks at me with a half-smile; I lace my hands behind her head and pull her into me again, and when I relax for a second, our lips part, and she says, "Took you long enough."
And then we get to the part of the dream that woke me up and made me so sick at heart that I went back to sleep and tried not to write it down or think about it really. When I woke up it was still there, just as vivid, and I knew it wouldn't go away until I had written it all down.
The dream is in third person now, I am not me but the omniscient Me that has no ego, only observes, and the dream camera pans to the back of the room so the table/couch/bed where the beautiful train woman and I are lying down, talking, kissing recedes, becomes as incidental to the plot and the action as a decorative plant.
The corner of the room where the camera settles is vivid with color and slick, like a cartoonish caricature of reality. In sharp focus is a fat, balding man, sweating profusely in a Victorian style suit; he is squatting on the ground, rocking back and forth on his heels. He is facing a baby bird. The lining of his glossy black coat is red satin. There is blood on his hands. The baby bird is not much shorter than the man, but weak and half-dead from hunger. It gazes at him with desperate need and expectation. There is blood dripping from its beak.
The man speaks to the bird, alternately in a sickly sweet simulation of love and then in a cajoling sarcastic tone but it's all senseless, english words strung randomly together with no apparent meaning. He seems clearly insane but his eyes glitter with malevolent intelligence. The presence of evil is strong; it smells of rotting flesh.
The man cuts another strip from a heap of meat on the ground behind him and tosses it to the baby bird. He laughs as the bird swallows and then comes back, angling his head up in the universal avian infant sign for "more".
The man reaches for a bucket and stands, towering now over the baby. He pours a trickle of pitch-dark liquid into the upturned throat of the bird, then tips the bucket further till the liquid is a torrent and the baby is filling right to the brim. The camera is directly overhead, so the world is the mouth of the bird and you can see the fleshy ridges of its throat, the frothy swirling of the liquid. Red splashes overflow onto the ground and the baby is stock still, unable to move or breathe, while the toxic whirlpool settles into every part of its body.
The man steps back, sets the bucket down, becomes still, waiting. The bird lowers its head, its eyes coming to rest on the mutilated, drained bodies of its parents discarded on the ground just behind where the man was sitting. A switch of recognition flips in its tiny reptilian brain and the baby opens its beak in horror, convulsing as if poisoned, and emits a terrible endless wrenching wail of grief and despair.
After that dream I did finally sleep again. There was a castle made of white moonstone that glowed at night, and a woman who was half elf, half vampire, so she could only come outside in the moonlight; she wore a white lace gown and wandered bored and aloof through a garden with luminous jewels for flowers. The castle became a fortress and I was on a mission to get inside. I found a secret entrance, I solved the riddle of the password and the door swung open.
I woke, feeling like the the right side of my face and eye sockets were visibly pulsing.
I wrote.
My headache seems bearable now and I'm late for work.
I need a shower.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1IPrx-zC1Y&feature=related
Wednesday, September 8, 2010
The wedding
660am
I dreamt so much I feel exhausted. My back hurts. My neck especially.
And I can't remember a damn thing. Very frustrating. As if blogging about it has chased the dreams into hiding.
Relax. Breathe. Try to remember.
Fragment. I am at an Indian wedding. The bride is elaborately dressed and beautiful. Her hair is long and curled deliberately around her face so that all of it is hidden except her eyes. Her entire body has been henna'd, I know this without seeing it all since in reality she is mostly covered by an ivory floor-length, wrist-length dress. So only her feet, neck and hands show evidence of the calligraphic brown swirls. Buttons have been glued to her skin, painted to match, so it looks like they are a lumpy part of her and even that is strangely beautiful. I can sense the patterns rising up her arms and legs, radiating back to the core.
I dreamt so much I feel exhausted. My back hurts. My neck especially.
And I can't remember a damn thing. Very frustrating. As if blogging about it has chased the dreams into hiding.
Relax. Breathe. Try to remember.
Fragment. I am at an Indian wedding. The bride is elaborately dressed and beautiful. Her hair is long and curled deliberately around her face so that all of it is hidden except her eyes. Her entire body has been henna'd, I know this without seeing it all since in reality she is mostly covered by an ivory floor-length, wrist-length dress. So only her feet, neck and hands show evidence of the calligraphic brown swirls. Buttons have been glued to her skin, painted to match, so it looks like they are a lumpy part of her and even that is strangely beautiful. I can sense the patterns rising up her arms and legs, radiating back to the core.
Tuesday, September 7, 2010
Keywords
I had a busy dream night, woke up three times to write down keyword reminders so that in the morning I would be able to recreate the plot, and vivid sensory details of the experiences I was having. This is what I found on my night stand in the morning, scrawled onto a torn piece of paper:
"moon - extra"
"hair polish"
"dehydrated people"
I remember the first dream had something to do with the moon being a soap bubble orbited by two smaller moons that deformed its trajectory and affected our oceans. Hair polish refers to a dream in which I invented a product certain to revolutionize the cosmetics industry and make me wealthy: nail polish applied to long hair, making it sparkly and crunchy. As for the third? No idea. The mind boggles. I confess to feeling frightened.
"moon - extra"
"hair polish"
"dehydrated people"
I remember the first dream had something to do with the moon being a soap bubble orbited by two smaller moons that deformed its trajectory and affected our oceans. Hair polish refers to a dream in which I invented a product certain to revolutionize the cosmetics industry and make me wealthy: nail polish applied to long hair, making it sparkly and crunchy. As for the third? No idea. The mind boggles. I confess to feeling frightened.
Sunday, September 5, 2010
Stalkers and roommates
There's an absolutely hysterical youtube video of a cat stalking a cameraperson. The videographer is hiding behind a partition and playing peek-a-boo with a cat at the end of a hallway. Every time the camera emerges to film the cat, it is stock still; then the camera retreats. A moment later when the camera "peers" around the corner, the cat is again absolutely stationary but noticeably closer, until in the last frame, the cat's face takes up the entire field of view. It is a brilliant piece of amateur horror comedy.
I am a morning person. Usually in the morning, I come instantly awake. But I was up till 2am at work and today I am like a tired engine, coming to life in fits and starts.
And so, this was my morning: the first time I open my eyes, my cat is about a foot away. Close my eyes for a second, open them: cat is closer, her body pressed flat into the covers, looking right at me. Rinse and repeat about four times, and suddenly her eyes are as huge as the sun would be on your forward moniter if you were flying your spaceship right into it. Also she drools when she's happy and a rather sizable droplet has accumulated on her chin; the flap of a butterfly wing would bring it down. I manage to ninja manoeuver out of the way just in time, but my pillow does not escape. She buries her face in it. In the one tenth of a second before I can karate chop her from the bed, her super powers of happy drooling have left a three inch ring of liquid on the pillowcase.
Now I am awake, but still not alert, and grouchy as hell - which is also unusual; as I said, generally I am a morning person and annoyingly chirpy on first rising.
And then I remember my dream.
I am driving home to a townhouse after a hard night's drinking at the salsa clubs with my queer dancing girl homies. One of them, a super sweet soft butch is too drunk to get home so I have invited her to sleep on the couch.
I lead her in through the tiny garage, and by the time I cross the threshold, my dream has decided I have two roommates, one good and coincidentally hot, and one evil and also coincidentally a guy. The hot femme sleeps upstairs in a giant bed with her parents, a la Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The guy is still out carousing.
I decide to give my friend - whom I will call Sophie out of sheer bloody-mindedness, since in reality she has a far more appropriate and gender neutral name - my bed. I get into bed with the hot girl and her parents, all of us naked as the day we were born, and it is sweet and erotic and awkward and totally dream-normal. I end up sandwiched between my roomate and her mother, with my legs draped across her mom's legs, which elicits a sigh of happiness from mom. Apparently I have feng shuied her into a very difficult-to-achieve uber zen sleeping position. Eventually I roll over to spoon my roommate, who I should mention at this point is rather straight, and fall asleep somewhat sexually frustrated but still pleasantly curled around her.
I wake up alone, in the sort of misanthropic mood you might find yourself in if you had been drinking too much the night before and then did not have sex with the naked femme in your bed or, more to the point, with the even hotter actually queer drinking companion who somehow by the power of your own drunk-logic ended up sleeping alone. Sophie, the aforementioned hot drinking companion, is gone. I wander groggily into my kitchen, to find a man peering in through the sliding glass door, which is fortunately covered with a sheer shade that just might be enough to make someone uncertain whether I am buck naked, and unfortunately, unlocked .
Shriek, run to the door handle and push the latch down, while this man knocks, gestures and calls to me in Spanish. I turn to go into the living room and see a very short, very muscular man with no neck and a six-pack in one hand; with his other hand he is jiggling the knob at the screen door, trying to get in. The main door is swung wide open, and there is no shade, sheer or otherwise, to cast doubt on my state of undress. I run upstairs to the sound of catcalls and put on floor clothes, not even sure they are mine.
When I come back downstairs there is a party in full swing in my living room; the stereo is on, at a volume not at all friendly to the recently hungover, seven people are draped on various pieces of furniture holding beer cans, and while many of them admittedly are girls, mostly nerdy and unthreatening, I am 93% sure I know absolutely none of them.
I ask the crowd if I've met any of them before and this girl with horn-rimmed glasses and a waist-length ponytail of thick shiny black hair raises her hand urgently like a fourth grader with the solution to today's algebra problem. Yes? I say. Miriam she says, smiling and blushing. We met last month at Jay's law school party. Now I do remember her; I relax just a millimeter. This is followed by a wave of escalating irritation. At 830 on a Sunday morning, my evil roommate aka Jay aka the budding lawyer has brought over his law school buddies to "study" over beer and the learning-friendly sounds of Hole and Rage Against the Machine.
Jay, of course, is nowhere in sight.
I go into the kitchen to make eggs.
And wake to the feline version of Jaws.
Watch the youtube clip of Cat-stalking-camera here and if you are hungover and despondent, perhaps it will brighten your day. More likely you will just be spitefully glad that someone else is up at this time of day feeling as much like ass as you.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uo0F1YEYU1U
I am a morning person. Usually in the morning, I come instantly awake. But I was up till 2am at work and today I am like a tired engine, coming to life in fits and starts.
And so, this was my morning: the first time I open my eyes, my cat is about a foot away. Close my eyes for a second, open them: cat is closer, her body pressed flat into the covers, looking right at me. Rinse and repeat about four times, and suddenly her eyes are as huge as the sun would be on your forward moniter if you were flying your spaceship right into it. Also she drools when she's happy and a rather sizable droplet has accumulated on her chin; the flap of a butterfly wing would bring it down. I manage to ninja manoeuver out of the way just in time, but my pillow does not escape. She buries her face in it. In the one tenth of a second before I can karate chop her from the bed, her super powers of happy drooling have left a three inch ring of liquid on the pillowcase.
Now I am awake, but still not alert, and grouchy as hell - which is also unusual; as I said, generally I am a morning person and annoyingly chirpy on first rising.
And then I remember my dream.
I am driving home to a townhouse after a hard night's drinking at the salsa clubs with my queer dancing girl homies. One of them, a super sweet soft butch is too drunk to get home so I have invited her to sleep on the couch.
I lead her in through the tiny garage, and by the time I cross the threshold, my dream has decided I have two roommates, one good and coincidentally hot, and one evil and also coincidentally a guy. The hot femme sleeps upstairs in a giant bed with her parents, a la Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The guy is still out carousing.
I decide to give my friend - whom I will call Sophie out of sheer bloody-mindedness, since in reality she has a far more appropriate and gender neutral name - my bed. I get into bed with the hot girl and her parents, all of us naked as the day we were born, and it is sweet and erotic and awkward and totally dream-normal. I end up sandwiched between my roomate and her mother, with my legs draped across her mom's legs, which elicits a sigh of happiness from mom. Apparently I have feng shuied her into a very difficult-to-achieve uber zen sleeping position. Eventually I roll over to spoon my roommate, who I should mention at this point is rather straight, and fall asleep somewhat sexually frustrated but still pleasantly curled around her.
I wake up alone, in the sort of misanthropic mood you might find yourself in if you had been drinking too much the night before and then did not have sex with the naked femme in your bed or, more to the point, with the even hotter actually queer drinking companion who somehow by the power of your own drunk-logic ended up sleeping alone. Sophie, the aforementioned hot drinking companion, is gone. I wander groggily into my kitchen, to find a man peering in through the sliding glass door, which is fortunately covered with a sheer shade that just might be enough to make someone uncertain whether I am buck naked, and unfortunately, unlocked .
Shriek, run to the door handle and push the latch down, while this man knocks, gestures and calls to me in Spanish. I turn to go into the living room and see a very short, very muscular man with no neck and a six-pack in one hand; with his other hand he is jiggling the knob at the screen door, trying to get in. The main door is swung wide open, and there is no shade, sheer or otherwise, to cast doubt on my state of undress. I run upstairs to the sound of catcalls and put on floor clothes, not even sure they are mine.
When I come back downstairs there is a party in full swing in my living room; the stereo is on, at a volume not at all friendly to the recently hungover, seven people are draped on various pieces of furniture holding beer cans, and while many of them admittedly are girls, mostly nerdy and unthreatening, I am 93% sure I know absolutely none of them.
I ask the crowd if I've met any of them before and this girl with horn-rimmed glasses and a waist-length ponytail of thick shiny black hair raises her hand urgently like a fourth grader with the solution to today's algebra problem. Yes? I say. Miriam she says, smiling and blushing. We met last month at Jay's law school party. Now I do remember her; I relax just a millimeter. This is followed by a wave of escalating irritation. At 830 on a Sunday morning, my evil roommate aka Jay aka the budding lawyer has brought over his law school buddies to "study" over beer and the learning-friendly sounds of Hole and Rage Against the Machine.
Jay, of course, is nowhere in sight.
I go into the kitchen to make eggs.
And wake to the feline version of Jaws.
Watch the youtube clip of Cat-stalking-camera here and if you are hungover and despondent, perhaps it will brighten your day. More likely you will just be spitefully glad that someone else is up at this time of day feeling as much like ass as you.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uo0F1YEYU1U
Why???
I like writing but I am really only motivated to do it in the morning, when my internal critic is too slow and sleepy to stop me. And I have dreams that variously entertain, puzzle or frighten my friends. It seems a shame to waste this obvious peanut butter and chocolate opportunity.
Traditional elaborate justification for existence of blog is now over. Let the Reese's peanut butter cup dreaming begin!!
Traditional elaborate justification for existence of blog is now over. Let the Reese's peanut butter cup dreaming begin!!
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