Rebellion before office life, rebellion after office life.
Behold, 2006:
"We raced our engine up and down cliffs and our motorcycle is a quiet one so we had to scream the engine noises instead.
“BURRRRRRRRR!” Nick yelled as we downshifted for a steep climb and passed a pickup full of Papuans*.
“BA-BAP! BA-BAP!” I shrieked with the gearshift as Nick kicked it down, down, down, down, one for each gear, to stop at a stoplight.
‘REOOOOOH! REOOOOOOOOHRHRHRHHHRH! REEeeeeoooooHHEHEHRHRH!” we shouted together at bikers without mufflers as their exhaust pipes shot out blipblipblips of smoke and we went flying past them.
“Hey, QUIT holding onto my shirt!” Nick spat back at me, so I threatened to pull it up and flash passersby his tits. “Do it!” he said, so I did, as we flew around a corner and through a little cluster of warungs and markets screaming girls-gone-wild style all the way.
People don’t stare, or at least they don’t stare anymore than they do already just because we’re bules (Westerners, but slightly more offensive), which is always and hard, so I guess they do stare, but we’re past caring. I pull his shirt back down just as we pass a traffic cop, blowing his whistle in vain at every single driver on the road, because every single driver on the road is doing something illegal.
Road rules here are more like suggestions, anyway. "One Way Street" means "don't go the wrong way on this street, unless of course you're in a big hurry to get somewhere, or you are learning to ride your bike and don't want to make a bunch of right turns unnecessarily, or are going to speed down it so fast the police won't care about catching you." The other day Nick weaved around some blocking cones that were meant to control rush hour traffic and shot down a one way shortcut street the wrong way, and right at the corner was a police campout. One of the policemen yelled 'Hey!' and then went on chewing his betelnut. The others hadn't noticed because they were watching an attractive woman coming out of the marketplace."
(taken from my 10/26/06 entry)
And behold, by contrast, 1/31/08:
Just now I walked to the coffeemaker to fill my teacup with hot water from the side spigot. I have a big mug that officemates are always trying to steal and put their soup in, and the trickle of hot water is always meager, so I had awhile to stand and think as it filled. Suddenly I had this massive inexplicable urge to keep my finger on the tap and take my cup away, watch the boiling water spilling in a perfect line onto the counter, under the coffeemaker, spreading under the disgusting trash can full of spoiled berries and across to the refrigerator that always has someone's moldy old lunch in it. I could picture standing there with my hand on the tap and not moving a muscle if someone were to see me. Standing there acting like this is what's supposed to be happening over here, and how is this your business? Move along. Move along. I'm just drenching the floor here and the water's creeping along the cracks in the countertop and soaking the communal cutting board and the box of free bagels.
I could see myself doing that so clearly that I left with my mug only half full. Unlike flashing a bunch of teenagers a chest not my own while zooming past on a motorcycle, wearing a sorry excuse for a helmet, this would have repercussions.
Thursday, January 31, 2008
Monday, January 28, 2008
It was suddenly 65 after a winter of ice and the creek was a mass of floating icebergs. The edges were filled with cracks and sinkholes from people who tried to walk on the ice and crunched right through. Where it looked thin, it took the chunks of rock I threw and bounced them right off onto the opposite bank. Where it looked thick, in broke off in razor-sharp layers that we threw at a tennis ball marooned in ice.
Swirling in circles in one of the waterfall eddies was a perfect circular iceberg. Its surface was covered with rocks and logs people had thrown at it to try and break it, all in vain. It was clearly thicker than it looked, because it looked like it would break at the touch of a bird's feet. We sat on the rocks at the edge of the creek as the iceberg swirled and sloshed towards us. When it reached us I put out my foot to kick at it, thinking it would be solid. It wasn't. A whole side broke off and left me ankle deep in water that would have been ice if it hadn't been moving.
It was my inclination to worrywart around about how cold it was, how dangerous it was for my foot, etc., etc., even though it didn't really hurt, but we had just finished watching something we'd never seen before. A little black bird, maybe the size of a sparrow but fatter, was bathing in the creek. Not just wading in a half centimeter and fluttering around, but actually diving in at the tops of falls and flailing about underwater, struggling against a current that's strong for most humans, then surfacing, smacking his beak, doing a little knee-bend dance, and diving back in. Every time he emerged, he was fatter.
We couldn't get enough of him and followed him up the creek almost to the point of being late to where we were going. We speculated that maybe he was a fairy-tale-like bird leading away from (or to) our dooms, like if he hadn't made us late we would have been hit by a truck at the intersection we should have been at at that certain time, or if we had ignored our commitments and followed him all the way up, we would have found ten million dollars in gold, but... we don't come from enough of a fairytale world that we paid any heed to this idea. When it was time to turn around and make our meeting, we turned around and made our meeting. If we lived in fairytale land, we'd probably be dead. Or else hopelessly lost in a tangle of brambles. As it was, we forgot about the little black bird almost as soon as he was out of sight. If you were supposed to lead us to our fortune, bird, then I'm sorry.
Swirling in circles in one of the waterfall eddies was a perfect circular iceberg. Its surface was covered with rocks and logs people had thrown at it to try and break it, all in vain. It was clearly thicker than it looked, because it looked like it would break at the touch of a bird's feet. We sat on the rocks at the edge of the creek as the iceberg swirled and sloshed towards us. When it reached us I put out my foot to kick at it, thinking it would be solid. It wasn't. A whole side broke off and left me ankle deep in water that would have been ice if it hadn't been moving.
It was my inclination to worrywart around about how cold it was, how dangerous it was for my foot, etc., etc., even though it didn't really hurt, but we had just finished watching something we'd never seen before. A little black bird, maybe the size of a sparrow but fatter, was bathing in the creek. Not just wading in a half centimeter and fluttering around, but actually diving in at the tops of falls and flailing about underwater, struggling against a current that's strong for most humans, then surfacing, smacking his beak, doing a little knee-bend dance, and diving back in. Every time he emerged, he was fatter.
We couldn't get enough of him and followed him up the creek almost to the point of being late to where we were going. We speculated that maybe he was a fairy-tale-like bird leading away from (or to) our dooms, like if he hadn't made us late we would have been hit by a truck at the intersection we should have been at at that certain time, or if we had ignored our commitments and followed him all the way up, we would have found ten million dollars in gold, but... we don't come from enough of a fairytale world that we paid any heed to this idea. When it was time to turn around and make our meeting, we turned around and made our meeting. If we lived in fairytale land, we'd probably be dead. Or else hopelessly lost in a tangle of brambles. As it was, we forgot about the little black bird almost as soon as he was out of sight. If you were supposed to lead us to our fortune, bird, then I'm sorry.
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
Saturday, January 19, 2008
There are flashes, sometimes, where I think that I have gone crazy, that this is it and from now on I won’t know where I am or what’s really happening to me, that life from now on is a daydream and nothing else, that I might think I’m in bed with a lover, but really, I’m in a straitjacket and in a morphine drip, or that I may think I’m studying law, but I’m babbling somewhere on the ground. In a hospital. In a coma. Severely schizophrenic.
I’ve always been occasionally seized with the fear of becoming schizophrenic; I exhibit more than half of the warning signs for late-onset. But the episodes where I feel crazy, where I’m not sure that what’s happening is what I see, and vice versa, aren’t scary. They’re merely curious.
Yesterday after work it was snowing, and snowing hard. Big enough flakes that I could catch them in my mouth, and slightly quench my thirst. I couldn’t help doing that even though I was on a busy road and grown women aren’t supposed to be catching snowflakes in their mouths, so I got a lot of curious looks, some honks, one trailing hoot of laughter and a lone shout that was meant to be an insult, I guess, but I didn’t quite catch it and even if I had, it wouldn’t have registered. The sky was low and gray enough that the mountains were completely obscured, and strangely, it was sort of warm. The asphalt made the snow sparkle. I was waiting for the bus to take me to Barnes and Noble, even though I could have walked. I should have walked. In the state I was in I wouldn’t have even felt my feet hit the ground.
In Barnes & Noble I was in the bathroom and I was studying the pattern in the tiles. I know the tile pattern of every bathroom I’ve spent any amount of time in; the number of rows before a repeat, how they have to adjust to turn the corner or go up a wall, or, those crafty places where it’s both a corner and a wall. 3-D pattern adjustment. Obsessive-compulsive. On resumés I call it ‘attention to detail’. I forget I’m on the toilet, extrapolate the pattern to Spirographs and mosaic magnets, those indistinct games from when I was a toddler. The bathroom tiles in Los Angeles, the pieces that have been dislodged by earthquakes, upsetting the pattern and upsetting me in the process. I colored the holes yellow with crayons. I did. When I visit there years later I can still see the impressions.
When I snap back into myself and I’m still on the toilet, I have lost time and suddenly I’m not entirely sure I’m in the bookstore bathroom. It seems entirely plausible that I may have begun daydreaming at work, at the grocery store, at the tall pants boutique, and absentmindedly dropped my pants and assumed toilet position. Though this has never happened before, it seems likely that it could, that it is happening at the moment, that if I pinched myself hard enough I’d open my eyes to a new background... as if were dreaming. How do I get out of this? I can’t. How do I find out if I’m at work, in a store?
Wait for someone to shake me. Yell at me. Inject me with drugs, take me to the hospital. But the world feels so weird that I doubt any of those things would work. Any dream world that seizes me with tile patterns has to be too strong for such remedies. Any dream world that makes me feel this light and airy has to be a dream.
I walk out of the store. How much time have I spent? It’s still light, but the world has flipped. The sky is cloud-streaked blue and the sun is setting and it isn’t snowing anymore. The gray has evaporated. It feels like a different day. Maybe it is. The sun has brought out sparrows and women teetering on heels and the women’s heels look to me like bird beaks, pounding, pounding, pounding the asphalt.
I’ve always been occasionally seized with the fear of becoming schizophrenic; I exhibit more than half of the warning signs for late-onset. But the episodes where I feel crazy, where I’m not sure that what’s happening is what I see, and vice versa, aren’t scary. They’re merely curious.
Yesterday after work it was snowing, and snowing hard. Big enough flakes that I could catch them in my mouth, and slightly quench my thirst. I couldn’t help doing that even though I was on a busy road and grown women aren’t supposed to be catching snowflakes in their mouths, so I got a lot of curious looks, some honks, one trailing hoot of laughter and a lone shout that was meant to be an insult, I guess, but I didn’t quite catch it and even if I had, it wouldn’t have registered. The sky was low and gray enough that the mountains were completely obscured, and strangely, it was sort of warm. The asphalt made the snow sparkle. I was waiting for the bus to take me to Barnes and Noble, even though I could have walked. I should have walked. In the state I was in I wouldn’t have even felt my feet hit the ground.
In Barnes & Noble I was in the bathroom and I was studying the pattern in the tiles. I know the tile pattern of every bathroom I’ve spent any amount of time in; the number of rows before a repeat, how they have to adjust to turn the corner or go up a wall, or, those crafty places where it’s both a corner and a wall. 3-D pattern adjustment. Obsessive-compulsive. On resumés I call it ‘attention to detail’. I forget I’m on the toilet, extrapolate the pattern to Spirographs and mosaic magnets, those indistinct games from when I was a toddler. The bathroom tiles in Los Angeles, the pieces that have been dislodged by earthquakes, upsetting the pattern and upsetting me in the process. I colored the holes yellow with crayons. I did. When I visit there years later I can still see the impressions.
When I snap back into myself and I’m still on the toilet, I have lost time and suddenly I’m not entirely sure I’m in the bookstore bathroom. It seems entirely plausible that I may have begun daydreaming at work, at the grocery store, at the tall pants boutique, and absentmindedly dropped my pants and assumed toilet position. Though this has never happened before, it seems likely that it could, that it is happening at the moment, that if I pinched myself hard enough I’d open my eyes to a new background... as if were dreaming. How do I get out of this? I can’t. How do I find out if I’m at work, in a store?
Wait for someone to shake me. Yell at me. Inject me with drugs, take me to the hospital. But the world feels so weird that I doubt any of those things would work. Any dream world that seizes me with tile patterns has to be too strong for such remedies. Any dream world that makes me feel this light and airy has to be a dream.
I walk out of the store. How much time have I spent? It’s still light, but the world has flipped. The sky is cloud-streaked blue and the sun is setting and it isn’t snowing anymore. The gray has evaporated. It feels like a different day. Maybe it is. The sun has brought out sparrows and women teetering on heels and the women’s heels look to me like bird beaks, pounding, pounding, pounding the asphalt.
Thursday, January 17, 2008
Until I was old enough to know that something was wrong with it, I read four, five hours a day. Every inch of free time (yes, I measured my free time in inches), every moment I wasn't at school or asleep or eating dinner or in the car (I got carsick if I did anything in cars besides stare out the window, reciting streets - I guess that's sort of reading, too). I learned early, at about 3, so there was more time for me to read in blissful ignorance before the awareness of social norms came up on me and I realized that people were supposed to do other things sometimes, too.
Before I realized that, I don't remember a time when I felt bored or unsatisfied while reading. I think the boredom and the drive to do other things came from outside. As I realized other kids played Nintendo. (Once I tried Nintendo, I was immediately hooked - I can still beat anyone at any of the original Marios - try me.) As I realized other kids were in softball leagues, or went camping with their parents. Everyone has a drive to fit in, so as soon as I figured out I didn't, I wanted to - even though, left alone, I probably could have read, and played the piano, and drawn forever.
Sometimes I wish society had laid off. Now, when I write music, I feel this push to record it. And when I record it, I get frustrated, because it doesn't sound the way my voice sounds in my head - the music isn't as easy to play as it is for me to write, and hear and organize in my brain, and it comes out clumsy, stunted by my inability to understand recording/mixing technology. If I hadn't come to know that people record what's in their heads, make money off it, compare it to what comes from other peoples' heads, stress over deadlines, stress over accomplishing something - I might have just been able to be happy sitting down at the piano at my leisure, playing in that creative dreamworld I used to occupy, until I felt finished, and then I could move on, and not have to feel like it needed to be more than that.
I can't read anymore either, without either thinking that I need to be doing something more productive or that I need to be making 'something' out of my reading, like turning it into a job: book reviewer, novelist, professional insufferable literary snob, whatever. Writing this blog even makes me feel sick sometimes when I read other people's blogs and think, this person lives a more exciting life than I do. This person writes down their experiences more accurately than I do. Competition. Achievement. Blah blah blah.
It has become confusing because I'm not sure if I can escape the cycle, so I think, I might as well dive into it. I think this a lot when I'm around my family, who imply in a myriad of ways, intentional and not, that I am wasting my talent (whatever that talent may be). As I write this, I don't see how enjoying myself without putting pressure on is a waste of anything at all, but mired in my family, who are all doctors and lawyers and psychiatrists and teachers and other such things, and who get really huge fake grins on their faces when I say I'm a bus dispatcher, I start thinking, yeah, I AM wasting this as-yet-unnamed talent. I should go to grad school! I should write lots of papers to compete with other students' papers and go into a challenging field somewhere and think about work all the time, even when I'm sleeping, and make a lot of money and buy a lot of things that I slowly become unable to live without, and if I lose my job I will think back on how much I made in 2008 and think, how the fuck is it possible to live on such little money?
I may sound like I'm exaggerating and/or being sarcastic, and I am, but at the same time, I think that's probably what I'll end up doing. All of the above things are true, and aren't ideal, but at the same time, society is here, its presence is there in my brain, and it's not leaving. I do feel like I need a 'challenge', like I need to 'make something' of myself, like I need to 'exercise my brain' and have a 'purpose', and yes, even though I know somewhere deep in my brain that these things are silly enough to merit quotes, I also know that the need to fulfill them isn't going away, and probably will never go away.
Before I realized that, I don't remember a time when I felt bored or unsatisfied while reading. I think the boredom and the drive to do other things came from outside. As I realized other kids played Nintendo. (Once I tried Nintendo, I was immediately hooked - I can still beat anyone at any of the original Marios - try me.) As I realized other kids were in softball leagues, or went camping with their parents. Everyone has a drive to fit in, so as soon as I figured out I didn't, I wanted to - even though, left alone, I probably could have read, and played the piano, and drawn forever.
Sometimes I wish society had laid off. Now, when I write music, I feel this push to record it. And when I record it, I get frustrated, because it doesn't sound the way my voice sounds in my head - the music isn't as easy to play as it is for me to write, and hear and organize in my brain, and it comes out clumsy, stunted by my inability to understand recording/mixing technology. If I hadn't come to know that people record what's in their heads, make money off it, compare it to what comes from other peoples' heads, stress over deadlines, stress over accomplishing something - I might have just been able to be happy sitting down at the piano at my leisure, playing in that creative dreamworld I used to occupy, until I felt finished, and then I could move on, and not have to feel like it needed to be more than that.
I can't read anymore either, without either thinking that I need to be doing something more productive or that I need to be making 'something' out of my reading, like turning it into a job: book reviewer, novelist, professional insufferable literary snob, whatever. Writing this blog even makes me feel sick sometimes when I read other people's blogs and think, this person lives a more exciting life than I do. This person writes down their experiences more accurately than I do. Competition. Achievement. Blah blah blah.
It has become confusing because I'm not sure if I can escape the cycle, so I think, I might as well dive into it. I think this a lot when I'm around my family, who imply in a myriad of ways, intentional and not, that I am wasting my talent (whatever that talent may be). As I write this, I don't see how enjoying myself without putting pressure on is a waste of anything at all, but mired in my family, who are all doctors and lawyers and psychiatrists and teachers and other such things, and who get really huge fake grins on their faces when I say I'm a bus dispatcher, I start thinking, yeah, I AM wasting this as-yet-unnamed talent. I should go to grad school! I should write lots of papers to compete with other students' papers and go into a challenging field somewhere and think about work all the time, even when I'm sleeping, and make a lot of money and buy a lot of things that I slowly become unable to live without, and if I lose my job I will think back on how much I made in 2008 and think, how the fuck is it possible to live on such little money?
I may sound like I'm exaggerating and/or being sarcastic, and I am, but at the same time, I think that's probably what I'll end up doing. All of the above things are true, and aren't ideal, but at the same time, society is here, its presence is there in my brain, and it's not leaving. I do feel like I need a 'challenge', like I need to 'make something' of myself, like I need to 'exercise my brain' and have a 'purpose', and yes, even though I know somewhere deep in my brain that these things are silly enough to merit quotes, I also know that the need to fulfill them isn't going away, and probably will never go away.
Monday, January 14, 2008
In high school it was a lot easier to write. In high school everything was do-or-die, everything was of utmost importance, it could make or break me. I would have experiences that I thought if people misinterpreted, it would color the entire rest of my life. I used people's initials in online diary entries and thought that it was enough, that people somehow wouldn't pick out their initial from the alphabet and hundreds of identifying details from the sidelines of my entries. It was astonishingly naive of me. Luckily, I was also pretty unpopular and no one really cared about my online diary. I could have, you know, been really popular and thrown it all away through passive-aggressive online gossiping instead. The horrors.
Actually, my sneakiness factor hasn't gotten any better. I am still as stark and obvious as a bloodstain on a white couch. When I was a kid I would pick my nose sitting next to someone on a couch if we were watching TV, working under the assumption that their peripheral vision couldn't possibly be operative. And now I seem to think that just because I'm six feet tall and crowned by fiery blonde hair doesn't mean that I can't blend into a crowd (it does mean that. It absolutely does, and just because it's unfair doesn't make it untrue.).
The same goes for gossip. I can be talking about someone right in front of them and I think they somehow won't hear me. I can tell a secret about someone to their best friend and think that their best friend bond will temporarily break, especially for me, and the secret won't be passed. I'm just incredibly socially immature like that, and I'm starting to think it's permanent. My solution to this problem thus far has been to talk about everybody to everybody, to put everything out there in the most blatant terms possible, and to disclose this before someone tells me a secret, in case the secret-teller doesn't like the way I handle information. I see this as honest and egalitarian and I don't think anybody in the world agrees with this sentiment. What say you, internet?
Actually, my sneakiness factor hasn't gotten any better. I am still as stark and obvious as a bloodstain on a white couch. When I was a kid I would pick my nose sitting next to someone on a couch if we were watching TV, working under the assumption that their peripheral vision couldn't possibly be operative. And now I seem to think that just because I'm six feet tall and crowned by fiery blonde hair doesn't mean that I can't blend into a crowd (it does mean that. It absolutely does, and just because it's unfair doesn't make it untrue.).
The same goes for gossip. I can be talking about someone right in front of them and I think they somehow won't hear me. I can tell a secret about someone to their best friend and think that their best friend bond will temporarily break, especially for me, and the secret won't be passed. I'm just incredibly socially immature like that, and I'm starting to think it's permanent. My solution to this problem thus far has been to talk about everybody to everybody, to put everything out there in the most blatant terms possible, and to disclose this before someone tells me a secret, in case the secret-teller doesn't like the way I handle information. I see this as honest and egalitarian and I don't think anybody in the world agrees with this sentiment. What say you, internet?
Thursday, January 10, 2008
How planes actually crash is not how I always dream them crashing; being in an unrealistic plane crash is more often than not how I discover that I'm dreaming. I will be in a plane, usually with some kind of magical X-ray vision that allows me to see 360 degrees out my tiny bubble-window, and I'll feel some turbulence. Instead of a wing blowing violently off, though, or an engine dying and the plane tilting, or a sudden wind gust causing a nosedive, in the dream we'll gently land, just as if we were landing at the airport, except we'll be landing on a highway, or a winding country road, or even, laughably, at the wrong airport.
I've had this dream, or some variation on it, so many times that every time I have it I jump out the plane window and start flying, or doing complicated gymnastics, or burrowing into quicksand, or any of the myriad things I'm unable to do in real life. I've always been able to lucid dream easily, and I'm thankful for that. Most of the people I know tell me that as soon as they know they're dreaming, they'll instantly awaken. Kicking and screaming and holding onto the fabric of their dream world. Or something.
Last night was different. I was in a plane crash, the dream drifting kind, like always. We landed gently on a country road lined with snow-coated maple trees. There was a gentle sort of urgency to getting out of the plane, because we knew it would explode, so I took none of my luggage, and followed my dad sprinting across a swamp, which was slightly perturbing because I was sinking and running at the same time, but I turned around just as the plane started burning, and then, with one muffled bang, exploded (which consisted of the flames being snuffed out and the plane becoming a perfectly preserved skeleton of itself). After the brief interest of watching that, I was ready to fly, so I jumped off and spread my arms.
The same thing happened when I tried to fly as what happens when I try to fly while awake. The more I tried it, the more I fell on my face... and the more it hurt. Actually hurt, like dreams usually don't. So I had a second thought, thought maybe I wasn't dreaming, but then shrugged it off. I had floated in an airplane into a winter glade, exited peacefully, and watched it blow up practically soundlessly. I was definitely dreaming.
I tried everything I can do in dreams, everything, one thing after another, with failure after failure, until I had managed to convince myself that I wasn't dreaming. It was an odd, unsettling feeling. Everything that my logic told me was wrong based on my experience. Usually, experience and logic go at least mostly together, or at least together enough that you can see where they connect. This time, they were worlds apart. Logic: gentle plan crash in absurd circumstance: dreaming. Experience: falling on my face trying to fly, flopping on my head trying to do backflips, meeting only with stubborn dirt when trying to burrow into the ground like a mole: not dreaming. I didn't know what to think, so I chose experience.
The longer the dream went on, the more I felt I had found the truth. We all holed up in a shelter against the cold, waited for rescue helicopters, took turns using the bathroom to get ready for bed. One particular incident I remember that racked up lots of points for the not-dreaming side was my very real fear that I would lose my possessions and not be able to pay for new ones. I sidled up to my dad, who was quietly unpacking his stereo in the corner. 'You think flight insurance will pay for all my lost stuff?' I asked him.
'Oh, yeah,' he said.
'Because I'll need at least $5,000.'
'You know how much they give you?' He lowered his voice, leaned in to whisper. '$27,000.'
'$27,000?'
That was enough.
When I picked up my cell phone to call Dan and tell him the story of what had happened to me, the numbers were all warped and I couldn't seem to dial straight. Every time I pushed an 8, it came out as a 9 (if I was lucky; if I wasn't lucky, it came out as a squiggle, or a Chinese character, or a squashed bug). Do you remember the swirling alarm clock in Waking Life?
Once I got the numbers right, and he picked up, I found myself in my bed, cradling my hipbone like a cell phone. I was absolutely shocked. Experience had failed me! How come I hadn't been able to fly? Was this the beginning of the end of swooping lucid dreams?!
I've had this dream, or some variation on it, so many times that every time I have it I jump out the plane window and start flying, or doing complicated gymnastics, or burrowing into quicksand, or any of the myriad things I'm unable to do in real life. I've always been able to lucid dream easily, and I'm thankful for that. Most of the people I know tell me that as soon as they know they're dreaming, they'll instantly awaken. Kicking and screaming and holding onto the fabric of their dream world. Or something.
Last night was different. I was in a plane crash, the dream drifting kind, like always. We landed gently on a country road lined with snow-coated maple trees. There was a gentle sort of urgency to getting out of the plane, because we knew it would explode, so I took none of my luggage, and followed my dad sprinting across a swamp, which was slightly perturbing because I was sinking and running at the same time, but I turned around just as the plane started burning, and then, with one muffled bang, exploded (which consisted of the flames being snuffed out and the plane becoming a perfectly preserved skeleton of itself). After the brief interest of watching that, I was ready to fly, so I jumped off and spread my arms.
The same thing happened when I tried to fly as what happens when I try to fly while awake. The more I tried it, the more I fell on my face... and the more it hurt. Actually hurt, like dreams usually don't. So I had a second thought, thought maybe I wasn't dreaming, but then shrugged it off. I had floated in an airplane into a winter glade, exited peacefully, and watched it blow up practically soundlessly. I was definitely dreaming.
I tried everything I can do in dreams, everything, one thing after another, with failure after failure, until I had managed to convince myself that I wasn't dreaming. It was an odd, unsettling feeling. Everything that my logic told me was wrong based on my experience. Usually, experience and logic go at least mostly together, or at least together enough that you can see where they connect. This time, they were worlds apart. Logic: gentle plan crash in absurd circumstance: dreaming. Experience: falling on my face trying to fly, flopping on my head trying to do backflips, meeting only with stubborn dirt when trying to burrow into the ground like a mole: not dreaming. I didn't know what to think, so I chose experience.
The longer the dream went on, the more I felt I had found the truth. We all holed up in a shelter against the cold, waited for rescue helicopters, took turns using the bathroom to get ready for bed. One particular incident I remember that racked up lots of points for the not-dreaming side was my very real fear that I would lose my possessions and not be able to pay for new ones. I sidled up to my dad, who was quietly unpacking his stereo in the corner. 'You think flight insurance will pay for all my lost stuff?' I asked him.
'Oh, yeah,' he said.
'Because I'll need at least $5,000.'
'You know how much they give you?' He lowered his voice, leaned in to whisper. '$27,000.'
'$27,000?'
That was enough.
When I picked up my cell phone to call Dan and tell him the story of what had happened to me, the numbers were all warped and I couldn't seem to dial straight. Every time I pushed an 8, it came out as a 9 (if I was lucky; if I wasn't lucky, it came out as a squiggle, or a Chinese character, or a squashed bug). Do you remember the swirling alarm clock in Waking Life?
Once I got the numbers right, and he picked up, I found myself in my bed, cradling my hipbone like a cell phone. I was absolutely shocked. Experience had failed me! How come I hadn't been able to fly? Was this the beginning of the end of swooping lucid dreams?!
Tuesday, January 08, 2008
I've been playing ridiculous amounts of Scrabble lately. Upwards of three games a day, average, and two as I write this. Some may think that this is a relatively intellectual way to pass the time, but I don't know; the effect of such huge amounts of noncontextual (uncontextual?) language flying at me is somewhat disconcerting. I find myself putting words in strange places in sentences, forgetting how the plural works, or a particular tense. Using archaic words in live sentences with friends. Writing down a word just because of its high score without bothering to look up its meaning.
I read a book* once (all in one sitting in the bookstore, one of my forays into forcing myself to be a public presence while still being allowed to bury my face in a book) about a journalist who got crazy into the National Scrabble Association tournaments for a book he was writing. He ended up not being able to detach. He memorized every two letter word in existence, recited it like a mantra. Rearranged anagrams with friends as a social activity. Dreamt about letter formations and board patterns in hotel rooms at night.
I heard once that mathematical people are better at Scrabble than English major types. It wouldn't surprise me. I am an English major type and because I see the anagrams on my rack as logic puzzles, and not language, it's difficult for me to unscramble them. Letters alone and puzzled mean nothing to me. Their probabilities don't interest me, the sound of them all jumbled together is sometimes funny* but ultimately nonsensical, and the more I look at them the less potential sense they make, sort of like when you say words over and over and over until they just sound like a noise you can't believe anyone would actually make in front of other people. (Try 'sketch' or 'doorknob' or your own name sometime.)
Anyway, the point is I should feel smarter playing Scrabble all the time than if I just sat around reading my weakness, celebrity blogs, all day, but I don't, I just feel slightly like I've heard being on mushrooms feels. Words are morphing and taking on meanings beyond their normal ones, so every time I speak or write there's an underlying weirdness going on that feels oddly like... math. It's not unlike what happens to me when I try to listen to music while falling asleep. There's a mood there, and it can be the most relaxing music in the world, but my brain is still calculating the harmonic progression, and I won't go to sleep no matter how many hours I lay there. I feel now like I'm not sure if I'll ever make sense now, no matter how many hours I spend forming words.
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I read a book* once (all in one sitting in the bookstore, one of my forays into forcing myself to be a public presence while still being allowed to bury my face in a book) about a journalist who got crazy into the National Scrabble Association tournaments for a book he was writing. He ended up not being able to detach. He memorized every two letter word in existence, recited it like a mantra. Rearranged anagrams with friends as a social activity. Dreamt about letter formations and board patterns in hotel rooms at night.
I heard once that mathematical people are better at Scrabble than English major types. It wouldn't surprise me. I am an English major type and because I see the anagrams on my rack as logic puzzles, and not language, it's difficult for me to unscramble them. Letters alone and puzzled mean nothing to me. Their probabilities don't interest me, the sound of them all jumbled together is sometimes funny* but ultimately nonsensical, and the more I look at them the less potential sense they make, sort of like when you say words over and over and over until they just sound like a noise you can't believe anyone would actually make in front of other people. (Try 'sketch' or 'doorknob' or your own name sometime.)
Anyway, the point is I should feel smarter playing Scrabble all the time than if I just sat around reading my weakness, celebrity blogs, all day, but I don't, I just feel slightly like I've heard being on mushrooms feels. Words are morphing and taking on meanings beyond their normal ones, so every time I speak or write there's an underlying weirdness going on that feels oddly like... math. It's not unlike what happens to me when I try to listen to music while falling asleep. There's a mood there, and it can be the most relaxing music in the world, but my brain is still calculating the harmonic progression, and I won't go to sleep no matter how many hours I lay there. I feel now like I'm not sure if I'll ever make sense now, no matter how many hours I spend forming words.
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