the sloppy copy

Hi, my name is Julie and I’m addicted to Craigslist

Just when I thought that I had my addiction under control, a friend directed me to this site.

Read, and laugh your stinkin’ guts out.

Don’t you love how several discrete dream sequences can run together in your brain at night, producing one crazy montage of subconscious what-the-fuckness that doesn’t even make sense during the actual dreaming process?

Case in point: last night.

I won’t even try to create a timeline, because it will make no more sense to specificy a sequence than to just spit it all out, stream-of-consciousness style.

I am in the kitchen of a house. It is a weirdly modern house and in this particular room, the range is a shade of lime-green and very angular. In fact, this applicance seems to have no right angles at all. It’s a galley-style kitchen, quite small for the rest of the house in which it is located. In the back of my mind, I know that this is my friend (in real life) Gennie’s house.

The living room, which adjoins the tiny kitchen is sunken and dimly-lit. It is furnished in the same muted-neon shades as the kitchen applicances, and I think there is shag carpet. Instead of this being a truly modern house, it is modern in the Tomorrowland sense: when I recreate the room in my mind now, all that’s missing is the happy housewife serving cocktails on a silver tray to her suit-wearing husband and his poker buddies.

As I stand in the living room, I am given a baby. A cute little baby of Asian descent. Somehow, I know that this little girl’s mom is gone. Dead, kidnapped, I don’t know – but Mom is in trouble. I am to take care of the baby.

But the baby is sick. She keeps having seizures. I am somehow not alarmed by this. She gets sick after I feed her lemon wedges. (Why am I feeding a 6-month old lemon wedges?) And yes, I know that she is 6-months old. Except I think she is starting to talk and can walk. A highly advanced 6-month old I guess.

I learn that my father has had a heart attack and has died. I wait two days to tell my friends, and then, I do so in a Twitter message. (What the fuck is wrong with me?). I do not cry, and am confused as to why I don’t cry.

I am in a restaraunt, with the baby. It’s a diner; Steak n’ Shake-esque. I’m at a large table with many other people. I don’t remember who the people are, but I knew them all in my dream. We are all important people, for some reason. I think we might be after the people who took and/or killed the baby’s Mom. We sit at the table, and I think we’re having a good time. The restaraunt is very crowded.

A group of men enters the restaraunt. The front door is very near our table. I see that they are armed with very large, automatic weapons. I know that they are after the baby, so I hold her closer to me and hide under the table. No one else at the table with me notices the 5 dudes with machine guns not three feet away. They also do not seem alarmed that I suddenly hid under the table with the baby.

As I sit under the table, I realize that the baby is not sick, she is just allergic to acidic fruits. Hence, having seizures after I feed her lemon wedges. I demand, from underneath the table, that someone hand me my water glass. But there is a lemon wedge in it, and I cannot give it to the baby (do 6-month olds drink water? They certainly don’t from glasses) because of the acidic fruit (yes, that was exactly how it was phrased in the dream).

It’s unclear if the Armed Bad Guys have attracted attention from my friends at the table, and I un-hide myself, just as I feel the barrel of a gun to the back of my head. I don’t know if they want me or the baby. But I am heroic, and I cover the baby as best as I can so she is not hurt. I’m pretty sure my friends at the table are just sort of staring as this is going down (some friends). For some reason, the Armed Bad Guy With A Gun Pointed To My Head leaves. I am relieved, and it occurs to me that I should cry, because I was just quite close to having a bullet shred my brains.

I get up, still holding the baby, and walk through the restaraunt. Armed Bad Guys seem to be gone. I see a man who I instinctively know is the baby’s father. I hand her over to him, making sure to explain that his daughter is allergic to acidic fruits: “No lemons, or oranges.” I walk away, then remember something else, and turn around: “And no grapefruit, either.”

Then I woke up.

(On a side note, when I write my dreams out like this, I can pretty accurately pick out where each of these odd details came from during my previous day. It’s incredibly fascinating, and you should try it sometime).

– one –
I could really go for a massage right about…. now. Just the back and shoulders, please. None of this kneading-your-knuckles-into-my-glutes crap, thanks. It feels as if someone buried his large, beefy fist into the space between my shoulder blades. I woke up this morning curled up into a small ball. Perhaps that’s why the act of exhaling feels like I’m stretching something that wasn’t there yesterday. I’m tempted to sleep strapped to a piece of plywood tonight.

That entire paragraph was vaguely…dirty.

– two –
I always figured that I wasn’t really a nut for science fiction, but I’ve realized over the years that my tolerance for the fantastical is quite high. In an effort to continue to make the best use of my Netflix subscription, I’ve been working through the first season of James Cameron’s Dark Angel* for the past few weeks-or-so, and I dig it. I only vaguely remember it existing when it premiered nine-ish years ago but, knowing me, I probably watched bits and pieces of it along the way back then. For any number of reasons, it didn’t stick (I was a freshman in college back then. Our television was permanently tuned to VH1), but it’s accurate to say that I’m hooked now.

For the record, my rate of cultural absorption is about 10-15 years, so my discovery of this long-cancelled series is right on target for me. Hey, have you guys heard of this band called No Doubt? They’re awesome!

– three –
I’m think that I’m going to try to post something every day, even if I can only manage to think in short, controlled bursts like these.

*I’m not sure if this series is considered “science fiction,” but it’s the first example up with which I could come.

Must…stop…thinking…everything…I … say… is…dirty…

I noticed that everything on my Facebook page was in Spanish at the same time a Spanish-language McDonald’s commercial came on the TV.

Talk about a mind fuck.

Ole!

Some miscellaneous thoughts, updates, and observations – neatly packaged for your browsing pleasure:

1. Yeah, yeah, yeah… I have mixed feelings about this latest release of Rockband, and my reticence stems from my deeply-rooted music snobbery. There, I said it: I cringe to think about people butchering the music I’ve revered since birth. Talk about a snob: I don’t boycott karaoke bars, and the concept is almost the exact frickin’ same. The flip side of this, though, is genuine excitement: though I love to karaoke, I’ve never in my life played Guitar Hero or Rockband (except for about 2 minutes on Carynn’s DS at Christmas last year). Perhaps this latest version of Rockband will be what it takes to finally get me to play. In a way, I hope it does so I can finally get over myself. Ah, well. Who knows?

2. Giddy for Glee. Watched Glee last night. Well, technically, I was flipping through the channels in my new Media Room (more on that later), and found it by accident. And – !!! – trying to contain my giddiness here, for fear of making a fool of myself – !!! – what a happy accident it was! (Deep breaths, Julie…). I had zero expectations for this show going in. I’ve been doing a lot of reading up on the upcoming series and season premieres, but sort of glossed over the critics’ reviews of Glee because I had it pegged as some TV version of High School Musical. Matthew Morrison’s face was plastered across the latest issue of the Charter magazine this month, and I instantly gave him a mustache, yellow highlights, and perhaps some neck ink, I can’t remember. Aaaaaaaanyway… I only saw about half of the premiere, and my one sentence review is something like this: aaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh! Love it.

3. Contradictions and Revelations. I now realize that the juxtaposition of my haughty disdain for The Beatles’ Rockband and my omgomgomg schoolgirl excitement over Glee is, well, odd.

4. The Job Front. I’m still looking for a job, and have lost track of the number of online applications I’ve completed, cover letters I’ve composed, and HR e-mails I’ve sent. I’m now signed up for alerts through Snag A Job, a site that very badly wants me to work at Long John Silver’s (Silvers? Silvers’?). And while I find myself occasionally craving Chicken Planks with the rest of ’em, I’ve not yet submitted my application for Shift Manager. Honestly, though, part of me wonders when it’s time to quit being stubborn and see if I can’t just go back to Sonic. (I do have new skates, after all).

5. The Media Room. Since he left for college a few weeks ago, I’ve taken to watching prime time television in my brother’s room, on the TV he so graciously left behind (or, more accurately, could not fit in his car). I’ve since rearranged the room for optimal TV viewing and antenna placement (while the stop-and-stutter when a digital antenna loses its signal is sort of funny at first, it gets old after about the sixteenth time). I don’t remember where I was going with this bullet point, so I guess I’ll just drop this thought and pick it up later.

Well, folks, that’s it.

‘Til next time…

To get to my Grandma’s grave, make a left after the weeping angel.

At least, that’s how I think you get there. It’s a very large cemetery and I’ve only been once, that I can remember.

My mom went to see her today, and I stayed back. I don’t know if I feel guilty about this. Should I feel guilty about this? I never met her. She died years and years before I was born. I enjoy hearing stories about her; she seemed like she was a pretty neat lady. But to go visit her grave seems strange to me. Maybe I’d prefer to remember her as she is in my imagination, not reduced to an inscription in concrete; I don’t know.