No, *Your* Face is a Wussy Chicken Banana

I can feel a story growing inside me, but I have *absolutely* *no* *idea* what it is. This is a new experience for me. Usually when I have an idea, I have, you know, an IDEA... this time, it's like I have an idea that I will have an idea... something is about to break the surface of my consciousness. Interesting.

Have had trouble remembering my dreams lately. I know I've been having them, but I can't remember them. I get flashes now and then, sometimes in the middle of the day. Perhaps *they* hold this secret idea. I need to be able to inspect my mind... a brain detective. Like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind ("bookslave, for like, five years now...") Or maybe it's just better to let said idea marinate until it is ready to come out and meet the big bad world.

'Tis frusterating, though. It's like something I can't remember, but I've never membered it the first place. It's on the tip of my tongue, though I've never said it before. Maybe I'm lapsing into my fight-club-esque double-life routine again. I am jack's repressed subconscious.

This idea had better be good. When I find out what it is, I'll let you know.

The Key To My Heart

I know the title is cheesy and a horrible pun, but it seems fitting.

Here I am in Key Largo; it has been a packed 48 hours.

Thursday morning I woke up at 10:00, went to campus, and wrote my paper for Shakespeare and Ethics. I ended up writing a dialogue between Shakespeare, Kant, Isabella, and Angelo. It was set in the Mudhouse and John from Boris Yeltsin made a guest apperance. Yes, I got a little bit carried away with it.

After turning in my paper and taking care of some other business on campus, I went to visit my grandma (i.e. eat her food) and then went to work. Worked until midnight, then went to see Constantine. I don't know why it's been getting bad reviews; I liked it. A lot. I really, really liked it. Not "favorite movie ever!" liked it, but still. It was good. It was like Dogma, only serious.

Got home from the movie 'round 3:00am, packed a suitcase, left for the airport. Ate McDonald's Breakfast in Dallas, got to Ft. Lauderdale 'round 12:30pm Eastern, drove to Key Largo. Everything was better when I finally saw the ocean, and before Sundown I fed a real, wild Manatee. I was *obsessed* with Manatees when I was about 9, so it was quite an experience. They're just like elephants, only made for water, with smaller trunks. We watched the sunset on the beach (a necessary Flordia Keys tradition) and ate at a bar on the water. Today we just sort of toured around to neat spots, beaches, docks, hotels, etc. Tomorrow is the big day; Miami South Beach, but tonight I'm writing a paper.

Anyway. The point. We're slowly coming to the point. Everytime I see the ocean, I feel at peace in a way. I become very melancholy, but in a good way. I feel like a woman whose betrothed has gone away over the sea on a ship, and every day she scans the horizon for ships, hoping for his return. I know that's nauseating cliché, but it's true. In a sense, I am waiting for him, even if I haven't met him yet. I don't feel like I'm waiting just for anyone, but for one specific person, and it feels like his name is just on the tip of my tongue, but I can't quite draw it out of my mind.

I said on Tuesday that I don't believe in coup de foudre, love at first sight, but I suppose I do in a sense. I get the feeling that when I finally meet him, I'll just know, immediately, but it won't be love at first sight, because I'll sort of already know him. Does that make sense? I don't think it does, but I don't care. The ocean makes me all floaty and melancholy and cliché and sacred feminine and blah blah blah.

Well off I go to write about the ethics of McDonald's. I'm going to argue that McDonald's is excellent from an Aristotalian standpoint. I mean, you can complain about how bad their food is for you, but how many people really want to see McDonald's disappear completely? I mean, even if it's only once a month, or once a year, there are times you crave something from Micky D's. This should be fun.

I had better stop being all spacy so I can write this thing... I can feel another wave of melodrama coming on; get out while you still can! Or better yet, I'll go!

A Little Help Here??!!?

Two nights ago I had a zombie dream. It was very Shaun of the Dead, only it wasn't funny. At all. Rather, it was scary and grotesque. In the first part of the dream, I was at a funeral (some middle-aged man I didn't know) and some really disgusting and disturbing things were happening that I don't think I need to go into here. Then, suddenly I was at my house, and there were a bunch of zombies in the dining room. My mom was there too, and I ran into the kitchen and started grabbing things to use as weapons. I told my mom, "Something heavy, sharp, or both," and ran to attack the zombies before they attacked us. I hit one of them over the head several times with a heavy pot, but when it's skull finally cracked I wasn't satisfied that it was actually dead, so I had to scoop out it's brains with a wooden spoon; oddly enough, the brains looked like raw hamburger meat that I'm used to cooking with that same wooden spoon...

The next zombie wasn't so easy. I had her straddled, face down, in the hallway and I was beating her head against the floor where it met the baseboard, over and over again as hard as I could, but it just wouldn't crack. Finally, in a strange burst of super-strength, I hoisted her over my head and threw her on top of another zombie. I turned and yelled at my mom to help me, but she was just sort of standing around, and all she had in her hand was a wire whisk. "Mom!" I screamed, "I said something sharp or heavy!" She just stood there, waving her whisk around ineffectually in the air.

Then I saw this guy. Late twenties, tall, rather attractive, little stubble of a beard. He wasn't acting like a zombie, but I just *knew* he wasn't human; I could tell he was evil on the inside. Then it dawned on me. "Hey!" I said, "You're the zombie king!" Unruffled, he gave me a weird look and said, "No, I'm not." "Yes you are!" I yelled at him. "No, I'm not," he said again. "*Yes* *You* *ARE*!" I yelled again. He rolled his eyes and sighed. "Alright, fine, I'm the zombie king." Then he leaned in close to me like he was going to hug me, or whisper a secret, and I got this flash of how he was turning people into zombies. My hand snapped up to my ear and pinched. I caught the tail of a wormy-leechy thing as it tried to slither into my brain. They were parasites, just like yeerks in Animorphs or the aliens in The Faculty. I pulled it out and threw it to the ground. I think I tried to fight the zombie king, but the worm things were everywhere, and you couldn't feel them while they were crawling on you, so there was no warning, no way to tell if they were about to crawl into your brain. I think one finally made it in just as I woke up.

My first thought when I woke up was, Why weren't Feral and Chuck there? I was actually really pissed off at the both of them for not being there to help me. I had this mental image of Feral with a shotgun laying the zombies to waste, and Chuck helping me and my mom beat them to death. It took a while for me to get un-mad at them, even though it wasn't their fault that they weren't in my dream.

In last night's dream, I was starting to get a little lucid, and I managed to make myself able to fly. There was a really huge apartment with four or five levels and huge rooms with sets of four to eight stairs separating areas of the rooms; it was decorated very modernly. Anyway, the point is, it was a *LOT* of fun to play tag in. Everything curved around so you could head people off, but you got the edge if you skipped over all the stairs with big jumps. Wheee.

Le cycle de rêve de la sirène

As soon as I saw there was finally a 4th comment on my last post, I knew it would be Hannah nagging me to update. Relax, O impatient one, I'm heading that direction.

This is another post about a dream I had, wherein I shall describe the dream and its impact on my mood/thought process today, then proceed to psychoanalyze myself/overdose on introspection. If you are tired of these sorts of posts, you're not the only one. Unfortunately, I feel compelled to keep doing this. It's the only thing I want to write about (me? egocentric? no...) so I at least thought I could have the decency to warn you beforehand. If you don't want to be exposed to any more of the twisted inner workings of my psyche, go here and watch some carrots dance. Thank you.

Alrighty then. On with it I get.

Last night's dream sucked. It just sucked sucked sucked. But in a way, it was good too. It reminded me that I'm doing the right thing (in a very twisted sort of way). In the dream, I was reminded what it was like to be in love. Nay, I *was* in love, in the dream. I was taken back to that time five years ago when I was really, truly in love. None of the weird, complicated, dumb stuff that happened later, but the first, pure, true, real love. I think most of you know who I'm talking about, but he isn't the point. He has absolutely nothing to do with any of it. The way you love someone is about you, not them, because it doesn't matter how they feel about you, or even really how they treat you, what you feel for them remains something that is occurring within yourself. Is this making sense?

By the by, if you don't think a 15-year-old can really be in love, you are an ignorant fool. You just are. It may not be the kind of love that you build a marriage on, and you may feel more comfortable calling it "infatuation", but it is real love. It's the kind of love you'd die for; Romeo and Juliet love. It is irrational and reckless and stupid and immature, but in my opinion it is one of the purest forms love can take. Romeo and Juliet were blind, stupid children overcome with passion to the point of irrationality, but that's kind of the point. Young, dumb love like that is completely pure, undilluted by reason and experience and maturity. Yes, it is often a bad thing in that it causes people to do very dangerous and stupid things. It causes people to ignore and often sacrifice what they should be focusing on. It puts blinders on you, it makes you an idiot. Still, there is something very precious about that kind of love. The first love happens because you want it; because you're not afraid of getting hurt, you're too young to feel mortal, and your brain doesn't have that little voice that rambles on about consequences yet. When you're in love for the first time, you go all the way. You throw all of your mind body and soul into the same proverbial basket and don't even consider what will happen if said basket is dropped into a meat grinder.

I took a lot of abuse before I learned NOT TO DO THAT anymore. I hear that in time, you learn to do it again, because it's absolutely necessary to throw caution to the wind and take the risk in order to find the real love, the love of your life. Right now though, I'm not in a throwing mood. It's not really a throwing year. Or maybe a throwing decade. The point is, in the dream, it all came rushing back. It wasn't in the happy phase though, it was in the ripping-out-of-the-heart phase. It was the First True Love Gets Her First True Heartbroken phase. And the one word that sums it up? Desperation. It was that hunger that was more than hunger, it was suffocation. I felt that feeling that I was drowning and he was air. It wasn't lust, it was just a burning need to be close to him, physically, mentally, spiritually (by the way, I realize that my cliché-o-meter has not only gone off the scale, but has actually overloaded to the point of explosion. The pieces are scattered around the room and I'm fiddling with the little arrow right now. There goes another fifty bucks). It wasn't *him* him in the dream, so don't get all freaked out. It was a stand in guy, but the feeling was the same. Like I said, it has very little to do with him. It's all about me. Me, me, me. That's right. Me.

Okay, so what actually happened in said dream, you ask ("no! i didn't ask!" you cry. well, too bad.)? Well, we were standing in front of my house and he asked for his journals back. In reality, they're *my* journals, but in the dream they were originally his, then while I was his girlfriend he gave them to me and I started writing in them, and now he wanted them back. I started to give them back to him, then opened one to find where I had started writing in it, in case he wanted to tear my pages out. At the top of the page was a header like I always write, in my handwriting, in ink from my sparkly pink pen, and the date was 2001. Then I started thinking about "when he hurt me", which doesn't make sense outside the dream, but apparently "when he hurt me" was symbolized by him crashing a plane into my house. As I thought about it, it manifested itself, and, though he was standing next to me, on the ground, a plane appeared a flew over my house, then banked around like it had the first time, coming back to fly into my house. This time, however, he grabbed me and flung me a few yards away, then covered me with himself (very movie-like, all heroic and such), protecting my from the explosion of the plane (lots of fire). It sounds sexy, but it wasn't. Just really, really painful because hey, just a reminder that we weren't together anymore. Apparently, the first time the plane had destroyed my house, but this time when we got up and the smoke cleared, the plane was destroyed but my house intact. That's kind of all I remember.

If you want a breakdown of the symbolism, or at least what I think it means, flying= usually something sexual, his plane=his sexuality; crashing=well duh; house=mind, brain; my house=my brain. Interp: first time he hurt me I was vulnerable to it, his sexuality got into/destroyed my mind. The second time, my mind was stronger than his influence and wasn't hurt.

The symbolism of events is kinda fun and all well and good, but the point is the way the emotions and experience of the dream affected me. Being taken back to that place, however unreal it was, was like giving a recovering alcoholic a shot of whiskey. It took me most of the morning to put myself back together again (I reserve the right to be depressed/angsty at any time), but it reminded me that it's good that I'm keeping myself somewhat isolated right now. I don't need that crap messing me up anymore. It really is like a drug. A very bad drug. That's why I refer to myself as "clean"... I've been clean for a year and four months now. Let's keep it up.

The title of this post is french for (i think) "The dream cycle of the siren". I thought it would be a good title if I were to start a blog just for my dreams... but then what would I post here? "Anything else!" you cry. Well that's just too bad.