Sleeping Life

It's been a week (a month?) of dramatic dreams for me - the semi-annual nightmare I have about being many months pregnant, but only just realizing it; several dreams about my dead grandmother, including one entailing an ill-fated trip to Arizona to visit her; and one about being thwarted in my efforts to body surf with African penguins by a wall of water... My dreams have this heavy, significant quality right now, like my subconscious is pointedly saturating them with highlighter. But while I typically have a pretty sophisticated knack for dream analysis if I do say so myself, lately I feel like something's broiling just below my consciousness' line of sight and I'm not sure what it is. I definitely have that "in the mix" feeling that I so love to pursue in my life right now... Am I on the verge of some stunning metamorphosis? Or another crash? (Or nothing at all?)

Waiting for the world to change

Last night, I undertipped my cap driver by a dollar, then burst into tears when I walked into my apartment building because I felt so guilty about it. (To be fair, it was 2:30 in the morning and I was kind of delirious). I feel like, lately, I'm in a constant battle with myself between living from a place of openness or defensiveness. I guess this weekend was a lesson in the former - both Cindy and Doug bought a meal for me, they accompanied me on a rather epic journey in pursuit of a Crazy Creek, and, I don't know, just in general, acquainted me with some of the little human kindnesses that are possible. They usually do. And I feel really lucky to know them.
And listening to NPR on my 1,000 hour drive was kind of inspiring, too - I mean, all of the things in the world to try and to learn about - spices from Zanzibar and parrots from California and Dick Cheney...

Coming back

In the laundry room on the first floor of my building, inexplicably, the light is always left on, in spite of the fact that the room spends only a small minority of its time actually occupied by laundry-doers. It's become a near compulsion of mine, over the last two years, to walk by the room and flip the light off as I'm, say, taking out my trash. Then last week, it happened. Our management company took the light switch out so that pesky apartment building dwellers such as myself could not save them money, as well as the foster the well-being of Mother Earth herself, by turning off the light. (And I wonder why "drill, baby, drill" is considered a legitimate campaign slogan. Argh). The switch, if you're wondering, was replaced by a rectangle of beige plastic.
But more to the point, or, I guess I mean to say, to make the opposite point, I have a feeling lately that things are coming back. The plant I'd pretty much resigned myself to watching die slowly over the last six months just sprouted two beautiful new shoots. Little snippets of human connection are popping up here and there throughout my week. In general, I feel my hopefulness and sense of humor returning. A friend told me today that he's a pessimist about the small things and an optimist about the big ones. Maybe I'm the opposite. And breaking down my big picture doubts into little picture certainties has helped ground me a bit more this week. So... onward.

As I was when I was six years old

My trip to the grocery store today was partially an excuse to be outside in the rain. The water on Kalorama came up to my ankles; I was immediately drenched, delighted. I don't know if my love for dramatic weather started in Australia, when the rain would turn the dirt paths to rivers in seconds and I would stare out the screen windows practically giggling with amazement, or whether it started further back... I can't remember when anything started lately. I have this urge to know which characteristics are current personality fads and which are my essence, my soul. I've tried to piece it together from my old journals, conversations with long-time friends, even a movie Eryk said reminded him of me.
Today I finished Atmospheric Disturbances. From the book: "...whenever I feel sad, the sad feeling tends to manifest in my seeing humans (myself included) as orangutans. A human ordering coffee, a human offended when someone cuts in line, a human sprinting to refill a parking meter - in my moods all those people are orangutans... it makes all the humans (with their loves, their hates, their haircuts, their beloved unconsciouses) seem sublimely ridiculous".