June 7, 2016

A throwback from fb, 2016:

"Celebrity dreams are the best! Last night I dreamed that Chris Isaak tried to get me to wear clown shoes and bumblebee antennae on the stage. I told his roadies "I wear street shoes on the stage and clown shoes on the street!! I'm a MUSICIAN, motherfucker!!!" Please vote today, everyone."

Anxiety Dreams

I had an interesting chat with my soon to be former therapist this week about my anxiety dreams. I didn't tell him about all of my scenarios, but they usually have this setting:

College, version 1. A combination of my high school (1960s concrete) and my junior college (1970s wood). I have a class I need to pass in order to get my degree. I have taken several incompletes in this class over the past few years. I really want to not let myself down again. I don't know where the class meets. I desperately search for a place where I can find the course catalog so I can find the classroom and attend.

I attribute that one to the shame I feel about my undergrad days where I totally procrastinated, took incompletes in classes and had to make them up a year later and was a terrible student. 

College, version 2. Takes place on the UC Berkeley campus, and the sociology class I have not attended all semester is in Dwinelle Hall, a building that looks normal on the outside but is notoriously confusing to navigate. I want to find the classroom and start attending the class, but rather than look for information about what room I'm supposed to be in, I think it's reasonable to just wander the halls and see if I can recognize my class through an open door in a hallway. I do not. I feel terrible that I've procrastinated on such complex material, because I probably won't be able to bullshit my way through the final with my good writing skills.

I attribute this one to shame I feel about basically bs-ing my way through life. Why is it always Sociology? I never had to take Sociology for any of my degrees. Also I did my penance, went to graduate school and was mostly an A student (I got an A- in Reference, of all things. Still bothers me). Why can't I forgive myself?

Restaurant. I still work on Sundays for my old employer. Everything in the back of the restaurant is totally disorganized, so nothing is findable. The restaurant fills quickly, and I'm still looking for matching water glasses long after I should have been taking orders in my section. Everyone pitches in to help me but I'm not really a full team player. I get blazingly mad about not being able to find stuff. I'm searching in the basement which seems more like a sewer than a basement, but there are folks cooking down there.

Family vacation. I'm putting away dishes in the kitchen of our rental house (this is a customary scenario) and Chevy Chase comes in (a first, just the other night!). He's a real asshole, but I guess he's a friend of some other family member and was invited on vacation. He starts giving me a hard time about the kind of therapy I'm receiving -- he uses big words and tells me that people who do "x" kind of therapy are jerks.

So ends my short list of anxiety dreams. I really just wanted to mark the occasion of the Chevy Chase dream (what an unwelcome element!), but there you go.

Undressing the Orange

This weekend I did not see my mom. And it felt great. Yesterday I returned a piece of broken furniture at FedEx (ours -- Wayfair -- say no more) and tried to get a lamp fixed (mom's) and I learned that the wonderful woman who repaired lamps has closed her shop. I am grateful for all of the lamps that she refurbished in the last year. And her niece's haunting cd that I purchased after listening to it waiting in line in the store. 

Instead of fixing the lamp I asked my sister if she wanted to go to breakfast (she was at mom's). And we had a really nice time catching up and talking about some things that didn't involve mom. And then I bought groceries and slept on the sofa and it was great. 

Today I attended the monthly writer's hangout where everybody is mostly much older than I am (how is this possible?) and the prompt was based on a woman's poem and was to start "I have a friend who...". The person who wrote the original poem apparently said that she had a friend who was 18 years old before she had undressed an orange in public.

That may be one of the best things I've heard in months.

One of the best dreams I've had in months involved Jimmy Carter who, as we know, is in hospice right now. I dreamed that I dropped in on his house in Plains, Georgia, and there was a houseful of friends and family tending to him. It was very casual -- a shoes-off sort of house with laundry to be folded strewn about and people puttering around making food. I slipped under the sheets with Jimmy Carter and comforted him, patting his skinny arm. The interior walls were paneled and lightly whitewashed. I kept asking if I'd come at a bad time and the people in the house seemed to think it was all pretty normal.

I hope you're doing ok in your journey, Jimmy Carter.