I cannot imagine why my dreams are so strange lately. Last night I dreamed that the whole passel of my relatives were at my house and I was trying my best to get rid of them. (Like fish, they had surpassed the limit.) I kept opening the refrigerator and finding one of the children hiding in it. In my dream, I yelled at him that I would spank him if I found him in there again. My sister-in-law Debbie was a major character last night. Somehow she was doing what she always does--gets involved in everything, whether or not it is any of her business. She is entirely too nosey in real life, and last night, she'd gone one step beyond.
In another dream that somehow blended with that dream, I was in a wheelchair in a downtown cityscape. It was dark, except for boardwalk lights of some sort. Someone called down from an upstairs window as I was going past, and I answered them. Because of my Southern accent, they told other people that I was black. Someone in a position of authority at my workplace began to tease me about it, as if I had deliberately tried to pass myself off as a black woman. And then, in the weird logic of dreams, my "punishment" was cheesecake, except it wasn't cheesecake when it arrived. It was more like a taco salad bar. I could really analyze this one for all its implications--race, disability, weight.
Maybe the race angle came from something I was thinking after class last night. I have a couple of black women in the night class. One in particular is someone who is right up my alley with her personality. She is forthright, outspoken, and funny. As we were leaving last night, I remember thinking how much like her I feel that I am, especially as I once was, before I had a chance to get an education. She's braver than I am. If she doesn't understand, she asks. I'd just sit there in misery until I got it figured out, or until someone else had the courage to ask. I can tell that we would be friends in any venue.
The disability angle comes from the leg pain I have been having, perhaps. My left leg--the bad one that I had the blood clot in--has been hurting a lot lately, especially behind my knee. It feels as if there is a lump there, but when I feel with my hands, I don't find anything. I've probably just strained a tendon or something, but after everything I went through ten years ago, I can't relax and stop worrying. It hurt so much when I went to bed last night that of course I dreamed about it and incorporated the discomfort into my subconscious.
As for the cheesecake-turned-salad--maybe that's a reflection of my love of cheesecake, a food I don't eat and haven't eaten in some time. It's not exactly sugarfree, after all. But why it turned into a taco salad mishmash of ingredients--who knows? Maybe I shouldn't have had fried eggs and bacon for supper. All that grease likely affected my brain!
Speaking of last night's supper, hubby ate four fried eggs and five strips of fried bacon. His cholesterol level is still kind of bad--his HDL is too low--but I was too tired to cook anything that needed prep time and tending, and it never occurs to him to cook. He'd live on eggs and sausage if I didn't force other foods on him now and then.
Another oddity in his check-up yesterday is that his blood sugar was 117 after fasting. That's about what mine normally is, but his has always been low before.
I appear to be locked into self-examination trivia today, don't I? I'm actually trying to write this while watching the noon news. Some nutcase in Missouri shot up a city council meeting and killed six. (Or maybe killed five before being killed himself.) An explosion at a sugar refinery in Georgia killed six. The world is too much with me. When I feel helpless and unable to control the chaos of life, I turn toward what I CAN control--what I eat, what I do. What I worry about.
One thing I can't control is the fact that the two other candidates for Writing Specialist at my school are already being brought to campus. Why was I saved for last? Is that a good thing or a bad thing? One of the candidates is also in-house and is also applying for the literature position. I hope the game plan is to hire her for literature and me for writing. The outside candidate, as best I can tell via a google search, is from Texas and is male. This is a great time to bring in a Texan, what with the awful weather we've been having. If he's smart, he'll turn tail and rush back to the Lone Star state.
Hubby is off with his friends today. They had a faculty meeting to attend, but then they went to lunch and then to a heated golf driving course. Hubby has some new golf clubs (used, bought on e-bay), and I can tell he's eager to start playing. I had good intentions of getting out to get my hair trimmed, but it's snowing. Again. And I'm feeling lethargic. Sleepy. Getting a haircut is an invasive moment for me. Having a total stranger touching my head bothers me a lot. The gossip and chit-chat that goes on in any salon, even the cheap places I go to, is invasive. I'm usually fine with small talk, but it's a lot easier to make small talk when the other person is interesting. Some people who cut and style hair are fascinating. Others are frankly boring and have little to offer. I can tell that their lives consist of work and partying. They'd be fine talking about clubbing and drinking and shopping, but since those aren't areas of interest for me, our conversations soon drop off to nothing except murmurmed questions and answers.
Time to end this long chat with myself, actually. I'm behind in grading, so off to work! Dr. S.
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