Whatever....Debbie Downer edition

Been a while. I keep meaning to update, writing the posts in my head, then never actual typing them up. :shrugs:

I'm feeling disconnected - from just about everything. Some of it is the season. I am definitely seasonally affected, and it seems like it gets worse every year. Last year was the first time I had to dig deep into reserves I don't have any more to keep from giving up - and I was discovering writing last year. This year, it's only October. How the hell am I supposed to get through the rest of the year?

My mom's been dead eleven years next month, and last night, I had the first dream I can remember about her. In my dream, she was tall and straight and strong, hair flaming red falling in waves past her shoulders. Happy. Much as she was before she made the conscious or unconscious decision to drink herself to death. What was weird about this dream, though, is that when someone told me they'd seen her, I dismissed it. "No, mom's dead. She died a long time ago." Then I caught sight of her, standing half a football field away in a crowded parking lot, and I was terrified. I ran. Then the dream switched scenes, as dreams do, and I was sitting in front of her, and she was saying, "Yes, it's me," all nonchalant like I see my dead mother back to life and beautiful every day. By the end of the dream, I was deeply resentful of her, and I don't even know why.

There was a con here in Dallas recently, where both Katee Sackhoff and Jamie Bamber appeared. I would have pushed past my crowd-shyness to see the two of them. Hell, I would have worked the thing to see them. I desperately wanted to go, but money was, as always, an issue, and I wasn't able to go.

I did get to spend the weekend with my smut-writing/TV friend instead, but things are different with her new relationship. Do I begrudge her the happiness? A thousand times NO. Do I still wish she had time for me that wasn't divided twenty different ways? Of course. We didn't even get any writing done, and not a whole lot of TV, for that matter. I came back to the house feeling exhausted rather than renewed for the first time ever.

My thirty-year high school reunion is later this month, and I won't be able to go. No way to get there, and no place to stay if I did manage to get there. My car's inspection and registration are both expired, and to pass inspection would take money I don't have or a deeply dishonest inspection station. Without the inspection, no registration. Those new state databases tell the state when your car's not inspected, and they won't give you a registration sticker any more - well, Texas won't. Not that I have the money to pay for it anyway. :sigh:

Thanksgiving's next month. I'd gotten used to going to my friend's house, spending the holiday with her, hosting Airmen for their first real break from Basic Training in weeks, and last year because her husband was home from Iraq, I didn't get to go. Not even sure why. He likes me fine - we get along well most of the time. I haven't even bothered to ask this year, because I when I texted & emailed her about reunion weekend, she never answered, and he's home for good. He's not retired, but for medical reasons, he won't be going back to the middle east.

So, whatever. I'm having a pity party, I guess. I miss my kid. I miss my grandson. I miss San Antonio. I miss my entire family, who aren't speaking to me for their own reasons. And yeah. I miss my mom.

My writing is frakked. Mostly I haven't been able to write, and when I do finish something, I'm not satisfied with it. It's been three weeks, and that, probably more than anything else, is getting me down. The thing I've used to cope for the last year is failing me, and frankly, considering where I am emotionally, that scares me.

On the other hand, things that make me smile:

The other gramma was in Italy to visit the kids, and this was Baby Potatohead getting tired of gramma taking pictures of him. Love the attitude.

Dreams and Random Stuff

I had this weird dream just before I woke up this morning.  I'm a military brat, so I've been around planes my entire life.  Well, in this dream, I was outside, in front of my house, watching a plane fly across the sky.  Suddenly the plane stopped and hovered.  Not many planes do this, and certainly none non-military, so of course, I knew it was a military plane.  It was also carrying something on its back, a la space shuttle type thing.  Anyway, this hovering plane slowly turns exactly nose down, pauses for a very brief moment, then plunges to the earth.  Somehow, I was seeing this all simultaneously from directly below the nose, and also from a slight angle.  Don't ask me - it was a dream.  Anyway, as I see it begin to slow down before it turned nose down, I said, "Oh, shit."  Then as I watched it hit the ground, in my neighbor's front yard, I was just frozen.  Just watching it happen, like I had no sense at all.  Fortunately, though I watched the explosion in the neighbor's yard as if it were in slo-mo, I woke up before my dream self was dissolved by the shockwave of the impact.  lol  Sometimes, I don't know where my mind comes up with this crap.  I don't even want to know, for that matter.

The cough I got when I got sick at the first of the year has hung around.  Makes me short of breath several times a day, and I'm kinda weaker than usual, but otherwise, I'm getting back to normal.

I have two friend-dates to go see Die Hard 5 opening weekend, and I have another friend-date next Monday to have dinner to celebrate our upcoming birthdays early.  I have a $10 gift card for Cheesecake Factory that expires at the end of the month, so we're going to take advantage of it.  Love Cheesecake Factory, despite the fact that I do not love cheesecake.  Not even a little bit.  Not even at all.

I noticed in November that all I was doing on Facebook was liking a bunch of stuff and reading other people's posts, so I decided that I would check out for a while.  This was also at least partly in response to changes in FB and their incessant need to change their privacy policies for the worse.  Since then, I've been reading a very small list of people whose lives I actually care about, and not liking anything at all, and only posting a comment when I had some actual information to share.  Nobody's noticed I'm gone, and I haven't missed FB, so I've decided I'm going to trim down the pages I've liked (I've already trimmed down friends several times) and make what's on my FB pretty basic.  I haven't posted anything on my own page since mid-November, and I pretty much plan to keep that up.  I guess if somebody wants to know what I'm up to, they can get hold of me some other way.  In the meantime, I have more time to obsess about BSG and read BSG porn.  Thank the gods for smut!

Last but not least, my Firefox has gotten some kind of freaky thing.  When I click on something, a pop-under will randomly open up and redirect me to another page.  You might think this would be some kind of actual porn, all things considered, but the redirects are to Amazon, or search pages, or, about 10% of the time, to porn pages.  Weird, and unwelcome, and I have not been able to figure out how to get rid of it.  It doesn't seem to do anything, other than open a random page in a pop-under.  It never redirects the page I'm actually on.  At the same time this happened, I get ads randomly on livejournal, over the top of people's pictures, that I have to click closed if I want to see said pictures.  Have people begun to monetize their ljs?  Has livejournal started doing this to a random selection of people?  The two things may or may not even be related.  Maybe I should uninstall Firefox and redownload it.  ETA:  I did uninstall and reinstall, and that fixed the problems.

What dreams may come

Yesterday, I dreamed about visiting my kinfolk in Oklahoma, and toward the end of the dream, my cousin Zack walked in the front door.  Zack was my favorite cousin, and he died more than ten years ago.  He was the only one of my cousins who really *got* me, maybe because he was, too: twisted, perverted, vulnerable, lonely.  Yet he was always a gentleman when it counted.  Maybe because we were both onlys for a good period of time before we became eldests.  I don't know what it was about him.  But it was so good to see him in my dream that when I woke up, I was nearly crying for how much I miss him.

You know how they say that a woman will tend more often than not, to marry someone like her dad?  I don't know about the marry part, because my ex was nothing like my dad.  But when I'm deciding whether or not to be attracted to a guy, there's some truth to that adage - strong, silent, alpha when he needs to be, completely dry sense of humor; more often than that, though, any man gets compared to Zack, at least subconsciously.  Aside from the familial relationship, he was my ideal.  He's how I knew that there was someone out there who would get me and love me just the way I was, warts and all, who wouldn't be put off by my sexual innuendos in the most innocuous of conversations, or by my innate ability to flirt with anything human.  Now, as I close in steadily on the "halfway" mark, I have to wonder where that person is, because I've never found whoever it is.  Granted, for the last fifteen years, I've been actively not-looking, but that's beside the point.  :)

Back to the dreaming thing.  This morning, I was dreaming something, and the dream morphed, as dreams are wont to do, and I was tied up, with Helo from BSG looking at me *that* way, and then the dream morphed again, into something else I don't remember.  When I woke up, I was still stuck on being tied up by Helo, with my brain whining, "C'Mon, man!  I can't even get any action in my DREAMS?"  Perhaps that particular bit of the dream was the result of too much BSG smut, as if there exists such a thing as too much smut of any variety.  lol

And yes, I did just share perhaps too much information.  Look at the labels.  :D

Dreams

Had the strangest dream today (yes, I didn't get to sleep until after 0600, so it was today).  This was one of those rare occasions when I was dreaming, then wake up, do something, and go back to sleep and slip right back into the exact same dream.  Brendan Fehr (Michael Guerin, Roswell) represented my brother (worst casting EVAR, brain!) and it was full of the most bizarre and wonderful events.  The dream left me with something important to my waking life, and all I can consciously remember are Brendan as my brother, a vague recollection of having a sister and a welcome and much-needed hug from a real-life friend I haven't actually seen in person in fifteen years.  Oh, and the word "skin," imbued with great importance, though not related to the story-arc of Skins on Roswell.

I have new insight into the importance of hugs in my life, and the strange idea that I've been hugging wrong.

Strange Dreams

Lately, I've been having trouble getting to sleep before 4AM, which makes it even more difficult to actually drag my ass out of bed (or technically, recliner) when my alarm goes off at 11AM.  This morning, just before my alarm went off, I was dreaming that I was sleeping on a couch in my room, and I heard some guy talking.  This guy (his name is Andrew) pushes open my bedroom door, thinking it was someone else's bedroom.  He notices that it's not the room he thinks it is and just stands there for a moment, I guess dumbfounded.  I smile at him and tell him he can turn on the overhead light, which he tries to do, but I had turned it off at the fan when I went to bed.    Mind you, in real life, I rarely tell anyone it's OK to turn on the overhead light, and most definitely not when I am still half-asleep.  I really don't much like overhead lights, particularly the ones they put in ceiling fans.  Anyway, he comes into the room and sits on the couch in front of my legs and picks up my hands and starts playing with them absentmindedly.  And then...the alarm went off.   In my dream, I was interested in this guy almost as soon as I saw him standing in the doorway with that goofy look on his face.

I tried to go right back to sleep so I could get back into the dream and see what happens next.  Sometimes that works for me.  Definitely didn't this morning.  Ah, well.

30-Day Writing Challenge, Day Nine

These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world. Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

Is fear holding you back from living your fullest life and being truly self expressed? Put yourself in the shoes of the you who’s already lived your dream and write out the answers to the following:  Is the insecurity you’re defending worth the dream you’ll never realize? or the love you’ll never venture? or the joy you’ll never feel?  Will the blunder matter in 10 years? Or 10 weeks? Or 10 days? Or 10 minutes?  Can you be happy being anything less than who you really are?  Now Do. The Thing. You Fear.  (Author: Lachlan Cotter)

Play with cockroaches?  OK, that's a flip answer to a real question, though I am irrationally afraid of roaches.  I suppose I have the same fears many people have - not just the fear of failure, but the fear of success.  Once I get moved, I'm planning to take classes, one at a time, in simple things that will contribute to my bottom line, and at the same time will allow me to help people.  An example?  Reflexology.  I can learn that.  And I can use it to help people heal.  And I can use it to help my financial glass be more than half full, rather than more than half empty.

30-day Writing Challenge, Day Five

Our arts, our occupations, our marriages, our religion, we have not chosen, but society has chosen for us. We are parlour soldiers. We shun the rugged battle of fate, where strength is born. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Next to Resistance, rational thought is the artist or entrepreneurs worst enemy. Bad things happen when we employ rational thought, because rational thought comes from the ego. Instead, we want to work from the Self, that is, from instinct and intuition, from the unconscious.

A child has no trouble believing the unbelievable, nor does the genius or the madman. Its only you and I, with our big brains and our tiny hearts, who doubt and overthink and hesitate.” - Steven Pressfield, Do the Work

The idea of “being realistic” holds all of us back. From starting a business or quitting a job to dating someone who may not be our type or moving to a new place – getting “real” often means putting your dreams on hold.

Today, let’s take a step away from rational thought and dare to be bold. What’s one thing you’ve always wanted to accomplish but have been afraid to pursue? Write it down. Also write down the obstacles in your way of reaching your goal. Finally, write down a tangible plan to overcome each obstacle.

The only thing left is to, you know, actually go make it happen. What are you waiting for? (Author: Matt Cheuvront)

I've always wanted to go back to school, but single-parenting, and the lack of money that goes with it, always kept me from trying.  Well, I'm not a single parent any more, or won't be very, very shortly.  So, I'll have time to go to school, just have to find the money.  I also want to figure out what I want to be when I grow up.  That one's not so easy.  I love so many things, and I so want for my next career to be something I'm happy doing.