Learning Experience

Before booking your work group on a guided tour of a coal mine, you should probably do a little homework.

You might google the tour company and find out if previous groups have returned from the tour alive. Or just read their brochure. If it says something like, "Your thrilling trip to the coal mine ends with a blaze of glory as your guide slings the mine cart caroming into the flames of the smelting pit!" then you might plead a tight schedule and ask for the abridged version.

Or just don't go at all, because I don't think coal mines are even supposed to have smelting pits.

Death by immolation is one thing. Being misinformed on an educational fam trip? Completely unacceptable.

Something's Not Right

I've been eating, sleeping and breathing nothing but hurricane for the past - has it been a week? I don't remember what day it is.

Hurricanes are not particularly nutritious, and they're hell on your lungs.

And then you have the dreams.

When I was a teenager I used to have nuclear war nightmares a lot. You'd hear a "boom" and look out the window and see that telltale mushroom cloud ballooning up out of the horizon and you knew, this was it, it was over. I still can't think of anything else as scary as that, not even the thought of Sarah Palin as -

On second thoughts, perhaps I'll sleep with the lights on tonight.

But answering phones is scarier. I hate it as much as going to the dentist, or getting a mammogram - the difference being that you have to make an appointment to do those things, which makes them significantly easier to avoid than something that sits on your desk and yells at you until you pick it up and talk to it, sort of like my elderly cat Romeo, only not quite as likely to drool on you.

So this is a no-brainer: I simply don't go to the dentist or get a mammogram, and generally wear absorbent clothing. But there is no avoiding the wrath of the telephone.

I dreamed about it night before last, only I'd be hard-pressed to say exactly what those dreams were. Nothing about the callers themselves - for whom, individually, I have nothing but deep compassion. I have no problem answering most of the emails that come through the website, with all the helpful advice I can muster. Some of my responses are a couple of pages long. Either I'm single-handedly eradicacting the ancient image of the faceless, unresponsive government agency, or all my correspondents are saying "well all righty then" and embarking instead on a mercifully brief and impersonal exchange of ideas with the IRS.

Last night, after spending 13 hours in the call center Sunday, with the prospect of another early morning at it today, I inexplicably dreamed I was shopping for wedding dresses. I almost woke up screaming.

This weather is driving me crazy.

Girl Meets Boy

How sad to wake up to a gray and rainy morning from a particularly vivid, realistic dream depicting a classic tale of rejection and abandonment:

Girl loves boy; boy makes advances on another, far inferior girl; overcome by jealousy, girl takes boy off his hinges (boy is inexplicably a closet door all of a sudden, the folding kind with the little louvers) and drags him out into the front yard to plead with him, but keeps being interrupted by small children and by a neighbor who accidentally turns the hose on her, besides which boy has now become either a rug or an artificial Christmas tree and is in any case pretty unresponsive; distraught girl drives to a roadside rest area to seek the advice of an older friend, who tells her that, though boy does love girl, boy finds her completely repulsive physically; girl sadly returns home only to discover that boy, inferior girl, and the economy-size pack of condoms from yesterday's post are nowhere to be found.

It's a familiar story, probably one you've read a million times.

Um, pizza. Why do you ask?

How's That Again?

Going out to eat should not make you feel like a dumbass.

You know those restaurants where they have a big board posted by the door that says "How It Works" and then when you get to the front of the line, the staffer asks you, "Have you ever been here before?"

On the other hand you have your traditional types of places, where nobody has to explain anything. You sit down and a waiter takes your order; or it's a buffet, or cafeteria style, or fast food. These are better because, no matter how friendly and patient the staffer is whose task is to explain the rules to you at a non-traditional-format restaurant, you can't help seeing it from his perspective. Oh look, it's Faceless Customer. He comes in here all the time. But he still just... never... gets it. Geez. What the hell is wrong with this guy?!

Last night I dreamt that a friend and I went to grab a quick breakfast taco at some place with a weird system. There was a long line snaking out the door, but we walked right up to the counter and placed an order and paid. This upset a few of the people in line and a fight nearly broke out; the staffer behind the counter explained - a bit huffily, too - that this was the way it was supposed to work, but the people waiting were still not at all happy. Novices. So it's probably not a good idea to come up with a concept for a new restaurant in your sleep.

But next time you go to Freebird's and the guy behind the counter asks you if you've ever been there before, furrow your brow, say, "Yes, I come in here all the time, but it's still not quite making sense to me. Could you run over the rules again?" You'll be a big hit.

Morning Sickness

Around 5 a.m., I awoke from a vivid dream that I had just found out I was pregnant. Timing is a bit muddled in dreams. For one thing, it's odd that I was only just finding out as I was beginning to feel the baby move. For another thing, if my last sexual encounter had knocked me up, you'd think the diapers and 3 a.m. feedings would have tipped me off some time ago.

My alarm went off just as I was getting back to sleep, and I was agonizingly tired, and I don't want to go to work, and I haven't taken a sick day in a month or so. I got up to compose an email to the panicmonger. "I'm sick (cough, cough)," I wrote.

The joke's on her, because I moved my car back into the break spot before riding my bike home yesterday.

But now, of course, I'm wide awake. Maybe I'll go shopping. I could use a pair of these:

They're perfectly safe. I have an IUD!

Bright-Tailed and Bushy-Eyed

What an ungodly hour to be awake on a Sunday morning. I didn't get to bed until four. Did you know that Oilcan Harry's gets to be incredibly crowded? And that Magnolia Cafe after the bars close down isn't much better? And that, if you drive down South Congress at 2:45 a.m. in a decked-out Happy Fun Car, some drunk guy in a pickup truck might scream and moon you? Honestly, after Friday's happy hour, I'd already had my fill of crack.

I so totally meant to blog about that and forgot. It was heinous. There's not enough spackle in all the Home Depots in the world. No one we know: just some guy at the next table who apparently isn't averse to a bit of a draft.

Last night I had a dream about interviewing for the job I applied for on Friday. This is, of course, entirely Tony's fault. I dreamed that I was attending some high-level frou-frou meeting at a picnic table in the mud, but then the pilot arrived and the picnic table took off, and once we were airborne, one of the high-level frou-frou attendees began asking me interview questions.

Picnic tables are less than ideal, aerodynamically speaking. The flight never got very high, and was shaky and shuddery, and we kept narrowly missing trees. And of course our feet were sort of hanging out the bottom, so I felt a little vulnerable. It was hard to concentrate. But I think I did well!

We'll take the dream as a promising sign. Maybe I'll be picking up some new interview duds at Mall of America in a few weeks. Fingers are crossed!

Desafinado

When you're at odds (who can say why?) with someone you care about, your whole universe is out of whack. Nothing seems quite right: food doesn't taste the way it should, colors aren't as bright, everything seems generally off-kilter.

And I have these dreams. I have dreams of reconciliation, where we talk, and cut easily through all the mess. By the end of the dream it turns out that everything that was wrong was just a misunderstanding. Everything is all straightened out now. There's this wonderful sense of connectedness, and happiness, and peace, and friendship, and love, and harmony.

Then you wake up and realize it was only a dream, and you feel so broken and sad. Was anything ever real at all?

Spooked

How freaked out would you be if you had just spent the night all alone in your house for the very first time and when you got up in the morning to use the restroom there was pee in the toilet?

And you knew it wasn't yours, of course. I was brought up to flush, thankyouverymuch.

I was a little freaked, but I'm pretty sure it was Romeo, who always appears slightly disgruntled at not getting to be a human, though I've tried explaining to him that being human is overrated. It's been a few years, but I've "caught" him peeing in the toilet before. I never got a chance to encourage him because he thought he was in terrible trouble and dashed off. I've caught him going in his water dish, too. I think he used the toilet last night because it's cold and rainy and he didn't want to go outside.

Of course, now he's on the bed right next to me, back legs splayed in the air, making enthusiastic schnorking noises as he cleans his nether regions. See, Romeo? I'm telling you, humans can't do that.

My mom was easily freaked out by strange sounds and other odd little things and I inherited that trait from her. She told a story about lying in bed in the dark as a child, petrified with fear, because there appeared to be a burglar smoking a cigarette in her bedroom. (It turned out to be a firefly.) And I remember one afternoon when she had gone out to run errands and I was in the house by myself, I heard a rustling of papers and a low groaning noise from the living room, then footsteps coming towards the room where I was. I ran and hid behind a door and grabbed a broom to whack the intruder with, and it's fortunate that I didn't; because it turned out to be my mom, who had gotten home without my hearing her, and sat down at the desk in the living room to pay bills.

Mom... This morning I woke up from a dream about her. I was in my old apartment, by myself, when the landlord came in to tell my my mother was there to see me. I thought he must mean my stepmother, my mother-in-law, something like that. But it really was Mom, and when I ran to her crying, she hugged me and stroked my hair and told me she loved me and everything was okay.

I don't know if I love those dreams or hate them.

It's cold outside, and rainy and gray. How lovely to have no one to answer to and nothing in particular to do today. Romeo's finished his morning ablutions and fallen asleep. It's a perfect day to stay home and help him hold down the bed.