1. All day long I keep acting like it’s Wednesday and then “remembering” that it’s really Thursday and then panicking because it means that I’m not going to, preparing for, and doing the right stuff. I did this yesterday, too. And Monday. Monday I even sent someone a Tuesday-oriented email. And then on Tuesday I realized what I had done and had to email them again to explain why the previous email made no sense.

I keep going to the calendar to double-check that I’m going through the right motions. So far so good.
 

(It really is Wednesday, right?)

2. Last night I finished watching the first season of Transparent. I would’ve launched right into the second season but there is no second season (yet). So now I’m irritated. So many questions!

Have you watched the show? In spite of some initial hesitation (that I still feel, on occasion—the show is graphic), I absolutely loved it. Here’s why:

*Flawed characters that aren’t particularly lovable (though there is one that I adore), which makes me connect with them more deeply. As a result, I feel a greater appreciation for people in general.
*Fabulous acting.
*Real bodies and non-classic beauty = a breath of fresh air.
*The show isn’t fast-paced. I read somewhere that someone compared it to Boyhood, and it’s true. It’s just life happening.
*The actors eat all the time! The constant munching is almost jarring, so different is it from what is normally observed on the screen.

(One downside: the occasional sloppy filming. Did this bother anyone else?)

3. My new reading glasses broke. The lens kept popping out so I had to take them back to get fixed and then the store ended up having to mail them off so I am without glasses for a week. I miss them.

4. Rehearsals have started for the next play! This means that I am gone every evening, Monday through Thursday, and then for several hours on Saturday. It’s manageable (and lots of fun), plus, the director is good at budgeting time and not wasting mine, so it’s not too bad.

Still, it’s a shift. Suppers are rushed, and there is no bedtime read aloud. But my husband is getting acclimated to my schedule. A couple nights ago he initiated a different bedtime read aloud; he’s reading Hatchet to the younger two.

5. Practically 3.6 seconds after telling you about my grocery store strike, I went on a disorganized and violent shopping rampage. Something like six grocery stores in two days. The whole debacle was riddled with miscalculations, unwise choices, and weak impulse control and fueled by an upcoming birthday (and the accompanying weird purchases) and a couple other food-related events. I’m taking several days off from food buying to catch my breath, but my rest time is limited. I’m nearly out of butter…again.

6. I used up all the butter on the cake I made for my younger son’s ninth birthday: a picaken, a pie baked inside a cake.

I’ve been wanting to try this Food Event for months and months, ever since I read about it on Jaime’s blog. It sounded so awful that I thought it might be good.

So we made a blueberry pie inside a lemon cake and iced the whole deal with real lemon buttercream (in other words, five egg yolks and a entire pound of butter).

It was as awful as I hoped it wouldn’t be. So much for that.

This same time, years previous: itchy in my skin, chocolate mint chip cookies, in which we enroll our children in school, ruminations from the shower, take two, the perfect classic cheesecake, snowcream, and a bedroom birth.    

This same time, years previous: stuck buttons and frozen pipes, how we got our house, taco seasoning mix, wheat berry salad, ruminations from the shower, learning to draw, and on moldy beans.

Do you ever do dream interpretation? I don’t, usually. I rarely remember my dreams (except for that period when I was on Zoloft—now that was wild), but when I do, I’m more inclined to think, “Oh, that was cool/scary/weird/etc,” and then move on. Dreams shpeems.

But last night, oh boy. It was a nice dream turned nightmarish and I awoke with a jolt, semi-frozen in bed, too scared to even get up to go pee. My husband wasn’t in bed and I couldn’t remember why not. As I lay there, slowly gathering my wits, I realized that he had probably been struck with another bout of insomnia and was most likely downstairs watching a movie (the perfect calming, blue-light solution, ha).

So I laid in bed and pondered my dream. Because it was a nightmare and I woke up right after, the details were vivid. It went like this:

I was on a sort of open wagon which was being pulled by a person I distrust. We were moving slowly downhill, and I was watching the ground as it passed under the wagon—there were lots of tracks in the dried mud. The person and I were talking, getting more and more friendlier as we went along. We started talking about the enneagram, and the person correctly guessed my personality type. I felt known and happy. We were connecting.  

But then off to my left, I saw a horse that had broken out of its fencing. I said, We need to turn around and get the horse back in. I was planning to get a bucket of grain to lure the horse, but the person honked the horn instead. I said, No, don’t do that. It will startle the horse. But the horse started heading back into the fence, so I said, Oh, all right. Go ahead, and the person honked again. The horse went back in.  

And then I noticed that a little farther down the gravel road was a house. An older woman dressed in thick, heavy clothing was pulling out onto the gravel road on a motorcycle. When the person I was with gave the second honk, the woman swerved and her bike tipped over on top of her. And then, even though she was going slowly and should’ve just stopped, the bike slide a few more yards, dragging her with it. 

People rushed out of the house to help her. They picked her up. Her arm! I yelled. Hold her arm! Even through all the clothing, I could see that it was partially torn off. As they picked her up, it fell off completely, leaving behind a bloody white bone. But it was the bone of a leg and foot, not an arm and hand like it should have been. 

At first, I took this dream at face value. I was getting to know someone I didn’t trust and had crossed the line from mistrust to trust (the horse). Then bad things happened. In other words, don’t connect with people you don’t trust or people will get hurt. Cool, huh? I went downstairs and told my husband. He laughed at me and sent me back to bed.

But as I drifted back to sleep, I recalled a therapist that I had read about who used intensive dream therapy. One of the key theories of dream interpretation is that all characters in a dream are the dreamer herself. And then a totally different interpretation occurred to me:

I am beginning to understand myself on a deeper level. This makes me happy. But this also means I am, or will be, crossing boundaries and stepping out of familiar territory. There are risks involved, and I am anxious that I will be hurt. I have coping mechanisms, but in spite of them, part of me will be stripped away. Who I am is different from what I think I am. 

There are still so many things I don’t know, though. Does it mean something that the horse’s pasture was filled with brambly shrubs? Or that there were lots of tall trees in front of the woman’s house? Or that the woman was elderly? Or that I distrusted the driver at first but then started to feel strongly connected? Or that the motorcycle drug the old woman? And about the foot instead of the arm—that part was so horribly terrifying. All that blood and bone. 

It feels like I have been given a mysterious gift, an intriguing look at my under-the-surface rumblings. It’s wild.

This same time, years previous: stalled, lemon creams, and just when you thought my life was all peaches, the quotidian (1.30.12), peanut butter and honey granola, mayonnaise, rock-my-world cocoa brownies, homemade yogurt, and orange cranberry biscotti.