January 9th, 2013

Next: 2013

Some years I have a full complement of serious, specific resolutions; some years I have almost none. This year is…somewhere in between.

1) Read awesomely. Gotta start with the easy ones. Though I’ll leave off with the To Be Read Challenge after I finish the 2012 books (in a couple months, sigh) I don’t think I’ll abandon program reading–it’s fun and gives me a structure to work in. My last post was the first installment of awesome reading will be the Cohabitational Reading Challenge, wherein my beloved and read the same book, talk about it at meals, and blog about it. I’ll also be continuing with my super-great book club, and trying to make full use of my Kobo.

2) Cook everything in the Milk Calandar, preferably in the month in which the recipe appears. Also cook other new things–stop being culinarily boring/lazy.

3) Start writing fan letters to musicians, artists, writers, filmmakers, and maybe others that I like. I’m not above a “you suck and here’s why” note, as well, but largely I’d like to keep this resolution positive. I’ll post these as open letters on my blog as well–when someone is awesome at what they do, I think it’s worth spreading the news.

4) Finish a complete draft of my current book. That one seems really daunting, but originally I was supposed to finish it at the end of *last* year, so really, I should be able to manage it.

5) Don’t eat it just because it’s a cookie. There will be other cookies. Not all cookies need to be eaten.

December 10th, 2008

What Dreams May Come

Reading the Writing About Dreaming post on the Joyland Blog made me want to point out that I agree–nine times out of ten, a person talks about dreams in order to speak uninterrupted about him- or herself–who can contradict you, or even add information, if you are talking about what you imagined? It’s very annoying, especially if you, like me, mainly think that dreams are just myriad snipped-off ends and mangled impressions of the day that just passed.

But the other thing that post made me want to do is tell you about my dreams last night! I so rarely dream anything I can remember and then last night I did, and woke up to blogging about dreams and now I want to share. Here’s to contrarian self-absorbtion!

Dream #1: I needed to talk to this guy, but he’d gone camping.
Dream #2: An acquaintance was making fun of me for refusing to walk on the cracks between tiles on the floor (something I actually won’t do if I can avoid it. But the woman in the dream has never mocked me for it in waking life).
Dream #3: One of my friends was doing my laundry for some reason.

That’s it. Boring and pointless, yes? But that’s probably it for the week, Rebecca-dreamwise. And so it needed airing (well, not *needed*).

Soon one morning
RR

August 29th, 2008

Narrative Dream

I am, in general, against talking about dreams (you always get that sentence when someone is about to talk about his or her dreams). Most dreams that I’ve heard narrated are very boring, and mine certainly are. They are actually often textbook anxiety dreams, about forgetting I registered for a Spanish class until I am forced to take the exam. And I’m not wearing a shirt. Blah blah blah.

About once a year, I have a cool dream, in a narrative format–a tv show, a movie, once a magazine article (the whole dream was text), or else just a series of events that *could* form a narrative, if I wrote them up properly. Often I *do* write these dreams into stories, though honestly, it never really works out. So I thought I’d spare myself the disappointment, and just sketch out the dream here. Feel free to quit reading now.

So I found myself in need of a place to live (though much less discomfitted by this than I would’ve been in real life) and took a room in the house of a middle-aged couple who had two teenaged daughters. The ethnicity of the couple kept shifting between white and Chinese, but the daughters were both adopted Chinese orphans. Them being teenagers would put their adoption somewhat before it was easy to get babies from China, I believe, but my dreams have never been long on historical accuracy.

The man of the house was the butcher at a No Frills, and the woman’s job was unclear, but she was somehow heavily involved in political activism. I seemed to be going through a tough time in my life, not only because I was homeless but for other reasons that weren’t really mentioned in the story (this dream is so obviously a short story). Anyway, I was out of the house a lot, but when I was home I mainly hung around with the guy, who was short and heavily muscled and *smoked* (what year did I dream?)

He really liked his job and enjoyed telling me about the ins and outs of butchering for mass sales (I don’t actually think that goes on at No Frills). The store was, oddly, owned by Mel Gibson, who was apparently an all right guy. The daughters were fascinated by him, and their father would bring home candy wrappers that Mel had discarded, which enthralled them, though I think they also might have been selling them (on eBay?) The wrappers were made out of silk, delicately embroidered with Chinese characters in blue thread.

For a while, something kept me very busy and I wasn’t interacting with the family much, and then I realized that the girls and the wife didn’t seem to be there at all. I asked the man, and he said the girls had gone to summer camp, and the wife was just busy. We were sitting around late at night in the living room, him sitting on the couch and smoking, me lounging on the floor. It was very comfortable, but somewhat forlorn. He confided to me that his wife was a lesbian, but it had been necessary for her to have a husband in order to adopt the two girls from China (that’s not correct, actually, is it?) and she had felt it important politically that she take them. The marriage was ok, more or less, she just had her focus mainly political activities. It was not clear to me whether this was a euphemism for affairs, and I wondered if it was to him.

The man related this to me more or less easily, considering the emotional import of what he was saying. I was sad for him, but he didn’t seem to register his marriage of convenience one way or another. He loved the daughters, and seemed to have a good deal of respect for his wife. We sat in silence for a while in the living room, and then I woke up.

I was wide awake in bed
RR

January 29th, 2008

Free Associative

So I have a cold, which is making me insane! It’s a pretty minor cold, as these things go, I’m sure, but since I’m rarely ill, I have poor coping skills. My eyes have been itchy, even in my sleep. The other night, I dreamed I went to the bathroom mirror to see if I had an eyelash or something in there. In the dream, the pink bit of the corner of my eye had tiny plastic snowflakes in it, and I couldn’t get them out. It was weird, and icky, and then I woke up.

Yesterday, in real-life (I think), I was leaving work when a very sleepy fat raccoon lumbered out of the bushes. Its tail had been mainly lopped off somehow, and it was very very puffy and fat–it looked like an animate dust-bunny. It was headed drunkenly for the road (aren’t raccoons supposed to be hibernating in winter?) I am scared of raccoons, ever since one tried to crawl up my skirt while I was eating on the rooftop patio at Hemingway’s, but I didn’t want to see this one squished by a car. I yelled, “Bad raccoon!” to no avail. Even though it was like 5:04 right outside my office, I was mysteriously alone outside.

“Bad raccoon! No road!” I yelled, and then I found a stick on the ground and tried to chase the raccoon away. Only, the raccoon would not be chased and *ran towards me*. I panicked, and threw the stick at the raccoon, who very wearily, like a teenaged babysitter consenting to a game of Boggle, turned and went back into the bushes. “Yeah! And stay there!” I told it, and the greyish snowy dark beside the road.

I think I have a low-grade fever.

The eventual downfall / is just the bill from the restaurant
RR

October 16th, 2007

Minor things going wrong

Yesterday I got chocolate pudding on my desk dictionary, which is embarrassing because not everyone who sits in my section has one, so mine is often borrowed and I do not want to get the reputation as one who cannot keep her afternoon snack on the spoon. This was the only major hitch yesterday; otherwise it was a productive and pleasant day. Which causes me to wonder why I spent most of last night dreaming about the apocolypse… Surely the pudding spill couldn’t cause an anxiety dream by itself…perhaps I should examine my subconscious a bit more closely.

I do not dream often of the end of the world, but it does seem to recur more frequently in my dreamworld than, say, taking exams unprepared or in the nude or what have you. Though I was deeply upset by my dream when I awoke, I have to admit that this one, when examined in the cold light of day, bore more than a passing ressemblance to the very-good film, Last Night. I loved that movie, but it is both sad and lame that my subconscious is too lazy to come up with original material with which to terrorize me.

*Last Night* stars the very funny Don Mckellar whose twisted world on the tv show Twitch City so coloured my impressions of what it would be like to live in big bad Toronto. When I moved here a few years later, I found that while his vision is accurate re: a certain variant of Toronto life, it doesn’t *have* to be that way. I guess it helps that I have no roommate, or cat.

Well, maybe I’ll give up pudding once my brace-free lifestyle allows for more crunchy snacking options. Really, though, a fair number of those are open to me now, but I’ve gotten sort of addicted to mush. And blogging. There are worse addictions to have, really.

In your endless summer night / I’ll be on your other side
RR