In My Dreams

I didn't realize that a urinary tract infection could wipe you out.   But then I've never been this old before, and the last one I had was 30 years ago.   This afternoon, I decided I needed a real nap and so went into the living room and lay down on the couch, under Polly (who was very confused that we were doing this when it was still light out)

The sun streamed through the window and it felt so good lying there warmed by the sun.

I fell asleep almost instantly and woke up about an hour and a half later.  While asleep, I had a bizarre dream.  Walt and I were with my mother....somewhere.  I don't know where.  But it was her birthday and I told her we'd take her out for a Mexican dinner.  

The restaurant had been a sit-down place,but was now a fast food place.  We went to the counter and ordered our food and when we got to the table, I realized that we had my mother's food, but not mine.  I also wanted chips and guacamole, so I went back to let the counter person know that I had not received my meal and also to order chips and guacamole. 

She re-ordered my meal and gave me this tiny packet of guacamole and no chips.  I was commenting on how the quality of food had gone way down since the restaurant had become a fast food joint.

Suddenly Walt and I were somewhere else...it was a subplot of the dream, but I can't remember it now, but we then realized we had left my mother at the restaurant and returned for her.  We knew she had no money and didn't know where she was.

We found her sitting by a pool next to the restaurant,  I asked what had happened to our dinners and she said they had thrown them away.  I was very upset because I was looking forward to Mexican food, which is my favorite.

Next it was a new dream and I was home.  There had been a second mail delivery, a package from one of our foreign students who had sent me two packages of chocolates, but the packages were torn open and they were spilling out.  Polly managed to get through the front gate and was eating them as they fell on the ground.

Now.  I have been on this Diabetes eating plan for three days now.  Today I fixed myself oatmeal for breakfast.  The oatmeal was from a box that is probably several years old and the result was inedible, so I pretty much skipped breakfast.

I somehow don't think it takes any sort of a degree in to analyze my dreams this afternoon!  Oh it's going to be a long life....

Can of Worms

I took a nap this afternoon.  

It was around 3:30 when I realized I was going to review a play by Federico Garcia Lorca, "the most important Spanish poet and dramatist of the twentieth century."  (Quite a hefty title since the man died in 1936...no more important poets and dramatists to come out of Spain in the last 60 years of the 20th century?)

This is the kind of play that makes me cringe under the weight of my inadequacies.  I'm always terribly intimidated by my colleague, Jeff, who has been reviewing plays since he was in knee pants and drives hither and yon to catch any interesting play he can.  Thus, he told me that he was happy this play was coming because "he rarely gets an opportunity to see Lorca these days."

I had never heard of Lorca.  However that has never stopped me from reviewing plays before. One has to see ones "first" whatever at some time, and OK, so I'm seeing my first Lorca at age 69, not as a young cub just out of college.

But to review a show like this I had to prepare and think and figure out all the little themes and hidden messages.  The Music Man it ain't.

So I have to go to a show like that with as much sleep under my belt as possible, and since Sheila had me up at 5 a.m., I knew that I needed to take a nap.

I turned on MSNBC, which I was pretty sure would put me to sleep (and I was right). I slept about an hour and a half, through the end of Al Sharpton and through just about all of Chris Matthews (I always feel it's much better to sleep through the histrionics of Matthews than to actually watch them).

I was so deeply asleep, however, that I was having a very vivid dream.  I dreamed that we had taken in a new foster puppy and that they told me the puppy had worms and had brought medicine for him.  But after whoever dropped him off left, I looked at my feet and realized that the floor in the kitchen and in the family room was covered in long, narrow, translucent, wiggling worms.  There was nowhere to step where you were not stepping on worms and even the dogs were recoiling (pun intended) in horror at the plague around them.  It was worse than the night Walt and I spent at our friend Mike's house in Hawaii when the carpet in the guest bedroom was covered in red ants.

I awoke from the dream, and glanced carefully at the floor before I got ready to stand up.  But it was 5 p.m. and The Ed Show, which I never watch had just started and I was mesmerized by the information that he was sharing.   Apparently as John Boehner and his cronies prepared to bring yet another bill on contraception to the house floor, a dozen congresswomen sent the Speaker a letter asking him to reconsider his plan. "Women have had enough," they said, adding "It's time for you to put an end to the attack on women's health care and to work with the Senate to get back to the American people's top priority: creating jobs and boosting our economy."

Ed Schulz was also talking about the action in the birth control arena across the country this year and said that in states across this country, 1,100 contraception and/or abortion bills have been discussed and voted on. 

At a time when we are trying to deal with so many problems in this country, it seems that women's health care and reproductive rights have become the most important item discussed in any Republican controlled congress all across the country, the party of "smaller government."

As I listened to the statics roll out, I checked the floor again.   I wasn't so sure that big can of worms was all just a bad dream after all...

Daymares

Oh lord, was it a bad afternoon!

The puppy has decided that she must join the "pack" and now that she doesn't eat me alive every time she gets into my lap, I've been letting her sleep in my lap at night with the other two little dogs and I guess I'm just not sleeping well at night.

I was so exhausted after the matinee yesterday that I was falling asleep at 7 p.m. I forced myself to stay up for awhile and then settled in to sleep, covered with dogs. I desperately wanted to stretch out on the couch and I just couldn't bring myself to sleep on the couch that "he" had slept on the other night, so I slept under all the dogs after all.

This afternoon, I settled down to clear away some stuff on the DVR and fell into a deep sleep, riddled with dreams.

First I heard a commotion and went to the door to peek out, then I opened the door to find a large family in my driveway, the oldest man looking like my intruder of the other night, but older. They seemed to be a foreign family. Turkish, maybe. They were there with a big truck and tools. They had decided to clean up my house and yard. Nobody would tell me why, or who they were, but I assumed it was to make up for the actions of the guy who broke in. I tried to get the mother to tell me who they were, but she only smiled enigmatically. I was spending all my time trying to keep them out of the house as they tried to slip through the back gate, opened the garage, and opened the front door which, surprisingly, didn't make the dogs run out.

I was relieved when Walt was suddenly home and we barricaded ourselves in the house, but the house was like a mansion with very tall white walls. We locked a gold chain lock prominently placed on the front door.

Then the dream switched to the Capitol building in Washington, DC, where I was taking a tour with friends. There was Mary from the Netstock group, with her daughter (who is now a teenager, but who was a toddler in the dream), and my grammar school friends Lois and Maureen, my mother, and some other people. I remember that I was wandering around what was like a rummage sale being held there to demonstrate the downturn in the economy.

At some point I got lost from the group and kept trying to call my cousin Peach, who was apparently part of the group. I finally caught up with them, and we all got on a bus together. I took some photos, using my telephoto lens to take pictures of Lois and Maureen, with whom I had not yet spoken and they apparently became upset and disappeared.

Just before I woke up, I was trying to take a picture of Mary's little daughter.

I haven't had such vivid dreams in I can't tell you how long.

While I was busy with my daymares, the puppy was busy with my cell phone, which I'd left on the table beside me, when I sat down to watch TV.

I went out this afternoon to get a replacement cell phone holder at my local Verizon store and ran into a good deal.

Seems they are having a BOGO (buy one, get one free) sale, so if you buy an accessory, like a cell phone holder, you can get either a car charger or a charger for your house. Only I don't need either of those things, so one guy suggested I get a second cell phone holder in case a puppy got to the new one, since it would be free.

So I left Verizon armed with two brand new cell phone holders, and the next time a puppy decides to teeth on the one I'm using I'm already all set.

Sometimes you wake up to good things.

---

(Incidentally, the video of the day was really recorded for the sound...it's what goes on here about once a day or so, whenever a siren sounds in the distance.)

Tell the Chinese Guy I'm Sorry

I have said for years that one of my big disappointments is that I don't dream. My sleeping habits have been so poor for so long that I know that either I don't get deeply enough asleep to dream, or I don't remember my dreams. In any event, I have always felt that I was missing out on some fun stuff.

Last night I woke up at 2 a.m. This wasn't the dogs' fault this time, it was the fault of my bladder. I fully expected to go right back to sleep, as I did the night before, but I didn't. The dogs were very cooperative and no problem at all, but I just simply could not go back to sleep.

I tried watching a movie that I knew well, figuring I would doze off, but I didn't. I finally got up at 5 a.m. and did some stuff on the computer for awhile, but around 5:30 was feeling sleepy, so I decided to try getting a little sleep again.

Walt came downstairs around 6:30 and the noise of the dogs greeting him woke me up, so my dream took place within an hour and it is so crystal clear in my mind (and since I so rarely dream!), I decided to share it.

I was depressed and decided to go for a drive. I was driving a car along a path that got more and more narrow until it finally abruptly disappeared and the car rolled off and into water. The car was immersed and I had two things that I needed to do--I had to get Ned (who somehow was strapped in the back seat) and my purse (with my camera in it) out quickly. I managed to get out of the car and dove down under the water to unstrap Ned and get him out, and I grabbed my purse and tossed it up on a rock nearby (miraculously it was still dry inside). The car and I were stuck in the water when a Chinese guy came down to the edge, very angry with me because apparently the water was in the middle of his restaurant and he kept telling me that I had to get out because I was on private property. I kept trying to explain that I had had an auto accident but he just yelled that he didn't care, I was on his private property and I needed to get out.

I was standing in the water and checked my cell phone and discovered that it still worked, but the SIM card had been erased, so I had lost all the information stored in it, and couldn't call AAA to come and get the car out of the water. The Chinese guy continued to yell at me as customers arrived at the restaurant.

I finally did manage to get hold of AAA, but the call was dropped before I could give them my location.

Somehow I was now inside the restaurant. The Psychiatrist and his wife arrived and I was chatting with them while they were waiting to be seated and telling them about a birthday party that we want his bluegrass group to play for.

I was still trying to get back to AAA when I realized that the nubby rubber cover to my cell phone was broken and so I was also trying to find a new cover for the phone and trying to call the number of the company, which was printed on the rubber cover itself.

Somehow I wandered to the house next door to the restaurant and rang the doorbell. Apparently Jon Voigt lived there. When he didn't answer the door, I wandered in as if we were long time friends and plopped down on the couch and asked if I could use his telephone book to look up the number of AAA. He started coming on to me, which made me very angry so I got up and left to return to the restaurant.

I went in the back door and through the kitchen and then wandered through the restaurant looking for The Psychiatrist to continue our conversation. I realized that one room was full of only gay men and the other room was full of heterosexual couples and thought it odd that they divided the restaurant into gay and straight.

I think that was about when I heard Walt coming downstairs. As far as I know the car is still stuck in the water outside the restaurant and the Chinese guy is still angry with me! And I don't have a clue what happened to Ned. Or Jon Voigt either, for that matter.

Good Morning!

Well, it's 6 a.m. and I'm finally rested and awake and ready to tackle writing a journal entry.

Last night was really weird. I just couldn't keep my eyes opened. I missed the end of Lost. Thank goodness for our DVR. It's hard enough to keep up when you watch it week to week, but to skip a week is unthinkable.

I'm not sure why I was so sleepy,but it probably had something to do with the murder I committed that morning. You see, I killed myself. It was this very weird dream where I was slowly smothering myself to death, holding my hands over my mouth and pinching my nose closed. Somehow I was in one body and I was also in this green body that I was killing.

There might be something deeply psychological in all of that, but I figured out what ws going on when I woke up and couldn't breathe. I thought it might be springtime allergies (sorry, all you snow folks, but we have blossoms starting to pop out around here --

-- Punxsutawney Phil's California cousin apparently didn't see his shadow around here.)

But by the end of the day there was a cough starting too, so I still don't know if this is allergies or not, but it did at least explain why I dreamed I was suffocating.

The murder happened around 4 a.m. and somehow once you've been killed at 4 a.m., it's difficult to get back to sleep, so I got up to start working on my article, which was due today. I worked on it off and on all day and finally finished it up this morning. Almost exactly a year ago, the editor asked us to take a 50% pay cut for these articles, saying that she was sure the economy was going to pick up and she would be able to restore our full salaries within a year. Well, we all know how that economic "upturn" went. We are apparently going to be getting a note from her soon about salary, but I'm not expecting to be getting a return to my old salary.

So let's look at how much time it took me to write this article. I spent an hour interviewing the director, I went to rehearsal for an hour and a half and interviewed several of the actors, it took me a day to transcribe all of the interviews (of course if I could take better notes I wouldn't have to do that, but I take rotten notes and must rely on a recording). And then writing the article itself, with lots and lots of interruptions, took the better part of a day.

My salary at the end, when it's published? $25. I'm half-way expecting to be asked to pay for the privilege of having my stuff published next year!

Peggy asks me why I do it, and I guess I do it because I like the writing. I like meeting the people that I interview. I always go through the tortures of the damned, afraid I'm going to sound like an imbecile (and sometimes when I play back the recordings, I do!) but it's my creative outlet ... and then, of course, there are all those free tickets to all those stage shows.

So I'd probably do it for the fun of doing it, without being paid at all, but I'm glad that at least I get something for it.

One thing I did yesterday that had nothing to do with work was to take time out to watch an old movie, Interrupted Melody, the story of Australian soprano Marjorie Lawrence. It starred Eleanor Parker and Glen Ford and I remember loving that movie when I was a kid. It made me want to sing opera and I skreetched songs at top volume each night when I was washing the dishes until my mother begged me to stop singing.

I had never seen the movie shown on TV before, and had tried once to get a DVD, but it hasn't come out on DVD (though there is a VHS version, apparently). I still enjoyed the story, though overly sentimental, of this young Australian girl who made it to the top of her field and then had her career cut short by polio. I probably saw the movie during the height of my hypochondriac period, when I was convinced I was going to get polio and perhaps that was one reason it had such an effect on me.

I had to laugh at the start of the movie, which opens on a sheep ranch in Australia. There is the mother, the father, two brothers and Marjorie and all of them have different accents, only one of which seems to be someone trying to use an Australian accent. Eleanor Parker doesn't even try changing her American accent.

But it was fun seeing it again and I still enjoyed it, for all of its typical 1950s feel.

Today I have to get caught up on Lost and everything else I missed while dozing last night, as well as put together a "boef en daube" for our French dinner tomorrow night.