Sculpin

You know that anxiety dream where you’ve forgotten that you’ve signed up for a class and the final is tomorrow? Just about all of us have that dream, right? (Mine’s always a math class — there’s no bullshitting my way through that.) Last night I had a variation on that: I dreamed that I’d been in a long-distance relationship and had forgotten to break up. Whoops. Awkward.

The problem with Terry Pratchett’s books is that — and I’m not quite sure this is a problem — I wind up having Terry Pratchett sorts of dreams. Especially if I’ve just read one of his books for the first time.

I just had a dream about someone who was named either Mincemeat Princeton or Princeton Comma Mincemeat. I’m not quite sure what it was he did, but I’m sure it was fussy. No surprise that I’ve got my paws on the new Pratchett, then.

Maybe something in me knows that it’s Poetry Month again. I took a nap this afternoon and dreamed a complicated dream about impossible computer problems, and somehow getting a prompt for a machine I didn’t know existed, and then accidentally posting a very long, dull session transcript to somebody’s livejournal… etc. One of the readers of that livejournal chided me in a set of three haiku, which I thought was so charming that I in turn apologized in haiku.

What gets me is that the only one I remember is actually in 5-7-5 form:

In this floating world
Nothing is ever certain
Save computer bugs.

Thank you, subconscious mind!

This afternoon, I dreamed that my scalp was spontaneously breaking out in Far Side cartoons. (There was one with a bear in an Old West bar, and another with cavemen in their underground research facility.) I am sure this says something profound about my character, but I am not sure what it is.

Josh and I are wrapping up our STP@home at last. I hope to make it to the finish line within two weeks. Josh is about thirty miles behind me, but he could still catch up if I slack off. The race is doing a pretty good job of building my stamina.

Via Salon’s Broadsheet, this strange introduction to a recipe: “As a Southern belle once said, ‘A man can have sex with any woman, but not a good chocolate cake.’” I am not sure I’d want to argue with that.

And via Mind Hacks, an article about a very seriously mentally ill (but hot! oh so hot!) girl whose successful pharmaceutical treatment caused her to gain weight.

“They had removed a stigma of the mind and replaced it with a stigma of the body. It struck him as strange that the patient had been the only one not to worry about a loss that the team around her found so tragic… The treatment had reversed a Faustian pact in which Nia had been beautiful and mad, and replaced it with another—in which she was fat and sane. But was it really a blessing that Nia seemed to have no conception of what she had lost?”

How it strikes Nia, we’ll never really know. Nia doesn’t have a voice of her own in this article. But it does seem to me that, in her place, I would likely be so relieved at no longer being tormented that worrying over having my features “corrupted” (jeez!) would not be among my immediate priorities. The whole thing had me spitting hot nails. Pandagon has it right: “Can’t we just sedate her and put her in a glass coffin?”

Ever think so hard in a dream that you wake yourself up? In today’s Afternoon Nap Theatre, I had to list all the men’s names and nicknames I could think of that could also be reasonably common words: Will, Ward, Grant, Frank, Rod, Rob, Bob, Bud, Mike, Bill, Dale, Mark, John, Drew, Nick, Pat, Rich, Tony, Randy, Don, Martin, Victor, Gene… For some dream reason this was Very Important. After a while the list got so long, and I was trying so hard to remember it all, that I woke right up. I’m still muttering things like “Chuck!” or “Derrick!” or “Art!” from time to time.

Last night I dreamed that I was alone in a children’s museum that was all about animals. There was a sort of petting zoo operated with giant pneumatic tubes. You’d be in a room watching animal documentaries, and when you saw an animal you wanted to meet you’d press a button and it’d be delivered to you, encased in ice from the neck down so that it wouldn’t scrabble in the tubes or attack the patrons. Press another button, and it’d be taken away.

The petting zoo system was broken, so I figured I’d just watch the documentaries. But one of them was so exciting that I lost my head and unthinkingly ordered a polar bear. Which arrived. Thunk! Turns out only the return was broken. I briefly petted the bear’s broad, confused-looking head, and realized that once the ice melted, I could be in big trouble.

I left the room, shutting the door firmly behind me, and ran downstairs to find a guy working on the machinery. “Um, excuse me,” I said. “I’ve just done the stupidest thing I’ve ever done in my life.” He grumbled a little, in a friendly way, and said he’d deal with it. Apparently the polar bear thing was a known problem. Then he handed me a set of delicate little scrapers and set me to cleaning out some tiny channels that had gotten clogged. When he got back from handling the polar bear situation, I was still working; we hung out for a while, chatting and working on the machinery.