The flying dream...

It's a short one, but possibly meaningful.  I think.

I was flying.  Soaring above the landscape so high that I could see over the mountains.  When I held my arms out straight I could glide along effortlessly, and by holding them at my sides I shot through the air so that the landscape was a blur below.  Then I landed.

I was in a town I didn't recognize.  As soon as my feet touched the ground, I knew something was wrong.  I tried to take off again, but I stayed where I was.  Running down the street, I leapt into the air only to fall to the asphalt.  In a moment of mad panic, I climbed to the roof of a three-storey house and tried jumping from the eave.  I flew like a rock and landed in someone's garden.

At the edge of town was a cliff.  It was miles high.  As I threw myself over the edge, it didn't even occur to me what might happen if this plan failed.  The rock face blurred past me while I gained speed.  Finally, I spread my arms and pulled up out of the dive.  I flew away from the strange town.


Hmm....  Reading back over that, it seems like there's a suicidal bent to it.  That is definitely not the hidden meaning.

Many things happen

How long has it been since I posted last?  I forget.  At least a week.  It's been a busy week.  First off, I had a dream which I will talk about later.

Next, the district manager was in town interviewing potential assistant managers and terrorizing the boss and myself.  The boss began with 'Sorry I dropped the ball on [insert arbitrary unfinished task here]', until he found something wrong he could loosely pin on me, then used that as a spring board to assign ultimate blame for everything.  Then he told me I needed to come in on my night off to help out with the Midnight show of Sex & the City 2.

I showed up while everybody was wandering around trying to remember how to deal with Midnight shows.  I told everybody where they needed to be and what they needed to do while organizing all the promotional decorations and givaways.  No problems whatsoever; I excel at organized chaos.  Am I bragging?  Heck yes.

Thursday was my other day off, which I spent digging holes, cutting wood, and doing other yardwork-oriented chores.  Then I made the greivous mistake of wandering into the theatre for five minutes to get a free drink.  Some time around minute number four, alarms started going off from the projection booth.  Unable to resist the instict to help, I wandered upstairs.  By the time I got there, they'd figured out that one of the belts had broken on the projector.  As I stood there dirty, sunburnt and tired, two unfortunate facts flashed through my mind:

1. The last time a belt broke it took me two hours to take apart the projector and replace it.

2. I'm the only one there who's ever replaced a broken belt.

The boss promised that he'd make up the extra time to me this week.  Apparently his idea of making it up to me was to forget that I'd asked for a short closing shift Monday, so that I could spend some time with my family up in Wyoming, and scheduled me for a ten-hour opening shift.  He wanted to take Memorial Day off, it seemed.  A little wheeling and dealing with the rest of the crew let me at least land a regular closing shift.

Wyoming was beautiful, and we all enjoyed it by going out to play golf.  We did pretty well for ourselves, losing only five balls.  It's hard to tell for sure though, since we somehow lost the scorecard as well.  For dinner we had chicken nuggets and chocolate cake by request of my nephew the eight-year-old birthday boy.  Now it's nose to the grind again though.

A weird moment of syncronisity

A weird thing happened a moment ago while I was getting ready for bed.  Early, I know, but with the total lack of a good night's sleep last night, I thought I should play it safe.  Anyway, I was fishing my phone out of my pants pocket from the laundry pile to set the alarm for tomorrow when I randomly thought about Max and the way we sometimes call each other at the same time.  It's not like we call each other every day, so it would only stand to reason that we'd call at the same time every once in a while.  We're just long-time good friends, so I can't say we've got some psychic rapport going on either.  We just seem to find ourselves on the same brain wavelength sometimes.

We've simultaneously dialed each other a couple of times.  There've also been times when I'll think, 'I haven't talked to Max in  a while, I should give him a call.'  And my phone rings just as I reach for it.  Guess who it is?  It's even happened when he or I have been a few hundred miles apart in different states.  There's never been anything creepy about it, just, "Hey dude, I was just going to call you!"

Back to the point, I was climbing into bed while pondering these strange coincidences.  I opened up my phone to set the alarm and... yep, guess who had sent me a text not two minutes ago?  Never heard it ring or noticed any blinking light indicating a message.  Even if I had subconsciously registered the ringing or message light, I don't have anything programmed into it to diferentiate Max's messages from any others.  I didn't even know he was already back in town from Washington DC.

Incredibly, randomly, our thoughts synced up somehow.  Does it mean we've got some kind of deep spiritual connection, or that we knew each other in past lives, or that we're long lost brothers?  I doubt it.  My theory is that it's just a weird syncronisation that happens randomly.  But that doesn't make it any less cool.

Why wouldn't everyone want to know about the state of my internal organs?

Bleagh... I woke up this morning at 6:00am (having gone to sleep at about 3:30am) with some nasty heartburn coupled with a touch of disentery.  It sometimes gets in the tap water up here during the spring melt, when there's overflowing everywhere and streams and rivers pick up extra junk.  The day before, I was being my usual unwise self and drinking lots of water as I lugged boxes around the bookstore.

I've learned from past experience that if I notice the disentery messing with my stomach soon enough, the alcohol in a few beers will kill off all the bacteria and save me from a day or two of extreme discomfort.  The heartburn and the fact that it was 6am made me question that plan of action though.  So I decided to try killing two birds with one stone and had a glass of milk with a shot of honey liquor mixed in.  I may have only wounded the birds, but I think it helped.

In other news unrelated to my bodily functions, we've received word that we may be getting a visit from the District Manager at the theatre.  So we're cleaning up and shining all over the place, because he's even more of a hassle to deal with than my immediate boss.  But it's his job to give us a hard time, I guess.  Thankfully, it's only once every few months that he comes to visit.

Comics and Scrabbles

I had to go down to Denver Thursday afternoon for an appointment with Brittney, so I decided to give Cris a call and see what she was doing.  All she was really up for was hanging out at her place, but after an hour and a half of harrowing criticism, I was fine with that.  Lindsay came over and we went out for asian with Cris' roommate, Melissa.  Afterward, we played Scrabble and listened to the Voltaire CD I brought Cris for a late birthday present.  Then everybody who had normal 9-5 jobs and had to get up in the morning went to their respective beds, leaving me to curl up on the couch with a book for a couple more hours before finally drifting off to sleep myself at about 2:00am.  Working at a movie theatre really messes with your schedule.

I also hit the comic shop while I was there but as I'd feared, since I hadn't been there for a few months, they'd cancelled my hold slot.  Not that I can blame them too much.  My reserves consist of only about seven different subscriptions, while most others are more like two or three dozen.  Still, I can't drive 75 miles to Denver every month just for a few 'zines.  Now my only other option is Mile High Comics, but while they've got much larger stores of back issues, the price goes up monthly.  Maybe I can find a relatively cheap online store...

Must get back to work now.  I wasn't supposed to close tonight, but since the other manager didn't show up, it's either that or close early.  Tempting, but I like being paid.

New book

I read Spellwright by Blake Charlton over the weekend, and it was good!  It was one of those high fantasy books we're seeing more of recently where the author creates a new and specificly intricate system of rules by which magic operates (other examples are Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson and Shadowfall by James Clemens).  In this world, there are different magical languages which wizards use to shape spells.  The main character, Nicodemus weal, is an unfortunate type of wizard called a 'cacographer' whose touch immediately causes magical words to become misspelled and corrupted.  The story was very engaging and fast-paced.  I didn't want to put it down.  Of course, also like most new fantasy novels, this was only part one, so now I have to wait for the next volume to be released.

Links to comics

I've added links to my favorite online comics.  You may notice a mad scientist theme, but that's perfectly normal since mad scientists are awesome and comics about them are similarly so.  At the top of the list are my favorites: Girl Genius and Narbonic.  I also highly recommend Dresden Codak, which frequently travels so far into geekdom that it comes out the other side, and XKCD which features the darkest, most philosophically introspective stick people ever drawn who also study physics.

Reconnected!

Home internet works again, so I can stop using the office computer to post on my lunch break!  I have no idea why, but for some reason switching the ethernet connection between the modem and the computer for a usb connection got it to stop acting up.  And I know for sure there wasn't anything wrong with the wire or connections.  Now on to the scanner, which inexplicably unplugged and uninstalled itself while I wasn't paying attention.

I had the day off yesterday and got to spend about five hours writing uninterrupted!  It was awesome.  That night I went out for pool and darts with the roommates.  It was fun to go hang out, but when we got back they immediately poured themselves some more drinks and fired up Guitar Hero (it's my TV that has the PS2 hooked up to it, naturally).  In situations like that, both the game volume and obnoxious over-friendliness start on a steep climb, so I decided to go to work and relax.

The boss was there, so I had to endure the arbitrary criticism and recrimination that inevitably accompanies any encounter with him.  After that, I was able to go sit in on the Thursday night prescreenings of Robin Hood and Letters to Juliet.  And yes, prescreening is fully justified, since I caught and fixed a bad splice on Robin Hood.  After all, we should make sure everything's perfect for opening night, shouldn't we?  Actually I see less movies than you'd think, working at a movie theatre.  True, they're free and I get free popcorn and drinks, but it feels too much like going to work on my day off.  Especially since I always seem to notice some problem or another that the projectionist missed, and feel the need to go upstaris and fix it before I can enjoy the movie.

The roommates were still going strong when I got back at about 2:00am, but by then I was beat and feeling much less accomodating than normal.  I made it clear I was going to bed, and they took the hint and relocated downstairs.  There have been enough instances when I griped at them to keep it down, and then again the next morning when I overslept, that now they tone things down pretty quickly when I ask.

Snow and more snow

It's forty degrees in the middle of May and there's a blizzard going on out there!  Obviously, Mother Nature has gone off her rocker.  I can't complain too much, since I heard our messed up weather up here in Colorado is turning into freak tornados when it hits Kansas.  I've seen more than a few in person (never from the inside, luckily) and they're all kinds of scary.

Bad weather is good for the movie theatre business at least.  In the outdoor tourist playground of Summit County, indoor activities consist of pretty much just us and the bowling alley.  Now if there were just some tourists around, we might be in business.

In other news, my modem started acting up again.  This being the new one that replace the old one that was acting up.  Why am I always getting these problems that even the experts look at and say, 'That's not supposed to be possible?'  I wish I was more computer-literate.  I'm still trying to learn enough html language to be able to put pictures on this thing.

Hmmm, must find something to talk about that isn't negative and complaining.  Ah, the new Doctor Who!  What's his name, Matt Smith.  I wasn't too sure about him at first; he seemed a little too much like Peter Davidson's characterization, who was sometimes in my opinion arrogant to the point of childishness, but I'm warming up to him.  For some reason it's an endearing character who is arrogant and irreverent, but who also can quickly and grudgingly admit when he's wrong.  As for the stories, I think they're leaning toward the more fantastic side of things now.  And as much as I loved the last few seasons and how they really explored what it meant to be a 900yr old time traveler, I'm looking forward to seeing what they come up with.  Particularly since I heard Neil Gaiman's going to be writing an episode!
(http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/feb/08/neil-gaiman-dr-who)

I think I might have acutally done that link right.  Ha!

A random thing to know

Foxes look both ways before crossing the street.  Really, I've seen them do it.

Back on the thing

Feeling much better now than last week, though I won't tempt Fate by saying I'm back on the you-know-what again.  I could chalk it up to eccentric broodiness, but really I was just being lame.  It happens; we move on.  I was thinking about deleting the post, but I'm an information pack-rat.  My memory hole is boarded up and welded shut.

I finally wandered into the theatre last night and watched Iron Man 2, and it was awesome.  My jealousy of Tony Stark continues unabated.  I also liked how they stepped up Pepper Potts' skills too, or at least emphasized them more.  Something I noticed in the recent comics is that as Tony uses his crazy genius to create bleeding edge technology and secretly plan for every contingency, she somehow manages to keep up with him throughit all.  Even when he whips out one of those crazy contingency plans, she's usually the one who has to step up and implement it (or clean up after it).  Tony's got his downtime between global conspiracies and supervillains when he gets all angsty, but some of my favorite scenes have been those when Pepper stands up from a computer where she's been coordinating a team of super heroes fighting an army of zombies, takes off the headset through which she's been having a conference with the executive staff of a multinational corporation, and vaguely realizes that she hasn't slept more than a couple of hours a day in weeks.  Then she has to go find out why Tony is blowing things up outside.  Pepper doesn't have Tony's bottomless well of inspiration and creativity, and yet she does everything he does short of inventing crazy stuff.  Tony may have genius, but Pepper has skills.

My only complaint with the movie would be that it was pretty anti-climactic (after the massive robot battle, of course).  [spoiler warning] They spent even more time in this movie than the first one building up the whole thing with SHIELD and then at the end of it all, Fury gave Stark a "We're not hiring"?  What, did Robert Downy Jr. turn down a contract at the last minute?

We're not who we were anymore

The last one probably belongs in the other blog, but right now it feels very descriptive.  I seem to keep losing old friends.  I'm still not discounting the possibility of having too much going on or some other reason, but two months of unreplied messages and emails is a bad sign.  I know we're none of us the same people we once were, but does that mean we can't even stay acquainted anymore?  These are the people who I knew best and who knew me best.  We could all take off our public faces and hang out and be ourselves without worrying about accidentally offending someone or being offended.  We trusted each other.

Now the trust is gone, and in some cases has even been replaced by crazy amounts of passive aggressive hostility.  It hurts like hell when someone whom your first instinct is to trust deliberately sets you up to embarrass yourself and does their best to idirectly make you feel worthless.

Sigh... I promised myself this blog wasn't going to become a dump for negative thoughts and emotions, so I'm going to stop myself before I really get going.  In order to keep to that promise however, there may not be very many posts for a while.

Divergant paths

We were all lost in a darkened world then, stumbling forward on paths we couldn't see over obstacles we didn't understand.  Hesitantly, we called out, our need for companions overcoming our fear of what else might lay hidden in the darkness.  Speaking to each other in the dark we found friends and allies, united by a dangerous world we could not see.  Strengthened, we continued on.

As we forged ahead, the light began to grow.  We could see the path on which we walked together, and could look ahead to what lay ahead.  The path grew smaller as others broke off and led away.  The friendships we shared in darkness remained in light, and we still called to each other from our seperate paths.

The light grew until there was no more darkness.  The paths we walked on diverged further and some of us passed out of sight in spite of the light.  Those few of us left, our paths once so entangled with each other, moved out of reach.  I watched with fear burgeoning anew as my allies and confidants traveled on paths that took them far away.  I called out to them, even after they had passed beyond my sight.

Now I find myself alone once more, traveling on my own narrow path.  Those I once trusted and relied upon so heavily in the dark are gone in the light.  When the world was dark and full of unknown dangers, we found safety in numbers.  We traveled together on a common path not out of coincidence, but because we wanted to do so.   In this new illuminated world we can move forward without fear, able to see so far that we do not need each other any more.  In the darkness I walked with trepedation, the paths uncertain but numerous.  In the light I walk with confidence, seeing clearly the lone path ahead.

Thursday night prescreens

I wish I could say that I've just gotten back from previewing Iron Man 2 and that it's totally awesome.  In reality, I've just gotten back from yelling at the projector for the last hour and a half, trying to get it to work.  To add insult to injury, we received two copies of the film so we could run it on two screens.  So everybody else was previewing the other copy while I was stuck upstairs in the projection booth.  Plus, I never did get it working; I'll be getting up bright and early tomorrow morning to meet a technician they're sending up from Denver to look at it.

I think I can say that Tony Stark is someone of whom I'm truly jealous.  Not of his trillion-dollar empire, or his cars or super-model magnetism, but of his mad creative skills.  The way he can juggle five different projects with seven more planned in his head and somehow focus on all of them simultaneously is something I'd kill to be able to do.  I've lost count of the half-finished ideas and works that I lost interest in or just plain forgot about because of something new coming up or lack of time to pursue it.  Who cares if he's a fictional character, the guy's a freaking supergenius that makes me feel like a massive underachiever.  All my flying battle armor does is catch fire and attack the neighbor's car.

Dreams and more dreams

Maybe this is one of those weird side-effects of getting eight hours of uninterrupted sleep at night.

Continuing with the horror movie theme, Sunday night I dreamed I was in a vague city and there were zombies everywhere.  The zombies were all I really remember other than that it was a city.  There might have been vampires too, come to think of it.  It's odd, but none of these have been actual nightmares.  Sure, there's horrible things everywhere that want to eviscerate me, but all I'm really thinking is, Crap, I don't want to be eviscerated.  I'd better get out of here.  None of the panicky fear that jerks you awake in a cold sweat.  In spite of all the fighting, running, and hiding that I'm doing, I think there's still a tiny bit of mind somewhere in the back of my head that still knows it's all a dream.

Monday night the genre shifted from horror to fantasy, and I was in a medieval castle somewhere preparing for war.  The castle was ancient and green from being half-covered with moss, nestled in the back of a box canyon.  We were about to be assaulted by the enemy and were marshalling all of our forces.  I must have been some kind of liutennant or captain, because I was walking around inspecting the defenses and speaking with some of the soldiers as they prepared themselves for the battle.  We were just getting together on top of the walls to plan our strategy when I woke up, so I never even found out who our attackers actually were.  I guess it's kind of a stretch to call this one fantasy, but I definitely had the feeling that it wasn't going to be a typical battle.

Tuesday night, all I really know is that I was dreaming.  This morning was one of those where you wake up quickly, thinking about what you were dreaming.  Then that first waking thought that comes into your head makes the memories of the dream fragment and dart away.  So all I remember is remembering the dream, not the dream itself.

Dream worlds

Yesterday was one long twelve-hour work day of trying to stay awake.  I'm not sure what my problem was, but every time I sat down or even leaned against something it seemed like I was nodding off.  Normally only getting five hours of sleep a night for a week straight doesn't faze me that badly.  Anyway, the point is that I didn't have to come in to work today until 6pm, so I slept in until around 1pm.  And man, did I have some crazy dreams.

The first found me at a college campus.  It wasn't my old college campus, but very similar.  The first clue was that although I knew everybody there in real life, none of them ever went to my college.  The second clue was that I'd been there before in another dream, oddly enough.  There are places that don't exist, but I dream about every once in a while.  Sometimes I recognize parts of them from the real world, hence the similarity to my old college, but there are other parts that I can't place at all.  Other than the campus, there's also a huge waterfall up in the mountains that I visit fairly regularly while asleep.  I wonder if these places are mental landscapes based on our impressions of a place; the concrete reference points that we know so well, combined with those less defined areas that we only catch glimpses of even though we pass them every day.  But if that's the case, then why is the art studio always outside and the art building missing?  Did I mention that I was once obsessed with dreams?

Back to the dream.  We were all hanging out next to the Lit building when we were kidnapped by aliens (this is also how I know it wasn't my old campus, since that almost never happened there).  No secret where that came from: I'd just seen the preview yesterday for the new Predators movie.  Without ever seeing our abductors we were dumped in a strange mock-campus that was a fake simulation of some kind.  Somehow, no matter how far we walked we always found ourself in the same hundred square-yard area.  Soon the various horrors ensued that one would associate with being animals that have been captured for the sole purpose of being hunted.  We were bathed in radiation that was meant to sterilize us, then the weaker specimines were culled and removed by giant spider-things.

During all this I found myself huddled next to a girl who had been a painter and refused to stop just because we were all about to die.  I'm not sure where she got the paints and canvas, but she'd managed to already finish a few, including a pretty good likeness of one of the predator aliens.  Even with everything that had happened, we still hadn't gotten a good look at our captors, but I recognized the one she'd painted immediately.  I also recognized it as a Predator and came to the slow realization that I was dreaming.  So I was able to avoid being hunted for sport by waking up.

I drifted back to sleep and had other, much more vague, dreams that I can't remember clearly other than that they were also very strange.