Dreams, Screams, As It Seems

I'm sore today. Wine, weather, and attacking the treadmill to exercise my panic attack demon all caught up with me. Lots of sleep. I only did a tiny bit of work, and nothing with visible money results or getting out of the house.
In my nap dream, my whole body hurt so badly I could barely move and I was trying to take a bath to loosen up my muscles but I couldn't move to turn the water off and I knew I was sleeping but I couldn't wake myself up and I was worried about what was real and what was dream because the hot water felt unquestionably hot and the cold knob on the faucet felt hard and solid and cold and my aches felt present and the water wet and with all my tactile functions and reactions intact, what did that say about my dreaming? And more importantly, what did that say about everything I do and feel when I'm "awake?" All these questions bothered me mid-dream as the hot water kept rising and I wanted out of the bathtub but couldn't get there on my own. I tried to yell "Mom!" but I couldn't break through the layers of dream. I wanted to shout something, anything, to wake myself or alert people in the conscious world so that maybe they could help me escape.

I dream this way a lot.

Possible Boy sent me a text message from the bar with a photo of the pumpkin I carved lit up sitting alongside the cash register and booze. I carved a row of various beer and booze glasses, so it makes sense back there. Possible Boy also texted me nice things. When I said I hoped our raucous adventure last night didn't dampen his day today, he said (and I quote), "Nope not at all, in fact I was smiling all day because of it."

Tomorrow is Halloween. I think Little Red Riding Hood may make her first full appearance since freshman year at Nameless Liberal Arts College's Safer Sex Night. Possible Boy and Other Girl are coming over to raid my costume box (yes I have a costume box) so that they, too, can participate in the dress-up madness. I. Love. Halloween. Alter-egos on parade. Be something you're not, or that you want to be, or that you are but you don't usually show or try not to show. My dog has a pig costume, but otherwise he'd make an excellent Big Bad Wolf. Well, Little Bad Wolf. Maybe I can steal Neighbor Guy's dog. That's a big friggin' dog.

The universe is huge.

Tonight I was going to finish some of my projects. I didn't finish one. Now it's 1:30 AM and if I don't go to sleep I'll be a zombie tomorrow even without a costume.

What ever happened to individual rocket packs and rocket boots and all that? They figured in so prominently in the 60s and 70s projections of the 21st century, but I certainly don't have one. I would love to move around in three dimensions instead of two. That's a whole other thing I've been writing in my head and will probably stick in here before too long: seeing and moving and living on limited dimensions and planes of existence.

Get ass in bed. Read until pass out. Be awesome tomorrow.

Simpy Syrup

Two glasses of wine, a boy, a concert. He wants my blog address. Even with the wine I didn't give it to him. Instead I gave him confessions: I was a phone sex operator, I like you as more than a friend and I suck at this boy-girl stuff. He didn't blink. Still wants my blog, wants to see me naked in the way that only people not presently in the story get to see me naked. It's so much easier to get personal at a distance.

Tonight was so lovely. So, so lovely. Whatever it was, I want to bask in it. I feel like a mermaid swimming through a pond of simple syrup. But give him my blog address?

Double-Time

I lied to Possible Boy about how far in advance I knew about the pumpkin carving last night. Not just him and not flat-out lied, but I came to the bar playing "What is this pumpkin carving?" even though it showed up on my Facebook events days ago and I'd been looking forward to it all week. Why did I blur this line? To downplay my exhuberance.
"Yippy skippy! Pumpkin carving is here at last!" Truer to my feelings, but far less socially acceptable. I imagine extremely prejudiced people go through similar double-takes before they speak; "I hate you because you're foreign" becomes "Stop taking jobs from hard-working 'Americans.'"

Tonight I am going to the symphony. With Possible Boy. I won tickets. I want it to be a date. I asked him in a date-like manner but last night I saw him and freaked out and was all panicy on the inside so I acted all casual and just friendsy on the outside. And he likes this OTHER girl, other than Other Girl, but he'll keep looking around the universe unless I make myself clear. Asking him to the symphony where it's just him and me and a concert was a big step for me, but I hide this shit and wig out a lot instead of just being open and honest and saying "This is how I feel." Instead I say weird things that fall out of my face.

Blaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarg!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY BIRDIE!!

clean and empty

My condo fit so well with a family, baby running up and down the hallway yelling "hubble! hubble! hubble! tack-o!" [translation: football! football! football! tackle!]. Now my comforter is in the dryer, the last piece of cleaning I intend to do tonight before going to bed. My bedroom smelled wrong until I washed all the sheets, vacuumed every last dust bunny, mopped with my Method floor cleaner, and attacked the surfaces with Method grapefruit spray, my usual cleaning products creating familiar smells. My dog wasn't going in there until after it had been scrubbed, either.

I'm learning how to keep house. It's a portion of my education entirely neglected up until this point, but I have this perfect opportunity to learn right now. Scheduling myself times to clean. Structuring my life. For whatever reason, I am 27 years old and lousy at self-structure and self-dicipline; it doesn't come naturally to me. Luckily, I have the chance to experiment and work and figure things out now.

There's a baby in my house. And friends. Baby is wonderful. My house is better with people in it. I miss my dog, who is at my parents' house. I want my dog and people more often.

The Usual

There's a mouse in my house. I tried to scare it out the door, and it may have made it out the door, but I'm not sure. Did it come in when I opened the door earlier to shut up the smoke detector? I made fried chicken (gluten and dairy free and entirely delicious) earlier and my smoke detector likes to go off when I do sit-ups. My house isn't OCD clean at the moment, but it's nowhere near vermin-worthy. Dishes are in the dish washer. Food is away. Maybe I need to wipe down the counters better or mop again. I need to mop before my friends from out of town show up. Today I 90% finished putting together my chandelier and figured out exactly where I'm hanging my living room art. I wanted to get a lot more done, but I'm having ouchy-head day. No death pain, just distracting pain and the general stupid feeling. No auction, no shopping with Neighbor Guy, no selling things. I'm trying to decide if it's better to drug myself and go to bed now or put up the towel hook and clean the hell out of the kitchen and hit other small projects while I'm conscious. I'm probably better off getting to sleep at a normal hour and keeping my medications on schedule and all that. I'm not in uber-productive manic mode anyway, so I'm not wasting supernova time. Bed. Drugs. Sleep. Be nice to body and maybe body will be nice to me tomorrow.

Hanibal Lecture

I need a regimen. Structure. Some skelleton for my daily activity. I'm so scared of what happens when I get locked into things and then "fail" to do them, I instead go for the amorphous blob life.

I need to write. Every day. Make a schedule. Give myself hours of writing instead of hours of fucking around on the internet. Write in my journal. Write on here. Write blips and stories and anythings. Just write. Set a timer. There are alarms on my phone. I have one set daily for waking me up so I get up at roughly the same time every day. Get up, walk dog, eat and write until noon? I can do that. Write anything. Write about not writing if I'm feeling that stuck stuff. Write reviews of movies. Just make sure I'm producing words in such a way that those words can be read by another person at another time.
Maybe that'll help my recent brain self-cannibalism....
Chomp chomp chomp there is nothing in the universe to hold onto chomp everything is relative chomp all I have is perception chomp and perception chomp is relative and unreliable chomp so who am I? chomp! What am I? chomp! there is absolutely no way of knowing and no stationary unquestionable and dammit I want something stationary to hold onto chomp chomp gobble gobble swallow wipe juices off corner of mouth with napkin.
I'm reading Tom Robbins's Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas. I hated the first 40ish pages. Now I'm much more mixed about it. Staggering. Totally post-modernist. Totally those guys in creative writing classes who are so amused by their own uber-randomness and creativity. Like, come up with some really obscure bit of subconscious something that you force together and make it work because life is crazy anyway, man. Tip your hat as often as possible to Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. It reminds me of a boy I liked a lot one summer at camp. I couldn't write shit that summer. It's not my style. I'm forcing myself to read it anyway for the parts I do like and because it is a style and I don't really like the currently popular mid-century revivalist decor, like what 1970 thought 2010 would look like. But I'm studying it because it's popular and people buy it and it doesn't hurt to know what other people like. There's no right answer. Opinion. All opinion. I like to think that what's "right" is what causes the least amount of pain, stress, oppression, etc. But that's all subjective, too. Too much subjective. Give me ether.

These are thoughts I've had since elementary school. Some are more developed than others. Some bother me more than others. Sometimes I can ignore things, like basic questions of existence. Sometimes I trip over those things every step I take. I don't give myself enough credit, allow myself to ponder and wonder without feeling like a pompous asshole. Why, if everything is so subjective and ok, am I so infinitely critical of myself? It's like I use the subjectivity to move from perspective to perspective so that I can shoot myself down wherever I go, whatever I think or do. Use your powers for good, Annabell. And self good. I think about Neighbor Guy. He's imposed all these rules on himself so he'll think about others, but he's just never dealt with his own issues and is way too fucked up to care or notice anybody else's existence. Is there an answer to that? Does society have it? Am I doing the "right" things? What am I doing anyway? Doubt doubt doubt. I am a parfait of doubt.

Then there are the fruit flies. In the last few days, they've attacked in force. I leave out an empty beer bottle from when people came over Saturday night, and the next morning it's a macroscopic orgy. The food that gets caught in the drain stopper after I do dishes is also very popular. I empty it into the garbage under the sink, which has also attracted quite the colony. I attack each space with bleach. Fruit fly holocaust after fruit fly holocaust, and still they send in reinforcements. Why do they like the paper towels sitting in the bathroom? Why do they like the bathroom? My office desk lamp? My printer? When I was a slob, the appearance of bugs told me I needed to clean up. But now, what more am I supposed to clean? I'm sorry I have a garbage can! What can I do! Apples! Those apples are very good and they get mealy in the fridge! I don't want to put them in the fridge, but what else can I do! I'm no longer asking for a fruit fly infestation. How do you ever know when you're doing as much as you can do and the rest is just futile?

And there again is the big question. I want to know something. I want some sense that I'm doing something right. That cleaning my house has a positive cause-and-effect relationship and I'm not just putting on makeup before I get in the shower. I want an answer. When I get like this, I just stay like this until I can sufficiently distract myself back into the day-to-day and ignore my lack of gratifyingly believed purpose and motivation until the next time. Something shiny and busy, or extremely tactile. Boys are good distractions. I need to find a Boy other than Possible Boy. And have more local female friends I can bitch at and talk to about thinking, because we womenfolk don't get enough credit for thinking about thinking, and most of my favorite thinking she-people live anywhere from 45-minutes to 45 countries away.

I ate, I wrote, now I should clean and do errands but I may crawl back into bed with Tom Robbins. It's my first day adding to the "schedule." Go easy on myself. I have to go to my parents' house for dinner tonight. That's enough stress.

Ooh, Baby

I think I can't eat gluten. Fuck. I was so sure that was going to be perfectly fine to add back in, but it seems to be the thing that has me feeling bad again, not the weather shift. Or it's the combination of the two, but at least gluten is something I can control.

Spent a long time at the bar tonight talking to one of my favorite people. For blog purposes, I will call him "Dijon." He's the one who adopted me into the crowd of regulars. He instantly recognized something in me that I'm recognizing more and more in him. It's like we're made out of the same flavor Jello, or our insides have the same wallpaper or something. There are many, many, many, many, many, many aspects to a human being and obviously we can't share or compliment every aspect of ourselves with every single friend. Still, it's a big warm fuzzy to find another person with a long list of sames.
Dijon's over-testosteroned skeezy drunk politician friend from childhood stopped by. I fucked with him a bit but nothing too overt. He asked me out. I said no. He asked if I was a lesbian. I said no, but I had enough on my platter as it was. When he left, he tickled me. What the fuck? Asshole gets rejected and then still tickles me. Possible Boy and I are afraid to get near eachother. I'm doing something wrong.

Six days until a baby stays in my condo. Must clean.

Human Fractal Infinity

Body is fussy. Soul is fussy. Weather is fussy. Fuss fuss fuss.

Neighbor Guy doesn't actually speak English. He's been in the US since he was 8ish, probably speaks English better than any other language, and isn't actually stupid. Still, I don't think he speaks English. He emailed me to say he officially got one of the good jobs he's been trying to get and to see if I was feeling ok because he rang my doorbell and I didn't answer. I emailed him back to say congratulations and no, I wasn't feeling ok. His response: "I'm glad you're feeling better."

What?

Does he completely ignore reality and operate entirely in the world of what he wishes? Like The Secret on crack? It would explain a lot.

Human beings are complicated. We have so many different aspects. Different relationships and interactions satisfy different pieces, pieces of pieces, blah blah blah fractal infinity.

Gnu Yorker

The New Yorker does a cartoon caption contest at the end of every issue. This was only the second time I've entered something, but the perfect caption seemed obvious to me.

"Brother, can you spare a lime?"

Today I checked to see what captions made the finalists for voting, and there at the top is "Brother, can you spare a lime?"
With somebody else's name getting credit.
I have no doubt many people submitted "Brother, can you spare a lime?" It's like back at Major Greeting Card Company, when we went through everybody's card ideas and picked out what went on to production: people would write the same card independently. If there's something that fits perfectly, more than one person is likely to come up with the idea.
But according to the rules of the caption contest, if multiple people submit the identical caption chosen as a finalist, they select the "winner" by lottery. That seems totally lame to me. Why does one person get all the credit? Caption printed up with his name under it, like he's the only one in the world. One of my life goals is to be published in the New Yorker, and I suppose this is cheating, but dammit, I want my name on everybody's coffee table, too. Even if it's in a list of the 100 people who all wrote the same thing. Get my name in that magazine before I hit 30 and I can work on writing great works of creative nonfiction later.

I want to be in bed. It's cold outside and all the pretty plants and flowers are shriveled and dead. I want hot cider and down comforters and hibernation. Is there a warm, sunny place on this planet with stable barometric pressure?

I tend to scoff at and avoid consistency, but maybe I would love it. I had the two parents at home thing growing up, but neither of those parents are particularly regimented. Is it too late to learn without being a fuddy-duddy asshole or born-again religious freak?

I'm wearing my glasses. And on the computer. Each of those things separately hypnotizes me into zombieville. Right now I'm toast, only instead of popping up when I'm done, I sink lower and lower into the chair.

Mmmm...toast...

Pumpkin Carriages

Possible Boy's best friend came to town for Columbus Day weekend. Possible Boy's best friend brought his wife, 11-year-old step-daughter, and 2-year-old daughter. Tonight, I went over to Possible Boy's new apartment and we all carved pumpkins together with my copy of Nightmare Before Christmas playing in the background.

Possible Boy didn't invite Neighbor Guy and the two of them are being weird and both trying to distance themselves from one another. I felt guilty, since Neighbor Guy is lonely and wanted to spend every possible moment this weekend with me. I didn't think I could handle that much Neighbor Guy and I've been in a Whythefuckisitsuddenlyfall funk anyway. Neighbor Guy would have loved family pumpkin carving, or at least the concept of being included. I feel bad for excluding him. It wasn't really my place, but once I was at Possible Boy's apartment I was too twisted dumb to say or suggest anything.

We had a wonderful time. Really. Possible Boy and I shared a pumpkin. There are now four fabulous jackolanterns glowing in his kitchen window. The 11-year-old is my new bff. She invited me to stay over and hang out before she realized I was going with the menfolk to the bar.

Then I went to the bar. Possible Boy's best friend and I ended up in a conversation about the universe. It was awesome. We didn't have to agree, but at least we followed one another all over the physiasophical playground. I needed that. I've come unhinged lately, and even if I'm still swinging around in the breeze at least I got to play a real match of jello tennis. Possible Boy went home at least an hour before his friend and I did.

I had a beer. I shouldn't have. I'm seeing my neurologist tomorrow, but I messed my meds up a bit in the past few days (refill timing and just being sub-consciously self-punishing and weird) so I didn't need to add beer to the equation. Beer make Annabell happy. Tonight make Annabell happy. Possible Boy is still a giant question mark and I'm still a little bit terrified of another possible Boy something brewing, but happy.

Why don't I have stuff-in-my-face-and-go-to-bed food?

One

I tried to thwack the avocado pit with a knife. I succeeded, but I also thwacked my finger. The "What do I do?" and general mortality tinges weren't nearly as difficult as the urge to share the experience. I hate when people doubt my ability to do things myself; sink and a bandaid were all I needed (and after my sister's disastrous finger+knife+stitches=permanently effed-up finger incident, I'm perfectly happy letting mine heal on its own). But once I've proven I can do it, it's terribly lonely. Where's a second person to bring me a glass of juice? To make a big deal out of things? A few hours later I made turkey bacon and, even with the fan on and the door wide open, the smoke detector kept going off. I went back and forth waving paper in front of the smoke detector and flipping the bacon. Everything turned out fine. But a second person? Would have been nice.

Yes. I'm lonely. In a way I don't usually get lonely.

Is my sweet potato done yet?