Multiple dreams

One of the cooler things about remembering by dreams is that not only do I remember what I was dreaming just before I wake up, but I also remember other dreams I've had that night.  They say that you go into REM sleep about four or five times every night.  I'd say that I've been able to recall at least half of those dreams each morning.  Last night is a perfect exaple.

Multiple dreams:
  I was at work when a customer came up to me and said that there was a problem in one of the restrooms.  "Oh I'm sorry," I said.  "What's the problem?"  He stood there silently without answering and I realiszed that he was one of those who thought it was my job to somehow know everything that was going on at all times in the theatre.  Since I didn't, know about the problem in the restrooms, I now should have to go from room to room, stall to stall, in order to find out what this mysterious problem was.  I sighed, dropping the plastic smile that I usually wear for the customers' benefit.  "I don't have time for this," I told him and started to walk away.
  When he realized I wsn't going to check the restrooms at all he relented and told me that the plumbing coming off one of the toilets in the women's restroom was leaking.
  Going into the restrooms, I found that they wre much more complicated than in reality.  There was piping lining the walls everywhere, and the stalls were a veritiable maze.  I picked my way over mop buckets and cleaing chemicals to find the leaking pipe, whick was only the slightest trickle directly over a drain in the floor.

  I was in the mountains visiting my family at a cabin in the Masonic Park.  I was about to head home and needed to go say goodbye to my mom.  She was at an old abandoned military airfield at the top of one of the nearby mountains.  There was a clear path to get to the airfield, but for some reason I was trying to navigate it in a little go-kart.  I was making decent progress when I recalled that Mom was a ghost.  Then I realized that I was  ghost too, and it would be much easier to just evaporate and reappear at the air field instantly to say goodbye.

  I was sneaking into a government controlled building with Juan.  We weren't on any kind of mission, just curious and goofing around.  We managed to get into one of the sealed off areas and headed back to the main entrance.  The man at the door stopped us.  "Who are you guys?"
  "We're doing the installations," I said as matter-of-factly as I could.
  "Did you sign in?"
  "Um, no."
  "Well okay, just sifn in now and then sign out."
  Juan and I signed in on the sheet.  Overconfident, Juan made a note at the top of the sheet over the names column, 'must show ID'.  While he was signing in I saw a rack of x-rays going by into a high-security area.  They were of different people's skulls, and there was clearly a small piece of metal inside each one.
  Since we'd already established that we were supposed to be there, it wasn't hard for Juan and I to get into the high security area.  We went upstairs into some mostly deserted offices.  In one of them however, there was a woman in pink sitting at a table talking to an alien.  It looked like one of those big nasty ones from Signs.
  We crept behind a desk and tried to overhear what they were discussing.  "Some people are starting to ask questions," she siad.  The alien didn't say anything, but she acted as if it had replied to her.  "Yes, I know.  We could try telling them that it's a new form of therapy but I don't know how long they would buy it."
  It was then that I noticed someone else was spying on the conversation.  There was another woman hiding near another door.  We crawled over to her.  She explained in a whisper that she was a member of a group of abductees and was trying to figure out what was going on.
  "We should tell her about the things in their heads," I whispered to Juan.  Our conversation was getting loud though, and I was worried that either the woman in pink or the alien would notice us.  We snuck out back through the door the abductee had used.
  As we made our way down a narrow hall I looked back and saw that the other woman had left the alien and was following us.  "Guys, we've got company," I whispered.  "Pink company."  The pink woman didn't act like she was trying to apprehend us, but we didn't want to take the chance of sticking around to find out.

  I was downstairs in my house trying to get the woodstove to light.  To help it along, I took some of my clean laundry and, stuffing it up over the ceiling tiles, proceeded to light the ceiling on fire.  There was some confusion as I tried to find a working lighter, but there were several already up there.  Eventually I found a zippo that worked and was able to light a few of the ceiling tiles on fire.

Then I woke up.

Too busy to write, but not too busy to dream

I've been working and running around quite a bit, so I haven't had time to sit down and write very much.  The dreams continue though.  Some are the full on stories that I'm used to seeing, but others have been snippets and fragments of thoughts.  Instead of new or only vaguely familiar places and people, these shorter dreams seem to be composed of a jumble of images and ideas that I can very easily trace back to their origins in the waking world.  Is there really a difference, or is it all just the same mental mush that's churned up during the night?

Fragments:

I was speaking to a parent of two young boys.  The parent insisted that since he didn't let his kids eat any sugar, there was no need for them to brush their teeth.  I tried to explain that there was sugar in natural food too, and that they should brush their teeth regardless.

I was watching Ghostbusters from the inside, a sort of disembodied point of view that floated along beside the characters.  This time though, when Venkman entered Dana's appartment in search of ghosts, he found them.  A disembodied hand played the piano while spectres flew back and forth through the walls and Venkman and Dana cowered in the corner.

I was a deposed prince or something, running through the forest away from men on horseback with a man obsessed with birds.  We found a cave where someone had kept a stash of random objects.  Among them was a Silby's Bird Guide, which my friend dove for immediately and clutched to his chest in relief.

Dreams

Okay, I've caught up to today now.  Last night's dream was strange, as usual.  I was somewhere in South Africa, surrounded by strangers.  I ran into K, who had apparently decided to teach there instead of Abu Dabi like she's currently planning.  We decided to catch up and were wandering out in the wilderness on some kind of game trail.  There were all the uncomfortable silences followed by hollow niceties that usually plague our conversations as we wandered through the tall yellow grasses.  Eventually one of us raised the topic of vampires and hey, remember that time we fought that whole nest of them back in the good old days when we were vampire hunters?
Then there was what I can only term a flashback, though it seemed we were actually back in time fighting them again somewhere in rural America.

Right about then was when I was woken up by a phone call from work.

Recent dreams

I'll start with the dreams I've had the past few nights.  They're starting to fade.

Dream #1: Parallel universe

I was in some kind of massive machine.  It looked like a gigantic foundry/asembly line thing, with no specific purpose.  I was some sort of scientist, creating a sophisticated clockwork android of some kind.  It looked very similar to how I pictured the automoton from The Falling Machine.  Then I woke up as the android.  I don't know if I was programmed with the scientist's memories or if they were downloaded or what, but I knew that I was essentially him and he was gone.
There was someone else there with me, but all I knew was that she was a friend/colleague.  Somewhere else in the machine a portal of some sort had opened to a parallel universe.  It was a narrow opening about two feet across at the bottom of a deep shaft in the huge machine.  It definitely had something to do with the giant machine, but I don't think it was the machine's purpose.
Looking down into the portal, we could see others looking up at us from the other side.  They were in trouble and needed help.  I decided almost immediately that I should travel through to help them and jumped over the railing down the shaft.  With my mechanical nature I was able to easily calculate my trajectory to plunge directly through the portal, despite the worry of my colleague.  On the other side I encountered more vague individuals like my friend on the other side.  They were surprised to see me because apparently, in this universe I was dead.  Considering what I had experienced in my home universe, maybe I was dead there too.
What I can recall after that point becomes more fragmented.  There was some kind of threat to the world, with an intelligence driving it.  The threat had some kind of biological element, a plague or blight or something.  The only way to stop it was to fight it with my very un-biological nature, and somehow I propogated my own machines that expanded across the surface of the world, racing against the blight to stop it from taking over everything.  It ended with some kind of high speed fight/chase with the villain behind it all.

Dream #2: Supernatural prison

There's very little I remember about this one.  I was a guard in some kind of supernatural prison.  We were interring a man with terrible energy powers.  There was a panic and he started throwing bolts of purple lightning everywhere.  We tried to catch him, but he created a magnetic field that repelled all of our weapons and restraining tools.  I don't know how it ended.

Dream #3: Infiltration

I was on a team of government agents, sneaking into an airport.  I could take on a non-corporial ghost-like form and travel through walls to scout out what lay ahead of us as we went from room to room.  We were up against a rival team, trying to capture their non-corporial agent.  Or he might have been trying to defect.  He seemed very happy to go along with us once we found him and we escaped.
This dream was a lot more vague than the others, with events happening around me in an indistinct fast-forward.  I jumped from moment to moment within the sequence of events, knowing that the interveining time had passed, but unable to recall anything specific about what had transpired.

New meds, new side effects

Turns out I've got some kind of mild heart-related thing that isn't really dangerous... unless I'm taking stimulants, in which case they might cause me to die suddenly.  The doctor said I could try different meds, or there's a procedure to fix the problem.  I considered the pros and cons of both options and decided on new meds over heart surgery.
There's a long list of side effects on the bottle, but fortunately I seem to be avoiding them.  There is one odd thing that's started happening though that wasn't listed:  I've started remembering my dreams more.  Since I started taking the meds, almost every morning I wake up with a clear memory of some dream I'd had that night.  Sometimes it's what I'd been dreaming just before waking, and other times it happened some other time during the night (not sure how I know that).  Sometimes I even remember multiple dreams.
At first I thought that the meds were giving me weird dreams but thinking back, they're not all that different from those sparodic dreams I used to remember.  I'm starting to think that these are nothing out of the ordinary for my REM cycle.
So I've decided to start blogging them.

I'm crazier than you

Had a really messed up dream recently.  Crazy enough that I'm not going to share it.  But I mentioned it on Facebook.  S commented that she had weird dreams sometimes too.  Like once she dreamt that she caught her husband making out with some movie star and actually woke up angry enough to wake him up to yell at him for it.
I'll admit, I was very tempted to tell her what my 'normal' dreams are like.  Just to give her a frame of reference for what I mean when I had one that I found disturbing.  But I didn't.  I didn't want to start showing off or playing the 'I'm Crazier than You' game.  There were a few times that C tried to tell me how she was crazy.  Seriously, she said.  I'm crazy.  like she was bragging about it.  I just bit my tongue and didn't say that I thought she had no idea what real crazy was.  I'm not even close to what I would call real crazy either, but I do know what real crazy is.
It irritates me when people start bragging about their insanity.  The truth is that they want all the secondary benefits that come with others thinking you're crazy, without having to suffer the drawbacks.  The main one is that they're crazy.

Fuck you, World. I want Kirstin back.

I want my friend back.  The friend who understood me and knew me better than anyone.  The friend who called me at all hours just because she felt like it.  Who would miss me if we hadn't spoken for more than a week.  Who was always happy when I called and would make the call last as long as possible.  And to whom I could do the same.
Kirstin knew me better than anyone.  She knew all about my stupid social and romantic hang-ups, but they didn't bother her.  She didn't endure them or not care about them; she just understood and let them be.  When I acted or said something stupid or went too far, she didn't call attention to it or hold it against me.  She let it pass and promptly forgot it.  She knew the secret me that few know or care about.  I could trust her and she could trust me.  We talked for hours about secret fears and dreams, family and friends, science art and philosophy.
Now she's gone and there's a gaping hole in my life that I fall into and have to climb back out of almost weekly.  I can't talk to anyone else the way I could talk to Kirstin.  I can't call at random times just for the Hell of it.  I have to watch everything I say and be careful of slip-ups, which I regularly fail at.  I have to analyze what they say and constantlybe on the lookout for double meanings and innuendos.  Even then, most of them can only last a few minutes at most before finding some excuse to end the conversation, let alone talk for hours like Kirstin and I used to.  The worst part is that if it had been anybody else who died, Kirstin would have been the one who could get me through it.
So yeah, fuck you world.  None of you can fill the hole left in my soul when she left.  Not even close.  So just leave me alone and let me get on with my solitary existence.

Dream survival part 2

The second important moment came when we were fed that night.  Our captors all came to throw scraps down to where we were chained, making evil remarks and trying to frighten us by telling us what they planned to do to us tomorrow.  I paid attention, and threw some of the rotten food back at one of them.  The other two laughed at him as he swore at me and dumped the rest of the food over my head.  I threw more of it, at the same man.  One of them had to restrain him from killing me immediately.
It wasn't a victory like before, but the important thing was that I had changed the tone of the story further.  In lots of horror stories, the villain/s are uniformly evil.  They might have a few quirks or personality traits that make them more interesting, but on the whole they're implacable fonts of misery and suffering for the main characters.  By getting them to argue amongst themselves, however briefly, I'd divided them into individuals and diverted the flow of evil for a moment.  They were no longer undefeatable abstract incarnations of evil.
The next interesting thing came when my phone rang, waking me up.  Blearily, I took a message before flopping back into bed.  Still half-asleep, I could feel the dreamworld hovering at the edge of my senses.  I knew I could get up now or allow myself to drift back into the pseudo-horror story.  I didn't feel any temptation to return, but I also realized that I hadn't saved Raven-hair yet.  The torture house closed in around me again.
I found the last focal point of the horror story at the end.  The three made it known that they were going to kill us tonight.  There would be an epilogue, I realized.  The police would arrive early in the morning, too late to save anyone and too late to arrest our killers.  Tragically, they would miss us by only a few hours.  Events had already been set in motion independently of our story thread, and they were already on the killers' trail.  I had to either delay the captors or get the police to come sooner.  The solution came in the form of an old cigarette lighter.  I set fire to the peeling wall paper and burned the house down.
On the surface it wasn't the smartest plan, considering that Raven-hair and I were still chained to the floor.  But the important thing was that the fire both distracted the killers and drew the attention of the police early.  It was the final lynch-pin that collapsed the horror theme.  The killers wouldn't escape.  Evil wouldn't triumph, or even disappear ominously, only to inevitably return later.  And if Evil couldn't win, then the main characters couldn't die.  We were pulled from the burning wreckage by the police, scorched and coughing, but still alive.  Blankets and coffee were provided as we somberly watched our tormentors handcuffed and led away.
I did say it was a strange dream.  Still, very interesting to someone like me who's obsessed with dreams.

Dream survival

I had an interesting dream.  Not last night, but the night before.  Last night I didn't sleep, which accounts in part for my rambling narrative.
It's all become a vague haze of thoughts and impressions now, but I remember the important parts.  I found myself in a world with a psychological horror/thriller theme.  A woman and myself were being held captive in a strange old house by three psychotic people.  There was all kinds of various psychological torture going on as they toyed with us.  We came damn close to escaping more than once, only to find it was all just a set-up by our captors so they could cruelly crush our hopes repeatedly.
I never learned the woman's name; all I really remember is that she had very black hair.  There came a point when she finally just gave up on escaping entirely.  It was then that I started worrying.  I'm not the biggest expert on horror movies, but I've seen enough to know that giving up all hope is a good way to mark yourself as the next one to be picked off.
This was the first point where the dream started getting interesting.  You see, I've had those moments before in dreams where my subconscious mind puts two and two together and realizes what's going on.  Zombies?  Quick, what characters are left at the end of zombie movies?  Vampires?  What kind?  Various movies and books spring to mind, and how the main character managed to survive (if they did).  It's just how my subconscious works, all full of plots and stories.
I immediately realized that even if I did find a way to live through the story, raven-hair girl wasn't going to make it.  That was a result that was unacceptable to me, so I did something I haven't tried before in a dream: I tried to change the story.  Instead of taking the situation as it came and trying to make the most of it, I started trying to change the rules.
Even after that revolutionary decision, I still somehow understood that this was a story, and I had to keep in mind how stories worked.  It wouldn't be possible to escape or fight our captors directly, we'd already been trying and failing at that for a while.  In horror stories, no matter how completely the main character seems to escape or win, it inevitably turns out to be pointless.  What I had to look for were the focal points of the plot that defined it as a horror story.  In order for both of us to survive, I had to disrupt those moments so that the theme shifted to a theme where more than one person barely escapes with his life.Most of this wasn't a conscious thought process.  These are conclusions that I came to after thinking back on the dream.
The first crucial moment came in the form of one of their psychological torture games.  Raven-hair and I were chained to the floor, each on one side of a room.  They made sure the chains were just long enough that we could almost touch fingers across the room if we stretched.  I was wearing a shirt with long sleeves, and even though I cried and cursed at them that I couldn't reach Raven-hair, I didn't stretch as far as I could have.  My arms were still slightly bent inside my sleeves.  As soon as they left, I was able to reach several inches further than they had intended.  We were able to touch and even hold hands in spite of the chains.
However we were supposed to have been tortured, it failed.  In most horror stories escape is the only real victory that counts, which only makes it that much crueler when it's snatched away.  By achieving this small victory against our captors, we'd already shifted the tone of our story a step away from the horror genre.

To be continued

Creativity is running low... and that's how I like it.

Been very busy lately, and not just at work.
Don't know if I mentioned it, but I'm trying to craft another steampunk-style story right after the last one.  Normally that's not how I write, but everyone seemed to like the first one so much and were so encouraging.  I thought, 'Sure, what the Hell.'  It's been much slower going than the Underground Lecturehall, primarily because I'm not exploring some shiny new idea.  Slowly but surely it's coming along though.
Now, add to that my half-conceived, half-finished, half-assed attempt at a webcomic.  Still mostly working on getting the characters to look the same from panel to panel.
And finally, Max and the guys have decided to try to tap our collective creative energies and make a cartoon out of it.  An actual 11-22 minute animated cartoon.  We've been meeting weekly and throwing ideas at each other and the project has gotten progressively more complicated at each meeting.  Last week Mike sat down and argued with everyone for almost an hour trying to develop some kind of a business plan.  We all mostly stared in frustrated bewilderment.  Dude, we're doing this because it sounds like fun and if we're really lucky it might actually be good and make some money.  It stopped sounding fun the instant you asked if we were each willing to put in $20 then and there to buy some registered animation software.  We still haven't settled on how many main characters there are going to be, for crying out loud!  I left that night frustrated and feeling utterly tapped.  It was very difficult to revitalize my brain enough to come up with eight hours of entertaining gaming the next night.
Also, it's been super-busy at the theater.
Am I complaining?  Not really.  It's been years since I put creative energy into so many varied formats all at once.  More often than not, there are a few things going on that I can switch focus between, but not simultaneously.  It's a good stretch I think.  Exercise for the brain.

The wind brings a feeling of change

Something's changing; I can feel it.  I don't know what's changing or how, or even if the feeling is external or internal.  All I really know is that it's something large and fundamental.  The air is stirring around me and somehow pulling me.  It's a feeling of forward momentum.  Even if I wanted to, I don't think I could stop myself.
Something new is coming.  Everything else will change because of it.  I can already feel small effects, like the swell of water before a boat.  My mind hovers in a becalmed limbo between states.  I can't concentrate properly.  I didn't sleep last night.  My skin tingles and my fingers dance.
And I write.  It seems to be all I can still do effectively.  It feels like all I have been doing for the last couple of days.  I've even been thinking in prose, a half-disembodied narrator describes my thoughts and actions to myself.  Still through it all I continue to feel this strange pull forward.
Something is changing.

Fugue-brained

Ah, that sweet fugue-like state of mind that occurs between twenty-five and forty hours without sleep.  When thoughts blur at the edges and begin to overlap with each other.  The sharp peaks and jagged valleys of consciousness soften and become malleable.  And from somewhere within, creativity and inspiration are unfettered and allowed to roam freely through a lucubraic wilderness populated by lost memories, fragmented dreams and subconscious demons.

Somebody actually read something

As I prepared to send it to Lindsay with the carefully worded request asking her read it and give me her opinion last night, it became another one of those mixed-feeling moments.  Pride in what I'd written and wanting to learn if others thought it was as good.  But also immense amounts of trepidation at the almost certain utter lack of any form of response, as the object of pride was completely ignored and disregarded.  Mouse hovering over the 'send' button, I stared at the monitor for nearly twenty minutes as the conflicting emotions warred within.  In the end, pride and optimism once again won out over experience and I sent it.

It was just a little two-page vignette, but it's still a thrill that Lindsay actually was willing to read it and what's more, give me real feed-back.  Never mind the short story that's been sitting in her inbox for the past two months.  Of course, another difference was that this one wasn't fantastic in any way.  It may be that Lindsay's even less of a fan of sf/f than she's willing to admit.

The bit of me that watches the rest of me

I felt it Monday while I was leaving Denver.  I was reluctant to leave my friends behind and go back to Summit.  Not that I don't have friends in Summit, but they aren't as weird and crazy and fun as Lindsay and Cris.  While preparing to reenter my day-to-day reality again, that little separate bit of my mind whispered, "Pay attention."  Already, I was putting the mental blocks back in place and assuming the mask that I wear in everyday life.  Language history and word etymologies aren't that interesting.  Awful scifi movies aren't that funny.  Intellectual and existential books, movies, and music are at best only vaguely interesting and boring/confusing the rest of the time.  It's a little disheartening, but this is how I've learned to avoid the glassy-eyed stares and poorly-hidden disdain that I know so well.

It's the little part of my mind that knows what's going on in my dreams and keeps me from panicking in my nightmares.  If someone is acting like a complete bitch or asshole, even as I'm raging I'll feel it wondering, "What's really going on here?"  When the rest of me is on top of the world with elation or being crushed by sadness, it calmly reminds me to watch what's happening and asks, "If you were writing this, how would you describe it?"

Mandatory vacation

I hate trying to sleep late when I've got the day off.  All that ever happens is I end up staring at the ceiling thinking, "I'm bored."  And I end up getting up at about the same time I would have normally.

Discounting the first day, wherein I had to make several phone calls and deal with missing deliveries, crashing computers, and alarms going off at 1:00am, it's been an awsome vacation so far.  Cris, Lindsay and Melissa came up from Denver and we all went on up to Glenwood Springs for the day.  We wandered around town for a while and then found a trail and spent a couple of hours hiking.  The next day I followed them back down to Denver and went to see Melissa's show of Macbeth (set in 1920's New York).  I highly recommend it.  Today, I hung out with Cris for a while before heading up to Wyoming.  I helped her clean up a little, then we ate left-over chinese and watched an Armenian movie, Big Story in the City.

These are my awsome crazy friends, who get drunk and read the dictionary out loud, think nothing of walking into the third bookstore in a day, and laugh ourselves silly watching terrible sci-fi movies.  I just wish they didn't live seventy-five miles away.

Invasion of the over-friendly roommates

Kiso, Lindsay and Melissa are visiting for the weekend.  They survived the Friday traffic and the snow and got here about 9ish.  We proceeded to break out the alcohol and joke and goof off as we usually do, and it was awesome like always as we looked up strange words in the dictionary and swapped complaints about our various unrewarding jobs.  Then the roommates started getting friendly.  They were loathe to leave in the first place, forcing me to actually kick them out (not quite physically).  But each time they came upstairs to get more drinks for themselves, they stayed a little bit longer and cracked a couple more unfunny or downright incomprehensible jokes.  Until finally they came over and sat down to talk.  And talk.  And continue talking, until we were all sitting silently for several minutes at a time, listening to them interrupt each other as they tried to tell unrelated stories.

After nearly a year of living together, one of them has learned to recognize my evil eye and tried to begin the trek back downstairs a couple of times.  The other hasn't though, and continued to blather on, oblivious to all else.  And since the former wouldn't leave without the latter, we were stuck for almost half an hour as they dominated the room, until I finally declared it was time to go to sleep.  Undaunted, the roommates kept suggesting "one more shot" and "could I just play these two songs for you?"  No, no, no, no, NO.  FOR THE LOVE OF GOD, PLEASE GO AWAY.  I came severely close to losing my cool, which would have been unfortunate for everyone.

On a side note, I'm not being deliberately vague about that.  I really don't know what would happen if I lost my cool.  It's extremely rare that my anger actually boils over and most of the time I'm unprepared for the sudden loss of control.  It sounds worse than it is.  The last time it happened, I shouted numbers.  Seriously.  The


Ah, sorry about that.  It's now about 45 minutes since the previous paragraph.  Speaking of unrewarding jobs, my phone just rang to notify me that the motion detectors were going off at the theater.  Both assistant managers were unavailable, so it fell to me to go meet the police and do a quick once-over of the building.  Did I mention I'd been drinking?  I brushed my teeth and did my best to dispel the smell of whiskey before meeting the police officer.  Fortunately I hadn't drunk so much as to impair my driving and if he smelled it, he didn't say anything.

[sigh] Where was I?  Drinking, annoyingly over-friendly roommates, loosing my cool... I don't know.  I think that my body's gone ahead and absorbed the remaining alcohol.  I feel significantly less literate.  Maybe I should just stop now while I'm possibly slightly ahead.  Except for the shouting numbers thing.  That really sounds a lot more messed up when I say it out loud.  Which is especially weird since I'm not speaking, but typing.  Meh.  Still a good time to stop.

Multiple media

Well, I finally decided to give in and sign up for Facebook the other day.  The truth is that there was an obituary for Kirstin and it really bothered me that I had to use someone else's account to look at it.  The problem is that now I've got two different outlets for my various ramblings (three if you count the other blog) and I'm not sure if I can keep the rambling levels high enough for all of them.  Oh well, I'm already learning that Facebook is mostly just a bunch of blurbs anyway.  I'll probably start hungering for something more substantial soon, and that's what this blog is for.

Yesterday I got a call from Cris.  She said that Kirstin's mom was going through all her stuff and wanted to know if we wanted any of it.  Um, yes?  Any or all of it would be fine.  Not really, but it felt terrible to be discussing it.  Like scavengers picking around for anything useful.

Reasons not to cook while drunk

Just one, really:  Food Poisoning.

I didn't do anything incredibly stupid like forget to cook the meat or anything.  If I had been sober though, I probably would have stopped to wonder why the ground beef, once opened, was pink on the outside and a little bit browned on the inside.  Just one of those harsher lessons of life I guess, where the universe gives you the equivilant of a slap upside the head and a "What were you thinking?"

So, write off one weekend, where I was too ill to even read.  I just spent most of it on the couch, drifting in and out of sleep.  Now, I daresay I feel better than ever.  Probably my body's just thrilled to be getting solid food again.

Still going

Kirstin died last Saturday.  Her sister was going through all the contacts in Kirstin's phone and called me with the news that night.  She tried to tell me what had happened, but my brain had kind of shut down and I didn't catch most of it.  It wasn't until I got home from work and saw Kirstin's name on my phone and realized that we wouldn't ever be able to talk again that I realized she was really gone.  I was just able to stumble into my room and close the door before I completely lost it.

I went to the service with Cris, Lindsay and Melissa, driving up to Wyoming from Denver.  It seems like the most unfair thing is coming back and having life resume as normal.  A big chunk of my soul is missing.  Something should be different to reflect that, but it's still all the same crap I was dealing with before.

It hurts the most at night, when I can't stop myself from wanting to give Kirstin a call.  We leaned on each other for support so often that I feel like I'm stumbling every time I turn around.  Actually, I guess that really is what I'm doing, since I've spent most of the time since coming back alternating between drunk and hung over.  It's slightly worrying on some level that I've drunk more in the past three days than I have in the last three months.  But it's the only way I can endure the memories.  The other option would be to forget, and I won't do that.

A random thing to know

Except for the Maxwell Montes mountain range, named for James Clerk Maxwell, all geographic features on the surface of the planet Venus are named after women (both fictional and historical).  The reason for this is that the Maxwell Montes mountain range was the only feature large enough to be discernable through Venus' dense atmosphere using radio telescopes in the 1960's.  It wasn't until the early 1990's that the Magellan space probe was able to provide detailed radio images of 98% of Venus's surface.  Rather than labeling the more prominant features one-by-one as they were spotted (normally after their discoverers), nearly the entire surface of the planet was suddenly laid bare.  As we eagerly mapped out the mountains and valleys of Venus, it seemed only fitting to give them feminine names.

Happy Nirvana Day

A little late, since it was on Tuesday.  But I was too busy trying to acheive enlightenment and drinking margaritas to post.  And yesterday I was too busy recovering.  Still, even in the midst of my recovering, I was very pleased that I didn't feel like I was dying.  Ever since going to Mexico and drinking way too much free tequilla (the fact that it was free should give you an idea of the quality), I haven't been able to stomach even the slightest amount without feeling wretched for days afterward.  What really sucked about it is the fact that I like tequilla!  But the good news is that after these many tequilla-free years I may have finally recovered.  Just to be safe, I should continue experimenting until I'm sure.

I'm out of it tonight.  Not sure why; I got a whole three hours of sleep last night somewhere around 7:00am.  And I'm pretty sure I'd more or less recovered from my Margarita-fueled zen quest the previous night.  May be it was the four glasses of assorted wines I drank before Max broke out the limes and salt.  Everybody brought at least two bottles of wine that night, and wine tends to do to me weird things.

Speaking of drinking, today at the theatre I had to wake up a customer who's decided to take a nap on the floor, in the middle of the hallway.  He was utterly smashed, and I had to help him up and take him to lie down on one of the benches while I explained to him where he was.  After he had some water and regained some coherency he drifted back into his movie, and I warned the cleaning crew they might have to poke him awake again once the film was over.

The rebel forces refuse to surrender

I've had a lingering cold for the last week.  I caught it from my roommate, but it wasn't really her fault.  It was stupid of me to pull an all-nighter and leave my defenses in a weakened condition with all those hostile germs lying in wait.  It probably didn't help that since I caught it I haven't gotten more than a few hours sleep per night, up until yestersday.  And now in my frustration, I've started downing whatever random cold pills I can find in the medicine cabinet (not in unsafe doses of course).  Yesterday I finished off some Dayquill and today I found some assorted decongestants.  In practice I'm not much aof a fan of taking medicine for something as mundane as a mild cold, but I'm sick of being sick now and my sinuses are crazy messed up.  C'mon immune system, hurry up and crush the rebel forces!

Hmm... Could viruses really be called rebels?  They're more like invaders, but once they get into your system they start reblicating using your own cells as incubators.  I think.  It's been a long time since my last biology class.  Eh, invading rebels, insurgeants maybe.

Clearly the cold pills are working their magic.  Whether said magic is actually being utilized to do more than play checkers with my brain chemistry remains to be seen.  That's right, you heard me.  Checkers.

On that note, I'd like to take a moment to talk about gay robots.  Not sex toys, but fully artificial and sentient robots that are also gay.  The idea was brought up in the sweetly existential webcomic, Nine Planets Without Intelligent Life.  (http://www.bohemiandrive.com/comics/npwil.htm) Itjust touched on it briefly as two female robots were forced to break it to the two male robot main characters.  But it threw me a total loop as soon as I read it.  Wait a second, these are totally upgradeable reprogrammable robots we're talking about here.  Couldn't they just switch out for a different model?  Or upgrade?  I've mentioned before that I'm totally fine with homosexuality but I found myself thinking, well of course there's no more wrong with gay robots than with gay people, but since they have the option wouldn't they prefer to have parts that... er... fit together?

For them it's more than just an accident of programming: they are lady robots who love other lady robots and also like to love them as the lady robots they are.  It's more than lilkely true that there are a lot of homosecuals out there who would leap at the chance to change their physical selves, and just as many unfortunate people who simply can't accept their sexual proclivity and would love to do a little reprogramming.  But most of them are just fine with being a guy who's into other guys or a girl who's into other girls.  Wait, I'm still just talking about robots, aren't I?

The Golgotha

Words are awesome.  Even more awesome than words are their etymologies.  Tyrant was just the greek word for king until they went through a series of really terrible kings.  The direct translation of nemesis is 'necessary end', so calling someone your nemesis is like saying they will be your end.  I could go on.  I have a massive 6" thick 1909 Webster's Dictionary that it's fun just to browse through sometimes.  It even has words that were obsolete back in 1909.  Most people wouldn't agree, but I find it all kinds of exciting.

I should write more about the etymology of words.  So I will.  Starting with Golgotha.  It started out as a hebrew word meaning, the place of skulls.  There is some confusion to its exact original meaning, but most agree that it refers to a place of death or of the dead, like execution grounds or a cemetary or charnel house.  Essentially, places where you were likely to find a pile of skulls.  Later in the 19th century it was used by English university students to refer to the room where the heads (skulls! get it?) of the university met to deal with disciplinary matters (a place of death!).  By the 20th century it had become obsolete.

It sounds like something a secret society of illuminati would call themselves, meeting behind closed doors to decide who lives or dies and direct the course of human history.

Now I've done it

Well, it's done.  After having been proofread and poured-over for the last two weeks, I finally submitted Underground Lecturehall.  So it probably won't be finished on Burning Snowflakes, and if it's accepted I may take it down just in case.  I'm going to have to find a better way of doing this, I think.  I can't be continually posting stories only to take them down again once they're finished.  It's too depressing.  Burning Snowflakes may have to adhere to its title a little more closely and be composed of fragments rather than fully completed works.

The internet: supplying volatile chemicals to dangerous minds

My sulfuric acid came in the mail today!

Yes, it seems that in our wonderfully advanced world it's ridiculously easy to get dangerous chemicals.  These days you can't just walk into a corner drug store and buy some plutonium, but apparently you can get it sent to your doorstep in 3-5 business days.  No, I didn't order any plutonium or other radioactive materials, though it was both available and affordable!  But as I proceded through the order process, I kept expecting to run into some kind of virtual barracade.  Something requiring a license or credentials, or even an online form to which I would have to add my virtual signature promising not to throw my acid in the faces of others or conduct unsafe experiments.  Nope.  Well then, on to the unsafe experiments!

Actually I got it for cleaning purposes, but I know myself well enough that with a bottle of concentrated sulfuric acid at my disposal I don't expect to be able to suppress my curiosity for long.  Hmm, what would happen if...

You know, it's probably a good thing that I didn't get any plutonium.

A Random Thing to Know

St Drogo is the patron saint of Coffee and Baristas.  His ability to bilocate was frequently witnessed, being observed in two places at once, usually simultaneously at mass and working in the fields.

If I could bilocate, one me would sleep at night while the other me would stay up and read.  No wait, both of me could stay up and read different books at the same time!  Hmm... Bilegition?  Bilegitation?

Creative solutions to life's little obstacles

Well, the plumber left and the Water Works guy showed up and replaced the meter thing.  In doing so, he discovered that there was in fact a leak coming from the pipes as well.  He wouldn't mess with it because of insurance reasons and the like.  This is all hearsay from my roommate, since I was at work while all this was going on.  When I got home and heard the story I asked him if he called the plumber back, he said he decided to wait until he told me.  That night.  Friday.
So until Monday when the plumber comes back we'll have a steady stream of water flowing from the pipe down into the insulation inside the wall.  Creative solution time!  1 extra-long poster tube + several feet of duct tape = no more water in the walls.  I'd say it was a MacGuyver moment, but he probably would found a way to fix the leak itself instead of just redirecting it out of the wall into a bucket (that has to be emptied every half-hour).  Fortunately, it's past the main valve, so at least we can turn off the water when we don't need it.
Meanwhile I set to work fixing the vaccum cleaner.  It was one of those Dirt Devil light weight types that breaks after a month or two of regular use.  Thanks to the clear plastic composition it was easy to see where the problem was, and thanks to a complete lack of access it was impossible to get to it.  However, after a careful inspection, I felt confident I knew which parts were important and which ones I could cut into with a hack saw.  Ninety minutes (and 3 breaks to go empty the water bucket) later, I duct taped the sucker back together and started her up.  To celebrate, I vaccumed.
With two duct tape themed victories under my belt, I felt a that just little bragging was acceptable.

-32

It was some kind of record up here in the mountains.  First time in 300-something years.  Driving around at 3am Thursday morning, I learned that the thermometer in my car jams at -23 degrees.  It's one of the things I love most about living in the mountains though, that there's so little humidity you barely notice how cold the air is.  At least until you actually touch something with your bare hand and get frostbite within a few seconds.
Our pipes froze in spite of the little trickle of water I left on that night to keep it from happening.  Inevitably, when they finally thawed there was a sudden spray of water through the splits caused by the expanding ice.  On the bright side it was only the meter that burst, which meant Water Works came to fix it and we didn't have to pay a plumber.  After four days, I'm just grateful to have water again.  I'm dying for a shower, a shave, and some clean clothes.  It was a miracle that we'd just run the dishwasher prior to the freeze, so at least we weren't breaking out the paper plates and plastic utensils.

Normalcy

Today was nicer than most have been recently, with sunlight and blue sky visible between the clouds.  When I opened the door to my car this afternoon, I found a small puddle of water on the floor in front of the drivers' seat.  No doubt snow had fallen off my shoes and melted while my car was parked in the sun.

Various half-plans for removing the water drifted idly through my mind as I sat down and turned on the engine.  I could turn the heat in the car on high, in spite of the warmth of the day, and crack the windows so that the water would evaporate.  I could try to somehow pick up the rubber mat and bend it into a bowl shape so that the water wouldn't spill, then dump it outside the car.  Then in the midst of my musings I wondered, What would a normal person do?  Probably just get a rag to soak it up and clean it at home.

Wait a minute... back up that train of thought.  Did I just think what I think I thought?  What would a normal person do?  What kind of a thought is that?  It just came unbidden into my head, so it might mean that subconsciously I don't think of myself as a normal person.  But is that a good thing or a bad thing?  It could be a sign of some perceived line of seperation between myself and most other people, resulting in some sort of deep-seated neurosis.  On the other hand, since what a normal person would do wasn't among my first plans of action, maybe it's true in any case.  I'm not normal, and those thoughts are just an affirmation of my acceptance of non-normalcy!

...  Do normal people worry about these things?

Well crap.

Underground Lecturehall is finished!

Everyone at our writing group said it was great, and I'm actually reasonably pleased with it too.  I'll get the rest of it posted soon, I promise.  They're really pushing me to try to get it published, (possibly even for actual money).  So I might have to take it down again.

Still on an enthusiastic high from their good reviews, this evening I surfed around a little on various writers market websites, looking into who might be interested in a random long-ish steampunk story.  I meandered through the pro and semi-pro zines, clicked through the e-zines, and clicked on every submissions link I saw.  Soon I found that...

Crap, I have no idea what I'm doing.

Well, in spite of that disheartening revelation I'm going to try it anyway.  If I manage to fail miserably or get completely ripped off.  I'll know better for next time.

And now enough of that.  On to the next shiny thing!

Vampire Dream

Snow, snow, and more snow outside.  Meanwhile, inside under a mountain of blankets, I dreamed about vampires.

I'd been invited to stay at my Great-Great-Uncle Harry's home for the week.  I knew absolutely nothing about him, other than that he lived in a huge victorian house in the country somewhere outside of Chicago.  The year was uncertain, but everything had a late nineteenth century feel to it.

My rooms were cavernously huge, though sparsely decorated.  Two beds that looked better suited for a hotel room were set against the wall on the left, and opposite them was a small table and chairs.  The far wall was made up of stained glass and warped glass windows, and a door in them opened onto a balcony overlooking a vast dining hall.

That night, Harry was hosting a private dinner.  I wasn't invited, but could easily watch unobserved through some of the clearer glass of the windows.  As they entered, it was like a parade of fashion from the 1920's.  I ducked away from the window as the server walked by, carrying a crystal punch bowl filled with a suspiciously dark red liquid.  I had the distinct impression that he knew I was there, but he said nothing as he served the liquid to the guests.  Nothing else was served, and the plates remained empty as they drank their dinner from champagne glasses and conversed politely, a picture of modern civility.

The next evening, I answered a knock at my door and was surprised to see Cris.  She wore a strapless green gown with a pattern of whorls and spirals that traveled all the way to her ankles.  In the excitement and fear of the night before, I'd completely forgotten that we had been planning to attend a formal dance that night with our respective partners.  Fortunately we had plenty of time before we were due to meet them, and she waited as I ducked into the shower and scrambled to figure out which clothes were my formal ones.

I had just finished getting into my suit when the lights in the adjacent dining hall turned on.  I immediately switched off the lights in my room and crept to the window with Cris.  The same server stood with his back to us just outside the window, with another punch bowl of red liquid.  "Want to try a glass?" he asked without turning around.  I put a warning hand on Cris' shoulder and remained silent.  Shrugging, the man carried the bowl down to the waiting guests.

That night, the dinner progressed with far more energy.  There was laughter and dancing as the guests drained their glasses with relish.  While we watched, the waiter came up to stand with his back to our window again.  "They aren't normally like this," he said worriedly.

I tugged Cris' hand toward the door.  "I'm getting a malicious vibe from them," I whispered.

"I know!" she hissed excitedly.  She looked at me then and I was surprised to see eagerness in her eyes.  With a jolt I realized that the thing I was afraid was about to happen, she was looking forward to. Cris liked vampire stories and had a large collection of novels and movies at home about them.  To her they were the inhabitants of a mysterious, darkly seductive world.

Somewhere deep inside, the part of myself that always remains concious yelled at me, You aren't in her dream!  She's in yours!  This world wasn't the elegant and sensual masquerade of the vampires.  It was the deadly and unforgiving existense of the vampire hunter.  Here, if the vampires caught you spying on them, they didn't initiate you into their ranks.  They killed you.

"Uh oh," the server said quietly.  Down in the dining hall, the guests had run out of punch.  They were now looking up at our window contemplatively.

I grabbed Cris' hand and dragged her toward the door.  There was a sound of growling and breaking glass behind us as we ran out into the hall.  I slammed the door and bolted the door, but not before catching a glimpse of snarling canine jaws and black fur.  The sound of claws scratching wood came from the other side of the door.

Cris glared at me accusingly as we leaned against the door.  "In any of your books," I shouted over the barking and howling.  "Has anyone become a vampire after being torn apart by vampire wolves?"

She thought for a moment before shaking her head.  "No."

"Okay then."  We ran.

After a minute or so, Cris stopped me.  She was having trouble running in her dress.  I pulled out my knife, prepared to slit it with a callous, hero-style disregard for its value.  Cris spared me a contemptuous glare before reaching down and revealing a concealed zipper.  It ran from the hem almost up to her hip, allowing for both fashion and freedom of movement.  I sheathed my blade and we continued on.

It became jumbled after that, as I was starting to wake up.  We got stuck in, and escaped from, an elevator.  Eventually we managed to escape the mansion in a coach.

I've had conversations with vampire fans before, and what would happen if they found a vampire in their room.  It seems to me that the natural reaction would be to fear for my life, but apparently their first reaction is excitement at the possibility that he might turn them into a vampire too.  The part that struck me most was the thought, You aren't in her dream!  She's in yours!  Maybe I should call Cris and ask if she had any weird dreams last night.

Vacation foiled again

I'd hoped to take this next weekend off and get a much needed break from the theater for a while.  As soon as he heard this, the DM decided he wasn't going to stand for it and swung by for a surprise inspection.  So I spent yesterday enduring a constant littany of "you-suck-you-suck-you-suck."  The quiet satisfaction I felt at the fact that he had to search so hard for things about which to gripe was squelched by the constant undermining of my authority.
Then he cornered and quizzed my assistant managers so that he could ascertain how well they could function in the projection booth if I wasn't immediately on hand for a couple of days.  Although they could thread the film through the projectors just fine, and knew how to troubleshoot problems like tangling and replacing bulbs, he found them lacking in other areas.  Apparently, they didn't know what some of the parts were called, and couldn't completely take the projector apart and clean it.  These skills were essential to running the theatre for the weekend.  I'm not sure how, but he assured me they were as he vetoed my vacation request.
It wasn't until afterward that he shot me a challenging look with eyebrows raised and it all fell into place.  This wasn't just another case of him being an ass; he was actually making some kind of vindictive attack.  He didn't give a crap about how much the assisstant managers knew about projection.  Even if they'd measured up to whatever rediculously high standard he set, he would have found some other reason to shoot down my vacation request.
Now this would normally be the time when someone would say, "So he wants to play hardball, does he?  Fine, bring it on!"  But the truth is that I suck at hardball.  I need to find some other way to resolve this.

A lack of reaction

There was a gay guy hanging out in the lobby after his movie ended at the theatre while I was locking up.  At least I assume he was gay from the fishnet stockings and makeup, though I guess he could have just been an efeminite transvestite.
I didn't pay him much mind.  I was finishing closing, switching things off and locking doors when he asked if we had a lost and found.  He said he'd lost a black and silver necklace at a movie a while ago.  Then he gave me a look like he was expecting some kind of reaction.  Something more than, "Okay, I'll go see if anything's been turned in."
Something similar happened last week when I was picking up Dylan at his appartment, which he shares with a lesbian couple.  The girls were talking in their room with the door open while I waited, saying things along the lines of, "I can't get up with your legs wrapped around me."  It could have been pillow-talk, but they were talking a little loudly.  Then one of them came out with the same expectant expression.
It was like they'd said, "Yes that's right, we're gay.  Now the ball is in your court."  I'm not sure what they were hoping for, but I got the impression they were disappointed by my lack of reaction.

Customer cons

A woman came up to me at the theatre and asked, "Do you have a lost & found here?'
I nodded.  "Yes."
"Did anyone turn in something small?" She held her hands up in a vaguely rectangular shape.
I waited for her to finish, but it seemed that was all she was going to say.  "Like...?" I prompted.
She hesitated for a second before answering.  "Like a wallet or a purse?"
I shook my head.  "I don't think anything's been found recently, but I can go check.  What did it look like?"
Another long second passed while she considered her answer.  "Black?"
"...okay."  It was kind of busy, so I'd been running on automatic and hadn't really been giving the situation much thought.  This was enough to kick-start my suspicious nature though, so I stopped and aksed, "What's your name?"
"Oh, it's not mine.  My friend lost it and wanted me to ask about it."
I waited another moment before asking, "And their name was...?"
"Judy?"
In the office I did a token search, and wasn't surprised that there wasn't anything belonging to someone named Judy.
Behind me, she must have heard me digging through the lost & found box and recognized the sound of the many pairs of sunglasses that had been found.  "Oh, my son lost his sunglasses here last week too."
I turned around, careful to keep the box out of sight.  "What did they look like?"
"I don't really remember, could I just-?" She tried to look past me into the box.
By then I was getting tired of her wasting my time and I started herding her out of the office.  "No, sorry.  He'll have to come in and get them himself."
She gave me a final glare and stormed off.  It was about ten minutes later that she found me again, tearing tickets.  "What about cash?  Did anybody turn in any cash?"
I didn't answer, and just looked at her.  It was one of those statements that took my brain a couple of seconds to fully process.  Did I hear that right?  After all that did she really just ask for any cash that might be laying around in the lost & found?  How stupid was she and how stupid did she think I was?  She must have read the expression on my face and guessed what I was thinking, because she didn't wait for an answer and left.

A Random thing to know

The expression 'white elephant gift' comes from South-East Asia, where white elephants were believed to be sacred.  It was considered a terrible transgression to force these animals to do any kind of work.  Receiving a white elephant as a gift was a sign of great favor, but was also a heavy burden since the animal had to be fed and cared for but could not do any work to offset the cost of its upkeep.

Successful visit

Kirstin came up again last week, and this time I was able to actually hang out and have fun with her.  I'd managed to get my hands on a couple of free passes to ski A-Basin (a few free movie tickets may have changed hands), and convinced Kirstin to go skiing with me.  She'd never skied downhill before, but had gone cross-country skiing and rollerblading.  At first thought you might not think that knowing how to rollerblade would help in learning to ski, but they both require paying lots of attention to where your feet are pointing.  We stuck to the bunny slope most of the day, and by the end I could tell she had gotten comfortable enough to try going faster and  making sharper turns.  True, she fell down a lot (we both did), but after a few hours she had the hang of it enough that she let me take her higher up the mountain to try one of the longer green runs.  (green=easy, blue=medium, black=hard).

Having survived A-Basin with only minor bruising and sunburns, we returned all our rented equipment and went to Nozawa for sushi.  In my damp, disheveled condition I felt like a scruff and argued for getting takeout rather than sitting down in the quiet well-maintained resturaunt, but Kirstin wouldn't hear of it.  After stuffing ourselves with rice and seafood, we spent the rest of the evening watching Firefly.  I'd never gotten around to watching all the episodes, and Kristin declared she would make me.  In the breaks between, I showed her some of my own eclectic collection.  Some of which she thought were quite silly (Scott Pilgrim, Brak, Space Ghost), and others she just plain didn't get (Sealab 2021).

I almost managed to drag her along to game night again, until the weather started turning nasty and she decided to try to beat it back home before she got stuck up here for another week.  My own opinion was that that wouldn't be a bad thing, but responsibillity won out over goofing off with friends and she headed home.

So I declare this visit a success, particularly when compared to the last one.