Haunted

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?"

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.

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.