dreams, more dreams

An intense week for dreams.  Perhaps because of heavy, poignant sleep.

Last night:
I am driving in my kia with someone else, and it's almost midnight and the new year.  We're looking up at the moon as I drive, because there is also going to be a total lunar eclipse at midnight.  It's getting closer and the moon looks spectacular.  We end up in Hollywood - I get a  materialistic hipster vibe, and I see the people outside these restaurants cheer because the new year just happened.  I'm fucked, because I wasn't even looking at the moon, and if midnight passed it means I'm late for work.  Apparently I'm supposed to be serving at one of these uppity restaurants.  I go into one through the backdoor, where two of my now married high school friends, Brittany and Katie, are also servers.  We were pretty close in high school, or as close as I got to anyone really, so maybe not that close.  In the dream they were wearing ornate engagement and wedding rings.  I look down at my hands and saw only a thick, clear plastic ring on my right ring finger.  Ha ha, I make some kind of joke.  Then there is controversy because one of them has their kids here and their estranged spouse is upset that they're out so late, and I try to fix it by making apple hummus with a mortar and pestle for the kiddos and showing the spouse what a fun time they're having.

Sunday night:
I remember being on another planet.  It's a small planet with a thin atmosphere, which I can tell because the curve of the planet is visible from where I stand, and the sky is deep, deep blue.  Or maybe I'm just high altitude.  I'm in a mountainous place that looks like south america and some of the more remote places of the trinity alps - rich, green vegetation, deep blue lakes, jutting granite (?) rock formations, a kind of surreality about it all, probably since I'm usually inside procrastinating.  I'm in a berry field with Vance and I think Ellen, also from high school.  They're raspberries and look dusted with crystallized sugar, but they're actually frozen.  I taste them and they're sweet.  We're on some kind of adventure, but talking about life and adult decisions as we go. 

At the edge of the berry field is a steep drop off with a rock wall.  I go to climb down and realize I've navigated to a protruding overhang that I don't have the strength or will to overcome.  This is too hard, I think, I shouldn't be expected to do this, I will just let go because it's absurd.  Then I look down, and see no kind of support system on the ground or air - I realize if I let go I'll fall a great height and break my back or die.  I'll just have to see how strong I am.  So, I force myself to find what strength I have and work back to the left where the incline is straight instead of protruding.  I make it there and also find a rope for repelling.  I climb down the rock wall now with glee, holding the rope and kicking way back from the wall as I lose height.

On the ground we're in a grassy sunny place with trees and these simple wooden structures, like an ineffective porch swing and a wooden crate basket, all overgrown with honeysuckle.  Someone's well intentioned project.  I realize this was meant to be PE equipment and my middle school PE coach Sam Jackson is around here somewhere. Uh oh.  I ask Vance a question but everything he says sounds like air escaping.  He sounds like the bottom of an aerosol can, with the bead rattling around.  I want to shake him so I can understand better! I remember (erroneously, but true in dream world) that he used to fill aerosol cans before he was a mallet sewer.

Saturday night:
I was somewhere... and I got  a call from Vheya on my cell phone, who was three in the dream.  At the place I was at, I was neglecting her - not intentionally but because I had to be somewhere for work or something and she said it was okay.  But now she was ready to be picked up.  I asked where she was and she was silly and vague - by some tower of dried indian corn... near a road... She finally asked someone for a specific location and I started to bike over there to get her.  It became stormy, flashing lightning and a downpour of rain, as I biked up and down hills on empty, wide streets.  I got her home (dry apparently) to her mother's house and she went into her room and got on her computer.  I wanted to talk to her and hang out with her, but she clearly seemed annoyed by people around because she wanted to learn things from wikipedia.  She was also clearly a genius three year old.

lucid dream

I was definitely lucid dreaming last night.  I experienced how long an unpleasant dream can be, when you're aware of it and trying to escape it. 

Several iterations of social exercises occurred.  I took a keyboard to farmers market and played the two songs I know, and John Chernoff came at laughed at the idea of a piano but wouldn't play.  I was in a house that had flood damage (no water now) and I had to grab everything that left.  I was in the Goodwill in Santa Monica looking at the entire rack of Leopard Print high heels and Kim Kardashian was telling me Paris Hilton used to be HER bitch, not the other way around.  I am guessing my brain just lives in scenarios and feels them out until they're boring, and I usually forget all but the last one.  Then I tell it to JT and we compose some metaphorical lesson from the tiny detail I remember, which is as accurate as every action in life is a metaphor or a finger pointing to some greater concept itself. 

In between every scenario and often during I tried desperately to wake up.  I pseudo woke up a lot of times and fixed the things that were bothering me - covered myself with the blanket, walked back down the hall to JT's room (I left earlier frustrated because he was playing snarky puppy really loud and it bled into the room where I was sleeping and I always feel bad when I make a hasty scene that causes drama, to keep my ego alive) and we made up, and every time I was able to rest in the comfort of everything being well in the world.  Then I would feel the couch still under my back and feel so helpless, frustrated.  This felt in a hazy, distant way.  Like a fever dream.  I begged myself to open one eye, to snap out of it.  I would use a lot of strength to open one lid for a brief second, but it was over powered by my stupor.  I willed an arm to cover me up with the fleece blanket at my feet.  It flung itself, unbending like it was frozen in the Yukon (I just read To Build a Fire) but I think I had success.  JT kept walking by and I made verbal contact with him, thinking much more than I could manage to say.  All that came out (I think) was "baby" to which he replied "hey baby".  I can't be sure any of this was happening.  Or if it was just my mind appeasing itself, more hypotheticals.   I thought, surely this is what it means to lose your mind.

In the last dream I was so frustrated.  So over it.  These dreams seemed to last hours.  I finally said to myself, if this is lucid dreaming, why don't I just fly?  Why don't I just end this dream?  I was really cold at this point, and desperate.  Previously when this has happened, I convince myself to fall deeper asleep.  I'd been resistant to sleep and resting all day because I had been really sleep deprived, and any sort of non-moving resulted in a cloud of grogginess.  Even here in this dream I wanted clean sleep or awakeness, nothing in between.  So I set myself to waking up.  I felt a subtle buzzing my brain as it moved to a higher frequency and pitch.  That last part sounds ridiculous, but I recognized it from one candy experience where I was paying very close attention to my entire body, and felt distinctly when I was high, the moment it happened, based on the way my brain was buzzing.  The way an air conditioner or refrigerator buzzes.  I finally awoke, and trusted the consciousness instantly.  I shot down the hall so fast, trying to escape from that room and that ensnaring state.  JT's bed was warm but he wasn't there to tell about the dream. 

I think it is merciful to forget your dreams.  I think if I had to hear myself talk and reason all night without the suppressive check of physical reality, I'd be a coon eyed insomniac.   

all I remember about my dream is that someone showed me into a warehouse - giant, natural light, like the shopping mall dream I used to have a lot when I was a kid - and there was a giant obstacle course inside.  A carpeted ramp, leading to swinging monkey bars, then a giant network of scaffolding.  My thoughts flew to all the potential of the scaffolding.  I could train to be an acrobat here.  I already saw myself putting on the perfect music and running up the ramp, training like crazy.  I had the feeling that someone said exactly what my heart was thinking, and just the mention made it physically manifest.  How I felt at Suzanne's cocktail party when Kevin was talking about the dharma of Walt Whitman and Joan was talking about a sleeping room. like my far flung soul was being held warm and safe.

two extemporized poems

 I. I feel like Austin Powers learning everything that happened since the sixties every damn day.

again, all I do is ask questions.
so I endure endless lectures willingly,
in fact at my request,
and I take half-chewed on food for thought
(held together by its own conviction)
(crumpled into a tiny ball by me)
and stuff it into some wriggling muscle
on my tiny body.

There is nothing I can say to everyone
and hardly something I can say to anyone.
I don't like to shut people out or down
because what if I might miss something and what would I be then?
Swallowed words and swallowed sermons are my substance,
which I shit out daily, unrecognizable, as a natural digestive function.

II. facebook status verse

Though a time will come when I speak to you in and of all reality,

for now let’s speak in parable,

so we can agree at this point precisely.

Though our interpretations may vary wildly,

we will not be hindered in superlative pursuit.

I tell you that you are not of this world!

It is a false world.  There is another, greater.

While this is a world of comparison, fear of missing out,

collected friends, and justified adventures,

I promise, a Great, Curious, Missing In world all around this one !

We are all going there, when we are done here, you can’t unsee that.

Awkward and not at all eloquent,

we spend most hours of the day doing outrageously normal things.

Don’t go without some comfort: in all reality, you’ll find awakened

in your heart things that had no place here.

 

Of course love is enough, for love.  Not for everything.


Another dream, in fragments:
I was at an abandoned summer camp in the gulf - It's reminiscent of the place I stumbled upon while exploring Fontainebleau State Park in Mississippi with my americorps team, in waders with sharp metal divels for tree planting or water moccasin killing.

A film in which the characters are confronted with the fact that their realities are fundamentally flawed.  Examples include a person with ocd, an alcoholic, a binge eater, and someone who sabotages relationships.  They keep trying to fix things in the same way that is fucking them up.  Contrary and important analogies are people who are on their own trip but are very functional and not bothered or even self aware, and technology which is consistent and flawless, but also mimics some of the intractability that bothers the first group. The film attempts to show the very worst of personal character and also redeem it, but make it appear that the director has done a poor job redeeming it.

Three dreams

First:
I was at a science conference with a random assortment of people from the music department. It was high in a giant skyscraper with a wall of floor to ceiling windows facing a city. We were sitting on bleachers and facing a lecturer.  The building right behind him was a giant glass elevator, and he was explaining a phenomenon that would occur when people in the elevator were raised above a certain elevation.  As he spoke, regular people in the elevator went above the line and began compulsively dancing.  See! The lecturer said, they cannot help but dance at this altitude.
He pulled out racks onto the floor of science toys which we investigated. I remember chief was there.

Later we were riding on a charter bus. I wanted to feel what it means to be a bus, so I either mentally (within the dream) or physically became a bus. Actually I was still a human, straight upright with my arms outstretched, flying down the highway. There were no cars, and it was cool with a lot of moisture in the air. It was either dawn or dusk. Later the bus came back again, and I remember Amanda L getting off and talking about what a terrifying experience that was.

And I can't remember if it was earlier or later, but I was sitting in a gigantic movie theater (I guess I've had several dreams in movie theaters) and I was watching a Pixar movie I think? The room itself was well lit, creating an informal atmosphere of people walking in and out. Mom's parrots were on my shoulder and they were uncharacteristically sweet, nuzzling my neck.

This was such a fun dream that without realizing it I had heard and turned off my alarm, which I set to get to work by six am. Jt had just gone to bed (5:30) and he let me lay there for a few minutes before shaking me awake. Thas my baby.

Second:
I was in a pastoral place, forest at the edge of my view, golden fields right ahead of me. Reminds me of North Carolina, near my mom's house on kernodle road where I used to bike a lot. There was a rusty old wagon wheel. I realized I had walked there from my home a little bit away, and that this was  Ariel's house. I felt dumb, because she lived so close and I hadn't visited her one time.  We decided to fly with the birds in the dusk, which were dark because they were silhouetted. It was a very peaceful place, with no thought of anything but the present.  JT wanted to come so we waited for him to finish eating. He had a very large bowl of something opaque and bubblegum pink.  When he poked into the round mass with a fork it would jiggle like jello.
JT was in ceremony this night and said he'd been thinking about listening to birds and how he might benefit nutritionally from eating more gelatin. Idk about the latter and idk if it was a coincidence or if we were on the same astral plane.

Third: whiskey dream
I crashed my car into the top of a tree.  Bc I was extremely clumsy, not because I was drunk.  I don't remember it actually falling or anything, but it put a nasty dent into JTs car and some obscure diagnostic declared his car totaled. The car was actually Jonathan's Volvo (probably some personal significance to this that I'm not in the mood to explore) which in real life never goes anywhere because it's been busted a parked for nearly two years. But in the dream it was JT's car and he was super pissed at me.
Other people, ignorant of my terrible driving, thought I had created a remarkable art installation. They were deeply reverent of my work. People googled me and found some quote of mine in a high school or college newspaper, and held it up as evidence of my genius. Idiots.

quick

things I'm practicing:

Beethoven
Yoga
Donut Sobriety
Tuning in to other peoples' energies to become very sensitive to auras


Here is a poem that took me two days to write:

Holy, holy.  Holy, holy.
It took two days to write two lines?


A conversation I enjoined after hearing the jist:

Drugs each have their own flavor of trip.  You can figure out what a pill is mixed with based on whether you trip out one way or the other.  Also you can be on a drug and deny it so that a trip doesn't even happen.  The brain is a powerful machine.

duppy conqueror

I ask questions as my main conversational tactic (often forgetting to listen/care about the response).
One of my favorite questions is some variation of "would you rather be deaf or blind?" "Would you rather lose your mind or your body?"
I had no answer, I was just doing the asking.  Now my answer is ha ha! You will lose them all.

I am obsessed with death, currently. (Because my new favorite band is lo-fi alternative goth? -> His Name is Alive; I've listened to Home is in Your Head at least ten times in the last three days.) I have had many phases of strong morbidity, beginning when I was a little kid.  I feel then what I feel now: basically terror (sometimes), confusion, and resistance, even though I'm not "actively" dying.
I wonder what it would be like to work with the dying.  I listened to a podcast from a hospice home, where people waste away slowly.  The residents are "sick of being sick", tired of the imposition of being weak. Some die without acceptance of the fact that they're dying.  The nurses were deeply compassionate but direct - when someone was dying they didn't break it to their family in a way that there could be any doubt or hope.  Probably directness is more compassionate in many situations.  I shouldn't have listened to the podcast twice but I felt like I had to.  Not to be obsessed with unnecessary pain, but because the experience is something I feel like I have to handle, something I can survive, ironically enough.

I hate being on drugs.  Another experience to survive.  I hate being high because I hate feeling my brain be hijacked and persuaded. (PMS is equally as infuriating, since it controls my moods (read: perception of the world) no matter how I deny its existence and I can't fight it.)  But every once in a while I find myself under some influence (due to some amnesia of my serious discomfort) and find myself therefore in an experience to endure.  And while I'm up there having my world blown open to new understanding and new perspective, I realize that my put-together little sober life is, of course, a crazy trip in itself.  It's exhausting and sometimes I see terrifying things - the most terrifying (or in my better moods, humbling) thing I realize is how limited my entire world is (and how soon I'll forget.  Maybe not intellectually, but viscerally I have already forgotten).  As a metaphor: the spectrum of visual colors for the human being is a rather tiny slice of all waves of light, and there are even colors in the gradient between colors too fine for us to distinguish.  In short, our visual spectrum is what is useful on earth for our living habits.  (Thanks radiolab!) How could my brain, which has undoubtedly evolved in the same capacity, comprehend something as colorless as God or meaning?  What I am trying to say I guess is drugs made me believe in God and I hate drugs and always we're resistant to being stretched, but can survive it.

Well I had a day of terror, not helped by the season two premiere of twin peaks.  My own Duppy Conqueror tucked me into bed and kissed my little head and I didn't have a single nightmare.  I didn't think about how terrified I am to ride my bike (traffic! pain!), which I did this morning, or how dreadfully afraid I am to ride in cars (accidents D-:   D-: ) even though I'm getting in one for a long haul this afternoon.  Sometimes I can't wait to die so I can have my brain blown open, but I definitely couldn't now without screaming resistance.

a dream after insommnia, watching 2 episodes of twin peaks, and going back to bed

I went to a place with tight hallways and thick plush carpets and tight stairs painted white - the structure was very old, but the paint and carpet must have been an attempt to freshen and renovate at some point.  Since it reminds me of my childhood home, I'm guessing the seventies.
I went to an apartment of this house where girls were sitting on the carpet - thin, beautiful, spunky college aged girls like out of an urban outfitters catalog, like nicki's friends that made me a little jealous a few days before in real life.  and those damn twenty year old girls in all my classes.  what do you want from me.
Anyway I walked in the apartment like I lived there, because I once had.  It was an apartment I lived in in Arcata - though in real life there's not resemblance to any of the seventeen or so houses I've lived in.  The girls got really hostile and I explained the situation to them and asked if they minded if I studied there - I was tired of studying at my new home, because every home feels too small.  They were definitely not receptive.  I had some flashes of places I've only been to in other dreams (or I felt a strong sense of recognition - I think this may be a separate feeling from the phenomenon.  what if recognition is just a chemical effect?) including some weird metal stairs on the outside of a building.

Later on, I am traveling again.  I don't remember with who.  I seem to often be going place in groups, in my dreams, but in life I am solo about 75% of waking hours.  We were sitting at a table with a woman who was our host.  She was about 27 and had a resting face that was bitchy.  Everyone else was discussing what to do about a certain person in the group, because a person who was absent from this place, his home, would be really angry when he returned, to find this young man.  I gathered that the absent person was very religious, and being my normally bratty self I decided to distract from the severity by turning whatever they were saying into cleverly rhyming hymns.  I was rather impressed with myself.

I can hardly remember the rest, only flashes, even though it was just fifteen minutes ago.  The religious man, chasing the young man through the jungle.  He had dirt on his face, and was very strong but terrified. 

If I'm internalizing what I'm reading about guerillas and persecution in South/Central America during the cold war as I'm cramming for an exam, that's really crazy, because it literally feels like I'm cramming.  When I read and even take notes it seems to get filed in a very superficial place and it feels like I'm hardly even grabbing onto that.


Another dream, from the night before last:
I was the guest in a house, again.  I had JT's computer, which was a 90s era Apple PC.  It started vibrating and I was worried because he might be missing an important contact opportunity, and he was nowhere near and I didn't know how to use the platform.  I eventually calmed the machine down and saw he had a bunch of messages from people sending him videos of themselves singing things a capella.  It was a new trend, like throwback thursday, and also the right commercialized holiday for it.

The people who were hosting me were kind of passive aggressive, and wanted me to leave which I had to gather from painful, personal ways.  I never saw them in the dream.  It might have just been a feeling dream Nyssa layered on the situation.  I went into the basement to gather my things - it reminds me of the Gill's basement, from my childhood.  The toilet was murky and clogged and since I was the last one to use it I felt obligated to unclog it.  My efforts rewarded me with water and sewage rising out of the toilet and spilling over, getting all over me and my clothes.  I started taking off my clothes and then I was covered with the sewage.  I didn't know what to do because I was supposed to be getting out of there.  Then JT's computer started buzzing again and then my phone started buzzing too, which I apparently felt compelled to check despite being covered in shit.  It was a bunch of people sending me a capella/spoken messages.  The only one I saw was a woman who I didn't recognize saying she was going to read me a John Whittier poem, since he is so under-read these days.


And finally a dream I wrote down elsewhere, from Feb. 8:

I dreamed I took a huge shit-the cylindrical mass of a five year old. It kept 

coming and coming, and all my organs. I panicked and started shoving them back in. 

Then I took a picture with my iPhone of the rest to ask my mom if I was going to 

be able to live. A nickelodeon alarm clock, and a bunch of other things covered in 

shit.  I also dreamed I was on the couch in JT's living room, where I actually was,

and the landlord came in a back door for some middle of the night tour. He was 

showing prospective around. I was supposed to be quiet because jt isn't supposed 

to be living there technically, but I also wanted the landlord to know I was only 

getting four hours of sleep. So as a compromise I made little yelps. I think maybe 

they were ghosts.

I included that last one because I seem to keep having dreams about pooping and feces.  I just browsed a few dream interpretation websites which say poop means money - according to Freudian analysis and Chinese wisdom.  Or it means something shameful and scary that originates in myself, that I don't know what to do with.  It may literally mean ridding myself of a lot of shit, or feeling covered in it.

Having bizarre dreams again.. I'm usually traveling in a place that could be real, but has one bizarre sci-fi or surreal element.  Like in one I crawled into a gutter, through a tunnel, into a concrete room with slanted floors and slanted ceilings and florescent lights.  JT had dragged a mattress there and we were just chilling.  I told him this was an outrageously boring vacation, and he was like, "what's wrong with you, why can't you just be happy?".

And last night I was with Madeline and some others at a really fancy restaurant in the country that we had just stumbled upon.  I convinced everyone we should stay and eat, it would be fun.  Their menu was only one course, one dish, but you had to order anyway.  We were arranged at two long tables (there were about five or six of us) but only on one side, like the Last Supper.  Or like a lecture hall.  The food was bizarre.  I don't remember what it was, but everyone was really uncomfortable and I was trying to tell them it was cool, it was a new experience, it was the way they did things out here.  After dinner, we wandered around the house.  Madeline was drinking some mixed drink - it was huge and very alcoholic - strange because I have never seen Madeline drink in my life but she was wasted.  The house had exhibits, kind of.  Movies playing on loops, displays.  I found an upright cylinder made of thin wood or birch bark that I discovered you could turn and it would make the words printed on the cylinder play out in real life.  It projected a little black boy playing in a yard with some chickens and hiding behind a tree.  All of a sudden he was being shot! Over and over! And slowly he sunk to the ground, against the tree.  I cried "NOOOOO!!!" but I was so far away I couldn't help him.  I stopped turning the cylinder and all sorts of wood mites and tiny, polished beetles were crawling out of it.  I felt so disgusted but I felt like it was important to keep going.  Everyone else had left, without saying goodbye, because they didn't want me to convince them to stay.

And the night before last, I was in a messy room - ostensibly mine, but I didn't recognize it; I've had so many rooms - and a bird landed in front of me.  It was a dove, but covered in muted and harmonious blues, reds, oranges, purples, teals..  I was curiously examining it when another one landed.  If the first was all these colors but mainly blue, the second was all these but mainly red.  I overcame my awe to remember the reason I was in my room - because my hedgehog had had another jailbreak in the night and I was looking for him, pressing gingerly on every pile of clothing to listen fo that little Hiss that means a hedgehog is underneath.  Everytime I was sure I'd found him, I was wrong and I was getting frantic.  Then my cellphone started buzzing and I couldn't find that either. Then JT was pushing me and it was real life and my phone was actually buzzing - my alarm - and JT was telling me to turn that fucking thing off.

scraps

I has my hedgehog, I has my johnnyhog, I guess I has it all
Rocky Dennis got picked up in Roseburg just a few days before my birthday - Roseburg Rocky or Jens Lekman he's also sometimes called.  And it turns out he's more like me than nocturnal, nearsighted Johnny.  Fussy, sleepy, musky, spikes out for strangers, motivated to action by food that isn't really that awesome.  I went to portland for four days and when I came back and got RD from the hog sitter, he had become a little fatty, and a decent escape artist.  Two nights in a row I found him out of the tupperware, curled up in some towel or another.  Generation after generation of cardboard exercise maze grapples toward perfection.

    I spent the weekend doing responsible thing after responsible thing, as if my birthday in the great spreadsheet alerted the people in charge of things (probably blundering phoneys, as managers of important things often are) that I was now 25 and should be entrusted to patiently manage the dozen different things I stupidly said yes to.  Filing recipes, scaling flour, washing hedgehog wheels, paying bills, folding soundshells, briefing trumpet players on stage arrangement, chasing down particular and particular tenured staff members, fundraising roommates.  (When you get tenure and people start bending over backward for your particularities, is it much harder to accept/believe that you're sometimes wrong?  If you are a human being, very often wrong?) I knew I shouldn't complain, have known for at least a year that no one wants to hear me complain.  But only recently has it really sunk in that complaining is a useless endeavor for an adult who would prefer things get done, instead of complained about.  If only because anyone who will patiently listen to you complain, a person who actually cares about you as a person and your well-being, and who has the capacity to not compete complain back, is usually someone who is much more busy than you and dealing with much heavier shit.
      Listening to Richard Rohr lectures on the ride back from Portland: "Immaterial gifts, unlike worldly gifts, don't diminish when you give them away.  Giving patience, practicing patience, creates patience."  Complaining, then, certainly creates conflict and struggle, where there doesn't have to be.  I am learning to embrace the process, what amounts to be simply Work, as where life is, as where the end is, as where I am.    (I don't know how to fit this in, but Rohr also spoke on love: Creating love in ourselves is fundamentally attached to seeing it in others - it's impossible to say whether seeing love or being love comes first.  He says love is not something we do, but Love is what we are.)

          I spent several hours this weekend working for the music department watching people not read signs.  The big signs taped to the door that say "do not let door slam, show in progress" and "do not knock on the door, show in progress.  An usher will let you in between pieces." and such knocking and slamming. It makes me really sad because if signs don't work then how can you communicate with anyone and how stupid is the world and how sad am I.
      I'm also going to start training as a recorder for the music department.  The interview was one brief moment in which all of my career skills and natural aptitudes made some sort of cohesive sense.  My abilities for managing, seeing the overall picture, making sure everyone is where they are supposed to be, memorizing a lot of finicky procedures, and a sensitivity for subtleties.  Also my disinterest in networking, self-promoting, self-starting, and disorganization, was not offended at all.  As far as careers I change my mind a lot. But right now I am organizing the road to becoming a professional dilettante, or jack-of-many-trades if I am luckier.  Stay in school another year to get my performance degree, stay another semester or year after that to prepare for grad school, to study musicology or performance.  At some point learning web design or graphic design, grant writing, accumulating accompanying jobs, students.  I still dream and talk about moving to the country and farming, but I'm on a section of 5 Acres and Independence that says why maybe farming isn't for city-folk like me.  hm.  because of lack of reliable help, lack of a guarantee someone has the same vision and work ethic. and because I have a propensity to dream too big.  At some point really the only cohesion between all my careers (I'm looking for a redeeming big picture but doubt I'll find one) will be me.  Everything I do will have in common only "nyssa". 
        Next semester I'm signed up for modern dance, history in the age of Jackson and Jefferson, recording methods and technology, percussion ensemble, brass band (as the organist), and what else is to come?  All because Why Not?
      I had a religious experience a few weeks ago, and I will not forgive myself for not writing about it immediately after.  In fact immediately after, though neither of us had slept, JT and I spoke for two hours without breaks or lapses in new things to share.  (This in itself is not so uncommon, but it was even more inspired than usual)  In fact I will not forgive myself for not writing many more times when my little life was rich and I had tangibles that could have stood the test of time if I had written them down.  But the running theme of our conversation was taking care of things that seem to resist care.  People who are big time jerks and one person who takes care of them, because who else will?  People who are lonely and constantly craving some kind of interaction, but preclude any deep interaction at the very onset because of fear (self-perpetuating isolation).  People who yearn for depth and could have it, but aren't content to devote themselves to anything, to call their parents and have an hour long conversation.  People who feel responsible for someone else's depression, destruction, but can't get in to help and couldn't really help anyway.  My mantra, as I was lying on the floor praying like a damn grateful hippie, was "Let the people who love each other be together".


            The only other thing I can immediately think to talk about and actually only mention in passing is that I am in a complicated relationship with doughnuts.  A new exciting term that relates to this is dynamic inconsistency.  I underestimate how likely I am to ever eat a donut again (never or immediately) based on how recently I ate a really big chocolate buttermilk (seconds ago or 23 hours ago) and am willing to pay fluctuating amounts accordingly (couldn't pay me to eat doughnut or I will pay much money for doughnut).  Hyperbolic discounting: I would rather have chocolate buttermilk doughnut now rather than two tomorrow bc WHAT IF TOMORROW NEVER COMES

love me while I'm young

This little ball of spikes is the manifestation of accumulating months of maternal instincts. I pinpointed maternal instincts after several dreams about protecting trembling slugs, getting ducks made of melting snow to water sources, and so forth.  I haven't met this ball of spikes, it's as abstract as any instinct, but I have met two hedgehogs in the last two days and I am overwhelmed by the feeling of all-encompassing love for a helpless thing, unrolling from a little ball and snuffling around in my hands.  After leaving the Zany Zoo in Eugene, I asked my mother if she has ever held something helpless in her hands and felt overwhelming love for the creature and fortunately she said yes, but I guess that doesn't necessarily mean me.  The reasons I used to describe why I love the little guys to my boyfriend - nearsighted, nocturnal, defensive until they know someone and then they unroll their soft bellies to be petted - also basically describe my boyfriend, so that explains the attraction to him and hedgehogs.  Several hours of research and speculation later, I learned that in addition to being rather expensive for small rodent type pets (but not rodents; Erinaceomorpha) they are also illegal in the state of California.  Some would say those are the end of my dreams but some wouldn't.

This is my third day in Junction City with my mom, visiting the old folks, wearing the same jeans and jacket.  Everyone seems to eat a lot of cake and cookies and peanut butter bars.  In fact I was the opening act for the Hill Billy Band/ ice cream social at the Junction City old folks home and I get the idea an ice cream social's nothing to holler about, especially when the Zany Zoo petting zoo, with live hedgehogs, lemurs, alligators, and sugar gliders that crawl in your shirt, happens at the exact same time. 

I made the board!

Some of the nurses are my age, but there's probably only 5% of us in the building still menstruating.  I hope no one kills me to drink my young, rejuvenating blood.  Tonight there was a high pitched alarm, making constant intonations equal in duration to the interval of silence between.  Why don't they turn that god damn alarm off, it makes this place so stressful, I wondered aloud.  Do the residents scream because of the alarm or because of the claustrophobia of senility?  How does anyone sleep?  My grandparents and mother wanted to know which alarm, and I realized I was the only one who could even hear it.  An alarm to keep away young people.  I asked the nurses about it and they said it goes off when someone has pressed their assistance button and someone has always pressed the assistance button so it is always going off.  They want to destroy it.
      My 89-year-old grandpa is in the rehabilitation center which is across the street from my 84-year-old grandmother in the assisted living center.  She eats breakfast and walkers herself over there by nine and leaves by 8:30 pm to be in bed at nine.  They're very slow.  My grandpa has Parkinsons, and there's a lot of speculation that with his lifetime as an athlete he'd be running around and climbing rocks except for the Parkinsons.  Instead he's so decrepit, he has a canvas crane that lifts him into bed (he has to hold on to the supports and he's terrified he won't have enough strength), and his tongue is so swollen no one understands a word he says.
        He's a funny and sharp old man, and makes any joke he can make without words and quick movements. My mother told me he was absolutely never a bigot, that he was a great fan of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., that he invited black singers into his ministry in Kansas when my mom was a little girl.  It's interesting to learn that my propensity to want to learn something from any kind of person is family legacy.  (Along with hot-headedness, restlessness, and preference for sweets over alcohol, all from Grandpa Helms.)  89 isn't necessarily so old, but decrepit is old, so old is old.  He doesn't have a ministry and he doesn't have a house and he can't hold his wife.  If he has opinions he can yell about him but my grandmother just assumes he is thirsty or wants to go to bed and she hollers at him (good naturedly) to hush and be still!  He has memories, surely, but then there's senility to interfere. And then there's the fact that you can't have every memory at once, they come out with some kind of stimulation - scents, pictures, visiting a place - and the Junction City rehabilitation center tries its best but ranks low in being stimulatory.  My grandfather has lost almost everything in its optimum form while he's still alive and can mourn it.  In the lifetime arc of accumulating things like independence and esteem and love, being old seems to be the business of losing property and friends and future.
         I have felt young my whole life and I have even been young my whole life.  I have also been me my whole life and other people have just been other people for my whole life so they seemed kind of like people with the same opportunities as me that made the mistake of getting old.  Is it obscene to walk into an old folks home and be so vital? Do they resent me and close off, the way my fat landlord does to me because she's insecure (the same way I am with pretty smart girls because I'm insecure)?  Do they crave young people to surround them and no mirrors, so they can forget for a while?  Am I romanticizing the whole business?  Will young people find it hard to take me seriously?  Will someone turn my wheelchair to the tulip painting on the wall and forget about me?  My grandmother has few memories, either.  She doesn't hoard them like me, so she's apparently unafraid of having nothing- a lifetime of plusses and minuses that sums to zero.  JT texted me, "Yep. As far as I can tell, life is about experiencing limitation and loss.  When we die enough times we'll eventually be free and limitless again."  He offers a tempting salve that I won't accept until I have greater pain.
        I know fear is the wrong response, I know it doesn't serve me, but all I have is fear for losing my function, for losing my youth and luster.  I'm young, I see that much more clearly now, but I spend an awful lot of time feeling old and talking to people my age about how old we are.  I fear my parents getting old because they're the definition of stability, and because when they're old I will have taken their place.  I will have to be patient and visit them and it won't be as fun as now, running around Eugene all day, eating mexican food and petit fors, petting hedgehogs, thrifting, arguing about silly things.  Fruit gets ripe and then goes bad, hedgehogs die, I know this, but they are not your mother.

I had an intense, awesome dream.  I was first listening to these scores that were playing out visually in my head.  About a kid escaping all these fantastic situations-assassins, airplanes - with a harry potter sort of feel of innocence.  sort of like you knew he'd never perish, though you delighted in having some fear.  The composer and librettist was hard to figure out.  I surmised it was Sibelius, then realizing I was incorrect guessed Nancy Hall.  That's Nick's mom.  Later I was in a minivan (like the one we took to Joshua Tree, me and five young techies who work at google, twitter, space x, and such, who liked to dream about being a bum) and I was reading another score, just reading it, and it was happening in my brain just as intensely.
Now it's friday and I'm sleep deprived.  Not a surprise.  Here goes another weekend of not quite catching up on sleep, playing out into the next.  Never quite catching up until summer vacation.  I hate fridays.

type-a

my class schedule has kept me on campus for many hours every day this semester (that is seven days), which is considerably different from how I spent my time last semester: struggle to make it by 9:07am three days a week to Gil's indulgent fifty minute lecture on baroque trumpets (or on tue/thurs sleep through ear training at eight am and make it to conducting by nine.. maybe), go to the gym, and then go home.  At home three or four hours would disappear mysteriously.  I still don't know where. I'd go back to make a half-ditch effort to practice, and then call it quits ten 'til the hour and go to yoga.
and now I'm on campus all day working, of all things - focusing, finishing things, practicing four hours in a row, going to every class and getting something out of it.  My type-A has been awoken, and is looking sadly over years of disorganization, lack of focused discipline, and wasted time.  I am mourning, and while doing so I am carefully avoiding refined carbs and researching internships and graduate schools and promising myself it's not too late to redeem some of this scattered mess.
This is more real and workable than that eastern "time stands still and 'success' looms eternally on the horizon" bullshit I was getting into

APD

            I managed to piss Arnold off for the second Tuesday in a row, which I figured out from the way he greatly tones down his regularly boisterous goodbye and switches from keeping a list of everything Anthony has fucked up to a keeping a list of everything I have fucked up (burger patties too flat, pizza boxes stacked carelessly, did not remember to immediately begin new turkey thaw). 

            I say “allll righty Arnold, they said they don’t need me downstairs, so I guess I’m outta here..”

            “You gonna put away your shit?” he says.  He is talking about the yellow pickle bucket filled with sugar.

            “Oh.. I was using that to keep the freezer shut.” (The door is fucked.)

            “Yeah, I don’t want the night guys to get confused about where the sugar goes.”

            “Oh, okay, you got it Arnold,” I say and heft the bucket back to where the sugar goes.  The freezer door creaks up a few inches hello.  Fucking crazy but I figure I got to let Arnold redeem his dignity in terms of being higher up on the shelf than me even though we have the same job, because I kind of got him good that day with my keen logic and also he is so whiny when someone upsets him (usually not me).  I can get people good with my keen logic all the time because I catch them off guard and make my escape before they realize it’s hare-brained, but usually I do not direct it to Arnold.  After all, he has been here a year and two months to my two months, and in a sense has been putting in time for decades longer, making a cumulative offering to the food service industry, for which I owe some deference. 

Last Tuesday I pissed him off because we were fighting over who gets the ends of the rye from downstairs – can you fucking believe they normally just throw it away? He was trying to wheedle my contrition saying his wife loves it but I would not be moved, because he works way more hours than me and also on delivery days, so normally when I get a shot at it to myself it is only floppy sourdough which doesn’t do it for me. 

The Tuesday before that I didn’t piss him off exactly but I had just for the first time ever tripped shrooms and I lay catatonic for the whole night before on my friend’s carpet with the entire weight of human suffering on my small frame, and on the morning of regathering he was like “are you going to shut up with the revelations?” because he could not get in an inch of his 9/11 Was an Inside Job rhetoric edgewise.  The brunt of it instead went to the new guy on dish, who doesn’t already Believe.

But this Tuesday I really got him, poor thing.  He was making a list of everything Anthony fucked up, not making tuna brine, stealing patty aprons, to the slap slap cadence of four ounce patty pressing.  Not out loud to me on the dough mixer since I couldn’t hear him over Alex Jones Watch Guard of Civil Liberties anyway but I have heard it enough times to know.  I really hate this radio show.  I have this irrational first world fear of immersing myself in the wrong lecturer because I am smart as a whip and things get lodged in my brain at mostly useless levels of my awareness with absolutely no effort.  I am really worried about picking up the wrong opinions and spitting them out at the wrong time (a place where I am trying to look smart) and Alex Jones has only opinions that alienate you from other people.  Right now he is asking me and other patriots if we are Eagles or Ostriches, if I am registered on infowars.com the only place for networking, news, and dating for defenders of the New World Order.  Am I ready to resist because resistance is victory. 

There is kind of a lot going on in this overheated prep kitchen in the sky – all the smells of food and  I feel sick because I just binged on pizza dough like I always do when I wear the shoes that make my back hurt. I am about to scream because everything is compounding and the Watch Guard of Civil Liberties wants to know have I bought my water purifier straw to defend myself and my family yet and I am like someone call goddamn Alex Jones I think my Civil Liberties are being violated.  This is hour two but over the course of the summer it’s more than the time I spent trying to not listening in summer school Sound Mind, Sound Body for which I earned three units.  Four hours a week of Alex Jones is worse even than fourteen hours of Grateful Dead on weekend shifts downstairs, where the next weed break is always only thirty minutes away.  This is waterboarding!

“Arnold!” I begin reasonably, “Don’t you think it’s dangerous to listen to only one source for The Truth and agree to everything this guy says?”  Arnold assures me he is by nature a defensively skeptical person.  The most skeptical person, he says, I do not trust anyone.  Not even your wife, I say.  “It’s for money, Arnold! They’re writing and selling you ‘The Culture of Fear’ and made in America Diamond Gusset Jeans.”  Yeah Arnold, who has more than once forgotten to rezip his diamond gussets, agrees they are probably trying to make money.  He will not get worked up enough to spew out any fallacies but at least he is cooperating in the deconstruction of the matter.

“When he says the media is the fourth branch of the government, let’s be clear we’re not talking about Anderson Cooper, are we?  If voting Obama is voting for a continuation of the same regime, what should I do instead, cry?”  I continue without waiting for answers, “And how do you know ALEX JONES is not a tool of the government?  For high risk subversives?”

“He probably serves some purpose,” Arnold concedes, “because he has not yet been exterminated.”

“God! You think you are on some special mission along with all these civil defenders to open complacent American eyes.  You don’t even fly because you’re afraid your name isn’t on the No-Fly list after all.  I can’t listen to this crap anymore, I’m afraid I’m going to start believing it.”

And I win, Arnold is pissed off and hurt.  “If you are so AFRAID of the truth – if you are so WEAKMINDED that you are afraid of being BRAINWASHEDS then – GOD help you I don’t know what else to say.  I thought maybe you had an open mind but you’re to self involved to have time for the truth like everyone else. NO ONE can tolerate the truth.  A woman was on here yesterday, a whistleblower, she blew the whistle on the government and she was silenced.  They took her from the airport and held her in an offshore prison for two years.  The government operates on your subconscious.  They have no conscience.  No one listened to Jesus, either.  He went into anonymous for twelve years, when he was 18, no one listened to what he had to say.”  I wonder if he spent his summers in the food industry.

This was gravitating rapidly toward bullshit interspersed with unknowingly repeating Alex Jones Live with a six second delay.  And I’ve said my piece.  So I go downstairs to make a sandwich.  “Arnold is sulking,” I sulk.  “Oh thanks a lot, Nyssa.” they say.  “Get the fuck home and bother someone else.”