not so dreamy dreams

there's a girl in here who looks like ms. teen south carolina. she's one of "those girls" who wakes up 2 hours early every morning to do her hair and makeup and get dressed in the clothing she picked out last night. she's blonde, styled in a pathetic attempt at a pompadour (also soooo 2 seasons ago)and wears a turquoise jersey dress, carefully matched with

oh shit i just started to remember my dream from this morning. scratch that before stuff, i don't care about her. this is the shit dreams are made of:

Jay, dad of the kids I babysit for calls and leaves a message. I think he's calling cause I'm late to babysit (maybe I was supposed to and forgot). But actually he wants to see if I want to come over and hang out. He's rented "Secretary" and we could watch that and I could play with the kids and have a good time. Angie's out of town. I was freaked out. All this meanwhile I'm doing some kind of Catechism class with my sister and brother and Chris Clinton and Kyle D and lots of others and it's in Malibu or something- everything is musky, grey. As per my dreams usual. So I'm not really good at this Catechism thing- there are lots of tests to prove yourself and if you get too many questions wrong, you die. There was a car too and we drove around A LOT. A fat woman was scared and in charge, she knew more than me for certain. Anyhow, I think there was a way to come back to life- like Jesus Resurrected- but I was terrified the whole time nonetheless. I went into a bathroom at a break to tell someone about it.

Then I was in Forever21 (This is the SECOND dream I've had in the past week about that store) looking at clothes that were on sale. I had omnly cash- about 40 dollars or so (actually it was exactly the amount I had after yesterday's cashing of 68 dollars and 51 cents and having spent 37 of it during the day). So, I'm looking and I'm also on the lam and whaddya know but Jay is there on the floor of the store eating cheetos and watching "the game" He's also drunk because he's an alchoholic and went out drinking with his work buddies before coming home/forever21. The clothes were frilly and summery and I was looking through some babydoll dresses and ended up with a huge pile. I kept taking off my shoes. At first nobody worked there but then a snobbish couple showed up and they were judging me. I was eating a sandwich and a salesman came around, he knew me and was nice but i needed to avoid him.

Then Jay's kids were there and they wanted to help me pick out underwear. There was a whole part of the store I hadn't noticed at first, with new clothes. the bras were all small and rainbow striped and i pulled one apart. They looked like training bras, and just came apart at the center chest seam, like taffy or a spiderweb.

Somehow I left, ended up at school in an shiny marbley florescent administrative hall with lots of doors and offices with windows and innuendos (sp?) to previous dreams from months ago and walked out and left the dream forever.

oh lordy

So. I am lazy. My house is disgusting- I didn't do anything all day. I have lots of homework- didn't do it. My dishes are dirty- haven't done them in 3 weeks. Maybe more. I finally got up at 8 pm after watching "The Office" all day long. Literally all day, save the 2 hour nap I managed to fit in between 5 and 7 pm. I skipped all of my classes. I don't remember the last time I did this and wasn't sick.

I've noticed a trend though: Usually I let things get really really really bad before I chin up and make themn good again. So this was the icing on the garbage can I guess. I went to Target tonight, where I spend 4 dollars and 9 cents on a fucking coffee. Then I went to Barnes and Noble, where I WORK IN THE CAFE and get 50 percent off. I didn't get upset because the trip to BN wasn't planned. It's cool, Starbucks deserves my hard earned dollars that they helped to give me. Working for the man, giving back to the man. Super.

I also misplaced 100 Years of Solitude, which I am reading for a class for which the reading now is not necessarily imperative, but I read it anyway because it consoles me to think that I'm doing SOME homework, even though the important homework hasn't been touched. I also picked up The Road at work tonight. It's reallllly good. He writes in fragments. I lovehate that.

Last night Kelly and I went to seve47 for my first time. It didn't hurt that bad, but I bled a little. Everyone was a frat or sorost. And a shitty band played. We had to pay 3 dollars each to get in, but we were drunk so it was cool.We also went to Logan's and Othello's. Order those backwards, you'll have the course of the evening. The bartender at Logan's gave us some free shots that were actually big drinks. This after a bottle of wine and 2 tequila tonics. Yum. Then we danced on the dance floor with some dude and his friend. One of them gave me his hat. I just remembered that part. Then we went to Pita Pit, where I tried to make them put bacon on my falafel sandwich. I was found out though- I didn't pay for bacon. Then we ordered pepperoni pizza and I ate that too and also ate it all day today. God, I felt like a fresh 19 year old with a fake id.

So, I blame today on last night.

This weekend though: it's gonna be good. I can feel it in my bones. "Good" meaning I'll do my homework. geez.

Had a dream that Kelly wanted to cuddle all night and lots of other crazy shit happened so that when I woke up I was confused and thought that all of it really happened. I was hungover too. I'm not allowed alchohol anymore.

p.s. Haven't seen Ralf in a week or so; I'm going to decide that it's a good thing. He is an unpractical crush. Still, half the reason I went to BN tonight was because I thought he might be there, and we could wax mathematics and gaze dreamily into each other's bespectacled eyes (if I'd remembered my glasses). Guess he must have been at Starbucks.

brief synopsis

dream last night:
gave birth to a baby boy, smartest kid i'd ever seen.
he was walking within minutes,
was large like a toddler not baby.
labor was not painful, baby was also talking within moments:
full conversations.
i looked at him and wanted to name him henry, though somehow
couldn't decide between russell and henry.

at one point in the dream, discovered that
throughout the pregnancy i had smoked cigarettes,
did drugs and alcohol. it was as though i hadn't known
that i was pregnant, rather the opposite:
i hadn't known i'd been drinking etc while pregnant.
people kept reminding me and i'd have vague memories
and then say no no no i wouldn't dare... but i had.

i think we also lived in a space station.

express yourself

Super Serious time
When I look back on old posts, I think of how orderly my life was: just because I was doing something: writing it down. My life has NEVER been orderly, but I like being reassured that I'm not a complete bored, boring idiot.
Last winter/spring went by so fast that I wish I had something to grasp onto- I wish I'd wrote more, made more, etc.
Simon and Clem are leaving on Monday: it seems that "only yesterday" we were picking them up from the airport. Yesterday I talked to Max on Skype and he has a MacBook now so I got to see him for the first time since August. I tried not to get too teary.
I'm working on getting things together: doing instead of saying and doing what I want, not what I think others want. It's really hard to break old habits but it's working.

My dreams are all more patterned than before latley: all with my sister and mother. Some with my Dad and brothers. Oh, I could make a chart/graph/map.

I decided that I'm going to close my eyes and point on a globe and that's where I'll go. No exceptions, it's where I will go. I haven't done it yet I'm kinda nervous.

I got "promoted" to 50 cents more per hour at the EIC desk, which means that now I'm a "Student Supervisor." I'm underqualified, seriously. But now I guess that's incentive to do work I should have been doing in the first place.
I also do some work in the Reference Office and I like that- I'm getting to know the other librarians.

i'm working on being nic eto everyone- strangers even. I like it.

I bought some film and tried out the Polaroid 669 film on my older 600 cmaeram but the shutter I think it is broken. So I ended up with lots of unexposed and weird stuff on the film- esp the ones I peeled before dev. time (90 secs). They look neat and I decided to turn a potential disaster (read: expensive)into something great. I started etching into the emulsion and I like what happened.
I'm still working a lot with text and even submitted work to a literary journal, don't know what will happen.
I have a hard time going to class still and missed two in a row in my sculpture class. So today I went and nobody was there. Serves me right. I'm going to try to do the casting alone tonight: one mold is finished and the other almost. I'm going to cast with paper too: see how it turns out.

I have to clean today- don't know if I will but I haven't seen too many bugs lately so if I want it to stay that way (and not have them hiding alll lllll over) then I'd best get going. The state of my house is disgusting, really and truly.

amsterdamwithtree

This is one of almost none of the photos I took in Amsterdam.
I went with Max and four of his friends, who were sometimes too rowdy. This day was one of the most peaceful. We stopped at an undercrowded coffee shop, and the Germans sitting next to us offered up their remaining hashish, as they couldn't take it home with them. We were in a quaint little neighborhood just next to a canal, and rode through someone's garden on our bikes to get here.
I was stressed out the whole trip, as riding bikes amongst hundreds of othe bikes while watching out for hundreds of cars and pedestrians while stoned... you get the idea. It was hard to get used to.
We camped just outside the city: was more like living outside- as there were hundreds of others. Though the campsite was over crowded- much like the city- word of advice, don't go in the summertime, the evenings were very peaceful and the community area had a well stocked ice cream vending machine.

I like the look of this tree and partial sign- also how I can just make out parts of the city beyond the tree. The blurriness and vignetting thanks to my vintage Zeiss 120 camera. It's a rangefinder, so many of my images were guesses and flukes. Some I feel I can't even take credit for. This one I can- it's one of the very few that I actually remember taking (really! and I was baked out of my mind).

from the train

i took this from the train window on the way from clermont-ferrand, france to marseille. there is a lot to see at the brief stops if you watch closely- even cliche, but quite real: french families and friends saying hello and goodbye, clothing drying on the line,


and just before the train picks up real speed (also when it's slow on certain tracks) it's easy to note vegetation and architecture, sometimes even people sunbathing near a river. kelly and i had our coach all to ourselves on this leg of the journey. the trains -long winded french ones especially- are remarkably hot in the summer time, making seats and coaches with other people virtual saunas. trains stop in just about every small town with a station on the way, so the trips take a long time, particularly when you have to change trains- this journey to marseille was around 10 hours.
we had a short layover in nimes, about 4 hours down the road from this image. there, we ate pizza and smoked our cigarettes while we watched passersby (a man with a caged bird at a nearby table) and suffered mild heat stroke.
there's not really much to see in this photo except the feel of fleeting glimpses which are so common from these kinds of windows.
"nothing" is often my favorite thing to see- photos like this make me feel, imagine, and remember something more than something more descriptive. this stop was only 15 minutes or so outside of clermont; the sun rose as we made our way from this small station to the next.