I had dreams last night where it seems like every one of my exes made an appearance. I was dating one and holding hands with another while still being aware I'm married, some sort of simultaneous dating, cheating and nothing situation all at once. Another came in while I was hanging out with his friends I haven't seen in years and gave me a kid's puzzle, which was sentimental in the dream because it implied that he remembered giving me one in the past. When he made a passive aggressive comment about when we dated, I made one right back that landed perfectly, which I don't know that I was ever able to do in real life. I'm not usually that hostile in dreams. Who's to say what any of this means?

I feel numb mostly. I've had a lot of bad days recently where unexpected things trigger me-- a post online where someone mentioned twins, a conversation about a coworker's granddaughter where she said something about wanting to be the grandma she never had, a thought that I still miss my Uncle John and Granny and Granda but don't feel as badly about it as when they died, though that just made me jealous that they got to spend time with it now and question whether it was even a baby at all since it died when it was only a cluster of cells. So early. With the doctor's office calling last Monday with the news that my hormone levels are back down to zero and to call when I wind up pregnant again, it's like it never happened at all.

I bought supplies last week to paint. I have plans for a memorial of sorts, though every time I think I know what I want to do, it doesn't seem right or to do it justice. I haven't painted in a long time, and I'm not sure I have the skills to execute what I want to do anyway. I don't know. It can't hurt to try, I guess. Some of the hardest parts of this have been not having anything tangible to point to other than tears cried and blood shed. I've heard and read many stories of other women who have been through this, but it still feels so isolating, like I'm unmoored in a rowboat in the middle of the sea, paddles cast aside as the waves wash up and over me unbidden.

It feels at once necessary and histrionic to be grieving still. I want to talk about it, but I also know the burden is entirely ours. People don't know what to say, and I can't blame them. I try blaming myself, and it goes nowhere. I don't want to get out of bed in the morning, but I force it. Can't spend all day crying. Can't sit in stony silence hoping everything will stop to let this pass. Death comes to all of us eventually. Hearts break. Time supposedly heals. Life moves on.

I had a dream last night where a woman let me know about a governmental conspiracy via a document she gave me. It was something involving proofreading. I spent the rest of the dream trying to tell as many people as possible about the conspiracy because I knew I would be caught before long. However, each person I told, I seemed to lose more and more details about the conspiracy and why it was significant. By the time I forced myself awake, I could barely string a few words together but knew it was important to say the words anyway.

That's all I remember. I've had a lot of crazy dreams lately, really detailed stuff that fills me with dread upon waking but spares me the details. I semi-chalk this up to taking sleep vitamins at night, but surprisingly, the dreams about being late for work/school/whatever dream world thinks is important have dissipated lately, even on Sunday nights when they are usually present in spades and wake me up multiple times before my alarm goes off. Not exactly sure why, but it is a nice change of pace. It'd be nice if all the nightmares and the sleep paralysis went away, though. Always a little frightening.

I had a longer entry I wanted to write about what I was thinking about earlier during my walk, but dreamwidth seems to be lagging quite a bit. I will attempt this again when the site isn't eating half my words as soon I type them. Happy Sunday, all.

I should post about Thanksgiving (which I still might do), but work has been really draining lately (for reasons I don't feel like rehashing right now). This is what I'm choosing to post about instead.

I dreamed last night that I was at a birthday party for tabular-rasa. I didn't know which room to go to in her very large house, and as I walked into a large room, a few servants closed the doors behind me. I rushed back to the doors when I figured out this wasn't the room where the party was, but they told me they couldn't let me out because of the special guest.

I went to the bar to order a drink and wait to be let out. As I was sitting there, Donald Trump sidled up to the bar, sat next to me and started talking to me. I thought, "Well, I'm attractive enough for him to talk to me but not for him to touch me," and I felt weirdly flattered and disgusted at the same time. I got out of there as quickly as I could.

I finally found the room where the party was, and my mom was there too. Amy was opening presents, and I grabbed one and opened it. I turned back to her and said, "I don't know why I did that. Sorry." I handed the gift to her, which was a large plastic light saber. She took a look at it and noticed that when I opened the present, I broke a connecting wire on the light saber. She started explaining that the connecting wire I broke was used to hook up the light saber to her phone and now it was broken and... In my shame, I didn't want to hear the rest of it. I cut her off and said I was going home with my mom.

We tried to leave through a nearby sliding glass door, but once we were on the deck, I found that half the stairs leading down were gone. We were forced to go back inside, where more of Amy's family/spillover guests from Trump's party were gathering. I tried to get Amy's attention so we could leave another way, but she was pissed at me still and distracted by everyone.

Then my stupid alarm went off.

This is the second time I've dreamed about Trump since the day of the election. At least he didn't chase me this time (but I did win the presidency in that one, so it's a wash).

Hello, we have returned. We got back from Iceland at midnight Wednesday actually, but since there's a seven-hour time difference (and Mike's been sick on top of it with a cold he got in the last days we were there), we've both been struggling to get back to some kind of normal in the past four days. I always tend to forget just how disorienting and weird jet-lag is until I experience it again. It was especially jarring waking up that first night and seeing Icelandic mountains in my bedroom instead of knowing where I was, but it gets better day by day. Soon we won't notice it at all.

It has been somewhat bittersweet being back. While there were definitely some fiascos, really the trip as a whole was very nice and different from anything we've experienced so far. I plan on going into details about the trip soon, but for now I'm mostly trying not to be bummed out about having to go back to work. I'm pretty sure this is the longest time in the five and a half years I've worked for the state that I've been away (not counting surgeries, but even then, maybe not), and it feels very surreal. Usually I'm more than ready to get back and buckle down into work, but this has been more of a break, I suppose.

I think part of it is the very real prospect of session starting again in February, and I have no more set time off between now and then. Well, that and needing to get some house repairs done before session comes (and hopefully succeeding in that because winter's coming up fairly quickly and I feel like we're running out of time again). I'm also not sure what's going to happen in the next year (or really what I even want to happen in the next year), so that's kind of terrifying. So it goes, the never-ending song of the sort-of adult I am, I guess. I'd much rather be in Iceland, where our only care at night was planning the next day's driving and wondering if the shower was going to be quite as bad as the previous place we stayed at, but I digress. It's okay. If not, it's going to be okay.

Anyway, Iceland posts coming soon.

I moved into an apartment where my ex and his brother lived. I knew I'd have to try to figure out how to get along with my ex, so I tried to reach out to him and invite him into my room. He declined, and I felt that it was a good sign because I didn't really want to get back together. I went out and watched TV with his brother while waiting for a ride to the new school I had to register at.

A big computerized display was in the background that listed mentors for each of the people in the apartment, all of which happened to be Indian. They were ranked by how well each of their charges were doing in school. I was excited because I knew I would do well in school, but I felt bad for whoever was at the bottom of the list because he had a red flashing zero or negative number next to his name. I wondered who this mentor's student was but went back to watching TV.

For some reason, there kept being a delay for my ride to school, and there was always an excuse as to why I couldn't go to school just yet. I went into the kitchen and put a bowl of food in the microwave. Before the timer went off, I opened the microwave to see if it was done, and it was very close. I put it back in for the rest of the time left and turned to look into the other room. When I turned back, it had caught on fire.

In the race to find a fire extinguisher, I had multiple arguments with my ex because he thought I should just let the fire burn and was trying to prevent me from finding the fire extinguisher. By the time I found one, I wasn't sure if it would work, and my clock radio alarm was going off.

What's that all about?

I had a dream a few nights ago that I interviewed for a promotion at my work. They told me I got the job, so I was super excited. I went into my new larger office and had no idea really what to do. I sat at my desk and shuffled papers around trying to figure it out. I left my office for a minute, and when I returned, my friend verypretty was sitting at my desk and doing the work like a champ. I was told I had actually been demoted and was now her assistant. The next day she turned into my old boss, and the office turned into my current office, and I wanted to go back home and cry.

(My old boss is great. My friend Aurora is great. Dream world is just weird, demoralizing and manifesting my imposter syndrome that crops up every now and then. Booooo.)

Work has been pretty dull lately. My brain has a lot of time to wander, and it's not always to good places. I found myself sleepily giving myself a pep talk the other day about, "Hey, what if you actually took the time and gave it your all to writing? What if you looked over some of the short stories you started back in college and actually tried to make them into something?"

It was enough to wake me up in that moment, but knowing me, I won't actually do that. It's funny it came up at all, really, since I don't tend to like writing fiction much anymore. I liked the creative writing classes I took, but nothing really seemed to stick in terms of lasting passion. If I write fiction at all these days, it's in the form of poetry because I find I like telling really small stories and stringing together pieces and phrases rather than writing long form. I would still like to write a non-fiction book (and have several ideas for research projects), but I don't know. I'd like to think that this is just my aesthetic, but really, it's probably more of a convenient excuse because I'm impatient and don't want to devote the time I would need to make it happen. There are a million different distractions and only so much time and blah blah blah. So it goes, I guess.

I have figured out I can take notes on my phone, though, so I've been doing that instead of writing all over post-its and hoping I don't lose them. (Yes, I know. Welcome to the 21st century.) We'll see if anything comes from it.

EDIT: Wait, hold up. This is better than everything I just said.

( Kung-fu fighting?Collapse )

Speaking of exes, I got this message on new year's eve: "With all the crap that's happened this year I want to say that I am sorry for the way that I treated you and acted around you. I was an insensitive asshole and it was a wonder that you were ever friends with me. That being said I want to thank you for all the years that we were friends and apologize for the years we were not because it was my fault! I hope you have a great 2016"

That would be from Thomas Warner, who I hadn't heard from since his grandmother, the only reason I knew him in the first place, died last April. Weird stuff. I didn't respond.

Not speaking of exes, we took Kiki to the vet yesterday because she's been sneezing for weeks now and getting it all over everything we own (plus we are still concerned and all, haha). The doctor gave Kiki another shot, her third since last August, as well as some information about a CT scan because she's still concerned she might have a nasal tumor and that would be the best way to figure out if she does, though they might take it and still not be able to see it. We're on the fence about it. On one hand, I'd like to know if she has cancer. On the other, it's an estimated $500-$1000 test, and every time they've given her this shot, she's gotten better for a while. Just hard to be on the roller coaster of not knowing, and since Kiki favors Mike, I'd hope he wouldn't have to go through the same deal he went through with his cat, Katie. Time will tell I guess. New to this appointment, they found she had a swollen lymph node in her leg that could be due to inflammation or cancer as well, so that's fun. This is not counting in Olive, who we haven't gotten a senior screen for but should because she's reabsorbing a tooth and should probably get dental work but they don't know if that would kill her in the process because of her age. Sigh.

And we're considering children at some point?!

This weekend has been pretty low-key otherwise. Usual chores and such. We also went to brunch today for an early celebration for my dad's birthday, which was nice, no drama, and tasty. Otherwise, my head is in a weird place, but at least I also have the day off tomorrow. Not much else to report now, I suppose.

I've been having a lot of jacked up dreams lately, most of which I mercifully don't remember. This one, though, I did. ( Dreams are dumbCollapse )

We had a very nice visit in Utah.( Farewell RileyCollapse )

This week hasn't been too strenuous. I worked for three days then had yesterday off so I could go with Mike to his follow-up appointment for his ankle. His doctor said he could start putting weight on his foot again, but to do so gradually so he can get used to it again after not being on it for eight weeks. He is still using his crutches to get around, but at least he can now put both feet on the ground and move forward. I think that makes things much easier to deal with. After we got home, I finished a blanket I started the week I broke my own foot, so I guess that's kind of fitting. Hopefully going forward won't involve any more broken feet, but we'll see what the future holds.

Other than that, got a new dishwasher today (because I've hated the way ours doesn't clean our dishes for quite a while now) and custom framed Mike's anniversary gift (a printout on cloth of our vows). We also finally got to try Peg's Glorious Ham 'n Eggs, which opened in our town a few weeks ago, and bought some groceries. Pretty successful overall, I think. Mike goes to Livermore tomorrow, and then it's time for another week. So it goes.

I had a dream the other night that I woke up and fell going down stairs in slow motion. In a daze, I heard the front door rattling. As I crawled toward it, a strange man broke the lock and started walking through the door. I tried shouting at him to get out and asking why he was there, but my voice was too weak and sleepy. Then I woke up.

I've been sleeping pretty badly. Don't know why. My dad put up the curtain rod in the master bedroom weekend before last, and my mom kindly hemmed the curtains we found online (because no one in this town sells the exact size we need, of course). Apparently, I just get to wake up at 5ish most mornings regardless. Well, if I'm lucky it's only one time a night. Next on the "try" board is reducing the dose of OTC allergy medicine I take, drinking less water before bed, praying to the voodoo gods, sacrificing a goat... Okay, only some of those. Maybe I'll figure out what the heck is going on soon. Probably not.

The 4th of July was pretty nice-- just hung out in Reno with my sister, her friend from work, my brother, my mom and Mike. We ate too much, played Uno early in the afternoon then Cards Against Humanity later while waiting for fireworks. My mom sat at the table and listened during that game, which was awkward at times, especially when one of the answers ended up being "The primal ball-slapping sex your parents are having this second." (I think my sister played that on my brother, which kind of makes it worse. He also didn't appreciate being played the "Motherfucking Sorcerer" card either and refused to read it out loud. Hahaha.) She said something like, "I can see how this game could be fun." Oh, sorry, Mom. Oh well.

Ah, not much else happening. I need to train people again tomorrow, which I'm not looking forward to but will be fairly easy. Past Fiona did most of the work for me already, and I just have to do the talking and explaining part now. Meh.

BUT we just have to make it to Friday. We're leaving for Vermont early Saturday, and that'll be nice. Just have to make it to the other coast and semi-isolated cabin in the woods and yes.

Okay. My stomach is having a full on hatefest at the moment, which has interrupted this post several times already, so I'll stop here for now.