lack of raw, red data

(Now up on my bulletin board where Leonard Cohen's words used to be.)
new here

Alright. How are we this morning?

Infused with sort of frustration that makes me want to say things like "Grr! I am small and ineffectual and have not rocked the world with great changes!" Belly mostly filled with good soup, seven nicely rolled cigarettes in my tin, having arrived at work at eight minutes till nine and having gotten almost six hours of sleep. So, in fact I have less than usual to complain about. I did have a rather nice weekend and even got a good long sleep during the Saturday-to-Sunday wee hours and morning. Saturday morning Paula's neighbor with the drum kit woke us up around eleven, which at seven hours is still more sleep than I've been getting during the week. And last night I did end up playing a little more Heroes than was strictly necessary, but I still got to bed around 1:15. I feel better today because of it, I think.

Still it's mainly my own fault I've been staying up late not doing housework, not working on poetry or guitar playing or reading useful texts, but playing computer games instead. Dangit, I shouldn't be so impatient with myself. Just because I'm impatient with the situation. It's still cold enough to feel like early March. And even if the envelope is filling up again with all the extra lifeforms of the biome's summer habitat, I am not good at being prepped for optimized mana draw in temperatures under 50 degrees! If your physical, chemical and emotional energy resources are dedicated to keeping warm and conserving what's already in your body, you are not reaching out into the environment around your body to see if you can get more energy resources. Simple as that. You do, in fact, get more energy resources, psychic as well as chemical, from a nice hot bowl of soup than you do from a taig in a good mood. It's just that if you have both the nice hot bowl of soup and the taig in a good mood, you feel much, much better than if you'd had either one without the other.

Just went and got the regular 1040 AND the instructions and printed out pages 10 through 64 of the 155-page instructions. Stupid having a 1099 and not being able to use the 1040EZ because I didn't know how to make corrected payroll checks into regular payroll checks so it got classed as "non-employee compensation." They were nice though; on page 10 they had a copy of the 2-page 1040 form with a little circled number on each line indicating which page of the instructions explained how to use that line. So I just printed out all the pages in the range indicated by the circles. Yes, I could have gone through and only printed out pages which reference lines I know will apply to my return. So I'm a paper-wasting bastard. Take that, environment. After work I'm'a stop by the Mart and scrape together enough change for a cuppa coffee so I can sit by the food court, finish my taxes, then drop them in the mail on the way home. According to my calculations on the train yesterday, I should be entitled to a refund. Take that, government. Or on second thought, don't take it. Give it to me like you promised. [whiny voice] Yoou proooomissed!!1! [/whiny voice]

Had a dream with two things I remember from it.

One was being upstairs in a house--odd lighting, more dim and blue-greenish than usual--doing something typey or computery. Amber was there also, but in a different room. Several times I had gone from one room to another through this hallway that got very narrow in the middle and had two little wooden doors that had to be unlatched and opened each time. But on the last one I got all the way to the middle of the hallway, laying on my side in the slightly torqued position necessary to wriggle through, and the second door had been locked from the other side. I was irritated by this and pounded on the door, even though I knew there was nobody within earshot on the other side of it.

For the other thing, which came afterwards, I was downstairs in the same house. There was a big plate-glass-looking window that faced some sort of courtyard or flat area with other buildings visible a little way off. Only instead of being made of panes of glass, the window was actually made of two force fields with several inches of empty space between them. I stuck my head through the first force field; I felt the shift and could see the second one glowing right in front of my eyes. But when I had my head in between the two force fields I could feel the air pressure drop by about forty percent, and decided not to try going through the second one.

Looks to me like two images of the same situation, emphasizing different aspects. I am caught between two things, one very irritating (my current job?) and the other uncertain (my potential other job?). I have navigated the irritating one successfully in the past, but I can't get past the uncertainty. Mind doesn't do well with lack of data.


Over the weekend I had a dream that I'm really having trouble figuring out.

I was in Japan. It was night and the streets and buildings were all dark in the gloam, the only light was from billboards and neon signs and the ads on the sides of buses and such. When I really looked around, standing on the sidewalk, the signs were in this crazy mixture of Japanese and Chinese and English. But the English words were all bad grammar-having or misspelled and none had to do with the actual point of the ad, so I knew the English was only in as flavor and cits were not expected to be relying on it for information. And the taig there was definitely a city and definitely not a city I have ever visited in real life. Doesn't mean I was literally "traveling" to real Japan, but it was definitely a mindplace I don't visit often and felt like one outside my brain proper.

There were other people there; I was in a place that felt like a bar but was sparse, not a lot of color or decoration, just white walls and a sushi counter and some seating maybe. It was filled with dour people in various stages of gruntlement who wouldn't have taken kindly to somebody who didn't want to mind their own business; they were all sitting around, more escaping the noise in mutual non-botherment than there to eat sushi per se. It's odd, but this pair of visuals inside and outside the restaurant is the clearest image I have from the dream.

But the thing that bugs me happened at the beginning. I was in a different place than the sushi bar or the sidewalk in front of it, more like a vendor's table in a large dirt mall with dark-colored cloths all over the table and various things for sale. And I'd bought a piece of meat, raw and red, maybe five inches by an inch and a half by a quarter-inch thick, no idea whether it was from fish or beast. I tore a piece off one end and ate it; it was good, if raw. Buying and eating the meat happened first, then I was in the weird monochrome sushi bar, which felt like a smoke-filled room even though no one was smoking, then I was out in the street looking at everything and deducing that I was in Japan.

It could have been a communication. It could have been me having a weird dream because I ate weird food, except I didn't eat weird food, I was at Dave's house. And I haven't been thinking about Japan or eating Japanese food (except some Botan rice candy) or playing Japanese videogames or anything. Maybe it was just I'd been craving raw red meat so much in real life that I dreamed up some and then an explanation for how I'd gotten it. Or maybe I catapulted from the wanting to eat raw, red meat feeling and created or found a place filled with other people who felt the same way. A sushi bar filled with disgruntled Japanese businessmen who felt more than happy to stab anyone who got between them and a little peace and quiet. Oh, that's comforting.

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