I did the grocery shopping after work last night. I got home and left most of the unpacking to my family then dived face first into bed. I briefly considered eating some dinner, but decided I just didn't care about food at that moment as much as I cared about sleep. I think I was out by 7pm.

I had some terrific dreams about traveling to China for a client. There are probably some deeper meanings in there I should be examining, but I really enjoyed my dreams (I really enjoy travel) and am instead choosing to dwell on the happy notion of traveling to China for work. How do I get that job, I wonder? That's the kind of job I'd really love. Towards the end of my dream the client mentioned that they'd like us to also visit a location in Belgium and as I surfaced back to consciousness we were leaving the details on making that happen to our travel agents. Why travel to China and Belgium? I have no idea. I haven't exactly been thinking about either of those places lately which kind of adds to the charm of the whole thing.

I'm feeling a bit better today than I have since Valentine's Day. That was the time I felt pretty all right, went to step class, went out at night despite a sore throat, and awoke the next day feeling as awful as ever. I am planning to work out tonight, but have learned my lesson: if I'm not quite up to it, I'll skip it and sleep instead. My husband heard that today is National Pancake Day and proposed going to dinner at a local place that serves breakfast all day and that wouldn't be a bad way to spend the evening, either. Eating pancakes is kind of the opposite of working out as far as physical health is concerned, but it's possibly just about equal in the mental health category.

Thinking of food has had me pondering the pork shoulder I bought last night. It is to be tossed into a Crock Pot with salsa verde for a leisurely cooking, then will be chipped into bite sized pieces for use in enchiladas - or something kind of close to enchiladas. We use flour tortillas since neither my husband nor I can stand the texture of the corn tortillas (yes, we realize this is both Bad and Wrong). Anyway, in a large baking dish we have tortillas rolled up with refried beans, the cooked pork, and a sprinkling of cheese. Once the dish is filled with these little burritos, in goes the salsa from the Crock Pot. That gets baked for a bit and then YUM! ensues. It's been a few months since we've had that and winter is the perfect time for it. I can't wait.

In other news, this online article on skiving caught my attention. As someone who's been working while ill for weeks (with the full support, not to mention encouragement, of my employer) I have some obvious feelings on the subject. I notice that they mention people who are nurses and policemen average the highest number of days off of work. This makes perfect sense to me. Not only do these people work in high stress jobs that take a lot out of a person, they are also exposed more than most people to all of the germs and other bugs that make us sick. There was a 'scandal' a couple of years back in Portland about police using cell phones paid for by the city to call home and other personal places. For myself, I couldn't figure out why this was a big deal. First of all, if the city doesn't have some sort of unlimited calling plan given the hundreds of people on the cell phone plan, the people administering the program are idiots and that's hardly the fault of the policemen using the phones. Second of all, I would presume that's the kind of job where you may think you're going to get off at a certain time or be able to do something you had plans for, but find that's not going to be the case. I don't begrudge a policeman a few phone calls home in the least and can't understand why it was made out to be such a big deal. If they were talking about excessive calls, that would be different, but that wasn't the case at all. Anyway, I'm of the opinion that there are certain jobs where a little extra leeway with days off or personal phone calls are in order. Nurses and doctors both fall into that category as far as I'm concerned. Give 'em a break, people.

OK, that came from nowhere and sort of dimmed the glow I had all morning thanks to my happy dreams. Which I suppose makes this a perfect time to find someone who's late in getting something done and make some threats to something precious to him follow up nicely.

Tags: dreams, food, health

The colossally intricate and large project I'm doing for work is at its zenith. This is the stage that involves coming in extra early and staying extra late and still panicking that it's not all going to get done by the end of the month. Last night around 9:30 I looked around and realized coming in this week-end was inevitable. As soon as I admitted to myself that there's no way this is getting finished and in the mail on Friday like I really wanted, a weight was lifted. There's still the same amount of work to do, but releasing some of the panic about getting it all done in such a small number of hours made a big difference.

I got home from work around 10:45 pm last night. I was starved, exhausted and wired. So I ate an english muffin, took part of one of my husband's sleeping pills (no way I was getting to sleep without it), talked with my daughter for a while, then crashed. Apparently around 2am I let out a bloodcurdling scream that would do a horror movie proud. My husband bolted out of bed (so he reports) looking for the person being murdered. I guess there were a few bad moments until I calmed back down, but then I dropped back off while he spent the rest of the night awake.

I don't remember a thing about it. I'm a very hard sleeper and have slept through things like a car crash literally right outside my open bedroom window. I woke up this morning on the tail end of a bad dream, though nothing scream-worthy. Until my husband told me why, I was wondering why my throat hurt and was just assuming I'd slept with my mouth open and it got extra dry over night. I find it a little disturbing to realize I could have been so worked up over something and have no conscious memory of it.

Besides the muscles in my neck and upper back feeling tight as a drum I hadn't realized the stress of this was getting to me that much. I've been working out every couple of days, which has been a help. Without that, I think I might've drop kicked someone this week. Though I guess the relief I felt last night consciously still wasn't enough relief to satisfy the subconscious. Anyway, at this point I'm just telling myself it'll all be over soon.

Well, that, and I'm also counting the days until vacation.

Tags: dreams, work

( Starting with a brief 'Giving Credit Where Credit is Due' which is off topic for the rest of this post )

I have to say how disconcerting it was when I realized this morning that my dreams last night were scenarios out of famous children's stories. I'm not real certain of the inspiration, but I think odds are good that they were inspired by this discussion about world building over at Smart Bitches along with me realizing once again that I don't get drawn into alternate worlds in the same way I did when I was a child. I remember a discussion on that very topic was hosted by Michael Dirda some years ago. It seems it's a common part of the growth of a reader to go through the stages of real immersion into a book's world as a child to a place where one reads little fiction at all. I'm not yet at the stage of giving up fiction, by any means, but I certainly interact with it in a different way than I did as a child.

As a kid, I loved Laura Ingalls Wilder, LM Montgomery (still do), Madeleine L'Engle, CS Lewis, Carolyn Keene, then later AC Doyle, Agatha Christie, Jane Austen, F Scott Fitzgerald, and all of the other usual suspects. My love was due in part to that feeling that I could step into an alternate reality just by opening a book. It was a visceral thing I could feel down to my gut. I was there. I was truly "world's away". In my adult years, I think the only book that has drawn me in in that way is Outlander. But unlike before (like with re-reading Anne of Green Gables as a kid), when I re-read Outlander now, the pull is not the same. I see it with a more critical eye; while I might be in that world when I'm reading, I'm not 100% there. It's more like I'm 50% there, at best.

It turns out that 50% difference is a very large difference for me. That Maximum of 50% Rule applies to everything fictional nowadays. Actually, it's far more accurate to say the 50% Rule applies for what I find to be the best of the fiction I read nowadays. Anything less than what I find to be the best falls pretty sharply under that 50% mark.

There's a part of me that mourns this change. However, the greater part of me accepts that this change is just a part of growth. It's a waste of time to do anything less than accept that this is just how it is for me now. One thing that really helps with losing a sense of wonder is the increase in understanding I've found. As a child, there was definitely less of an understanding of all of the ways that fictional worlds work through and examine truths of the real world. That increased interaction with fiction in a cerebral way is likely the thing that doesn't allow the sense of immersion to come over me. But I think like nearly every other situation where one goes from innocence to experience, it's impossible to go back to innocence once experience is gained, and it's close to impossible to truly wish you were still (or again) that innocent. One can look back, but one can't go back.

( Finally, a P.S. on the dreams... )

Tags: books, dreams

I had a dream last night that some movie was being filmed in my town and lots and lots of famous people were in it. Because of my job, I had a reason to be at one of the filming locations, so had met a few of the famous people. For the most part, I acted ok - not like a panting, star struck maniac anyway. Over the (ahem) decades I've had a few dreams about meeting the members of U2. Which I think must be a perfectly natural thing: when the art someone creates becomes important to you, I think it's got to be human nature for a person to develop some kind of subconscious connection to the artist that lives apart from the connection to the art.

I've always imagined that if I actually did meet someone like that, I'd be kind of like how I was at this big client meeting last week. One of the people asked me a direct question on my opinion about something and I articulated my response pretty well - even if I did feel like a red tide was moving up my body towards my face and that the words were coming out of someone else's mouth. The nervousness was due to the fact that I'm not the lead on this account and I didn't want to make a wrong step and there was a potential for my point of view to fall outside of what we'd usually advise to this client. But the thing was, I was asked directly for my opinion and, as we've established here already, I'm completely incapable of lying. I feel I've done well enough when I can soften the blow on how I state my case; it's just too much for me to resist being confronted like that and not tell the truth as I see it. So. I said what I thought even while the red tide moved and the danger of my mouth babbling on and on incoherently was all too real.

Thus it was a bit of a surprise for me to dream that I would be struck numb at the sight of Vince Vaughn. Vince Vaughn of all people! I mean, I like what I know about him and, from what I've seen, it appears he goes out of his way to put the public at ease, even if it must be a real annoyance for him personally to do so. But there I was in my dream, at a store of some kind comparing this product to that, when I recognized his voice a few feet away at a check stand. At first I thought, No - it can't be. Then I remembered the filming and looked up. I couldn't look away. I couldn't move. It was as if I was a rabbit frozen into stillness upon catching sight of a wolf. The entire left side of my body went so numb that when it finally occurred to me that if I didn't want him to catch me staring at him it would be a good idea for me to move, I couldn't do it. Thankfully he was with someone, talking as they walked away, and I was saved from the humiliation of being caught out acting like such an idiot.

When I finally could move again, I raced to find my husband and tell him all about it. He was sitting next to Sean Penn (I don't know why Sean Penn. Maybe due to Mystic River?) and it didn't occur to me until after I'd unburdened myself that I should probably be embarrassed about having blurted out my sad tale in front of Sean Penn.

Then I woke up, really disturbed at the realization that I would have had dreams all these years about meeting people who actually do mean something to me and had never acted that way in my dreams, but completely fell apart over Vince Vaughn. The part of me that's interested in Jung and his teachings is itching to take this dream apart for meaning. The rest of me is just amazed at myself because I do believe in the notion that your subconscious picks up clues about yourself that you don't necessarily acknowledge consciously - and if my subconscious is saying I'd be more freaked out at meeting Vince Vaughn than Bono it makes me think I don't know myself at all.

After coming more fully awake I realized I was feeling pretty miserably nauseous and had to make a dash out of bed. So perhaps it was all like the kind of dream you have when fevered. Disturbing, but really not all that meaningful in the end. I think I'll go with that theory because at the moment my tummy can use all the help it can get in settling down.

Tags: dreams

One benefit of being ill is the dreams. Sometimes they go off in scary directions that have me frightened of my own subconscious, but this illness is evoking just the weird ones. I've had two dreams in the last week related to being in high school.

Last night's dream featured me joining the boy's soccer team. Which, in real life...no. Just, no. In the first place my high school had a most excellent girls soccer team and they did very, very well so there would've been no need to claim that only the boys team could give me the equal opportunity experience and force myself onto it. In the second place, that would've required putting myself forward in a way I could never do. So why on earth would I dream about it?

The only part about it that made sense was in relation to two of the guys on the "dream" team. In real life, my best friend dated one of them throughout high school and before her husband, he was one of the most important males in her life. His best friend - the other of the two dream guys - and I were friends in real life. So in my dream it was perfectly understandable that I'd be having conversations with this guy...the rest of it is just weird, weird, weird. There were also cupcakes in the dream, but I don't consider that part of the dream weird because things are nearly always made better by cupcakes, don't you think?

Like anyone with an interest in Jung, I'm trying to find the meaning in these dreams. The only, admittedly very tenuous, connection I can find to this dream and real life is that yesterday I was listening to an iTunes U lecture from UC Berkeley on Existentialism. The professor touched on Plato; my first introduction to Plato was in a class I had in high school that these two people also took. Unfortunately for me, I had a very bad case of mono when Plato was covered so I had to read about and try to make sense of the cave and various other things as I was making up a ton of work. Thus, Plato, illness and apparently these two people are inextricably linked together in my mind.

If I'm to trust this logic, this means my mind went from existentialism to Plato to high school soccer and high school acquaintances (plus cupcakes!) in one smooth leap while I slept. It's not quite Superman, but I suppose it'll do for reminding me that even when sick, life's still going on even if I'm too miserable to really notice it.

Tags: dreams

And another one last night...

This one involved going to the house where I grew up, apparently at a point in time between after my mom had died and while my dad was living in the house alone. I didn't go inside the house in my dream, only walked around the backyard, marveling at how all the gardening my mom had done over the years was a distant memory because the backyard was a mess of weeds and chaos.

There was a little more there in the dream, but what got me this morning was that I woke up with a particular memory of my mom. I don't really know how to describe her. She wasn't a bad parent in the sense of being a provider of a decent home, good food, adequate clothing - she did all that. But she didn't know how to relate to kids and it always struck me as a thing of wonder and mystery why she had so many. And she didn't only have 6 kids, she also took in many foster children. I was the last foster child, adopted after I'd been there for approximately 5 years. (I say all this and it gives the impression that my dad was invisible or non-existent. He was there, but she was certainly the force to reckon with in our house.)

Anyway, the memory: after leaving for college I went back home as little as possible. After my freshman year, I lived at home for a few months, then had an offer to live with my college best friend and I accepted that offer with alacrity. Once I moved out to that apartment, I never moved back. I'd visit for holidays and the other odd occasion, but that was it. I couldn't relate to my parents, I had an uncomfortable childhood best forgotten, and any closeness was one that came from a sense of obligation more than anything else. On one visit back my mom was telling me a story about something a neighbor had done which annoyed her. She got to a point in the story where she said, "But you know me, a big ol' softie..." and I didn't hear any more.

Something along the lines of "???????????????" and "!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" was reverberating around in my brain.

It's been something I've chewed on ever since, the question of which of us was completely delusional when it came to describing her personality. I mean, certainly the fact that she took in so many foster children (and a couple of them kept in occassional contact, always commenting on their appreciation of all she did for them) bespeaks of kind-heartedness. And yet I wouldn't have called her a kind person. She was a strange amalgamation of actions - doing generous things while at times making the recipient feel guilty for accepting the generosity.

Maybe I was too sensitive about things like how she always, and I mean always, introduced me as "the one we adopted". Or yelling at me in front of a large group of people about participating in a series of practical jokes which had been going back and forth between me and my friends and my sister and her friends for a few days. While nothing was said to my sister. But then there'd be things like knowing I'd done things that were against her rules for which I was never disciplined. Or her changing her mind about providing some financial support for me to go to college after the mother of one of my friends said something about how I was the one kid she knew out of all of the kids she knew that needed to go to college. (It was perhaps that plus how I was given a scholarship I didn't even know about or apply for - something I still take as the biggest compliment I've ever received.)

Since becoming a parent, there's certainly a lot more that I understand about her. I can understand some of that drive to "just be obeyed, damn-it, because I'm the parent and you're the child and I know more than you". And some of how the daily grind of work and parenting can suck the humor or positive attitude right out of you. But even understanding more of her, I'll never understand all of her. That of course raises the question of whether anyone can ever understand all of anyone else, and I say that's a fair enough question. It's just that I can feel closer to some people and reveal more of myself to them after a few conversations than I ever could with my mom. I don't think that'd be any different were she still alive.

A lot of the times my husband and I feel like our only parenting philosophy is to not be like our parents. This can take you a long way, but really it sucks when it comes down to specific situations. There will be times when discipline will be left to me because my husband's father was so...well...I'll just say he didn't dispense discipline in proportion to the crime, so my husband will sometimes feel like it's better if he steps back so as to not do something that he'd regret forever. Likewise there will be times when I have to send my daughter out of the room to collect myself because my instinct is to scream incoherent and hurtful and guilt-inducing things, and I'd rather not say things my daughter will feel the sting of forever. So that takes care of negative reactions to avoid, but it's not much help when it comes to finding the appropriate positive reactions to act on.

One of the greatest blessings of adulthood is, I think, the fact that this is finally a stage in life where it's easier to accept your own flaws and it's easier to believe in your own strengths. Along with that is the knowledge that your parents were just their own collection of flaws and strengths so that a lot of what you don't understand is just them - it has nothing to do with you. While I know I'll never fully understand her, I can accept the idea that she was just doing the best she could from her point of view. She probably kicked herself for things she said and did just like I do. That's more helpful to realize than I ever would've believed back before I became a parent, so I think of that as one of the blessings of parenthood: being able to forgive even if I can't understand.

Tags: dreams, mom

I guess all it took was saying how long it'd been since I'd remembered any of my dreams. Last night brought me some humdingers. Including my daughter participating in a Dragon Boat race with Neil Gaiman while my husband and I chose to go for a jog instead of watching the race, something about grey aliens on cutter-shaped spaceships and how they had done some things back in Biblical times that we now see in Bible stories attributed to God (my dream helpfully supplied an interview with one ship's crew - they were quite cheerful and laughed about the fact that they're so famous, but yet not really "known"), a discussion between my husband and me about global warming as we swam in Crater Lake, and something about Mark Harmon and how I don't like longish hair on older men when it's at that whitish/wispy stage.

What I find strange about dreams I remember like how I remember this one is that there will be many times when it's as though I'm conscious that it's a dream. At times I'll be participating in things and it "feels" the same as my participation in everyday life. But at other times it's as if I know I'm observing something made up and despite the fact that I can't direct the action in any particular way, it is as though I can make comments on what's happening - like when you talk about what's happening in a movie while the movie is rolling. Does anyone else have this sort of "meta dream" experience? I've never thought to ask before whether anyone else has those first person/third person narratives while dreaming like I do. Well, I'm sure I'm not the only one since human experiences aren't all that unique. I just wonder what I'm supposed to make of the fact that sometimes while dreaming I get the sensation that I'm watching an interactive play.

This morning when I woke up I realized it was just dawn. All summer I've been rejoicing in the bright daylight at that time of day and now it seems like all of the sudden the earth is turning away from the sun and the long descent into night has begun. Of course that turning started months ago and it's been a gradual change, but usually these realizations hit sometime in early to mid-September. However, this summer has been very strange so that August has felt like September and thus my realizations are a bit ahead of schedule. I was reading yesterday about the strange weather in Britain this summer - all the rain and flooding they've endured - and how it seemed like the only sunshiny time they had was for the Bank Holiday; that kind of mirrors the summer we've had in the Pacific Northwest. It's being attributed to La Nina and is probably the reason why the massive hurricanes they expected after Katrina didn't materialize - things moved quickly from the El Nino to the La Nina cycle. So fewer storms in the warm weather climates and more storms in the cooler weather climates resulted. This made me realize that we've been hearing about El Nino and La Nina as the cause for strange weather since the early 90s at least, so I'm beginning to suspect that these two things aren't the rare and unusual phenomenon climatologists led me to believe back when they first brought the terms into wide use, but rather are just a regular part of the earth's constitution that we need to incorporate into our thinking about weather.

Finally, on the subject of hurricanes, I saw yesterday that the President of Travelers (too lazy to do research, but they're easily one of the largest insurance carriers in the United States) proposed an insurance solution for windstorm in coastal areas that would set a zone of up to 50 miles from the coast as the responsibility of the government. People started jumping all over the idea immediately, of course (I'd need to see more to form an opinion; he said he just wanted to get some ideas out there to get people working proactively on the topic instead of reacting every time there's a storm and that I agree with), asking whether the government could make insurance affordable to anyone living within 50 miles of the coast. In Oregon we've made the beaches public property, so there's a set back between the ocean and land where people aren't allowed to personally own property. It's probable, if not quite likely, that this informs my thinking alongside my knowledge about how the mechanism of insurance works - because I'm not trying to be unsympathetic to people losing their homes. BUT. It seems to me that since it's a known fact that property in certain areas will be subject to major loss on a "question of when" not "question of if" basis, that whoever wants to live on said property has to accept the risk and not expect to cheaply and easily transfer it elsewhere if they choose to build there. Put it this way: knowing that what you pay for auto insurance is affected by what happens to my auto, how cheerfully would you accept me purchasing a vehicle that odds say will suffer a loss? Not "will possibly suffer a loss", but "will definitely suffer a loss" and the only questions are when and how badly.

Well, this was a strange sort of post. Kind of like last night's dream, so I guess that's appropriate.

Tags: dreams

Last night's dream featured a debate with someone on the comparative virtues of LiveJournal vs. MySpace. I'm honestly frightened to delve too far into what my subconscious was trying to tell me with that. But the day is sunny and is supposed to turn out mild, so all is right with the world.

The Good German continues its hold over my brain. Not least thanks to all of the moral questions it keeps posing. Plus Jack's naivete and arrogance in thinking things could ever be the same after the war as they had been before (yes, I've decided to speak of a character as if he were real. Jack is the kind of name that encourages that sort of thing, don't you think?) Every page seems to have my mind haring off in a new direction, turning over this or that, comparing what happened then to what happened with earlier societies and what's happening now in ours. Plus wondering if little things are true, such as that some American soldiers hadn't liked France, but then felt confusedly at home once they reached Germany - an irony they weren't prepared for. Things like that make me think this is either one of the most meticulously researched books ever or the writer just has a way of imagining things that could be true in such a way that you believe they are true.

But that's kind of the point of most fiction isn't it? To have the reader believing the world the writer has created is true. Trickier than it sounds, I know. There has to be a good balance between describing and showing the truth, illustrating why its true through the actions of the characters, plus (perhaps most important of all) feeling true because it shares a close enough approximation to the reader's own personal experiences and observations that it's easy for the reader to make the leap of faith into belief. After all, reality and truth are only as real as a person believes them to be, so even non-fiction can seem untrue if the reader isn't able to make that leap of faith.

With that, I'll now take myself off and do my best to think about premiums and contract clauses and policy exclusions. Though it may not seem like it, undoubtedly there will be something about this very day that some person will find fascinating in the future. And here I am living in it - amazing how that works.

Tags: books, dreams

Man, I can't believe how crappy I still feel. This 'flu or whatever it is can GO AWAY NOW, please and thank you. I went to work yesterday and was dragging by the end of the day. There are two big projects with February 28th deadlines, though, so we've got to keep chugging along on them. The colleague I work with on these is now feeling like I did last Saturday....it's soooo not good to have both of us out of commission just now.

Last night my husband and I were wiped out so were in bed before 9:00. Then we were both awake in the middle of the night for a few hours. I finally fell back asleep and had the strangest dreams. Disturbingly strange. One of them was...well...when I was pregnant, I had a ton of strange dreams about both labor and imaginings about the period just after the baby would be born. I figure those are completely normal - the subconscious working through fears and whatnot. One of the dreams I had was that on the day the baby was born it said, "Oh, Mother" to me in this tone of complete disdain. Like a teen-ager speaking to his or her completely square parent. I can still hear that voice and that tone in my head, it was so vivid. Last night I had a similar kind of dream. In the dream we had a month-old baby boy. My husband and I were together in the kitchen, feeding him and talking and cooking. I picked up the baby to take him for a diaper change and was talking to him as we left the room. He talked back in complete sentences with coherent meaning. I don't get why I would have a dream like that now. I'm not pregnant, so no subconscious fears to work through over the health of a baby so WHY WHY WHY?

That was the least strange of the dreams I can remember.

This weird frame of mind coupled with feeling draggy and loopy, not to mention downright crappy, is not a nice place to be first thing in the morning.

With that depressing thought, I guess I'll get back to today's problem involving oil tanks and DEQ issues and the Clean Air and Water Act. O, the joy!

Tags: dreams, work
Current Mood: crappy

I'm having one of those mornings where I almost forgot to use soap in the shower. I awoke with a start from a dream this morning - late, of course, and with no idea whether the alarm had been going off or not - and was still thinking about it as I shampooed and conditioned. The dream was that my family was in Italy on a vacation and one day my daughter, her best friend, and I took a little side trip without the husband. Around dusk we were going to see about whether this particular tower we'd been wanting to go up would still be open. The daughter and friend went off to get in line, just in case. Meanwhile, I was speaking with some Americans who had been attempting to act like locals all day so as to avoid talking with other Americans (they lived there and had quickly tired of being every American's tour guide as soon as the common nationality was discovered). I had somehow ferreted out the truth about their American-ness and they were confessing all to me. Eventually I headed up to meet with my daughter but somehow on the way, as my daughter and I were coming towards one another, we both ended up in the ocean. Then, while swimming, I fished a kitten out of the water and a baby octopus attached itself to my arm. I detached it once, but it came back and re-attached itself even farther up my arm. I then had to get someone else to pull off the octopus so I could tread, kitten in hand, over to the dock where my daughter had gotten out of the ocean to heave myself out of the water. That's when I awoke.

It seems rich with imagery to explore (there were other bits, including a visit to a highly toxic site with bright blue water. On my way out I walked by George Bush who was just coming in and I was *this close* to inviting him to a drink of "refreshing bright blue water"), and I was attempting to do so in the shower, but I'm just feeling so stinking tired today that I got stuck on "why Italy?" and haven't moved on. I think it's because I know "why Italy".

You see, last week-end my daughter went to a birthday party for a new friend at school. I had left for about an hour and a half, but when I got back - expecting the party would be winding down - I discovered they were still going strong. So I sat with the mom of the birthday girl and the mom's sister. They were both from Italy. My daughter's friend as well as the sister's two sons speak Italian - plus the natural, easy English that kids can do when growing up speaking 2 languages simultaneously. At one point, the mom of the little boys was off doing something and the mom of the birthday girl was distracted and the 5 year old boy started asking me - in Italian - what had happened to the golf club and ball he had been playing with. I don't speak Italian, but thanks to body language and mom's intuition I knew what he was saying to me. And ever since then, I've had A Farewell to Arms on my mind.

Which is not as much of a non sequiter as it sounds like, as people who've read Arms may be able to attest. Because there's this part in Arms where the Lieutenant insists that learning Italian is easy. Whether it was intended or not, I've taken pretty much all of Hemingway's novels to have some autobiographical bits to them, and that bit about Italian being easy has always struck me as being particularly Hemingway-esque as well as particularly arrogant. I've never known quite what to make of Hemingway's arrogance and egoism on the one hand, then suicide on the other. I suppose it means at the heart of every arrogant egoist is a fatal kind of weakness, a lack of true self-confidence that is covered over with that arrogance. (I think I can admit there is a weakness in my arrogance over having a Hooper - it's a weakness of understanding and maybe even lack of compassion - though I thoroughly hope it's not a fatal one.)

So this is what I was thinking of this morning in the shower while forgetting to soap and not concentrating on what a baby octopus clinging to my arm for dear life could possibly mean. Now I'm waiting for the caffeine to kick in and doing my best to shift gears away from Italy and Hemingway and toxic bright blue water and kittens swimming in the ocean.

I think it may be a 2-cups-of-tea kind of day.

Tags: dreams