I feel like I have a handful of small, unrelated things to say which are the written equivalent of scouring your fridge for edible bits and tossing them into a soup with the hope that they won't glaringly clash and cause you to gag. On that note....

Postscript to my dream this morning: I went back to bed and an hour and a half later dreamed that I was flying home in a helicopter, above a bridge. Suddenly, an enourmous jet began falling from the sky--it was right in front of us, in thrall to gravity and terrorism, plummeting earthward. We swerved to avoid it, but all around us more jets appeared, dropping to earth. Maybe a dozen of them fell and exploded in this huge crescendo that signalled the end of the world as we'd known it.

And then, seguing from the terrible to the fannishly banal, I was stumbling along in the ruins with Spike, identifying as we ran the next potential targets (white, marbled buildings were the most likely to be bombed, I think), until we reached an alley where we stopped and flung ourselves together and kissed madly, our antipathy forgotten. It was the end of the world. Why not kiss?

I've been adding blog links like mad--I'm suddenly devouring everything out there, from no turkey to, er, hot turkey. (And if that makes no sense, consider: someday I'll probably stop reading cold turkey.)

Skies. Last evening when I went out around eight, the sky was midnight blue and below its span was a dune of white clouds, heaped directly above the shingled rooftops like snowfall meant for the ground. This afternoon when I went out, there was a patch of sky in the northeast: blue-green but with radiant white light behind it so that it glowed like a pane of colored glass, its shape the flattened, negative space between stratus clouds. When I went home this evening, to the west, I looked out at the mountains. The sun was setting, but it was nothing like a sunset--the mountains were a deep bluish-grey, and so was the cloudbank above, edging the sky's vault. But between them was this long strip of winter sky. There was no intensity, no luminosity. The sky held the idea of yellow and orange but the colors were muted, bled to this dark absence, the light coming from far away. Terminus, with bare tree branches veined across it all.

My boss was away today. I was bored and obsessive. My hair was terrible. I looked like some seedy hippie drummer from the late sixties. I still do, I'm sure. I ate rich chocolates and two snowman-shaped peeps. People need to stop bringing their Christmas goodies to work. I've never eaten peeps before in my life, for godssake. This is just wrong. The peeps were soft and squishy and I bit their heads off. So, so soft. Soft peeps.

I've been vaguely thinking of digging out some of my old poetry and posting scraps of it here, hoping it might get me writing again. But I am not quite up to that tonight.

Cool people are writing me e-mails that I want to answer! And yet, this freaky psychological relationship with my inbox that I have...it's just bad. Bad and wrong. I don't GET it. I can barely read e-mails to me, e-mails that aren't buffered by the "public" nature of lists. But it's not as if I don't like to get them--I do. It makes me feel connected to the world. I just fail to connect back. I am disordered. I need to set aside an entire day, like a bride, post-wedding, writing thank-you notes. It's not even an issue of duty; it's social in nature, but not primarily an obligation. I think I want to prove I'm alive and that I can communicate with humans.

I want to do more with my blog--stretch. Try dialogue, fiction, poetry, random lists. I feel self-conscious about this, too deliberate, and just the mere self-referentialism of saying that here means that if you read, say, a snatch of dialogue in the next week, you'll think knowingly, "Ah. It has a certain...self-consciousness to it." Bah. I will do it anyway. This is all just for me, me, me. The audience of me.

The Tomato Nation girl is one of those people I've mentioned whose writing--brilliant, incisive, funny, authentic--makes me feel as if my own talent is an inch-high gnome I keep in my pocket and often lose. When I'm reading her, I forget that. Then later, I think: "I suck."

One of my favorite things in the world is making a tiny change to a page and then reloading to view it. It is also one of the most obsessive and tedious.

I've been cast in a play, and there was such a dearth of talent that I've been given two roles. As time goes on I get unhappy, edgy. I don't really want to be in the play in the first place. Two roles is just pushing it. As I'm complaining, the young, self-styled director has been manufacturing fake video boxes to represent his past achievements. I'm highly amused and impressed at the joke when his pal delivers the finished product, flattened boxes which have been inserted in a double-sided plexiglass picture frame. Then the director sees a picture of my mom and wants her for my role instead. "This far prettier lady--why didn't we choose her?" he asks excitedly. Her photo looks like that of Naomi Sandburg. Sure, I say in return, relieved, sure--that sounds good. "I think she'd be okay with that."

I'm at my grandmother's house, outside with grandma. She is sweeping the nut porch. This is a big deck, on one side of which are a variety of nuts in stacked bins, with nutcrackers hanging nearby for convenience. The idea is you can crack nuts and drop the shells to the ground, rather than do so inside the house. As I'm praising and asking questions about this whole nut deck concept, I eat a nut but drop the shell into a box, because after all, grandma's sweeping.

We go inside and I steal some cookies that she's recently baked. I visit the garage to check out my grandfather's workroom, which I want for some purpose, but it's now some strange woman's office. I retreat back into the house and head to the living room, where my brother and I look through old childhood stuff in small tin boxes--I find a giant (palm-sized) Indian head half dollar, engraved with my name and a list of others. I can't recall what the purpose of the coin was, what it represented. I also find a big beaded necklace, which I put on. I pose in front of a mirror. My grandmother seems sour about my presence, and gives me a Look as she walks by--then offers us dinner. My mom arrives and sits on the couch and I tell her about the acting gig. She's up for it, but she asks about the length of its run, and decides she'll have to rent someplace in town for a few weeks while she's doing the shows.

Cut to me, my mother, and my brother, trekking somewhere--to the beach for some kind of day outing. We've reached the beachfront when I spot and point out a huge sidewinder missle, dark and as big as a dirigible, that has started zig-zagging across the countryside. We've all been expecting something like this. We always knew there'd be more terrorist attacks. Sudden response from the crowds, as if a collective indrawn breath. Except it's not entirely terror--some people have just come to stand in their doorways and watch tensely. The dominant feeling is one of huge moment, a historical enormity occurring before our eyes.

We have to get out of here, I'm yelling at my mom, and I'm trying to push her wheelchair up the sandy dune. She's not wheelchair bound; it's kind of like her car and she feels the need to retain it; I think it must represent her stubborness or something, She's brought us here, and thinks this is the safest place. I leave her and my brother to do their own thing and run off to hide. The hill we're on is a shantytown edging the beach. I scurry through a break in a fence, into an alley lined with tiny doorless shacks. Garbage everywhere. I crawl into another alley between two houses, no more than two feet wide, with a ditch, with garbage. The missile passes overhead as I crouch there. When it's gone again, I get up and continue running. I run across the landscape and I have a point of view over it all; the land is a patchwork quilt of various microcommunities--I can see all around, as the missle darts through trees, hugs the ground, does wide turns; it keeps homing in on new targets or can't decide where to hit. Or isn't ready to hit yet.

I'm running along a wooded road--the massive sidewinder is in the distance behind me, zig-zagging. Then I see a stadium of sorts, with its seats set Greek-style around the sloped walls of a small valley. In the far corner a baseball game is breaking up, people streaming away as they decide to call the game on account of missile. I work my way down toward them, crawling through an edge of trees and bramble, and then into the stadium itself, which quickly transfigures and fills with earth, a bowl of many contoured hills. I make it down a ways and then I look back and see, far off in the distance down a vista of road and thick, overhanging cedar-like trees, that the missile has been parked, and its terrorist driver is climbing out. "We have two minutes from this point," someone shouts, and we all scramble further away, then throw ourselves down behind folds of earth. I hunch down tight, hands over head, head ducked, eyes closed, as the first blast wave hits. It rolls like a nuclear explosion over our heads--when I look up, the sky has turned black and orange at the edges. Then someone warns of the aftershock and we all duck again and it booms over us.

We get up, collectively dazed. The air is dusty and grey but we're all alive. We climb back out of the stadium pit--the way I came down seems steeper now, more of a cliff; some panicky woman is nearby, climbing along with me. We get out and start walking, a giant crowd of people, toward wherever the bomb has hit, so that we can help. J.D., my old manager, is there, and has kind of taken natural charge--I think because he was there with a bunch of people from work. At one point, a reporter asks who's in this particular slice of crowd and he introduces several people, including me. I feel a brief, distracted self-satisfaction at having been noticed and named.

As we walk, we begin to see evidence of the carnage. Things get smokier, and then we hit a big industrial area where train cars used to stand--you can still see where the rows were, the bottoms of the cars, but they're mostly wiped out. We trek further and begin to wonder where the people are. It doesn't look so bad where we are--where are the people who got hit? I've been getting increasingly anxious because I'm thinking about where my mother stayed, and we've been veering in the opposite direction. So I point and shout, "Let's try over there." And the crowd turns course and streams en masse again toward where I left her, the shantytown.

As we reach the top of a rise, and are tromping through someone's yard, I'm suddenly walking along with Dawn, (from Buffy). I'm not her sister. I'm someone like Tara. I give her a protective look and wipe some ballpoint off her cheek. She gives me a tense look back. I reassure her that we'll find her mom. I think she says, "And Buffy." Or thinks it. Then we are shoving through the back of a man's house, using it as a throughway. He just stands there as people stream around him. He's on the phone to the authorities: "You ought to be taking note," he says to them, or something like that, meaning our tresspassage. His wife watches too, in wide-eyed sitcom style, as we all tromp through her house. The front room is open to the street, no walls except one, supporting the roof and with a big bed shoved against it. A guy, son of the house, is reading a book in bed. He looks up and watches as we walk past. Outside, there are no walls on the houses, and I can see a woman standing over a toilet in a house across the way, who turns to watch us. Everyone can see us as we stream through, laughing, giddy, on our way to rescue.

Oh, I'm not that blue today, but I'm going for a theme here. Recommended reading for the day is this good Salon article on women's magazines and this stupid Salon article on slash, and a seethingly funny Tomato Nation bitchfest about birth control which represents the kind of article we should be reading in women's magazines, but which the editors of any rag save Bitch and Bust would probably pick up between their french-manicured nails and drop floorward into the circular file, simply because of comments like, "I have no idea what she thought this pill would do, but I turned up at the clinic again in a month, my sideburns neatly trimmed, to request a new prescription, because my system had recalibrated to that of a forty-year-old Australian men's rugby player."

My recipe for you today (see? I'm being eerily Redbook) is the Single Woman Gourmet Chicken Special, which you can shorten to swogchisp. You can consider "swogchisp" a generic name like "stew" if you like, which I guess would make this recipe Anna's Swogchisp. Bear in mind that the defining attributes of swogchisp are that it be a simple dinner that will make you feel glamorous and healthy, despite the name.

• Take a casserole dish, or 9x9 cake pan, or deep-dish pie plate (you get that this is a "whatever" kind of issue, don't you?), and thump down half a raw chicken breast flat in the middle.
• Pour some olive oil around the chicken as if you're marking a crime scene.
• Halve 3 or 4 baby red potatoes and squidge them into the olive oil. Dribble a bit more oil on top of them if you like.
• Chop a carrot up and dump it in, followed by some thick wedges of onion and a few cloves of garlic.
• Slice up a nice vine-ripened tomato (the words "vine-ripened" should be making you feel very glam now), and wedge that in around the edges too, so that you're getting this effect of a litter of puppies tucked in around mom. Who in this case is a dead chicken.
• Chop some fresh rosemary and sprinkle on the potatoes, then add in whatever other fresh spices you have on hand--tarragon, bay leaves, whatever.
• Pour about a half cup of that cheap white wine you keep in your fridge over it all.
• Cover with foil (or lid) and bake for 50 minutes or so at 385 degrees.
• Eat with a nice crusty bread for mopping.

Dreamed of Jack and Daniel. Go, subconscious, go! They are at a house with a big yard out back. Daniel is lying on the grassy slope, head pointing downslope. He's lying in the sun but close to a patch of encroaching shadow that he will have to move to avoid in an hour or so. Jack comes out to collect him, and Daniel changes. He has to pretend to be low in IQ, childlike--except abruptly he is, he has the mental level of a child. Poor dumb Daniel. Jack takes him inside the ranch-style suburban house where the team is, but midway to wherever they're going, Daniel nuzzles up to him. Jack drags him into a bathroom for privacy, they kiss, and then Daniel gives him a thoroughly unselfish blowjob. Sweet.

Jack, attached to Daniel and protective, decides not to tell the others that he's mentally challenged. Daniel goes back outside and whiles away his time gardening, with Trance from Andromeda there more or less in a babysitting capacity. The two of them seem to get along well, in a sibling-like fashion. Then a mission comes up. Daniel stays behind, and the others go. There's a feeling of vague unfairness on Daniel's behalf, but he seems happy enough gardening. The others meanwhile are on a ship that looks quite a lot like an office suite. They're there for a heist. While the others do their assigned jobs, Jack searches alone for something. Impression that it's some kind of power unit, belonging to the absent potentate who owns this ship. He walks back and forth along the hall, poking his head into empty rooms, and eyeballing the small paintings hanging on the white walls. They are too small and too high to conceal anything. Then, retracing his steps, he sees one painting that is bigger. He prods it open and finds a safe behind it, which he opens. It's a deep, flat safe which at first glance has nothing inside it, but then he uncovers a cache of loose change.

Sam joins him for a status update. Jack indicates he has not found the power cell they came for, but did find some small change. Should they take it? No, says Sam dismissively. They leave the ship, and head outside to the getaway car. It's parked next to a big house, on a street that adjoins a canal. Scene with Jack rearranging pillows on the seats, and then he and Sam exchange a few tense words. Sam wants to know what's up with Daniel. She's intuited that something is wrong and distracting Jack; her attitude implies he could have found the power cell if he'd been giving the mission his full attention. She expects an explanation from him.

But Sam and Jack and the rest of the team melt away when the owners of the house suddenly arrive: first, a skeevy looking young tough on a motorcycle who unnerves me, and then his father who says something that makes me realize they own the house. They're going to go inside and realize they've been robbed. I get in the car and jab a small silver key at the ignition, and though it doesn't really engage, I start driving away. The road along the canal bank is very narrow and cobbled, and my passenger-side wheels nearly take me over the edge as I pull wide to avoid a badly parked car. Ahead of me I can see a parking garage, but to get to it I have to enter a small park--avoiding small sets of steps, benches and trees, little bricked plateaus. Some of it seems like it's not designed for cars, but there is a car-sized drive that eventually gets me to the parking garage, watched narrowly by a park security guard. Once inside, though, things aren't what they seem. I'm out of my car and scouting for a space, but the other cars I saw aren't on this level--this is a deserted, industrial level, empty, dark, with chains dangling from the ceiling. I've also inadvertantly misled two other women here, who followed me thinking this was the car park. I leave.

There was more to the dream, and I remembered it five minutes ago, but it was a race against time, writing one end of the dream as, on the other end, recollection faded. Play "Count the Themes!" How many recurring Anna themes can you find in this dream? Don't know? Don't care? Sadly, I cannot type the answers upside down, and even if I could, turning the monitor would be a challenge. So I'll tell you: we've got bathrooms, the ranch-style suburban, loose change, keys and locks, and I think we could count the industrial zone. The car driving precariously along the canal is actually one, too, but it's been a while since I've had any of my vertiginous car-and-bridge dreams. Maybe this presages things to come.

God, it's not even seven yet. I'm going back to bed.

Intended to go shopping or to a movie. Torn, took a nap instead. I thought it would be a short one, and threw myself face-down on the bed with a single blanket pulled over me, and my shoes still on--and then slept two hours. Dreamed vividly of sodomy, which is one of my recurring dream memes. Dreamed also of a big rented house, the locking and unlocking of doors, and my father's side of the family (for a change), which included stray cousins and my other grandmother, who in the dream had a website (yeah, sure) she wanted me to do some PhotoShop work on (I don't know PhotoShop).

The new mecca in Washington State is the Krispy Kreme that opened in Issaquah several weeks ago, and this morning I have made the journey. Thirty miles round trip, one additional hour spent waiting in line with dozens upon dozens of arriving cars and a policeman directing traffic, wearing my headset and re-reading Harry Potter, and then a dozen doughnuts were mine.

These doughnuts are not for the faint of heart. Each has a week's worth of sugar packed inside or slathered on top, or both. You feel these doughnuts could kill rats, or at least make them sluggish enough to stagger feebly into heavy traffic. Words alone cannot describe how sugary these are, especially the ones filled with whipped white cream, which will evoke in you a mix of bliss and alarm as they soften in your mouth and slide down into your stomach. Two words: creamed sugar. I think they must have a machine into which you can pour a cup of sugar and a tablespoon of water and foam it into a hefty substance very much like shaving cream, but tasting of frosting.

I went to KK to get the craving out of my system. I'd grown up with one in my town, and nostalgia inflated my memories, making me heady with doughnut lust. After getting my dozen in hand, I managed not quite three doughnuts, and I think that's going to be all for me. As I was tucking down the last one, my primary thought was: "God, I really want some tomatoes." I've overloaded my sugar circuits, and my body cries out for savories. Salt, garlic, basil, tomatoes, crusty bread, olive oil, spinach. I had to apply emergency cheddar to my tastebuds as soon as I walked in my front door. I'm not even kidding.

...and other questions of the day at YouThink.com. I'm also laughing my ass off today over at Tomato Nation, reading: Death is Not an Option and What Women Want.

Hmmm. I don't know. Has this become a very bloggy blog?

I've been online geek today, as you can see from the above links. No e-mail in my inbox. Very dull. But better silence than the crap coming over Prospect-L in the last few days, where some inbred, pinheaded nitwit has apparently decided to take a vacation from the newsgroups she usually trolls and visit our list and post inane, unsigned one-liners, much like a deranged monkey flinging its shit at passers-by. I had to battle down the impulse to post on list: "No offense, but could you please die, preferably in a manner involving amputation of your tongue and hands. Your drivel is cluttering up my life."

At least I can say that here.

I have the urge to brunch, and to let people bring me food.

Saw Spy Game last night. For a long time I had no interest in going. The trailers were painfully lame and Redford's face scared me. But then I stumbled across this review, read the first paragraph or two, and decided I would see it. And wow. This is an amazing movie. It's smart in a way that movies rarely are these days, it does unexpected things--good things, and the cinematography is sharp. Redford's face is still very much a souffle caught in the act of collapsing, and part of the plot makes noticing his age all the more wrong, but the movie was so good that I managed to distract myself from all that, mostly.

Ten books on the shelf by my computer: Psychedelic Shamanism, Crime Classification Manual, DSM-IV, Modern American Usage, Writing to Learn, The Triggering Town, Writing Down the Bones, Body Trauma, Writing Past Dark, Chemical Communication.

Ten books stacked on the floor by my desk: Election, The Dreyfuss Affair, Kitchen Confidential, High Fidelity, Sex and the City, Emotionally Weird, The Dilbert Principle, Boy, Skinned Alive, The Blue Suit.

Read Speranza's "Chicago's Most Wanted" and feel quite better, like I've inhaled helium from a dozen brilliant balloons.

Depressed tonight. Depressed in spite of the free crepes today at work, one with razor-thin prosciutto and cheese and spinach, and another with bananas and chocolate mousse. The crepes carried me through the day, but then I left work and it was dark and cold. Road rage driving home, suddenly springing up out of my chest like a tiger. Rage at other drivers, which is really just rage at everything. Then that horrible billboard at the stoplight I have to see almost every night, with the pair of hiking boots and an arrow pointing to them saying "Great Outdoors" and an arrow pointing the other direction to the words "Great Big Butt." It makes me angry, mostly for myself, though I always think of people in wheelchairs too--but it's as if with that thought I'm trying to justify my anger better, when it's a sham because I'm really disgusted with myself at least as much as with advertising or the world. And it took me more than twenty seconds to think of the word "billboard." Fucking piece of shit brain. It degenerates, as does my ability to type a word correctly on the first try. Angry.

Went to the movie with S. tonight, had a great time. It was Amelie and it made me laugh and cry, it was wonderful. And then later I got whiny and self-pitying over one glass of Chardonnay, and even if I was the only one who thought so, I feel like a rotten and boring friend, a rotten boring person. And a bit of a psycho. Mostly wittered on about the inferiority complex I have when it comes to my writing, how other people's story accomplishments and authenticity just drive home the fact that I've never lived, that I'm a fake, a loser, a little crooked crone behind a curtain, operating some giant effortful illusion that in the end collapses gracelessly.

Everything depresses me. As I walked to my car earlier I could see the tiresome struggle everywhere, all those small, sad businesses that try so hard to succeed but are clearly going to fail. They give off such anxiety. Rental properties imbued with our essential failure. The beautiful but empty wine bar. The place that opened as a fish-and-chips shop and now offers Teriyaki platters along with the fish. The tiny coffee shop the size of a closet, buried in an off block with no parking or pedestrian traffic. The nice florist, ditto, which is gone now, replaced by god knows what, bright splashes of product in the window, doesn't matter, it's doomed.

I feel one accident away from catastrophe. All the time.

Ugh. Went back to sleep and dreamed that I was laid off. I was working on a weekend when they came in to tell us, though it may have been a kind of retreat. Actually, they said we were meeting and I asked, "We're being laid off, aren't we?" And the girl said yes, and looked really upset. Our offices were like dorm rooms and mine was filled with crap, piles of stuff everywhere. In retaliation, I dug out a bowl of loose change and stole it, pouring it into my bookbag. In the dream, it was the company's. The irony is, in reality, it was my little Egyptian bowl and change.

So I ran off to the meeting, through the kitchen where the woman was now messing around at the stove, down the stairs--knocked what might have been my own hat off the railing end--and into the room where the meeting was being held, which looked a lot like a ski lodge. They were handing out pamphlets about phone service at the door, which had no relevance whatsoever that I could see, since the text was pretty upbeat. ("Did you know that 90 million miles of phone cable stretch across our country..." Like that.) Big circle of sofas, comfy chairs. My old manager A.A. was sitting at one near the fireplace, leading the meeting. I dropped into my chair and it apparently had not been on the rug, but on hardwood, for I slid across the floor several feet. I slid myself back and made a big self-conscious deal out of checking the chair legs to make properly sure they were on the rug. My anger at being laid off was dissipating, as I realized that I'd get a severance package. I was worried about finding a new job though, since the market would be glutted with my canned co-workers, and the timing--just before the holidays--sucked.

Three dreams last night, that I can remember anyway. The first was at 4:00 a.m. and rather than trying to remember and recount it, I'm just going to list the relevant elements, in the order they occurred: dark library stacks, handling of books, the decision to write about dark libraries in my blog, discussion about how to check out library books for free, three guys who asked for my phone number, bathroom stall, nose bleed (right nostril), mention of drugs (Ecstasy) stolen by my boyfriend when he left me, flight, pursuit, chase, dark school corridors, danger, sudden appearance of a little old lady with dark skin who grabbed my arms, escape to the roof through a window, killing of large mutant werecat.

You know, the usual.

Had a Buffy dream. I was Buffy, standing with Wesley and Giles in the kitchen. Wesley fired me from my position, on behalf of the Watchers Council. He was rueful and quiet about it. He handed over some money from his own pocket to tide me over, but it was only about a hundred and fifty dollars. I said thanks, brightly, and said, "Let's see..." I took the money to a kitchen drawer and did some mojo with a calculator, and then projected the sum remaining on my bills (after this donation was applied) up on a screen--it was a ridiculously high amount, in the millions. As Giles and Wesley turned to look at the screen behind them, they suddenly became slaves in collars, chains, and rags. They were in a line with a few others, all of whom were going to be auctioned off. Robert Guillaume was there too, and I remember thinking how offensive that bit of casting might be perceived as.

In truth, my magic had made all men slaves. And we cut, and pan across a huge cavern--sort of like a palatial hell cave. My man slaves lined the walls, standing at attention. They wore collars and odd glittery decorations around the head, and were bare chested--but they were wearing flesh-colored tights to simulate nudity. My mind apparently censors itself just like Standards and Practices. The effect was odd, though, because they all had these balletic codpieces that shaped their privates into weird cones.

Anyway, the dream ended there, sort of unfulfilled, if you ask me.

Third dream, the most mundane, I think. We were in a big house, filled with people from my high school (all invented characters--not real people I remember from HS). We were going to make a movie, and we were going over our plans, assigning tasks. The meeting was over fairly quickly. I remember that a couple who'd been sitting on a couch got up groaning--another couple had been sitting in their lap. There was something about matchboxes--they were movie souveniers, ordered with our logo. I took a handful, and these translated into loose matches as well that I stuck in my pocket, hoping they wouldn't rub together and set me on fire. I began lighting matches as I left the house. People streamed out with me, as if being released from school, and began walking home. I had, as I watched them, a sense of belonging to a tribe, one that was experiencing a brief, idyllic youth--outdoors was a broad sweep of hills and cliffs, and a winding road back to town. To one side, a group of boys were clambering up a breach in the cliffs; elsewhere, kids were heading off to hang together.

Was reading Sara's blog and she talked about coming across an old acquaintance online, and about this marine biology lab they were in together, and I had a sudden jolt as my own memory engaged.

My memory is often like dreams--sort of vague in the telling, and essentially meaningless. I was thirteen or so, no more than fourteen. I was insanely depressed. I longed to be sent off to a boarding school, and begged my parents to let me go, not really getting that I was a suburban kid, and we had no money for that kind of shit. I hated my family, hated my school, felt stifled in every way. I was a tiger in a cage, pacing, snarling. When I realized boarding school was never going to happen, I decided that a mental institution was the next best thing. All the really cool kids in school went to the local psychiatric institute. It was such a common alternative that we knew its acronym.

One day, fed up, I swallowed a bunch of pills--some miscellany of aspirin and other innocuous drugs. Nothing very exciting, and not even very many pills--maybe a dozen or so. Funny, I remember taking them from the brown, slatted medicine cabinet which was oddly located in our kitchen. There was some kind of table under it--a counter nearby--and it was right next to the phone. These details of our house aren't something I usually keep on tap.

I was home alone, middle of the day. I called my father at work and told him I'd taken some pills, was going to kill myself. Then I hung up on him. It was one of the few times I sensed panic from him. He came for me, took me to the hospital, and they pumped my stomach--needlessly, really, but I didn't argue, because it was part of the drama I had set up. I had no real intention of killing myself; I was too selfishly wedded to life. I just needed a certain kind of attention. And, just as I'd planned, the hospital protocols for adolescent suicide attempts required that I be sent to the institute. They didn't have room for me right away on the adolescent ward, so they put me in a mixed ward, with adults. I had a roommate my age, though, another girl. I remember that soon after I arrived she gave me a back massage, during which she leaned down close and kneaded me with her pointed chin, right between my naked shoulder blades. It was, now that memory surfaces, one of my first truly homoerotic experiences.

I stayed on the adult ward for a while. There was a guy there, with a long beard and glasses. He seemed old to me--a grown up--but he was probably no more than twenty-one or so. Twenty-five at the outside. He claimed that he had a preternatural electrical field that caused radio interference, and he demonstrated this to me one day in his room, moving his hand near a radio and causing static. I was dubious, of course, but could not offer a better explanation for the occurance.

They served cherry and blueberry pie in the institution cafeteria. It was the first time I ever had pie, besides pumpkin. It was amazing pie, and it made a big impression on me. I also remember going down into the basement for some kind of class--turns out they made you do schoolwork, even in the joint. I liked it all, though. I was incredibly happy to be there. The group therapy sessions were conducted in the common room on comfortable modular furniture. I took to it like a pro.

The Bearded Guy and I talked seriously about life, and said we'd keep in touch. I knew even as we spoke that I was just mouthing words and would never keep up a permanent acquaintance. But we did meet again after I got out. He called me or I called him, and my mom drove us to a small inlet near the beach. I'd been there before, sometime around third grade, planting dune grass to keep the sand from eroding--part of a marine biology project the Gifted Program had set up. It was all very familiar. I recall parental unease, distance, and stiff tolerance, and an awkward conversation between me and Bearded Guy.

I left the institution when my parents' insurance ran out. It was far too soon for my liking--two weeks or so. I was angry, in fact. Angry at their lack of insurance, and their willingness to remove me from where I was comfortable instead of finding a way to pay, which I took as evidence of their indifference, even though they arranged for therapy for quite a while after that.

In retrospect, it's clear I was a fucked-up kid, and I don't know how much of it was my fault and how much was theirs. What a sense of entitlement I had though--boarding school, therapy. I should have been born to old money. I have the perfect temperament for it.

And that's Memory Time with Mister Rogers.

posted 12.05.2001 @ 11:07pm

I had one of those sudden whims tonight. Danger! Danger! Cue whooping sirens and flashing lights. I suddenly decided, in the middle of doing something else, that making a fannish glossary would be a really cool idea. I had three or four words jotted down on a blank white page, when it occurred to me to check and see if anyone else had already done this. Turns out someone had and I am saved a shitload of half-hearted work. Sweet. Check out the Writers University.

I am thinking of all kinds of stuff tonight, or maybe lately, and most of it I can't bring myself to blog about. Not that I'm all that reserved--blogging is like being on stage while talking at a one-way mirror, on the other side of which sits an invisible audience. It doesn't worry me that much. And what I'd say isn't even that risky or risque in the big scheme of things. But still, I don't want people thinking I'm a freak, so I hesitate, and then the impulse is lost.

On an innocuous note, I notice everyone is sick--everyone is posting about their fevers and sniffles. (Hugs to Kat.) And what's weird is that everyone is sick at the same time, but it's not as if we see each other in person--you'd think, reading, that the contagion was transmitted online.

Ah, I got nothing else to say.

Dreams dribble out my ears. Something about trying to find out how Mrs. Benjamin Franklin died. She'd been hanged, but more details were needed. I was conducting this historical investigation with someone. We exchanged a mysterious phone call a seedy private eye who'd discovered information that no one else knew. He directed us to a certain house, so we climbed up on to the roof of the old house from whose eaves she'd been hanged, hoping to find out more. It seemed a dead end--nothing up there as we clambered over the shingles--then my friend was whispering, trembling, excited (Mrs. Franklin was her ancestor), as she slid aside a slat or brick to reveal a small, secret hiding space. She dug around inside and pulled out a few sheets of paper. She took them back to my grandmother's living room to read. The two-hundred year old papers held the jottings, or letter home, of a youth who'd been witness to the hanging. It started out on more general terms, and included a few itemized shopping lists ("1 bolt of cloth, 1 barrel of salt") of things he'd bought, and just as it was beginning to hint at Miz Franklin's fate, my friend turns the page and sees a few blank credit cards stapled to the sheets of paper. Anachronistic, wouldn't you say.

Turns out, they were left by the person we'd spoken to in our mysterious phone call; he'd gotten there ahead of us, and taken whatever was hidden there on the roof. What he'd left behind was, though it makes no sense, a way to cover his ass so that he wasn't killed--he was in danger. We had somehow put him in danger. We weren't worried, but the whole Franklin-hanging historical mystery was another matter, and my friend was grief-struck by the lack of closure.

I had many dreams last night, winding among my brain like trailing bits of colored string, so tangled that they disappear back into the complex of my thoughts and can't be isolated or traced. I recall almost none of them. It's vaguely annoying. Like the classic sitcom hangover I suppose, where the guy wakes up in a frilly dress, with a pair of handcuffs dangling from one wrist and a parking meter propped against the wall. He knows he did all kinds of weird shit, but his mind's a blank. Hmm. I did dream that I was getting something from my car, and I was parked a few blocks from the beach. But as a huge wave came in, its lapping edge spread across the road and up to my feet. I was awed and worried by the encroachment of the sea, which was getting closer to people's homes every year. There also might have been two giant, dead, rotting whales on the beach. Yes, yes I think so.

...but it can't replace lube.

My day? Well, since you clicked. Another day scrounging for interesting stuff to do at work, while simultaneously ducking to avoid crap I don't wanna do, like supervise a bunch of rebellious elves. (No--seriously. But don't ask.) Worked up a hunger and stopped at the organic co-op on the way home for food. They had all kinds of good stuff tonight, including some orzo salad and some tempeh, and those lovely basil-tomato-mozarella sandwiches on thick bread, with the olive oil and vinegar--I bought one and as soon as I got into my car, I wolfed the entire thing down. I was that hungry.

The holiday lights are strung up along the streets, white lights hanging across the bare trees, like diamonds on old women.

I am writing this entry in WordPad. Am seriously thinking of abandoning Composer altogether--using WP would let me do a lot more with my site (like this) without the trauma that comes from battling program defaults. It has its own flavor of tedium, though, hard-coding everything. I've been spoiled by the WYSIWYG. I'm still thinking of finding some new progam entirely, though, something utterly different--I got a few good recommendations when I sang my angst.

My neck feels much better, and I had the most blissful night's sleep last night, and woke up all noodly and satisfied. But I dreamed things that even I am vaguely embarrassed to write about here, so I'll just keep those to myself.

I haven't gotten any mail for a few hours now, and this is bugging me, particularly since it stopped after I had a huge snafu downloading my mail and lost a bunch of messages. Worrisome. I got a test message that I sent to myself though, so...huh. Guess everyone is just quiet tonight. It's not very Tuesday-like, is it? It feels Wednesdayish to me. Even Thursdayish.

I think I will go yawn somewhere else now.

posted 12.04.2001 @ 10:08pm

I suffered an itch all day because I noticed I'd written "suppose to be" rather than "supposed to be" in my previous entry, and I was not able to change it from work.

In working my way through other people's blogs, I found Jessica's, whose blog-voice and choices of subject matter I adore, and whose archive titles resonate deeply all by themselves. ("bleeding ulcer land," "foul foul contagion," "randomness," "talking to humans," "...frivolous garlic") Hey, wait, those are my life sentences. It's simply uncanny. I love them all. {grin} I wanted to find this great, apt Beckett quote in response to the essay on "inanimate object rage" (something about socks falling, I think), but I no longer have whatever book that's in. And, not to make light of a certain dream, but this just slays me: "But the core of the dream - the thing that ties together the nudity, the knowledge, the teeth..." You don't even need to finish that sentence, do you? The nudity, the knowledge, the teeth. That's nightmare in a nutshell. That's a book title of terror. And I've also had dreams of crumbling teeth, so that's just odd. Or some meta-meme of meaning. I dream sometimes too that I have a lot of really soft, sticky gum adhering to my molars, which I have to slowly tongue and pick out. It sounds innocuous, but it's really quite awful--and the weird thing is that it always lingers for a while as something between memory and reality, so that I sometimes pause and have to remind myself I've never had to do that in real life. No, that was a dream.

Jessica also provided a story excerpt from her juvenalia, and I wanted to emulate this, but in going back through my boxes I remembered that I actually--after long hoarding--got rid of most of that kind of stuff earlier this year. At least, the most egregious examples. I did find another old dream tonight though, from the early nineties, Death and Pigeons. Yes, yet another dream demonstrating the persistence of lifelong dream theme Anna memes; in this case, closets, flight and pursuit, violence, and homoerotic symbolism.

the fan and food lists

3 fictional characters who deserve to be real:

• Peter Wimsey
• Batman
• Kirk-n-Spock

• Seven
• The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover
• Kingpins

• Aliens
• Hair
• Eye of the Beholder

• Drew Barrymore
• Nastassja Kinski
• Lili Taylor

• Ashley Judd
• Mark Wahlberg
• Sarah Michelle Gellar

• cold drinks must have ice
• things must be sniffed thoroughly when they reach the sell-by date
• sandwiches I haven't made myself must be taken apart and reassembled

• dry shredded coconut clumping up innocent frosting
• mayonnaise on fries
• fruitcake

• bread and tomatoes
• sharp cheddar cheese
• garlic

• ancient milk
• things in tupperware that have rendered the tupperware nearly useless
• that one pink can of fruit-flavored soda

• bananas
• little vanilla pudding tubs
• Lipton cup of chicken soup, made from dry-mix bags

It occurs to me that the exercise mentioned below is supposed to be a kind of positive "realization" of oneself, but I was writing it more like a critical snapshot. Oh well. I don't visualize myself in a fairy princess tiara, with rainbow angel wings.

Mm. I had some other remarks here earlier, but have taken them out. Just thoughts on the whole personal blog thing, contemplating the eternal TMI question: how much is too much? But I figure people who read my blog know what to expect.

Put a few more dreams up--older ones, from the eighties and nineties. It's weird to see that even then I was dreaming about institutionalization, flight and pursuit, bathrooms.

1. The Dream That Was Real
2. My Baby is a Tomato
3. Kodachrome

I'm not looking forward to the end of my weekend. This could go without saying, but still. I'm feeling a bit off-key and flaky, nervy like a shying horse, and I have that frustrating sense of not having made the most of my time. I didn't do laundry, either. I want to go buy some tomato soup, but then I think to myself: Will it cure what ails me? Will it soothe this feeling of disgruntlement and dissatisfaction? I just don't know.

posted 12.02.2001 @ 5:35pm -- edited at 8:04pm

I was just standing in the bathroom brushing my hair after getting out of the shower, and thinking of that exercise where you lie down on a piece of butcher paper and have someone outline your body, and then you draw the rest of yourself in a creative visualization kind of way. So I thought I'd do that in words, because right now one of my lists has this interesting thread about slash, strong women characters, orientation, and self-image, and all of this has been percolating in my head.

So I'm about five-five and I've got dark hair and glasses, and I really look very little like my clumsy MS Paint picture that I tossed off a few years ago. At age thirteen, I had three strands of bright silver hair among the dark; these spawned kin over the years, so that now my hair is heavily streaked when not dyed. One co-worker, beloved for the remark, says I look like Rogue. Many people comment on the streak, but I no longer see the glamour in it that they do, and I occasionally get fed up and dye it, about once every five or six months. Right now, it's growing back out from a dye-job and the effect of snow spreading down from the mountain peak looks very odd.

I almost never wear make-up. I should. Whenever I wear lipstick, I feel as if I've anchored my face to something well defined. Coherent. I have many pairs of earrings, but I rarely wear them because I tend to rush out of the house each morning, too distracted to accessorize. My clothes come in shades of black, blue, brown, and off-white.

I have reverse-anorexia-vision. When I look in the mirror, I see myself as slimmer than I am. Which tends to make it all the more disturbing when I catch sight of myself at a new angle, or see a photograph of myself, and realize how heavy I am in reality--particularly in the face. I've always thought of my face as more or less svelte, a mismatching feature to an otherwise heavy body, but these days I'm beginning to realize my old face is buried somewhere in substantial cheeks. Still, when I stare at myself, I do see the classic Venusian proportions--waist indented between breast and hips. That's something.

As I've aged, I've grown tiny little moles, more like freckles, in a scattered star-map over my body, and I've come to appreciate those. One breast is larger than the other, of course. My skin is not as clear as I'd like it to be. I'd like to have Amerindian skin, blended light-brown skin, like milky coffee. But I'm a white girl. Possibly, I resemble a cake left out in the rain.

On a few occasions lately, I've gazed in the mirror and said, "Oh look, Harry Potter." This is, I have to face it, the inner Harry, because God knows I don't really carry the outward charms of an adolescent boy wizard. Twenty years ago, maybe. Now I can only lay claim to glasses that are rimless on the bottom, not Harry-like, really, but one of many variations on the theme of Seattle Grrrl Glasses--you know, those trendy oblong lenses that make each of us believe we're uniquely clever.

In truth, lately, when I gaze in the mirror...I'm beginning to see my age creeping up on me. It unnerves me. I didn't have a fulfilled youth that would make the coming years look comfortable. I see only wasted time in my eyes. There is something essentially unsensual about my body, that has crept over me these past five years or so, rendering me sterile and dull. Utilitarian and unwanted. It makes me realize how little I understand other people's bodies, because my own is so alien. I don't quite understand what it is to be human.

But first--story recs--because I finished three Smallville stories by Maygra and they just blew me the fuck away: Never Here, Here to Be, and Be What May, three serial stories, from which I kind of sense more to come. These were just amazing. I've been enjoying the hell out of Smallville--the eps, the recaps, the yummy fiction that came across my transom--but something in me was still considering the fandom a dalliance, because for crying out loud, it's barely two months old and the episodic plots are admittedly derivative, and it's all just about the pretty-pretty boys, right? Huh. Well. These stories opened my eyes and made me realize that the fandom, though new, has already come into its own. It has to be taken seriously; it's fully legitimized. There's already enough myth and universe to sustain the fandom for quite a while, even if the show were cancelled now.

So, my thought from this is the Two-Hour Rule, which I've invented to say: you only need two hours of source material to build a fandom. To wit, Phantom Menace. One hour is workable for some quick and dirty fun, but not enough to fuel epics. Two hours, though--that's a movie. If those two hours are good enough, you can launch a thousand ships. Heh.

Site of the day: Smallville Slash Archive (again)
Other recs of the day: Loving North by Resonant (Due South, F/RayK), which was stark and bright and reserved and lovely. And Gwyn's A Sea of Gold, a deeply satisfying Buffy/Spike story that pushed all my buttons.

posted 12.02.2001 @ 4:46pm

Good god. I had no idea I had so many dreams cached away in various folders. I'm going to take these off the page, because they're long. Clicking one of the links will launch a new browser window. Subsequent clicks will carry you further down that same page, as links are anchors.

1. The Second Anna
2. I Don't Wear Golf Clothes
3. Satan Doesn't Like Basil
4. Richard Sharpe and the Emotional Ensign
5. Bay of Sofas
6. The Bad Spike Dream
7. The Meeting with Cake
8. The One in Real Time
9. The One with the Flood
10. Kittens in the Shower
11. Flirty Spike
12. Touched by a Michael

posted 12.02.2001 @ 12:32pm

We're in what might be an upscale mental institution--at least, this floor is. More broadly, this is some kind of Big Brothery place. It has that vibe. Physically, there's a sense of airy but institutional floor space extending all around us, with small pillars, corridors, couches, people to-ing and fro-ing. There is a large square hole in the middle of the floor which gives us a view of the floor below; it's like an atrium, but there are no railings. A group of us sits along one side, dangling our feet over the edge.

There is something wrong with me: my affect is flat, my voice mechanical, cold. I think I've been in the institution; something has been done to me. Now I'm being visited. We look down into the next floor. There is a well-lit matted area where rows of people are lying, doing exercises--leg lifts. "Why are they doing exercises?" I ask in a challenging voice, as if this is odd and proves soemthing; in my mind is the idea that this is creepy evidence of groupthink. The woman next to me offers some bright remark in reply that makes me look at her askance. I say, "What would you do if I pushed you off, down there? It'd hurt, wouldn't it?" Everyone else is silent, made uncomfortable by my abrupt revelation of antisocial lunacy.

I get up and walk off down a corridor. I am looking for an escape route. Behind me, down the hall, I hear one of those classic movie cries of "There she is," or "Where'd she go?" as my brother has alerted security. I see a wall hanging, and a hidden elevator behind it. It's more like a closet--I step inside and lock the door behind me, and stare at the buttons. I think I press five first, the floor we're on, then I just hit a random down button. We go down. I have no sense of what this building is, or where I'm being taken. It takes me to the lowest floor--it's a hotel lounge off to my left, connecting to a mall off to my right: the usual interior shopfronts, people browsing. Very different from the floor I just came from. People here were clearly allowed their freedom; they're enjoying themselves.

I walk across the hotel lounge--sense of carpeting, lots of comfortable padded chairs and small round tables. Something, some kind of show will be happening soon, but the audience hasn't really arrived yet. And then I see the modest stage, not raised or anything, just an area against the far wall where a few musicians are consulting in desultory fashion. Standing there is Blair Sandburg. He has a microphone in his hand; he's wearing a blue long-sleeved shirt and maybe white trousers, for sort of a breezy tropical fashion effect. His hair is down, long and light and curly.

As I go up to him, he's looking off to one side and exchanging a laugh with someone as they discuss preparing for his show. I have a somewhat fangirl feeling, like, "He's right here in front of me, I can't believe it." Anxiously, I come up to within a foot or two of him. He notices me and smiles, "Hey!" and kind of claps me on the arms as he edges away to pack his gear: the star being friendly-polite, but then dismissing me easily from his mind. He goes about his business, and I stand there. I think he may have thrown a bag over his shoulder or something, and he turns again, with a dazzling smile. "Do I know you?" he asks. I say my name hoarsely, conscious of how much time has passed, how much weight I've put on: "Anna." He sort of double-takes: reaction shots as he recognizes me, wonders what I'm doing there, et cetera. "Jim's here too," I say. I can tell that gets his attention. There's some vague exchage between us, where I convey that we need Blair, we've reassembled the team, there's some wrong we have to set right.

He looks off over my shoulder, frowning, his gaze out of focus, as if envisioning our gathered group and wondering whether he wants to recommit himself to this. There's an ineffable sense in all of this, around us, of a society where "haves" are oblivious to the plight of the marginalized, dangerous "have nots." Blair clearly has no clue what's been happening to me, but I know he's a good guy, and that he'd help--except I sense the possibility of danger at the back of my neck, and walk off through the stage, leaving him as I look for an escape route.

I'm in another corridor, and I'm conscious of wearing one of those green patient smocks, bare legs, no badge to justify my trespassing presence here, very conspicuous. There are well-dressed people standing around talking. I break in with a false smile, and say that they let me come down and visit from upstairs, to hear my cousin sing in the show, and do they know if there's a bathroom around somewhere? One man, looking down his nose at me, says no. Well then, is there a lounge? I ask. He nods me off in a direction down the hall. I walk away, hoping they won't alert anyone.

I find an actual bathroom--he was clearly just snubbing me--and I go in to fix myself up so that I'm better disguised. I go to the bathroom, then I tuck my green shirt into the bluejeans that I suddenly have. I see a plate of pastries on a dresser shelf above the toilet--slices have been eaten, but there's a lot left: some kind of pineapple custard cake, something fruity, very thin slices of soft iced white cake. I eat some. I get a stain on my shirt. I stand at the mirror by the sink and look at myself. At this point, I start trying very hard to populate the bathroom by the power of visualization and sheer will. It's like, while dreaming, I try to achieve lucid dreaming and bring useful things to hand. I'm never very good at this, though. I try to visualize that the half-mirror is actually a full-length mirror with a closet behind it. This almost but doesn't quite work. Then I do see a closet off to the side--I tell myself, there will be clothes hanging inside. I go open it--nothing. Bare shelves, bare closet rod. I walk in--another door appears to one side. I strain again, telling myself that when I open that door, there'll be clothes galore. I open it and get another semi-empty room. I think I achieved a few items; a hat or something useless. I'm suddenly very impressed with this bathroom, though; I think to myself that its original size is deceptive; it's practically an apartment. I could even live here. And, more or less on that note, I wake up.

By now you should have quite a collection of Anna Dream Symbology: elevators, malls, bathrooms, clothes, mirrors, escape, pastry, violence. I'm sure you've deduced something useful and revelatory from that, like I'm a homicidal maniac with mother issues. It probably goes without saying, but all of the dreams I've written about are sleeping dreams, not waking; that is--in as much as you can say this of dreams--they're "real," though flawed by imperfect recollection.

Hmmm. I'm suddenly having an impulse to go back through my notebooks and e-mail today and see if I can find any interesting dreams that I wrote down but didn't recount here. Maybe. Right now, though, I'm hungry. Last night at midnight, starving and with no food in the house, I drove to the market and got fixings for a green salad. I came home and ate a huge bowl with some bread and butter. It was mostly good, though the lettuce was oddly thin, and I was so tired that I kept having the single-woman-choking fear, that I'd inhale some dressing-laden lettuce the wrong way, and keel over and die completely alone, and my body would lie on my living room floor until someone missed me enough to truly panic or the smell became noticeable--the latter being far more likely to occur before the former.

Still, I am hungry again.

posted 12.02.2001 @ 12:32pm

This day will never end. My posts will never end. My typing, like Celine Dion's heart, will clearly go on--and on--ad nauseum. It will be December First--forever! Cue squeaky, maniacal laughter and tiny mice high-fiving each other.

So I revisited Livia's livejournal and meandered through it, diverting myself with her story ideas--yes, I think Someone should slash Scott Evil and Lex Luthor--and chewing on her gifted prose--"happily typing like a crack-addled monkey" (Nov 23). You know, I'm definitely noticing a monkey theme in blogs lately. Or meme. Monkey meme. I like saying that. MST3K's "The Bouncy Upbeat Song" made me snark madly. I wish I could link to that entry directly, but I don't think I can. Sad. So I'll just say that getting from "Have you ever touched a Post-it Note?" to "I wish we could be more specific" was a wheezing journey of joy.

So I have actually been trying to read a Smallville slash story, and it is very good so far, but I have zero focus today. If you performed a moment by moment sociological analysis of my movements, an excerpt would look something like this:

10:37:00 -- Sat down at desk. Started reading slash story, left open in browser now for three hours and counting.
10:37:36 -- Got up from chair. Went to kitchen.
10:38:01 -- Abruptly decided to clean out fridge. Bagged trash.
10:46:49 -- Came back from dumpster, having been forced to stand on neighbor's car bumper to rescue dropped keys from inside.
10:47:12 -- Stared at television from across the room, noticing with apprehension Andrew Dice Clay.
10:47:27 -- Fled room.
10:47:38 -- Sat back down at desk. Started reading story again.
10:47:58 -- Paused to drink tea.
10:48:17 -- Checked e-mail.
10:48:29 -- Stared blankly at wall.
10:49:20 -- Opened FreeCell.
10:49:25 -- Abandoned FreeCell to visit my own blog page.
10:49:51 -- Clicked through to Livia's blog. Started reading.

Of course, any sentence that uses the word "postmodern" to explain itself is worth little more than a pile of gerbil droppings. I was going to qualify that with "probably" but does anyone really know what the fuck "postmodern" means? Yeah, I don't think so. It's a handy word, though, in the way that an empty cup is handy to piss in.

Gerbil...dropping off now.

posted 12.01.2001 @ 11:14pm

I'm stuck behind my Miasma Shield which repels all casual observers. Within its bubble I huddle and chuck things as passers-by, like a sulky zoo monkey.

Woke up--as my blog attests--before two a.m., after a few fractured hours of sleep. Dithered, then went into work for a little while, then came home and dallied in irc with Francesca. Stayed up until around three p.m., when I finally stumbled (literally--I somehow managed to sprain a toe) off to bed for, er, two more hours of sleep. Saturday is waning. In the small window of time during which I slept, the day slid from grey afternoon into dark, wet evening.

No more drinking, I'm thinking. The balance of power has tipped from my neck to my liver. My liver is wresting sovereignty of my body from the clutches of pain, and says dear god, no more. I'm going to have to drown any further pain in a mild, decaf iced tea, because this sodden, dyspeptic state I've reached is nearly as wretched as the state of weeping pain I inhabited earlier.

I hope I don't regret sobering up. Harrumph. Glower.

Jesus God, how many of these drippy, self-distractive posts have I logged here today?! Four! Note to self: Go. The. Fuck. Away. Now. Do. Something. Else. Now.

Self goes.

posted 12.01.2001 @ 5:52pm

I'm all of a sudden reading blogs. As mentioned, not usually my thing up to now, because I start thinking too much and get self-conscious and that sucks. Because this is just a page, you know? A page of noodling and whining and long-winded crap. But I leapfrogged from link to link this morning, enjoying the sense of community, and I keep noticing that there are so many cool people out there. God, I love fandom and all the little fangirls. I discovered Alexandria Brown's livejournal, found by hopping through friends-of-Livia. She says things in 30 words where the rest of us would use 300, and is funny when she does it. ("And not the smart Shakespeare writing monkeys either.") I admire pithy, witty people. I am forever ten miles past pithy, looking back at it with regret.

Sara's "Lost at Sea" blog is also nice: nice style, nice voice--one that feels friendly and familiar, even though I don't know her. She knows Maygra, so we are no more than six degrees off.

A very kind person (who will get a reply soon) sent an e-mail reminding me to do stretching exercises for my neck. This is the kind of good advice I always have vaguely stored in the back of my mind, but never do unless someone prompts me. I feel warmly fuzzed by strangers lavishing their kindness on me.

Smallville is sweeping the net, memes are reproducing, people are linked up to one another in some great, fannish daisy-chain. Sudden modest happiness.

CD of the day: Blackwater by Mofro.
Site of the day: Smallville Slash Archive
Accomplishment of the day: I have finished Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire with a sense of Snapey luxury.

posted 12.01.2001 @ 11:28am

Because I'm afraid to go back to bed, which has become the Rack of Pain. My pillow will hurt me! My Ibuprofen isn't working! I must kill something now! Bring me the head of John the Baptist!

Note on my Due South dream: the position that the first Ray (aka Fraser) holds, when he sits in front of the gravestone and lifts his head, is the exact same physical position Amy is holding as she wakes up deratted in that recent episode of Buffy. The vampire cough is of course a Buffy cough. And it's in a graveyard. My fandoms cross-pollinate.

The new Smallville recap is up on MightyBigTV and is shrieking hysterical as usual. It also helpfully red-flags the Gayest Look of the Episode, and other slash-o-meter moments. God, I love Omar G. Props to Omar. Whatever that means. Hmm, looked it up on the web. Hip-hop slang, derived from "proper respect." Meaning you're giving the person his due, paying him respect, giving him props.

I notice again that it's December 1, which means that NaNoWriMo is over, and I officially failed to log my fifty thousand words, succumbing to the lure of Buffy in syndication, a lure that has also caught my friend Kat apparently--grins--along with many others who've been posting about eps on various mailing lists. (Not that everyone had been launching into the novel challenge. I'm just saying, I think a lot of us are wanting to be distracted right now. It's the cold, dark tail end of a disturbing year--what else are you gonna do but watch Buffy and drink cocoa?) But other would-be novelists were successful, and I am properly awed and clappy. Hand clappy.

Speaking of Buffy, I've been complaining on list about the rotten things that FX is doing to the show in syndication--cutting scenes from episodes, omitting episodes from the line-up, et cetera. They left out "Hush" for chrissakes. Hello? Talk about a pivotal fucking episode. Pulling it cripples the entire fourth season run. But I won't dwell on that right now, because after all it's three a.m. and that would be obsessive, strange, and pointless. Right? Right, okay.

You want obsession? MY NECK HURTS.
 
posted 12.01.2001 @ 3:14am

I dream that it is a graveyard in the wilderness, quite possibly in Canada. It's night. A woman is kneeling naked in front of a white gravestone in the shadowy flicker of moonlight and trees. We have woken up and are watching her. She is looking down tenderly at the stone. There is the impression that she may have just finished having sex with its ghostly inhabitant. "Oh Benny," she says softly.

She eases away from the grave and sits down in front of a second white gravestone which is planted next to it, her back to its rough surface. Her ritual is complete. Now we can see Ray Kowalski sitting in front of the first gravestone. He's sitting with his legs drawn up and his arms wrapped around his legs. Everything about his body is perfectly aligned as he lifts his head. He has very experimental hair, and his eyes are dark and glittering. He's wearing dark jeans and a closely fitted greyish-blue Henley. As he wakens, he gives a small leonine roar, that little rolling cough that a vampire makes. Several yards away, another Ray Kowalski stands up from his sleeping bag and, also awake now, surveys this scene.

The other Ray stalks jealously over to the grave. The first Ray, who is actually Fraser, stands in a silent and vaguely apologetic way. Ray is not too happy that some strange chick has been horning in on his territory while they camped out in this graveyard. He takes Fraser by the shoulders and leans in and sniffs him in a proprietary fashion, and says....

Something that would have been wonderful, but I've forgotten during the five minutes I've been awake to write this down. Sigh. What a lovely dream. Ray K! I went to sleep hoping I'd dream of Spike, but apparently my head is now populating itself with fannish spawn, like bunnies in Australia. Er, whatever that means. I'm not entirely awake.

Before the scene above, I also dreamed that I was out in the wilderness myself, trekking through with a companion. There was something about a confrontation with an animal, during which we tracked spoor and droppings in the grass, and then I was back in my bedroom, dream-dreaming about the trip while happily collecting quarters and other loose change into a heavy bag, which would fund the dream journey somehow. I also had plans to listen to some new CDs. Of course, now that I'm awake, it's disappointing to find that I have neither a large bag of money nor any new CDs to listen to.

Day seven of My Neck Hurts, by the way. Day four, however, of My Neck Hurts Very Fucking Much.

And, hey, it's December.

posted 12.01.2001 @ 1:43am
 

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. TO LINK TO THIS PAGE: Go right ahead. By linking to http://www.drizzle.com/~eliade/blog1.html you will be linking to the "front page" of the blog, which is always current. If you want to link to a particular entry, note that anchors have been added to all entries beginning with Q4 2001. Anchors are all formatted the same: by the date of entry. You can find the link for a particular entry by using the drop-down menu. The exact link, with anchor, will populate your browser's address bar. For those who care about the logic, I put double digits for days and four full digits for years (e.g., 11.04.2001). If there is more than one entry for a day, add a, b, c to the end. As 2001 entries were cycled off the main blog1.html page into archived pages, they've become anchors of pages with different names. This means that 2001 links to entries have not been very stable, but will be as of January, 2002. Also starting in 2002, each new entry will be given a permanent address in an archive after it cycles off the main page, and you'll be able to link to a stable address almost immediately. Tedious, isn't it? But it will work, you'll see....  SCREENCAP courtesy of Debchan.

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