| dream blog to the stars | Q2 & Q3 Blog |
I've been dreaming a lot lately, but not recording them. I don't understand the program in my head, the architect that comes up with this stuff. This morning after I showered I fell asleep again and dreamed that I was with my mother and we were visited by a blonde woman, giving off the aura of some kind of aunt, and her teenage daughter. They sat at the kitchen table. I was dressed, I think, in just a robe. My mother worked at the stove as the two women sat around the corner. I kept asking who they were and she kept shushing me. I tried to gesture her to leave the kitchen but she wouldn't. Finally I said loudly, "Mother, I need to see you in the bathroom about an emergency."
She finally came off to the side for a minute and told me things I can't entirely remember, but I'm pretty sure she imparted that this aunt of mine was a Mafia bigwig--very Carmela Soprano crossed with my Aunt Lydia. Amazed, I went off to clean my room and put away my laundry, somehow feeling I needed to present a tidy front to this Mafia donness. It was my old room on C. Drive. The stacks of laundry contained brown folded towels mixed in with my stuff, which I recognized as not mine. A sheer orange top hung in my closet with a yellow, knitted pullover. Many loose socks. I was industriously cleaning when my aunt came in.
She had a newspaper, an odd one, sort of a print-out of recent, itemized minutiae concerning small localities of Maine, perhaps garnered online and involving some online activities (e.g., scheduled irc chats about Wiscasset). She gave this to me to read, to show me something significant. I read print so tiny it hurt my eyes--4pt, maybe. I read the minutiae and tried to pick out what was significant--was it that record of a recent birth in Bath? Was it a recent birth? Was it my birth? Was this mafia princess my real mother? She seemed to be making that point. But when I asked, she pointed out instead--and now mind pictures told the story--something about a unicorn (actually some other mythical, white, innocent hoofed creature of a different name) coming up out of the surf on a beach, and I saw my aunt's battered car driving mundanely out of the water onto a sandy band of beach in some backwater, near a salty wooden store of some kind.
Then we were outside some kind of Chinese restaurant. My aunt was preparing to leave with her daughter. While her daughter puttered, my aunt took a handful of snowy, wet skiing equipment, including boots. In the car next to hers--which at first I also took for hers--there was a strong fire burning in the back, a bed of hot coals. I didn't know why it didn't set the car on fire, and glanced to see the condition of the roof inside. My aunt dried the ski equipment by pressing it all against the fire, once, quickly. The boots came back dry. During all this she was telling me how she'd taken care of the unicorn, or it had taken care of her, and now it was time to pass the favor on--"pay it forward" so to speak--which I took to mean she wanted to help me. Actually the details and the symbolism was not quite so clear from our conversation, but I thought I got the gist. I was out of control, she said. I thought of my boring, sedate life and said, "I'm not really, actually." In comparison to who? Teens on drugs? Zen masters? What had my mom told her?
It turned out the car was not a car but a window, and the proprietor of the Chinese restaurant flipped a switch that put out the fire. He assured us he'd be there for five more minutes and it would be out before he left. We walked away from his place, across a wooden deck in front of a building that was renting for $11, so said a big white sign hung between the porch pillars.
Soon after that I woke up, and as usual I have no idea what it means--the whole birth question is of course a cryptic scenario. But what confuses me more are the drying boots, the eleven-dollar rental, the orange top whose precise decor I've never seen in real life but can recollect from the dream. Why these details? What am I trying to tell myself?
I am still not reading my e-mail, and have been erratic in all things since September 11. Today my chief goal is to drive to the neighborhood of Greenlake and drink coffee. Which I'm off to do right now.
posted 9.30.2001 @ 12:25 pm
Sandy pointed out to me that my famous last words were essentially, "I never thought I'd use my digital cable this much...." And that was two months ago. Since then I've been on a summer hiatus, an estivation. A gafiation, really, from online life, the stresses of which had been kind of getting to me. In my virtual absence, I lolled, I parachuted into the jungles of television, I worked and came home and lolled some more. I've withheld updates on my white-collar angst, my climb out of subequatorial depression, The Attack of the Giant Hand-Sized Spider, the dream I had about being my grandmother's slave, my wild girly-girl shopping frenzies (nail polish, glitter nail polish, bubble bath), my reclamation of zen through housecleaning, the shredding of a few more reams of my history in paper, my raves about Memento, and so on. Not a great loss to the world of navel-gazing, I'm thinking.
I updated my page on serial-killer movies during the last few days, and that's about it. Haven't been writing or updating recs, haven't been answering my e-mail--or even reading it--and am beginning to wonder if I ever will. Have been painting my toenails.
Oh yeah, I've also net-published Sex, my contribution to the Sentinel zine Crossroads. By net-published, I mean that I have publicized the link to the original version that I've had stashed away all this time. I truly can't recall if it's the same, edited version that was in the zine. But even if not, it's not very different.
I'm off to the real world, again. Good-night.
posted 8.26.2001 @ 7:37 pm
I thought, with digital cable, that
I'd only watch one new show, maybe two. I said to people: "That little
info bar along the bottom is really annoying." But this past weekend I
plunged into a frenzy of channel-surfing. I can't remember when I've wasted
so much fucking time. I lay on my couch and zapped from channel to channel--Sundance,
IFC, Showtime, Encore--watching inane movies, or parts of them, sometimes
too ennervated to even get up and snack. And I now obsessively use the
info bar to read the synopsis of whatever I'm watching, to scout for something
better, to see what's going to be on in two hours, four hours, six hours....
Usually, my experience of time is
this: a bombardment of dense variegated stimuli gives me a sense of attenuated
time, of high intensity. You'd think that when I write, I'd be experiencing
intense time. But it's not, usually--usually, time passes all too quickly.
Watching TV, now, that should make me feel like I've wasted a day. And
it does--but on the other hand, this weekend passed very slowly, in that
attenuated way. I was deeply conscious of my time wasting. It was
a higher consciousness of time wasting. I wondered, at one point, how people
do it, people who on a regular basis watch TV for hours at a time, doing
nothing else. I realized that I have lashed myself to the wheel of production.
I have the production ethic--I go to work, I need to be productive or I
feel guilty. I come home, I need to be productive, need to write, to feel
like I'm useful. I don't even read books for hours at a time anymore. That
may be due to some other cause, though. I may simply have some kind of
ADD, the consequence of computer addiction.
I no longer want to kill people. The urge has waned. I just vaguely want to punch them hard.
Link
for the day.
posted 6.19.2001 @
7:01pm
How do the bloggers say it...current mood: psychotic. La la la. I am hating the world and censoring myself from saying all the things I would say, if I were to wallow in my venom, or if I were a more callous sociopath, who didn't give a fuck for what other people thought of her. If I were to burn my bridges.
The hero of the evening is Richard B. Riddick. He may even be too nice a guy for my mood. But I'd still like to be him. To hell with scathing verbosity. I just want to kill people. With my hands.
posted 6.15.2001 @ 10:26pm
Returned to work and had only 2000 messages. Such a...relief. Then, after I'd been there four hours my first day back, they did some electrical work on our floor and when they were done my PC had crashed and burned. I had an old non-PC environment I could use, so I accessed my inbox there on someone's advice, not realizing until it was too late that the old program was no longer networked and I'd just downloaded everything and stranded it in the virtual equivalent of Antarctica. Much fun ensued over the next few days. In fact, I spent about a week catching up on mail. Now other things cry for my attention and I am vaguely cranky. But I like being busy more than I like being bored, so there's that.
I chipped a tooth right before I returned to work, and am still pondering my options.
Found a big spider outside my bathroom today and did not carry it outside in a life-affirming way. (Sorry, Kat.) Instead, sprayed, kleenexed, and flushed it with a sense of panic.
My wrists hurt, and my sprained finger is still weirdly bent and swollen, weeks later. The bottoms of my feet are not adapting to my shoes. My whole body is rebelling in small and cumulatively irritating ways. I need a haircut.
Now that I am done complaining...had a great weekend with Sandy watching the entire first season of Stargate on DVD, at least until Solitudes, when I began to slump drunkenly down towards her lap and mewl with my eyes half closed. The ep was not the cause, just the rum. Otherwise, a lovely time was had, with much eating and drinking and merriment.
I am oddly out of sorts on the whole, but friends are good, and so are imaginary men.
posted 6.12.2001 @ 6:54pm
Took a nap and dreamed that I returned to work and had 9,000 messages in my inbox, including a huge bunch of sent mail that the servers had returned as invalid. Then they moved us to work in another building for some whimsical reason; we went by bus. We bussed outside the city, and the bus stop was not near the building. We were going to the 'Columbia' building. I complained about what the hell we'd do for food--walk back to the city for lunch? The person shepherding us, one of those slim young shiny girls who get promoted before their time, was letting us into the building and getting testy at our questions. There was a shallow entrance foyer and I kept finding myself nose to nose with the doors that she was unlocking, and kept having to move.
The building was largely unused, and we discovered it was a semi-lit warren of corporate meeting and training rooms (pristine carpeting, whiteboards and blackboards, conference tables), none of which had computers, empty of any other people. But then we discovered one room, where there were five computers, maybe. A few of the guys said fuck this, and gathered their things and went home for the day. I wasn't sure if we should go, so I went to a computer and then realized it had no keyboard or mouse, and that I had to partly assemble it from a pile of equipment.
Anxiety as I prepare to work--and in truth, they may move us. Sigh.
Other notes, as they occur to me: Weedy Prick has moved out at last, and with very little noise. I am tentatively looking forward to someone new living above me--here's hoping he or she or they is, is, are not insane, in a noisy way. I've discovered though, that with the turnover, the landlords have upped the rent on an apartment identical to mine by almost $100. This...concerns me, to say the lease. Er, least. My lease is up in October. I am low on money these days. I have a toothache that I ignore because I'm afraid I'll find out I need something expensive, like a root canal. I was going to buy summer clothes this past week (you should see what I'm wearing), but then realized that the take-home from my last paycheck, after rent and bills, was $148. La la la. If I had to move, I'm not sure I could even save up enough money to do it.
I think the guy who said "Money can't buy happiness" was wearing a silk suit and half-drunk at the time, and composed the truism to taunt his waiter, after which he happily stuck a forkful of steak into his mouth, after which I hope he choked.
posted 6.3.2001 @ 12:14am
I dreamed I was Methos, hiding in shrubbery. It was my duty to crouch there, and coincidentally to watch the locals and find out where they lived. A man came up to my uh, bush, and reached in and pulled out a coil of rope I'd made (hello, Freud); he was stretching it across the street to trip people up. He sang very well. I crept out as he was driving off in his dark car; he had a woman with him. Their car stopped, and I ran to escape the woman, who wanted to shoot me, who also sang very well. I floated in the air, and she squinted and shot upwards and tried to hit me. They both did, actually; they both had guns. I went up a tree, and she cannily and relentlessly came after me, shooting.
Eventually I was taken off by the woman to be shot. I was in a school, and we went into an empty classroom. But then, gradually, the person who captured me was no longer this woman, but Spike. He was going to shoot me. Things were looking up. I lay down on the floor to be shot and he began to lose his nerve. He sat down on the floor, and we talked. I went to him on my knees and cuddled him. I think I told him he sang well. I didn't mind dying but I was going to prolong it as long as I could to be with my murderer. I wasn't going to miss out on this opportunity. He was pure beauty, and we did some kissyface stuff. He went for it, and we lay together on the floor; his gun was just sitting there between us and I could have gotten the draw on him but I didn't even try.
And, damn it, there was so much more and I've forgotten. I remember the close angular shape of his head as we sucked face, and his conflictedness and latent generosity, and we may have gone off together in the end, though I clearly remember a point when I was Buffy for a while and realized, in the dream, that next season I really should get it on with Spike. He should be my next new boyfriend.
I could be psychic, you know. It could happen.
I've been vacationing; two more days and then back to work. This only ever confirms that I should live a life of leisure. Or a life of slacker. What did I do? I wrote, and watched rather less Stargate than intended, because I was writing. I did a small mountain of laundry, at which accomplishment I feel pride. I kept taking naps when I wanted to be writing, which annoyed me. I got digital cable and watched my first episode of Stargate in the original. A rerun, but still. No bug! Clear picture! Showtime, baby!
I notice the blog does not get updated as often, when I'm writing elsewhere. No surprise there to me, really, but apologies to anyone who actually has expectations and cares.
I sooooooo do not want to go to work. I hoped last night that the game-prize Pepsi cap on the bottle I'd bought would be the $100,000 one. It wasn't. And how long could I live off that, anyway? Well, maybe I'd like to give it a shot and see. Just pointing this out for the record, you game-prize gods.
posted 6.3.2001 @ 9:44am
Seems to have a lot of guest stars, including that guy from Roswell. But in short, I got to dream of Spike again. Cordelia was a vampire, and then Buffy, and there was this incoherent plot where first Cordelia was being evil, then was helping us save Buffy by getting her in out of the sun. Spike came along, and sat in the living room, and I handed him a tiny kitten that clung to his shirt, and I kissed him on the lips. "I had to do that at least once in my life," I told him. "Give you a kitten and a kiss on the lips." He was very understanding.
I woke up making some joke that I knew would appall the others. "Spike is hungry. Oh, and he likes the kitten."
posted 5.21.2001 @ 8:53am
<anna> Time warp.
<anna> I'm listening to Stevie
Wonder's Musiquarium.
<anna> I listened to this non-stop
when I was thirteen or so and painting my room one summer.
<anna> I painted my walls pink
yellow and blue. I was always up all night.
<anna> I'd walk around the suburbs
for miles and miles.
<anna> Alone at 3:00 AM.
<anna> Back when that was safe.
<anna> The streets were deserted
and eerie.
<anna> I'd pass my old elementary
school, the houses with their blue windows, flickering.
<anna> Quiet, no cars.
<anna> The breeze whispering
in the trees.
* Ces frowns
<Ces> You had adolescence in
a pretty weird novel, there, anna
posted 5.17.2001 @ 11:07pm
Am in that state of weird uncertainty where all my stuff is in various stages of dissection. Story beta-read but not yet revised; story being beta-read, no real feedback yet, me hanging in a limbo of angst; story given to someone to read, because they asked, but then I see them in irc and they say nothing; story finished but I can't tell what manner of beast it is. And so on.
Am pounding Tool and Everclear into my ears tonight, trying to match my psychotic mood. Listening also to Cry Cry Cry and the "O Brother Where Art Thou?" soundtrack. Wacky, whacked. Must listen to Indigo Girls and Bush next to round out the eclectic insanity. Am drinking this horrible swill of Dr. Pepper and spiced rum. Actually, it's beginning to grow on me, which is scary.
"...in casting off my mortal self, maybe all this yearning will go away."
Have worked hard at the office all week. Not long days by the clock--eight hours, or a little over, and that's with me ignoring my legal obligation to take lunch. The days have felt full and long, though. Soon they are going to relocate us all and I'll no probably no longer get to see my favorite baristas every day. I'm glum about it. Depending on where they move us, we may be able to co-exist with the dogs, though. They let dogs roam the home office.
Am remembering when I used to live in the Virginia Blue Ridge, not long before I moved across country--when I was getting itchy and would drive 150 miles round trip to get a latte in Roanoke.
"I'm with everyone and yet not, I'm with everyone and yet not."
Fraser. Fraser. Fraser.
"Where I come from, the challenges are quite different. There are no drug dealers or pimps, and few thieves to bother with. There is only the evironment. And surviving in the face of it is the challenge of the Inuit...."
I am pissing in the stream of consciousness.
Drinking is good. Drinking is wild. Drinking makes you want to walk along the ledge of a building and rattle the pigeons and fly.
Go read Scrabble by Speranza, now.
posted 5.17.2001 @ 10:28pm
I dreamed of the X-Files which is odd, because I'm not watching it. I dreamed I was "Pusher." I'd been a prisoner, and then I pushed my way off a military base. At first, I'd been Krycek, trapped in a cell with a bunch of prisoners. I, Krycek, managed to psychically conjure a red military badge out of thin air, with some effort. (I hadn't realized Krycek was so talented.) Then I hopped in an elevator and bluffed--pushed--my way out, out past the checkpoint, into the parking lot. Convinced everyone I was a fighter pilot but almost got nailed when I failed to salute a general. Finally someone immune to my power noticed me. I got into my dinky grey car and struggled to get the hell out of there.
That's it. That's all I've got.
posted 5.17.2001 @ 9:27am
My dreams have been all over the place these last few days and I only ever remember bits. Dreamed three small boys broke into our store. I discovered them in the bathroom--or, first, I discovered the presence of some shucked clothes in the middle of the floor and a pile of more sodden clothes in the tub, stopping up the water. I called in my parents and when we determined none of us had left the clothes, we began seaching for who had. I swung open a door expecting to find someone, but didn't, and my dad grabbed my arm and told me not to do that again; he was upset, very scared I might open up a door on someone that would shoot me, and told me a story about an incident involving a child-killer who'd gotten away through a tunnel when they tried to nab him. I didn't pay him much attention, and was very aware of not doing so; it bothered me. He actually does seem to care about me, I thought. I could feel his anguish, but I was so used to blowing him off, that I continued to do so.
It turned out the three boys were actually three small bald men from Hollywood, who'd broken in to tell us that our store would have to close. (I do not make this stuff up.) They drove off in a stretch limo, and I asked, "Why did they have to break in to tell us that?" Someone said to me, smiling, "They had a thing for you. They think you're like Tasha Yar, but she never had enough body--you've got more ass." They'd wanted to see me in the shower, the little voyeurs, and in the dream, I was very pleased about this. I went to take my shower, and ogled my assy body in the mirror, preening on my sex appeal. Then there was a long, long, tedious part of the dream where I got in and finally took the shower but kept forgetting to take off certain articles of clothing. I kept showering and then noticing I'd forgotten to remove my pants and shoes, then my shirt, then another set of shirts, and I kept having to restart the water and strip more. Feeling of intense frustration went along with this.
My mom was taking a foreign-language course. We'd been fighting. Something about her locking me out of the "gay" kitchen, so that I couldn't eat the food in there. Brownies, actually. But I got into some part of the kitchen while she was gone--my father was ineffectually administrating the house in her absence--and there was a whole tray of excellent chocolate mousses instead, one or two of which I ate. Is this not a metaphor for something. The "gay kitchen"? The whole food thing? Oh my god.
Also, there was something about cats, as usual. And some West Wing stuff, notably a bunch of scenes that were like something out of Ally McBeal, lots of flirting and kissing. And I thought, in the dream, "I know I'm supposed to like this show, but it seems very inappropriate for the President to be kissing that page in a staff meeting." Female page. Later, I dreamed that CJ (or just the actress in some other vehicle) was trying to seduce a crazy man into having sex. She lay back on the bed with one nipple bared, looking sexy, then we zoom in for a close-up and see she this bizarre FX device strapped to the nipple, with a fake blood-packet and a small, clay demon's eye, which is blinking. I have no idea what she planned to do, but I knew it was going to scare the shit out of the guy, and she'd probably be very sorry to have provoked him. If a guy is susceptible to demon tits, who knows what he'll do. Probably has some psycho-sexual-religio complex. The wingnut would probably shoot her.
I'm glad I'm awake now. Enough of that.
posted 5.14.2001 @ 9:44am
Dreamed I was interviewed by a brash young black comic who lived in my apartment complex. I was in the backseat of a car, lying down, and he came around and asked my name, briefly tried to think of something to ask me, then moved on to the prettier girl in the front seat. She told him he'd done this to her before, she'd been in the audience and he'd teased her. He ignored the remark and kept try to get sexy with her. Then he tried to come up with something funny to say about this clique of strangers walking by. He wasn't a particularly good comic.
The comic got in the car and we drove around a McDonalds, and as we slowly circled in line, I kept craning my head to stare out the window at Kowalski. He was a very young Kowalski, and didn't look much like his self on the show. Still, I had a terrible crush. In the dream, I was not particularly attractive--not considered to be so by the others--but I had a chubby charm and a dark bob parted in the middle like Mary Tyler Moore, and I wore dark-rimmed glasses.
I went to a promotional media office of some kind, with the pretty girl from the car, and a new guy who was our agent. He was an inexperienced agent. This seemed to be his first time representing someone who was going to be in the media. As we entered the office lobby, he picked brochures on agent representation from the caddies. We asked him a question, and he said, "I don't think I'm that kind of an agent." We went to meet with a savvy media woman, who was going to help us establish our account and represent us. The deal was, the client needed an "angel" to represent its products and a bunch of ads would be in magazines, on TV, etc. (In Redbook, I remember in particular.) The angel was supposed to be the pretty girl, but the agent--who was now this slightly neurotic young woman who looked a bit like me--had decided that despite my offbeat looks, I was going to be the angel.
It made for an awkard scene. I stood behind the agent's chair, and the pretty girl stood to one side, and the media woman kept asking questions on the assumption that pretty girl would be the angel, while the agent kept answering slyly in a way that confused everyone. I don't think she ever made it clear that she planned to present me in that role, instead, but she implied it. I wasn't as flattered as I should have been by the idea, and recall exchanging a glance of rolled eyes with the pretty girl, who was not too bright, and more confused than the rest of us, and really not even that pretty, as I noticed now for the first time. Maybe I should be the angel, I thought. But eventually the agent got fed up and left.
So I went to a media party, and stood around with the actors from Roswell drinking and watching the crowd. I was very conscious of thinking, "Hey, everyone's gonna be insanely jealous when they learn I got to hang out with the cast of Roswell; I should write it in my blog." It was kind of sad to wake up later and realize it had just been a dream. Still, here I am. Writing it in my blog. They were fun to hang with, and we dished the dirt on people.
Later there was something about being locked out of a dorm room, and brushing my teeth in a communal sink. I can't recall the details of that, and I'm sure it's really a shame.
I keep waking up at six or seven in the morning, and this would be awesome, except for that I go bed at midnight or one. My internal clock is whacked.
I've just finished my third Stargate story, which is good. Maybe now I'll be able to focus however briefly on updating my webpages, answering e-mail, paying bills. I've been blindered, head down, racing along with the writing. Happy, though, even if nothing else got done. Earlier ones aren't even beta-read and posted yet; haven't had time. Up soon, I hope.
posted 5.13.2001 @ 7:33am
After weeks of not remembering my dreams, I woke up this morning groggy and cognizant. I'd been walking along a street and on the corner were three people pretending to be reporters and trying to talk this guy into going with them to the forest and lighting a bunch of sticks on fire. That is, they were some sort of radical group and wanted to start a forest fire but also wanted it to be a plausible news story for propaganda purposes. So the guy turned them down and I walked by and one of them said something about using a lone, stray female and they grabbed me and dragged me to their car. There were two guys, one girl now, and once they got me in the car, they let her try to handle me. I was conscious of not being a good fighter, but I wrangled with the girl and then started kicking the back of the car seat--every time I did, it slid forward and the driver had a hard time controling the car. Once when we were in a heavy lane of traffic, he barely stopped in time to avoid a pile-up.
We stopped at a gas-station cum garage, and got out. I don't know why we were there. I was with one of the guys, and he was trying to make a call, maybe. We were sort of hanging around the perimeter of the building, and then this guy came out of the garage and leered with some rude comment. A few minutes later, we wandered by this chick who was hanging out for a smoke, leaning against the wall in front of a beauty shop cum drugstore, next to the garage on the same strip. She called my kidnapper 'nigger' and I was appalled on his behalf--he'd been white before but he was black now. She went back inside, and we returned to the garage lobby and my kidnapper wanted to do something--had some plan I don't fathom, and so I went back outside and then into the beauty parlor place. The woman who'd been outside was now behind the counter with a bunch of other people. Her name was Janine, I think. She was black now. Someone called her name and then I called her name and trotted after her, trying to sell her on the idea of going to get a physical.
Once I'd discharged my duty, though, I wound my way back through the store and looked for an alternate exit. I found a set of back stairs and a rear door, which when I went through led up to a small medical office. I went out their front doors without anyone even noticing me, then took off across the nearest lot. I was wearing a white medical jacket and I shed it as I ran, got about twenty or thirty feet then thought, maybe I should go back for that--if they see it there, they'll know I went this way. But I didn't go back. I kept running, rather poorly, past an abandoned apartment building, through empty post-apocalyptic lots, looking back over my shoulder and wondering how far I'd get or if I could catch a ride on the highway, which I was running parallel to.
Then I made myself wake up.
I also dreamed about some asshole whose little girlfriend (or maybe boyfriend) was either seven or thirteen years old--kid wasn't sure, but he looked seven. The asshole kept fucking with me and I wanted to kill him; at one point he grabbed around my throat--hated that. I thought he was going to spit in my drink when I wasn't looking. Later, I took the kid to the supermarket.
posted 5.8.2001 @ 8:33am
Off writing Stargate fiction. And I still am. I have nothing much to say here. It is Sunday and I am listening to Bree Sharp sing about David Duchovny, as I try to drown out the drumming against my ceiling of my evil nemesis, Weedy Prick. As soon as he stops I'll get back to writing.
Cubicleland has emptied--Friday was the last day for most of our department as we close our Seattle office. The last few days were distracting as people said their good-byes and trundled in and out with their belongings--telecommuters bringing in their stuff, floorworkers carrying it out. And now we'll rattle around the emptied floor until we're moved somewhere else more suited to our reduced ranks.
I saw an old woman on the bus yesterday wearing what at first glance looked like a well-used scrubby mop on her head--the sort of material that looks like artificial sheepskin. It was some kind of hat. It bothered quite me a lot.
On my desk at the moment: a bag of sugar worms, a pumice stone, Ben-Gay, a book of poems by Rumi, several CDs, a large box of matches I don't need for anything, American Idioms, and an iced tea that's lost most of its ice.
Okay. That's enough of that.
posted 5.6.2001 @ 11:50am
I dreamed I met Harold Ramis. I was leaving some sort of mall court and dropped some change, a dime. I was aware of this man standing next to me. "Excuse me," he said. I told him to pick up that dime. "I'm afraid I can't," he said. He moved past me with his wife and I got my dime and followed him. We ended up standing next to each other and he looked at me again and said, "Oh," as he realized that we'd gone to high school together. He was embarrassed, I think, because he thought I might believe he'd refused to pick up a dime off the ground because of some celebrity hubris. We said hello and chatted and I said something about not wanting my socks to get wet, and as I walked off he made some comment about I'd picked up on one of the basic American anxieties--fear of not having enough socks. He got into his car--one of those suburban minivans--and had the windows rolled down as he drove off. He said goodbye to me again and I waved. I was wandering around the parking lot, distracted and thinking about something else. Or, you know, trying to be, so that I could clearly show it wasn't a big deal to me, meeting a celebrity. I wasn't some lunatic fan.
As he left, I thought, Hey, I could see that bit about sock anxiety in a movie. Then it occurred to me he probably wouldn't use it for fear of being sued.
Steve Martin was in my dream, too, but I don't remember so well what he was doing there.
posted 4.19.2001 @ 8:12am
I just spent the last two days sitting on the floor of my manager's rec room, knee to knee with twenty other young dot-com underachievers as we buzzed about quality assurance, operational excellence, throughput, and communication networking. I am exhausted and have weird leg cramps, and it feels as if I was there a week. A high rate of input, a bombardment of stimuli, will distort your perception of time; attenuate it. This is rarely bad--it felt like dense, rich time, the way you sometimes feel after forty-eight hours at a particular intense con. Of course, it would have been more meaningful, in the larger scheme of my life, if this dense time had been spent hiking through a canyon or ballooning over France. But you take what you can get.
Our global team comprises some very cool people--funny, earthy women and mild-mannered men. When you imagine intense work-related sessions of this kind, you (I) tend to envision frowning men with their shirt-sleeves rolled up, pacing and arguing over each other and reeking of cologne. Saying nothing at great length. Lecturing each other. Using whiteboards to draw complex and self-important org charts. But it wasn't like that. Our department represents the company's last remaining bunker of idealists, the kind of people who grow panicky at the thought of efficiency schemes and bitch about marketing. We are anti-corporate holdouts in a growing corporation, veterans of a start-up that has traded its vision for ruthless profitability. We are alternately nostalgic and bitter; when we focus on our work, we put into it all the frustrated passion of an artist who knows his finished canvas will be burned instead of hung.
My manager's house is Eddie Vedder's old house, which looks out over the bay or the sound or whatever that body of water to the left of us is called. Apparently when he lived there it was a trashy doss. But Martha Stewart met the Buddha in the road, and they linked arms and went to Restoration Hardware. The furnished results: zen and greenery and polished floorboards and silky cats walking delicately across the floorboards. We all wanted to live there. We are all slackers. We say we envy the rich, but we don't, really. We envy the comfortable.
I have barely slept for the last two nights--I've been wired up and tetchy--and it feels like the end of the week, instead of Wednesday Eve. That time dilation thing. I want to sleep and write but I don't know in which order. And will I ever pay this month's bills, I wonder, or do my taxes?
Twitter, twitter, dither.
posted 4.17.2001 @ 9:46pm
Match the wisdom with the item.
| Property of Servitex. Never sold. | Beanie Baby |
| Wash as you normally do. | tissues |
| Do not dispose of in fire, recharge, put in backwards...may explode or leak and cause personal injury. | tortilla chips |
| Please include code number...in all correspondence. | shampoo |
| ...there is little left for us to do other than abundantly thank Daryl Perry... | peanuts |
| Drain bean broth into a separate bowl... | pillowcase |
| Sly is a fox and tricky is he / Please don't chase him, let him be. | astringent |
| This beneficial medication may cause a temporary and harmless darkening of the tongue or stool. | oats |
| New! Nouveau! Nuevo! | batteries |
| Urtica Dioica | bismuth |
Neither Daniel nor I have done our taxes yet this year. We were offworld at the time they were due. Daniel appears to be thinking, "Ohhh...yeah. Oh. Shit." I, however, have been told on no particularly good authority (by a British person, in fact) that Washington State was given an extension until the end of the month because of the earthquake. I hope that's true.
posted 4.15.2001 @ 2:46am
One day I will catalog a full day's worth of links I'm sent, stories I read, the celebrity trivia du jour that passes for news and passes through my brain. The movie reviews. The webzine articles. The amusing ephemera. That's just the short list, baby. My brain is under bombardment.
Slept late. Worked five hours. Will go into work tomorrow--er, today--for a while, to make up the time. For breakfast, lunch, and dinner all rolled into one, ate a terrible burger of indeterminate meat, served with those ridiculous herbified yuppified french fries they force on unwary patrons now. Came home. Finished ELG's kick-ass story. Watched the new episode of Invisible Man, and also "Divide and Conquer," which was the very last Stargate ep I hadn't yet seen. Sigh of sadness. Am now noodling upon a plausible slashy fix for the damn thing. The best fix I've seen written so far--can't recall the story--was the idea that Jack was actually hiding something much deeper from himself; i.e., his feelings for Daniel. He was diverting emotion toward a more traditional outlet: the nearest compatible female. I rather like this idea.
My own thoughts take me to this: it was notable that the improper memories Jack and Sam had suppressed were associated with a single mission that took place while they were under the influence of an alien device ("Upgrades"). Alien technology. Racing, whacked-out physiology. They were hyped up and not entirely themselves. I can see them making out in the bathroom of the steak house. They chow down, they drink, they bump into each other in the corridor and impulsively lick each other's tonsils, then they come back out and get rowdy, sublimating their impulses into a round of fisticuffs. Hormones are sizzling, feelings are high. By the time their armbands pop off, they are at their peak, at saturation point, amped to the max. They face death for the umpteenth time and both experience a rush of adrenalin-driven angst and, sure, love, encapsulizing years of diffuse emotion and stress. But when Sam brings the incident to his attention, Jack has to be forced to attach the same kind of significance to it that she does. He's accepted what occurred as a Tok'ra-charged spike of emotion in the middle of a deadly mission, and put it out of his mind as best he can; it lingers only as guilt; a vague, discomforting awareness of transgression. He knows it would have been a source of potential team friction between them--one to be submerged so as to keep their working relationship intact. Obliged to recount it to the others, he relives it vividly--after all, they're using a version of the Tok'ra memory device, which triggers an intense sensory recall. This doesn't necessarily mean he's been living with a day-in, day-out secret love for Sam, or that he goes on doing so. Yeah, he probably has feelings for her. Even feelings he considers wrong, given their respective ranks and association. But he could have feelings for other people, too. Hunky, bespectacled, quizzical-browed male people.
Slashing the hegemony once again.
posted 4.14.2001 @ 12:53am
So I lost that whole will to live thing again. Oh, it was really just the will to write, but still. Started reading ELG's Stargate story The Wine of Dionysus before bedtime, and got through half of it (i.e., about 300k) before I was forced to make myself sleep. I lost the will to write somewhere along the way, while trying to figure out if there's a gene for intelligent story construction. I'd be the first to raise my hand if someone offered to introduce it into my body in a designer retrovirus. "It's experimental," Scully warns me, holding up her hypo. "We don't know all the side-effects yet." I tell her to jab it in me, now. Soon I am weaving epics that readers marvel at: long, detailed stories with actual plot that make readers slump in front of their monitors and weep with delicious anguish. So powerful is my lure, in fact, that readers are unable to pull themselves away from the story. "I was crying at the end," one reader writes in a letter to me, "and I used one of my argyle socks to blow my nose because I didn't want to go get kleenex, I just wanted to start reading again from the beginning. My cat ate all my fish and a few of my toes because I didn't feed it for a week, I got fired from my job because I didn't even bother to call in sick, and my boyfriend finally left me, but I couldn't stop reading your story over and over and over. It's the most perfect thing ever. Better than chocolate."
Last night my subconscious conjured a dream of Daniel's naked ass, being spanked with a wooden spoon. That was kind of nice. But you can't write a 600k story about that.
Hey, look. It's almost eleven. I should probably go to work some time today.
posted 4.13.2001 @ 10:59am
Soup Girl
I dreamed of the girl who works
at the soup kiosk in a building near my office. She's got a distinctive
face and manner: plain and dykey and briskly businesslike. She was at an
event I was attending--a global business conference that we'll actually
be having next week. In the dream, it was being held in someone's one-story
ranch-style house and instead of twenty people showing up, something like
eighty or ninety did. We were crowded along every wall, some standing,
some on chairs. We were to open the conference with a big auction event--a
kind of "ice-breaker" giveaway game, actually. A vast miscellany of items
were on the slate: tacky paintings, stereos, a panel of pale blue earrings,
a backgammon set. It was very slow to start, because of delays in organization.
Finally, the first item was up for "bid." It was a box of soy milk. Someone
would describe the item, and you had to guess its keyword--the keyword
for the soy milk was "content." No one was guessing. People were not warming
up to the event, or else didn't want the soy milk. Finally, as the facilitators
tried to whip up participation, the soup kiosk girl unenthusiastically
guessed "content," just to get things moving. They recorded the bid, but
when they did, they realized she'd previously bid while setting up the
event--it showed up recorded on their computer. They questioned what she'd
done--it wasn't clear whether she'd made some false bid or if it had just
been a test bid. The bid was under the name of "Freud." They conferred
with some guy, who spoke too loudly, insultingly, about how suspicious
it all was. It was highly embarrassing for the rest of us and the soup
girl was obviously regretting she ever bid. If not embarrassed, she nonetheless
expressed a mix of disbelief and disgust. (At one point she tossed up her
hands, as if to say, "What the fuck?") I think they finally awarded her
the soy milk, though.
Before the auction began, I'd gone out to the parking lot to hang out and get some fresh air. It was full of smokers. When I went back inside, they stayed out there, puffing. Then they began filing in, smoke billowing with them. The people who'd remained inside yelled and complained. You could also see smoky air pouring in from the outside, through a pipe near the door--like exhaust. While I was out there, event organizers tried to clear the lot around the house. Three fannish girls were trying to stack three shopping carts together--you know, how you push them together with their baskets drawn upright to save space. But to do this involved some complex maneuvering where the carts were all shoved together, with one girl crammed in per cart; the carts were pushed upright and then back down, and the girls had to crawl out of the end. Seah was the first one; she crawled through the shopping cart and out the hinged door at the end and then stood and brushed herself off, clearly looking none too impressed with the process.
After the first failed auction bid, Sandy and I went back outside to the parking lot, which was now just a driveway. A Rolling Stones concert was letting out just across the drive, from a low aluminum building. Their limo was pulled up to whisk them off. We were very excited about the chance to see stars. At first the limo windows were dark, but as they drove off, it became a convertible. We saw no Stones, per se (except maybe the back of a head as they wheeled away) but we kept seeing other minor celebrities. The road was filled with clumps of men in suits--business men, maybe, but also a sprinkling of actors. Sandy kept trying to point out to me this guy from "Northern Exposure," but I didn't recognize him.
At some point during the night I also dreamed that I was meeting with my family after several years. We were all sitting around a cafeteria table. My grandmother was there. I had my purse open to put on some makeup, and she saw the cheap pink razor I kept on hand, and took it. Took it back. It had been hers and apparently I'd stolen it once when I was at her house. I told her I was sure I'd asked her about it before taking it (I hadn't, though), but she said no. She'd been looking for it for three years. She had never bought another one to replace it. She was so sure of the contents of her house, and of her own mind, that this disappearing razor had become, like, a basic rip in the rightness of her universe. Fucked up.
So, we have, what? Some sort of shopping-cart phallic birth metaphor, Freud, the soup girl, job anxiety, the Rolling Stones, smokers, and a cheap plastic pink razor. Oh yeah.
I can't believe people actually try to divine deep meaning from their dreams.
posted 4.12.2001 @ 8:42am
I tend to like booze. You can only admit that when you've had a few, otherwise you'd actually care that people might think you're an incipient alcoholic. My dad was an alcoholic, and my grandmother. Quiet, passive-aggressive ones, for the most part, though my dad could get red-faced and angry when he'd had some, and my grandmother got louder and almost, not quite, slurred her words while making digs at my grandfather, who would turn down his hearing aid to block out her comments. I did not realize they were alcoholics until I was well into my twenties. I had to piece it all together and go ohhh, yeah. Hell, maybe they weren't. But I think they were. They--They--say there could be a genetic predisposition to alcoholism. Who knows. I'm no relative to these people, but being born in the cold, lobster-rocked state of Maine is disposition enough.
I prefer Canadian Mist, like my father. He drank every night. When I turned thirteen, he began to repulse me. I could not stand to be in the same room with him, could not stand to watch him eat, could not stand to hear his voice or look at his face or breathe in the same air. Literally. He smoked, too. He was a diabetic and eventually it caught up with him and they cut off his legs. He was always flabby but never fat, wore white tee-shirts, always carried a handkerchief in his pocket. My mother laundered handkerchiefs for years. We called them "hankies." There was something also repulsive about folding hankies, when you thought about what they'd been used for.
He kept Playboys in his dresser drawer, and growing up I used to look at women's soft-core-porn breasts and shaved twats. It wasn't about female sexuality, really, or even sex. It was simply: naked plus hidden equals dirty. I also used to skim for the comics. Sort of like when you read the New Yorker. We all skim for comics, right? We are the illiterate U.S. of A.
I mention all these things, because now I'm a lot like him. I drink his drink, I'm more than flabby, I don't take care of myself, I grow stuporous and old and disenchanted. I don't have hankies, but my bodily presence is no more transcendent than his was. I don't shit roses.
Speaking of shitting roses, though. This month's Vice has an article about how to fuck your girlfriend in the ass--aimed towards men, of course. A nice, politically incorrect article by "Max Headroom." I love this excerpt from the intro:
Recommendation of the day: Toni Childs'
House
of Hope.
posted 4.10.2001 @
8:42am
Dreams,
Reality, and Stargate
Oversleeping usually brings the
gift of spectacularly insane dreams, or at least vivid ones.
I am with my boyfriend, a hunky red-haired basketball player. We are in his car, on our way to the game. We drive up along the outside of the school, on the sidewalk, hugging the wall and nearly mowing people down. One woman mimes writing down his license plate number. We reach our parking space and climb up out of his car. His giant, beefy friend, also on the team, is there waiting for us with his girlfriend. We all go inside, and we should have to give them our tickets to get in, but we don't. We stride in: we are the elite. Inside is a giant stadium-style gym, with tiered seating and a huge game floor recessed in a pit. The guys leave to get ready for the game, and I circle the gym to find a seat. The first two rows of every section are always empty. People are sitting higher, because that's what's cool. I feel a vague certainty that I was not cool at one point, and I remember how I would have felt then, looking for a place to sit in a crowded gym. I might have sat down on one of those vastly empty benches, alone. Instead I pass them by and take a seat at the far end of the gym, where a gap occurs in a relatively crowded section of seats. There are girls on either side of me, one with long brown hair. Sitting between them, I'm anonymous. They don't know I'm a member of the elite, because I have no one around me--boyfriend, team members, another girlfriend--to validate my status. But that's okay. I sit and watch the game pit.
There are weird pre-game things going on: a frantic girl's basketball game that is over almost immediately, and then this woman who skates and skims across the curved walls of the pit, barely touching the surface. The effect is like that of extreme skateboarding in a swimming pool, but she's as light and graceful as a fairy. The game begins. The crowd perks up with interest as the team flows out across the floor far below. What they're doing doesn't really look like basketball; it looks like chaos. No clear play or interruptions, lots of lights and sound and fury, and at one point--this is hard to describe--the entire team, and cheerleaders, and a bunch of other cool people, sweep as one messy wave along the curved perimeter of the pit, like a dense clump of roller-skaters on a rink, some holding on to the waist of the person in front, forming chains. The crowd roars its approval; they find this highly cool, as a coordinated display of school rulership. Someone calls to me that I should be down there, taking part. I briefly regret that I'm not, but then the crowd of jocks and skirts skates off the game floor and continues outside its perimeter. The tone of the crowd changes abruptly and they boo, hiss. Not cool any longer. I was lucky not to have been involved.
Suddenly lacking the effusion of a game, one lone blonde girl, a perky drama type, stands down there and begins to sing--some spirited torch song from the nineteen forties, as if we're in an impromptu anti-Nazi war rally straight out of Casablanca. No one seems to consider this odd. I stretch to see something and realize my hand is entangled in the long hair of the girl next to me. "Excuse me," I say. "It's okay," she says, still watching the game floor below. The girlfriend of my boyfriend's buddy (it's like the highschool equivalent of some precise kinship status) stops by to say hello. I'm aware of my cachet rising in the crowd, because of her visit. Then my boyfriend comes up, sweaty and flushed. He grins up from a distance and I wave, conscious of myself: the girlfriend of a jock. He bounds up to see me and grins more. He plucks a piece of dust out of the air and gives it to me. We kiss. "You're doing great," I say. "I haven't played yet," he replies. I smile. I hadn't realized this, given all the confusion, but I don't let on. "I know. You're still doing great." Our conversation is romantic twaddle. He motions me to come with him, and I do.
Why do I write these dreams down? Usually because traversing a dream is the only interesting thing that happens to me in any given day. The rest is consumerism and sloth and laundry, and the fact that I can't get "Take Me Home, Country Roads" out of my head. "Take me home, country roads, to the place I be-longggggg, West Virginia, Mountain Mama, take me home, country roads...." It needs to stop now. Along with the ceiling drumming of my upstairs neighbor.
I did find out the full text on the sign of the yelling guy downtown. It was Frye Apt, not Frye Ape. And the sign concludes: "Damn liar devil stop." Eviction, perhaps. The sign's incoherency indicates his minimal grasp of English, but you have to wonder what his gripe is. The police do let him stand there and yell at us day in, day out. Once a motorcycle cop was pulled up next to him, waiting for the stoplight to change. I kept waiting for something to happen, but the cop had nothing to offer.
Lots of stuff to do at work coming up these next few weeks, and I'm a bit unnerved. Here's how my manager annoys me: our team spends a full hour briefing for an upcoming event--we all have to prep in different ways to make presentations. I, who of our team also hold sole responsibility for liaising with another department, stop by her desk after the meeting to mention that I'll also be prepping next week for an in-town visit from a group of new trainees, which will be more or less concurrent with our upcoming event. She doesn't look up from her monitor, waves me off. "Tell J. [my supe] about that--that's a workflow issue." Hello? I steam but simply mention that I was not sure she even knew about the trainee visit, and so I wanted to let her know, so she'd have a fucking clue what I was up to. Not as a workflow issue but because I thought, excuse me, that she might be interested. Yeah, I don't say all that. I just think some of it. She's actually a really cool woman, ultra-cool, and half an hour earlier she'd said some very validating things about me in front of the team, but occasionally I have the wonder what the hell is going on with her. She rarely seems to pick up on what I'm doing or want to know more. It drives me batty.
I managed to get through all of last week without having done laundry the previous weekend. This week, such is not possible. I will have to break and do it at some point today. Aren't you glad I told you? Let's discuss the contents of my cupboards some more now....
Watched some Stargate yesterday, took notes on "Children of the Gods." Lots of inconsistencies there, compared to later episodes, like the gate wormhole that goes both ways. And I wonder about Sam's feminist posturing; she quickly loses that, but maybe it's just a boundary-setting ritual that some military women have to go through when joining a new team? I tend to think not; I suspect that military women would be more likely to blend and bond with the 'boys club' in their own, um, boyish fashion, rather than calling attention to their reproductive organs. I think it was just goofy writing. The interesting thing was Jack's assessment of scientists, and the fact that if he had a problem with her, it was on those grounds, not because she was female. I think they carry that awareness of distinctions throughout the entire series--I mean, not Sam/Jack friction, but whenever Sam has trouble getting heard by the brass, it's because of her rank or because she's offering up scientific mumbo-jumbo that no one else gets. Not because she's a woman--though for someone like Maybourne, that may be a subtextual issue.
Daniel's relationship with Sha're is weird to see in CotG. We only get this brief glimpse into what the past year or so was like, but I see an easily manipulable husband--revered by everyone else, he likes that his wife will laugh at him when he tries to do chores. He is a Sensitive New Age Guy [TM] when it comes to Sha're. Look at how she clings to him, how he lets her. She's nothing like Sha'uri in the movie. She's needy and wants to keep her thumb on him, and knows that what he wants is for her to be in charge. He wants to sit and study his cartouches, and then to be drawn away by her winsomely chiding voice as she reminds him that it's time to grind some flour. For which work he'll be rewarded with unimpressed laughter and lush sex. Never mind that none of the other husbands grind flour, that it's a woman's job. Daniel knows he does woman's work, but doesn't care. He's a SNAG. He dons the apron because he's compensating for the fact that she was originally a gift, and to make up for all the unliberated precepts of the society he's adopted. She's one of those gentle but willful women who know how to work the system in a male-dominated society. Maybe she even became so through marriage itself, flowering when she realized what a nice guy she'd been given to, one who'd never beat her or command her, never make unreasonable demands, the kind of guy who'd beg, weeping and passionate, for a snake in his head when there was no hope of regaining her. Wrapped around her little finger, he was, and happy about it.
posted 4.08.2001 @ 11:56am
More Pointless
Fragments and Much Freudian Gunplay
My grandmother's room. Sleeping
over in the twin beds. My brother in one, me in the other. I am reading,
maybe; I'm doing something with the light on that might keep him up.
My mother has opened a shop in the mall. She does not have all the materials for the floor yet, so it remains unfinished. I try to lay down this blue, carpeted step but she points out that since the floor is not finished, people would trip. Someone--my father, perhaps--sets the long step standing upright in the far corner of the store. We may be selling shoes. A friend of my mother's stops by. It's someone I know from the movies, but can't recall who--someone like a mature Carrie Fisher. Someone else, though. Her husband sits down a row of chairs, waiting for her while she shops. At some point, I am trying to trade money with my mother, to give her loose change and some bills to make up a twenty.
Cats. I am talking with my mother, discussing giving the cats away. There is one soft orange cat, who is beautifully friendly. Another one, an old calico, stands on the arm of my chair, constantly piddling. We can't give it away. It's got too much personality.
I am fleeing from someone, as usual. I crawl along the ledge of a building and come up to a window. It is either go through or climb out further along a narrow, perpendicular fence stacked with small piles of books. I decide for the window. It has large glass half-panes that I have to crawl over. There is a young boy inside. I smile reassuringly and ask him if I could come in. I climb over and break the glass violently. It sprays into the room, small fragments going everywhere. I feel terribly bad about this. The kid's room was a mess even without the glass, and shards were now all over the beige carpet. He is a small self-sufficient kid, meticulous despite the room's appearance. He goes to get a vacuum cleaner with a feather-duster type attachment. He begins cleaning the glass, but I feel that I really should be doing it, so I take the duster off and begin sucking glass up from the floor directly with the bare nozzle. It takes quite a while to complete this task. We talk about a lot of stuff, none of which I can remember. He cuts the sole of his foot on a piece of glass and I pull it out. His father comes in, a large, bullying man, clearly indifferent to his child's well-being. He sees me there, asks a few questions in a vaguely menacing way, then leaves. I'm surprised he does not do more, with me there in his kid's room. Perhaps the spectacle of a woman doing chores reassures him. There are enormous silver fingernail polish bottles, like pillars in the room, near the windows. It's a kind of decorative thing. I think that this is not an appropriate room for a boy, and imagine him growing up here in this room, which clearly his mother and father did not choose with care. I clean up the rest of the room, while I'm at it. Pick up and fold clothes, stack miscellaneous junk, gradually clearing the floor so that it's visible again. I remember the placement of the bed, and the desk, and this long low table at which the kid obviously liked to play and work on projects. He had postcards, I think, and stray folding money, and a sepia-toned picture of a rigged ship (which became a hand-tinted picture of a tropical island). He asks about it, whether I'd seen it among his stuff, and I hand it to him; it is a tattoo that he is going to apply. He asks whether I think it's an attractive picture because it's going to be permanent, after all. I reassure him it is.
A woman is defending her theory that a gaze between a man and a woman can cause a fixation. There are four people in a hallway with her, suited government agency types, and she wants to prove her theory but they prevent her, physically, from putting a man and woman together in alignment. Then they do let her look at this sultry-eyed Asian man, on whose gaze she fixates, dangerously, her words trailing off. She breaks the gaze and walks away with increasing haste, pushing through a set of doors to stride down the aisle of an institutional kitchen, then through another set of doors, leaving the building. They follow with guns. She is at risk. They want to shoot her. She gets outside, where there is a crowd of people in front of the hotel. She tries to hide among their bodies, to evade being shot. She cries out for help, but nothing happens. The people mill around, uninterested or unnoticing. There are shooters gathering on the perimeter of the crowd. Then my mother drives up and hustles the woman to a getaway car. They take off, my mother driving. The woman crouches down in the cab in the back as the people chasing her drive alongside and shoot. Just like in the movies but more senseless.
Segue to a mall. I am in the mall, an off-duty cop. Something is going down. I ease into a small shop of some kind. I'm there with another woman, maybe a Holly Hunter type. I'm standing near a retail counter. We are trying to subdue a man with a gun. Another man stands off to one side, preparing to shoot. I am fumbling for my gun, left-handed. I try to shoot, but the safety is on. I nudge my hand, with gun, along the wall to push the safety off, then try to shoot again, but the gun becomes tangled in my cuff. I finally shoot the guy successfully, I think, or disarm him so that he can be restrained. We go outside, chasing shooters into a crowd of shoppers. I point my gun into the entire crowd and shout out aggressively, something like: "Throw down your weapons! Everyone down, now!" and so on. Everyone reacts--the shooters put their hands up, the crowd drops to the floor, most of them flat on their bellies. I begin walking through them. I think my partner starts restraining people--the shooters. There are some recalcitrant members of the crowd who will not go down. They're still kneeling and talking to each other, god knows about what. I have to keep reiterating that they should get the fuck down. They do so, but too reluctantly for my taste. Someone asks me why they need to be on the ground, and I explain that when people gather to protest like this, it's routine, and that the cops will sort them out from the shooters. I get to one particular guy who reminds me of my upstairs neighbor, Weedy Prick. He will not go down flat on his belly, the sour-faced bastard, and I get in his face and begin yelling at him repetitively: "Down. Down. Down. Down! Down! Down! DOWN!" I think he eventually goes down, grudgingly. I walk over to the glassed doors of the mall, where there are local blue-uniformed cops gathered, preparing to enter. I tell them what we need to do, indicating the floor of spread-eagled civilians. I see that some of the civilians are starting to get away--three or four have gotten up and are walking out the far side of the mall. One woman wears a red shirt. I begin radioing detailed instructions for their apprehension. It's all massively frustrating and angering to me--the lack of control and compliance.
posted 4.08.2001 @ 7:14am
Four
Fragments and Some Bedding
One: Daniel standing near Hammond
in the gate room, saying, "Leave me to my bedroom," in an imperious voice.
All around him, SG personnel--who were setting up an emergency bunker bedroom
of sorts on his behalf--stopped what they were doing and dropped into ranked,
kneeling poses of submission. Jack and Sam were in the room, tied down
to beds and thrashing with anguish. Distorted puzzle pieces from "Need,"
which I rewatched last night.
Two: The Media Cannibal gang (Jo, Gwyn, Rache, et al) are over at my house on Saturday morning to watch TV. I come out of my bedroom. For some reason I am not too involved in socializing. I do not have my glasses on and am not sitting out there with them in my living room. I begin cleaning up things--doing dishes, straightening stray pillows and knapsacks, putting various foodstuffs into order. There were a wide variety of boxed doughnuts, I remember. They all keep watching TV, some alien monster movie with Mike from Mystery Science Theater 3000, in which he climbs into the screen itself and follows after the monsters. Big, soft-headed lizardy monsters sort of like Barney or that cute dinosaur in Dilbert, being filmed in fuzzy black-and-white. They have sharp teeth. Mike pretends to kiss one near the lips when it stops at a bulkhead door. They are invading a base. One changes into a giant insect, and some carnage ensues. Blah blah. While I am cleaning, I start to drag a handful of bedding back to the bedroom. I thought it was my bedding--my striped comforter and plaid, purple blanket. Gwyn comes after me and says they're hers, and I say, "I thought they were mine, I have the exact same ones!" She looks and I do; they're still on my bed.
Okay, so she had the same comforter, I can see that--but it's very weird that she had that blanket as well, and that both were used together, in that exact same clashing combination.
Three: I was walking along a street up a hill, and turned left into a church. I walked down the steps inside, where there was a table of food. A woman was bustling around, serving or replenishing the food, and a few people were loading their plates. I could see people eating in the next room. It was free food; they were street people. I began serving myself, knowing that I was a bit out of place and unentitled but not caring. There were a lot of interesting vegetables, very plain, and kidney beans, and that incredibly thin pasta I can't recall the name of, and brown sauce and meatballs. It all looked very good. When my plate was full, this gamine, urchiny girl came up and grabbed a handful of food off my plate. I grabbed it back and then we fought clumsily, grabbing at each other's throats and hands, biting, twisting, shoving. I thought: I'm not a good fighter. My blows felt weak, awkward. But somehow I prevailed and she glommed onto me as her new pal. We stood by the food table and talked. At one point she asked in a low, naive voice: "Can two girls do it?" I said: "Um, they can rub against each other," and made a little hand gesture. "You're so cool," she said.
Hey. It's my subconscious. So sue me.
Four: I was in some weird level of
subtunnels, not unlike an attic--a big dusty, wooden room filled with miscellaneous
junk. I'd climbed up there through tunnels to escape. I worked a handcuff
onto one of my hands (behind my back) and a rope tie onto the other. I
knelt in a contorted, masochistic pose, bound. Someone came and put a ball
in my mouth. Stayed that way for a long time. This was just part of a much
longer dream I was going to try and set down, having woken up immediately
afterward. But instead I went back to sleep and lost the opportunity. All
for the best, probably.
posted 4.07.2001 @
11:14am
Wayward
Teens
I took a job with a large class
of wayward teens. My job was to give feedback on their gym performance.
I came in and began asking one of the girls questions--asking her if the
feedback she'd received was useful. She was shy about talking, so I said
we could discuss it later in private. I was aware of myself as being slightly
overweight, whereas all the young kids were healthy and fit. I wondered
if it was right for me to be giving them feedback. I began jotting down
notes on a writing tablet. The kids came in, and we sat down in rows of
chairs. At first I was on the wrong side of the room, but the teacher motioned
me over. I sat between a blonde girl on one side, and a couple--male and
female--on the other. We were crowded tight and watching a sort of holographic
movie with Matthew Perry and some other guy. The guy in the movie was getting
married. He and Perry sat on a bed together. The guy wanted instruction
on how to make love to his wife for the first time, or something like that.
Vague comic misunderstanding ensues as guy indicates he didn't just want
to go through the moves, he actually expected to practice this with
Perry. Perry leaps away to one side, nervous, aghast, etc.
I remember leaving and returning to my seat, across which the people near me were now holding hands. Movie ends. The woman in charge of the class had to take off for a while, leaving me in charge. She showed me how to work this huge machine, A/V equipment, except that it was part projector, part oven. After she points out a few things, I begin making dinner--lasagna or something like that. I have to keep asking questions about how the thingamabob works. Finally, I've made dinner and she still hasn't left, so she helps me pop it in the projector-oven and get it cooking. The kids smell dinner and start to gather (they'd been outside playing and hanging with each other). So I have to set the table. The woman shows me how to do it. It's very complicated. There is this big whatnot in the wall that folds out; it has numerous niches filled with glassware and small wooden boxes. We have to remove all of the glassware and deposit it in a nearby room, on the floor, on whatever surface is handy. I find it tedious. No wonder the woman is always busy if she goes through this for every meal--and then puts it back afterwards. I say something about my grandmother (or mother), who owned a lot of "wacky" glassware. (I use the word "wacky.") I say that I would never have glassware. The woman is sharp, offended, suspicious, thinking I'm mocking her glassware. Not mocking--it appalls me.
Later, I take the kids on a long bus ride to nowhere. The bus is full, but when we stop at a light a couple of the kids slip out the front. I question the driver about this; the door is open; he nods and confirms they've gone. One of them tries to start a fight in the road with a kid from a bus pulled up beside us.
Other earlier memories: a shopping center, and its parking lot. One row of spaces, all of which you can easily park in except the last, which is curbed off and connects with an alley. I walk off down the alley, past a row of stores. I stop into one, browse the entire store's perimeter of shelves. Lots of knick-knacks, expensive little things that I don't buy. The shopworkers are congregating the entire time I'm there, discussing software, inventories, something like that. I think some of them were people I used to know who'd since taken jobs there. Surprise, surprise.
All of this is clearly about job anxiety. Except for the whole oven-projector thing. Though, maybe that too.
Matthew Perry?
posted 4.06.2001 @
7:02am
Daylight
Savings
Ugh. Can I just say that I kind
of hate that it feels like eleven p.m. when it is really midnight. I stayed
up until two last night, my body thinking it was one. Went in late this
morning, and stayed late, but it felt early...god, I'm so confused.
I heard today in the coffee shop that the government might enforce an extra hour of Daylight Savings Time because of the California black-outs. This sounds like the whole "internet connection tax" hoax to me, but my barista swears it to be true and possible. Would my barista lie to me? I don't want to believe that. They tell me they're serving me decaf. Trust is crucial.
I went looking for evidence of such a news story in Salon, but instead it tells me: "Serial killer's portrait of Princess Diana star attraction at art show."
No real food in the house, though I do have two kinds of Cadbury bars and a brownie. When I got desperate, I did that thing with diced tomatoes from a can, and macaroni. Laundry...okay, this is not good. We will have to travel to the outside world soon. We will have to beat our wrappings against the river rocks.
The e-mail is also piling up in my inbox. What are my priorities these days? Reading, writing, and reccing Stargate. Um...that was actually a Freudian slip. I meant, reading, watching, and reccing. And also having fantasies that shall remain nameless and undetailed, like a vague mountain in the distance, of bizarre shape and proportions.
Richard Dean Anderson. I still can't
get over it. And the fantasies involve licking. Not my tongue, of course.
But still, you know? I am that Simpson.
posted 4.04.2001 @
12:21pm
April
First
I dreamed that I was replicating
the contents of a library in the cells of a dog.
I have been updating the site--new SG recs, new quotes in the thingy window, and this blog. I've put the entire first quarter on a separate page. Scroll to the end of the page for a link to Q1.
Have a headache. I am often waking up with a headache often. I fear lack of oxygen during the night, brain damage...more headaches. I suppose I should do some obligatory April Fool's Day joke entry but I am grumpy and refuse. I lost an hour. Damn Daylight Savings Time. Plus it's already nearly two in the frickin' afternoon. I kept going back to bed, hoping to sleep off my headache, but it hasn't helped.
Sandy stopped by last night and we watched an episode of Stargate--the one where they get sent to a rooty gated prison and Daniel becomes head glop-server. Before she came, I was watching the movie and taking copious notes, part of my plan to master all things canonical in the fandom. I will return to this absorbing task today, and in days to come as I work through first season and onward. I told Sandy all about my new obsession with Jack, and the suddenly spiking odds that I might buy a DVD player when SG's first season comes out. Of course, I won't actually have the money--I still owe the government taxes from last year that I never paid, and another April 15 is rolling around all too soon.
I did get things accomplished this weekend. Well, two. I went to the FedEx station to pick up the SG eps Margie sent--a nice little trek into the industrial wilderness near the airport--and I renewed my car license. These successfully completed errands gave me a great sense of accomplishment. Though the laundry thing is still pending, as it was, is, and ever shall be. Laundry saps my will to live. I mean, yeah, on some level, who doesn't like laundry--a heap of clean clothes is deeply satisfying. And being clean and scented is a social must. But the process itself--the cycle of eternal return, week after week after week--is something you just can't think about too closely or you will go mad.
Here is my thought for the day:
posted 4.01.2001 @
2:08pm
| BLOG logic
changes as time passes. Blog began with the New Year, 2001. The majority
of the year's postings are in two pages, one for the first
quarter, another for the second and third.
The last quarter I get talky, and there is a file for October-November,
one for the first half of December, and
one for the second half. Click to visit the old
blather page.
Update, Dec 9, 2001: Plans for next year include keeping this page shorter by breaking blogs up into months, or biweekly periods, or even days, so that you don't have to wait forever for this to freakin' load. |