Vivid vivid dreams lately. Can't remember what I dreampt about last night, other than I had to break down a dam- the water was cold and I kept diving down into it to push the bricks out, while books fell past me in the water. I woke up with my arms stretched over my head uncomfortably. And now, all day today I've been having daymares about my family getting killed, all of them, in a freak accident. I fold my laundry and imagine that I'm packing my dead family member's things up, to be givin away. I make lists of cousins whose help I'd enlist, the people I'd probably fight with, how I'd deal with selling the house.

Doc Matthews says that vivid dreams are a sign of heat, and we've been working on reducing that heat but I don't want to give them up. I like feeling neither here nor there, even when what I'm seeing is far from pleasant. I like the light feeling of unreality. It feels not unlike when I was just getting past the age when you believe in fairies- I didn't really believe anymore that you could enter a garden and enter an entirely different geography, but felt it would be rude to the residents of that place to stop believing.

Plan for a sculpture: A 2/3 size* reproduction of Grampa sleeping on a table with two German Shepherds and a shotgun. He should be almost as short as the length of the table, with his body curled into a loose fetal position. The dogs should be nearly as large as he is, and he should be nestled in between them. The entire thing should be large enough/small enough that someone could look down on it as on an operating table, to be able to see a dissected body and assign a cause of death.


*"Why did you not choose to make the sculpture larger? Because I was not making a monument. Why did you choose to not make it smaller? Because I was not making an object."*


*Actually, maybe no. I think it might be an object. Gotta think about that.

In the spirit of my friends here (and also recent events) I've been trying to get my act together. A day planner has been purchased and events written into it. I've been virtously doing laundry, folding my clothes and putting them away instead of leaving them in a pile and even doing dishes.

I kinda want to be responsible, that is, I want to know where things are when I put them down and not suddenly remember obligations at the last minute. It's a nerve-wracking way to live- I make myself crazy, I make other people crazy. I already find, writing things down in the planner, that I feel less anxious about my time. I know what's going to happen. It's written down, look.

I rubbed ginger on my head two nights ago, and cinnamon on my head last night. They're supposed to bring the blood to the surface of my scalp, and maybe make the hair grow back. Every time I look at the bald spots I am reminded that I am still adrift. That I am still in at least some ways at the mercy of my anxieties.

I talked with Hill this week about this and that. He told me how tired he was of living like a vagrant- he hasn't had a bedroom for the past five months. His current digs are in a squat, and while he's not paying rent the ceiling has taken to crumbling on his bed in the middle of the night. Before that he was working in the cornfields in Texas, and sleeping in a barn at night. I can only empathize. I haven't had a single living space of my own all year. I cannot wait (my reservations about living with Hill aside) to move this last time. My own bedroom..god. I haven't had one since moving out of my parents place last November.

I have a whole laundry list of the things I would like this studio to be. But I think more than anything else I want it to be my own.

Bottom line: the women that I work with now that I'm on the evening shift are a real trip.

A few people in the office tried to warn me about them before I started, but I really do get it: they're shallow and can be petty and catty, and probably stave off the boredom of the longish shifts paired with little work with internal politics of the most pointless kind. They are the type of women that professionals would easily call "girls", and I'll admit that that's how I thought of them in the beginning: they have a childish viciousness to them borne of the same kind of small-mindedness that draws a person to aspire no higher than to get married, and have nice clothes along the way. I can see them in my mind's eye at the age of five, hitting their friends over the head with their dolls when they don't get their way.

That said, they are entirely professional at what they do. I often find myself lagging behind, even when the work is as simple as scanning and printing. They easily complete three pieces of work in the time it takes me to complete one. So while they're not people I would willingly hang out with, they do what they do well.

Yeah, they're shallow- an entire shift can go by with the only topic of conversation being fashion- and they're definitely petty. But they're not (most of them) genuinely stupid. They do however have that sort of laziness of intellect that you often get with people who are born pretty and as a result haven't had to try too hard over the course of their lives. The office is absolutely filled with the conventionally attractive, and the secretary pool is the last place where there would be an exception: all young, female, thin, (mostly) blond. I am sure that they were given their (fairly cushy) jobs not only on the basis of their abilities but also based on their ability to be an attractive front to the office, to be able to smile prettily when the clients come in.

Some of them are university students, which is why they're working the evening shift. The evening shift is ideal for that- you make a full time salary at a part-time position. I can imagine that this job is another in a long line of unearned perks, just for being pretty- they won't have to work slinging hash or cleaning stairwells. They can stay in the air conditioning, with the complimentary coffee.

Maybe it's all sour grapes, I don't know. Probably "On Not Being Pretty" is a series of (probably long winded and self-deprecating) posts all by itself. I'm doing what I always do in these kind of situations: do my job, keep my head down and think about what's going on around me.

I really miss Yeller. He's gone for six months to the States, just to wander around. He's got a few places that he knows he wants to go to, but other than that he's just following his nose through various punk communities. It sounds completely awesome, but I do miss him a lot. When he was here we would talk on average 3-4 times a week. Now, if we manage to pull off one Skype convo in a week and a half that's good.

When we Skyped the other day he told me that he was thinking of cutting his trip short. This didn't come as a huge surprise to me because a couple of years ago when he was doing the same sort of trip in Europe I got the same sort of phone call. He loves what he's experiencing and the people he's meeting, but he misses having a social community around him. He loves traveling but at the same time feels "traveled out". This time he said that he's been thinking about his future and realized that he needs to make long-term plans (specifically about re-entering some academic framework), and in order to make those plans he needs to come back.

God knows I can identify. We're both introverts and deeply nerdy- like him, it's hard for me to make friends, and we both get comfort from books. I don't take my friendships- the real ones- for granted. They've been around for years and the people I have them with are extraordinary. With all due respect to the romance of being a citizen of the world, it's hard just packing up and starting fresh, building those relationships- that safety net- up again from scratch. It's lonely thinking of most if not all of your relaitonships as here till they're gone. I want to do a second degree, and I know that the single greatest obstacle is going to be the fear of being in a new city by myself. I've traveled a great deal, I'm good at picking up languages and understanding social cues (at least enough to not fuck up too badly)- but it's still very hard.

It's kind of depressing, all in all. We're both deeply ambivalent about this place we're in, which is a very polite way of saying that we feel ill on a daily basis at what goes on here. He's much more active politically than I am, and even he's ready to cut and run at this point. But he keeps coming back, and I never leave. It's getting to be kind of a joke at this point- I go on and on about all the different things I hate about being here, and eventually the person I'm talking to says, "Well, go then! Nothing's keeping you here!" And nothing really is, in the sense of school/army service etc. Financially, it probably wouldn't be that difficult to leave. But it's not that simple, and the thought of actually being stuck here just from the inertia of having stayed is..unsettling, to say the least.

I miss him so much. I know that he's having a ball and I wish him all the best in the world, but even so I wish he was back here in this horrible place, so we could watch zombie movies together and gossip. Skype's just not the same.

So last night's drag performance kind of sucked, all in all. I was in all honesty completely underprepared- the lipsync was off, the clothes were tossed together and while I did plan a little very basic choreography I still missed every single cue I had set. It passed, I got a few compliments despite everything, and that was that. This morning I'm kind of marinating in "oh god I suck"-edness, and am trying to snap out of it. It really has been a while since I performed that badly.

Look, all in all I have a good track record of strong performances. This time really was a combination of being genuinely very busy the week before performing coupled with procrastination and not a small amount of arrogance. I really thought that stage presence and generalized fabulousness would be enough to swing a song, and I know that it isn't. I've seen umpteen drag performances that failed because of this sort of arrogance- people get told that the sun shines out of their ass one too many times and they start to believe it, and get lazy. I really dislike that sort of thing, which is why falling for that is particularly painful for me.

I don't think people will hold it against me or anything like that. While I know exactly how underprepared performers are talked about back stage, I also know how long that sort of thing lasts, and it isn't very long. I just need to make sure that my next performance is completely awesome, so I can get back to having a strong track record.

Ugh. It'll be fine. It's good to take some lumps sometimes, it keeps you humble. I just gotta get back on the horse.

That said, though, dancing with Hill and Bella was wonderful afterwords. I do love the Rogatka and what they've created there. And I am happy to be moving in with someone who takes their debauchery as seriously as I do. :)

So, I definitely don't want ranting to be the default function of this blog. But since no one reads it anyway, and this is the first time..once in a while can't hurt, I suppose. :)

Anatomy of a failed proposition:

So this woman messages me on Facebook this morning. I vaguely remember friending her a few days ago- I friend people automatically, because what the hell. She says good morning, I say good morning back. And then she says. "so I see you're into Sado and Bizzare."

She loses a point right there, for basic manners. It's 8:25 in the morning, and just because I am at my desk does not mean that I am in any way awake. There must be people out there who respond to this sort of thing immediately, because asshats keep trying, but I am not one of them. Seriously, lady, I don't know you from Adam, and that's kind of personal.

Also, I personally find the term "Sado and Bizzare" to be affected, irritating and non-inclusive. I agree with Bitchy Jones on the use of deliberately obfusticating language. Or maybe I can just see in my mind's eye a girl in too much eye makeup saying, "I'm into Bizzaaaaaaaare", as though that gives her extra points in whatever scoring system of how completely awesome you are at sex we're using. Maybe I'm just cranky cause it's 8:25 in the morning. She couldn't have known that I don't like that particular phrase, so she gets a free pass, but I'm already ticked off at this point.

I answer, "Okay..." because I'm willing to give this conversation about 30 more seconds. And then she asks, "So are you a top or a bottom?"

Friends, this is not an appropriate question to ask a total stranger. I know that sometimes there is a certain lowering of what is considered acceptable hitting-on behavior because it's kink and we're all so sexually experimental! And free of social mores! And what are you, some kind of prude? Are you sex negative or something? And just ugh. Here is the thing: kink is more complicated than vanilla sex. It touches on powerful emotions and requires a great deal of trust. You need to be more careful, not less so, when selecting partners. I use far more rigorous filters when looking for kinky partners (if I was right now, and I'm not), which means that a person needs to be extra special fantastic if I'm going to play with them. And I don't need to justify that to anyone- I let into my bed only those who I want to, period.

It's not that I never have casual sex. But you have to be a pretty compelling person/I need to be a very specific kind of drunk/ the stars need to be aligned just so for that to happen. Of course, a perfect stranger can't know that about me, and that's the point. I think it's gauche to assume that someone you don't know is just going to hop into bed with you. Maybe (maybe) if I had spent some time at a party with someone and gotten physical cues that they were interested too I might proposition someone straightforwardly. But not online, and not a stranger.

Maybe I'm wrong in assuming that she wanted to play. But I don't think I am.

So, yeah. Rest of conversation similarly unproductive, unfriend, block.