dreaming: better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, but only barely

First and foremost, Sid, if by some strange chance you have found this blog, for the love of cheese, look away now. Just stop reading and go find something else to do. Please.

I had some weird dreams last night, and they weren't your standard "oh, how STRANGE" kind of dreams, oh no, that would be too simple. In the first, I had sex with Brad Pitt. And I don't even find Brad Pitt to be attractive. If it had been a lucid dream, I assure you it would have been Alan Rickman as Severus Snape. Most assuredly, it would have been.

But yeah. A sex dream. A STARKY FIRST. The worst part is, in the dream, I was still married to Sid. Fuckin' A, I cheated on my husband in a dream. If it's any consolation, which it isn't, Brad Pitt was cheating on Angelina Jolie, so it kind of evened out.

I woke up feeling awful. Because I cheated on my husband in a dream.

Believe me, I know it makes no sense.

So when I feel back asleep, I dreamed I was pregnant (ooh boy, that can of worms again). I'm not going to get into specifics, because it's really unimportant, but goddamn it, I was so happy. That's what sticks out to me. I remember telling someone that I was having twins, a boy and a girl (which is another can of worms, believe me). And I was happy, did I mention that? Truly, genuinely happy. Despite all the problems that were happening in the dream, which very closely mirrored my real life worries, I was smiling and not faking it. I was hopeful in a way that I have not been in a very long time, and that I fear I will never again experience in this life.

When I woke up, I seriously thought I might be sick. I felt like such utter shit, it seemed like vomiting was the only way to express it besides tears. And I am done with crying over stupid shit like this. Done, I tell you. There is no use crying over something so idiotic. There is no use dwelling on it. There is no use in even thinking about it for another second.

So I move on. To what, I have no idea. I'm still searching for that.

the Sadim Touch

You know, the opposite of the Midas touch. Apparently I have it.

Seems whatever happened to our crappy old lawn mower rendered it beyond repair. And I so desperately wanted to believe that I could fix it that I put off buying a new mower. Well, the grass - more precisely, the weeds - reached thigh height and I started getting nervous.

In a town this small, nothing goes unnoticed. Everyone on Liberty Street knows that I am a recluse, and that when they see me out of the house...it's a cold day in hell. They will actually comment about it to my face. Everyone in this town knows who I rent this house from, and they know where she lives, and they know that if something's amiss at Manson Homestead, they get better results when they bypass talking to me and just go straight to the lady that cashes my rent checks. So I knew it was just a matter of time before someone called her up and complained that the crazy, shut-in cat lady on Liberty Street was trying to see how tall she could get her grass before the city got sick of it and came to mow it for her.

Believe you me, as much as I would like to have the stooges from the city mow my grass while I sit on my shrinking ass and watch, I saw what they did to the foreclosed house next door. They scalped that yard. Thank you, but I can push a mower myself. Sid and I spent way too much time spreading grass seed last year for anyone to come along and scalp our (finally) beautiful lawn.

Anyway, like I said, the grass was thigh height, and I knew that if I didn't soon work myself up to do something drastic, like buy a new mower, the whole neighborhood would be ringing up the landlady, demanding my blood. I wasn't just putting off buying a new mower because I couldn't bear to spend the money, but because I knew I would have to use Sid's car, and that meant taking off the stupid cover and getting pollen and birdshit all over myself.

But I did it, and it was even worse than I had imagined. It's rained a lot lately, and that cover did fuck-all to keep the water and dirt out. That car was caked in yellow pollen. It was embarrassing, even to me, and I usually don't worry myself over the dirtiness of a car.

But that's not the best part. Oh no, the best part was when I got to the store and picked out my new mower, and had the guy bring it out and put it in my trunk for me. He says, "You know you got ants in here?"

Yes, you read that correctly. There were ants making a nest in the metal framing around the trunk. I feel no further comment is necessary on this, as thinking about it makes me twitch.

So I get the mower home, get it out of the trunk, and get it assembled. I fill it up with oil and gasoline and I'm psyched. I put together a lawn mower! I'm independent and industrious! Yay starky!

And then I couldn't get it started. I primed that thing, and yanked at the pull cord for a good ten minutes before I decided that one more failure would result in me taking a mallet to this spiffy new mower. In desperation, I went across the street to beg help from the neighbor man.

He started that thing on the first goddamn try.

It's the Sadim Touch, I'm telling you.

an unforseen side effect

I am finding out that all the weird things about me that always sort of defined who I was are not really me at all, but my hypothyroidism. And now that that's not a problem, I get to go through that whole teenage phase of "finding myself" all over again. Because this has apparently been going on for years, unnoticed, I do not know who I am without symptoms.

Take, for example, my sex drive. Nonexistent. Never had any libido to speak of. Ever. It didn't bother me, it was just who I was, and I accepted it. Well, now that the synthroid has had time to render some major changes, I'm finding out that hey, you know there really is something there.

And my god, I'm freaked out. This is the strangest thing to me. This is like being 12 years old again and going through puberty. It's alienating. I don't know my body anymore, this isn't the one I'm used to. My husband is coming home to a wife he has never really met before.

For the past few weeks, I've been taking my pill every day and seeing gradual improvement, and I was totally okay with having a chronic disease. It didn't bother me. I was not my disease, you know, it didn't define me as a person. And I'm finding out that I was, and it did.

It is extremely humbling.

there is symbolism here, I just can't see it

I dreamed about my grandmother last night.

I was walking through a wasteland of dead trees and destroyed buildings. The ground was cracked and parched and craggy, there were steep cliffs on all sides, some rock pillars standing in the middle with ruined houses on top of them... I was with my sisters, and we were trudging through this mess, and staring at the trees, and discussing what could have happened to the landscape to make it look so ruined.

We weren't scared, though perhaps we should have been, considering the desolate area we were stranded in. We were simply awed at the way nature had reclaimed everything around us.

In the middle of all this wreckage was our grandmother. She was sitting in the wheelchair she'd been using in her last years, her hair just as white and long as I remember it, pulled back in a bun the way she always wore it, and she was smiling at us holding her arms out to us and telling us to come to her.

So we did. She hugged us and said, "I think of you girls often," which was exactly what she did and said the last time we saw her alive.

I woke up bawling. I'm crying now, as I type this, and I don't understand why, because it wasn't a sad dream at all. She was waiting for us in that awful place, and was so glad to see us...what is sad about that?

so tight my ass squeaks

My mother said that once about my father: "he's so tight his ass squeaks". As you can guess, they argued about money a lot. Or maybe you can't guess. It does sound a little...risque.

Food prices here are not so terribly bad, but I'm still alarmed. So I've been looking online for ways to save money on groceries, and one way I've found is to use powdered milk for cooking. This sounds like a really good idea, as that's usually the only thing I use milk for. It's fairly cheap, cheaper than regular milk, so what the hey? I'm going to try to find some next time I go to the store, and see how I like it. Maybe, if it's not so bad, I can put a few drops of vanilla in it and it will be good for regular drinking and breakfast cereal, too. We'll see.

And I'd like to start stocking up on non-perishables now, while we have the money, because Sid's talking seriously about trying for spawnage when he comes home in a few months, and I'd like to have some stuff put back so that if/when I get pregnant, we've got more money to spend on baby stuff.

Now that the weather is getting nice, I wish we could plant a garden. I'm sure our landlady wouldn't mind, but at the same time...this isn't our house. I'd hate to put all that effort into a garden and then have to leave it. So in the meantime, I'm looking at little window planters. At the least, we can grow our own spices and stuff. Maybe some little window tomatoes!

When I go to the store next, I plan on buying the ingredients for bread. I can easily make my own for lots cheaper than storebought bread, and it will be lots yummier, too. When my father-in-law asked us what we wanted for a wedding gift, and I told him we wanted a breadmaker...it was the smartest thing I think I've ever done. That poor breadmaker gets so much use, just like our crockpot.

Sid has expressed an interest in "eating healthy". I'm not sure what else he'd like me to try to do, besides stop cooking pizza. We already eat lots of whole grains, fruits, and vegetables. I make my own soups, we don't buy the canned kind (less sodium and fat that way). When we need ground meat for something, we always try to get turkey instead of beef because it's not so fatty. Really, the only thing that needs to change is Sid's insistence on buying snack foods.

shenanigans!

So it's been a week and a day exactly since I started taking Synthroid, the super-cool synthetic thyroid hormone, and I must say, for such a teensy little pill, it has already effected some big changes in my life. I can ride my recumbent bike without nodding off. That horrid mental fog is lifting, so that I can form coherent thoughts with no effort (for the last few months, playing sudoku was totally beyond me). And the numbers on the scale, for the first time in over a year, are not moving up, but down.

I felt so good the other day I mowed the yard. Now, this is misleading, because it needed to be done, but the great part was that I enjoyed it. I didn't feel like pushing the mower and taking that next step was going to kill me; it felt pretty good, until the pollen had me snotting like a crying toddler.

The bad part is that in my overzealous need to GET THINGS DONE, I tried to replace the old gnawed up blades with some spiffy new ones. I don't know what went wrong, or where, but the mower runs like someone's dragging it over rocks. Oh, and did I mention the billowing smoke? Yeah, it's blowing like a fucking smokestack. And I'm no scientician...but that can't be good.

Circumstances around Manson Homestead are rapidly improving; Sid has reached the halfway point for his deployement, and I feel like a whole new person. Now if only I could do something about the box elders...

the hypocrisy, it burns

Sid sent me an email today, and it contained a paragraph most interesting:

I've also met some good friends here on the boat.. most of them females as they seem to be more mature than the guys. So yes, when i go to ports, i'm usually around a girl. Just wanted to tell you that so you know. I'm obviously not doing anything but when you see pictures and its me and a girl.. don't freak out ok?

Like I'd not noticed that the pictures he was sending me of the last four ports he's hit had the same smiling women in them. Like I'd asked about them. I had not. I knew exactly what was going on, but I didn't say anything. But he felt the need to bring this up now, after a month and some odd change, for what reasons under god, I cannot fathom.

But this is what I sent as a reply:

Let's reverse the situation for a minute. Would you be okay with me hanging out with a bunch of guys? Going places overseas with guys you didn't know and had never met, while you sat at home with the phone and waited for me to call? Can you honestly say you would be fine with that? Because somehow, I'm not seeing it. I don't care what you do out there - well, I do care, but there's nothing I can do about it - but if you admit to yourself that you would not be all right with me doing the things you're doing, maybe you need to change your behavior.

I have not forgotten the last time he was gone for months on end, how he flipped out when Cory asked me to come to Zakk's Coffeehouse to see his favorite band. Nor have I forgotten the screaming fights, as Sid went to the movies with his (girl) friends, and yet wanted me to stay home alone. It was epic, one of those things that we were either going to hash out and work through, or it would destroy our marriage completely. We'd been screaming at each other for so long it seemed like that was the only way we could speak to one another, and finally, in sheer desperation, I asked him "how would you feel if our situations were reversed?" and that was turning point. He had not stopped for one moment to see the situation from my point of view, until I asked him to. And when he did, he realized he'd been something of a douchebag.

Not that I'm accusing him of being a douchebag this time, but the idea is the same. Until I make him walk a mile in my shoes, he will not stop to think of my perspective. As he was the youngest child in his family, it was always about him, and as I was the oldest child in my own, it was always about everyone else, and unlearning those behaviors and ways of thinking is hard.