My Freudian Slip Is Showing

This morning, in the ten minutes between snooze alarms, I had a series of nightmares. One where I screamed psychotically at a cashier for letting someone cut in line in front of me. One where I was driving in the snow and started spinning wildly on black ice. And one with a snake.

I haven’t had the snake dreams for years. They started when I was a child – I assumed as a direct result of the huge snakes that my step father kept as pets. I had a fear that they would escape, I guess, because I would regularly have dreams that they did and that they would come into my bed and bite me and / or strangle me to death. In one prominent dream the snake mutated to a science-fiction size beast that ate all of my family as I watched. I still remember it vividly.

The snake in this dream was normal sized, but it couldn’t be caged. It seemed friendly at first. I was trying to play with it, as were the two cats and as I am writing this I am realizing exactly how comical this dream was because Oh my god a snake with two cats? It doesn’t get any more Freudian than that, does it? Except it does because the snake kept darting in and out of the covers and out from under the bed trying to attack the cats who weren’t sure if they wanted to play with something that could kill them. And I couldn’t cage the thing. No matter where I grabbed it’s head it bit me. In my dream state this was all so terrifying but in my waking state sex sex sex sex sex sex sex. OY VEY.

Ahem. Yes, Dr. Freud, I hear you.

Stealing Time

So I don't get a free day off of work this week, it's true. While this is lamentable it's also normal. I have to work. We all do. Life sucks and then you die, right?

Last night I had to do laundry. I was in the throws of a boo-hoo fest and certainly didn't want to be bothered with laundry but, like my job, it had to be done. So I went and did it. And I enjoyed it.

It wasn't a day at the beach in the sun, that's for sure, but it was time for me. It was quite, reflective time where I didn't have to talk to anyone I didn't want to or think about anything that didn't make me feel good. I spent twenty minutes in the Rite Aid next door looking at the thousands of colors of nail polish. I flipped my wash and then I read two entire articles. No, it wasn't a whole magazine, but the articles enlightened me and I almost felt like I stumbled on them serendipitously (if you can consider finding an old O magazine serendipitous).

While I admit fully that the first article made me curious to try MDMA with my husband (under the surveillance of a medical professional, of course!) I certainly won't be running out to get us any E. More useful to me was the second article, which seemed to strike exactly the right chord at exactly the right minute: Here I was spending the evening at the laundromat and getting exactly what I asked for. I needed a pause, some quiet time with myself and I without even trying I was getting it.

At lunch today I tried it again.

I was anxious all morning. No real reason except that I am an emotional sponge and there were a few office characters hovering around and spouting out their drama. Maybe some other things played into it, but whatever - my heart was racing. Across from me, my desk mate was binding ninety books. The constant crrrchhclunk of the binding machine punching holes made my sink crawl.

"I need a zen office," I emailed Husband. "If I ever own my own company I will have one."

I don't have an office where I work, I have an open space, so to be able to go to a designated spot of peace would be a dream on days like this. I imagined what my zen office would be like - full of puffy couches and low lighting. Quiet. It would be so quiet. It would have a door that closed.


I knew I couldn't ask my boss to designate a quiet room in our office, but I could get creative with what I had. So, taking a huge cup of green tea and a clean notepad I made for the back of the suite where I knew of a few unused offices. I found one that I felt sure no one needed and I closed the door. It was quiet.


For fifteen minutes I brain dumped and drank my tea, looking out the big picture window onto the parking lot, only disturbed by some part of a computer that had been left on. The desk was mostly uncluttered. No one interrupted me to tell me about the latest office drama. My heart rate went back to normal and by the time I walked back to my real desk I was very nearly refreshed.

Cccccrrrrrchlunk! Ring! Blah blah blah blah....


Nearly.

Funny

This video literally made me laugh out loud. It was one of those uncomfortable, stifled "I am watching something at work that I should absolutely not be watching and it's hilarious" laughs. So warning, if you're at work you should probably wait until nobody is around.

I know, I know, I am not the first person to have ever seen The Stiffy Goats. Everyone should know, though. Everyone.

It’s officially summer. Even though we’re only in the Month of April, the temperatures are beginning to hang above springtime with regularity. All of the trees are green and most of them have finished blooming.

I want to play hooky. My boss is going on vacation for a few days and it’s everything I can do to not call in sick so that I can just spend an afternoon in the sun. I guess there are no laws against this. It’s not socially acceptable though. I am supposed to show up – be present! Put in my forty hours. YES, I am living for the company!

And I am. I like my job and so I won’t call in sick. I just want to.

I miss Paris. Sometimes I get random flashes of streets or buildings I used to walk past and it’s still weird to me that I can’t just take the metro to get there. Of course it’s also massively cost prohibitive to hop on a plane and visit my old haunts so that’s not happening anytime soon, either. It feels like that whole life was just some long, crazy dream. Did it really happen? Was I really there?

No one ever asks me about my time in Paris. I think I thought it would come up all the time and that people would be dying for me to recount them crazy stories from when I lived abroad. The opposite is actually true. People think I am being pretentious when I talk about my time there. If I start a story by saying “In France…” people seem to automatically tune out. Or they will top me with their travel story as if I was somehow implying that no one else had ever been to France before. Wow, that’s great but you’re not that special.

So I don’t talk about it. I don’t get to tell anyone “I miss Paris,” without sounding like a pretentious asshole. Anyone would miss Paris, they think. And saying it aloud does sound pretentious. But I miss Paris in a way that I miss an old home. The way that I miss Austin and the way that I sometimes think about the house I grew up in and wonder who lives there now in the room that once had blue carpet.

I google street viewed the house once. It hurt. Someone had taken out all the landscaping and replaced it with earth colored stone. It was ugly, not at all the house I grew up in. It looked run down. I didn’t spend long on there.

With my free afternoon, if I was to take one (which I will not be doing) I would sit in the sun in a tank top and get my shoulders to brown. If I felt courageous I might sunbath in the backyard. I would make suntea and read a magazine back to front. I would only wear SPF 15. Then I would make cupcakes.

But I won’t, because I am a good worker bee.

I leave you with The Fantastic Zebras. Even though it’s not NEARLY as funny as The Stiffy Goats, Zebras are truly fantastic.

Now go play hooky for me so I can live vicariously through your lives.

Cold Cruel World

Lately I have been having a problem with adult acne. I blame it on some phantom hormone in one of the pills I am taking, or maybe it’s because of my shampoo or maybe I touch my face too much – I don’t know. What I do know is that I am breaking out like a fourteen year old.

This week while examining my blemishes with close anguish, I discovered something even more depressing: wrinkles.

Frown lines, to be exact. Not laugh lines, or even crows feet, I have frown lines.

It’s as if my body is saying to me “Welcome to thirty, bitch.” It’s a little preemptive, even, (I’m not thirty for another couple of months) but obviously cause for dismay. Can’t my face pick an age to be? Am I thirteen or am I forty? Should I be buying wrinkle cream or Proactiv? (If I put both on there will my face self destruct from product confusion?) And can’t I age gracefully with some wrinkly form of happiness? No, of course not. Frown lines, as if I have spent more years of my life sad than happy (is that true?).

I am slowly coming to grips that my hot twenty year old bod has been replaced by something a bit more dumpy. In the back of my head, maybe I still wish I will get that back, someday, but mostly I understand. I am an adult woman, thus I will have the corresponding body type. Okay. Fine.

But frown lines and acne? What kind of a world are we living in? Or perhaps I have simply descended into some level of hell where all the people who thought they would be pretty forever are sent to after twenty-nine. Am I being dramatic?

Oh yes. Yes I am. 

Take THAT thirty!