11:45 pm, Home

Today was one of those “If I find one more goddamn cockroach in my shower, I am going to kill myself!” kinds of days. In the midwest I called these my “If I drop one more pencil....” days, as in:

24/25 April 2002
1017 High Street, Dining Room with mint tea and Todd’s CD mix

Ugghh. I have just been in the worst mood all day. I can’t shake it, and I can’t figure out what’s going on. It was just one of those days when it’s like – if you drop one more pencil, you are seriously going to lose it. And of course I kept dropping pencils all damn weekend. I mean day. I am distracted and distressed....


That’s how today was – if not for my weird mood, it would have been a great day. Jennie brought me a latte this morning as I struggled with the ancient (donated, of course) computer, and we had nice talks to & from Moriarty, I got to play with Robert’s beast of a weimaraner, Spook, and with his sweet little girl April (also a weimaraner, “the dyke queen of dogs”), I got to talk to funny middle-schoolers, Maddie and I were in hysterics in the two hours it took us to make two copies of the bully-proofing curriculum, Danielle and I went out to dinner at a nice Chinese restaurant.... These are all good things, and yet ––

I’m tempted to dwell on the bad parts of the day (the first of TEN YEARS worth of student loan bills, for one), but instead....

Good things:

1. The Shins!
(Saturday afternoon, at the bookstore with Lisa)
Me: (picking up a copy of a CD by a totally obscure group -- The Shins -- who Dave Skogen got me hooked on in November or December...) Oh, the Shins! I love this band! Do you know them?
Lisa: Well, just Marty.
Me: What?
Lisa: I don't know all of them too well, just Marty.
Me: WHAT?
Lisa: ... um?
Me: You know Marty?
Lisa: (looking worried, like I might suddenly attack) yeah?
Me: (suddenly realizing I've picked said CD off table labeled "Local Music") Wait, are they from Albuquerque?
Lisa: Yeah, didn't you know that?
Me: WHAT! No! I only have a burned copy of their CD, no liner notes. Are you serious??
Lisa: ...?
Me: In the midwest, NOBODY's heard of them. Just Dave.
Lisa: I'll introduce you to Marty if you want. I was just thinking that I should call him, actually.
Me: WAAGH!


2. Lisa.
She’s great!

3. My first talking talons paycheck!
More than enough to cover my first student loan payment... oh....

4. Dream interpretation.
Sunday morning before I woke up, I dreamed that Ali and I were starting a school in the mountains (implicitly around Albuquerque), and we were trying to get people to help us raise money and support for it. I got a call from a band who said they’d play a benefit concert for the school, and I was really excited about it, and kept telling Ali that they were “really big, like the Beatles!” – and maybe they WERE the Beatles... it was unclear in that dreamy kind of way. And then I got a call from Winnie and Nelson Mandela, who said they’d like to come help us garner support for our school, but only if I took them mountain climbing first. They said, “We know the world thinks of us mainly as advocates of human rights, but in our minds we’re mountain climbers first and foremost.” I was kind of surprised, because I’m no sherpa, but I agreed (of course!) and then spent the rest of the dream trying to arrange schedules to see if the Beatles-like band and the Mandelas could come the same weekend, but it seemed like they couldn’t.

On the way to Moriarty today, I told Jennie this dream, and she said it seemed like a really positive dream, and we talked about the fact that it’s really about balance. Trying to juggle the band and the Mandelas (art & education, perhaps?), and the whole mountain climbing/advocacy thing. Jennie said, “You’re not defined by any one thing... and before you can open your school, before you can save the world, you have to climb the mountains.” Also, she said the fact that the Mandelas showed up to support Ali’s and my school says that there’s something really good and true about it – either the actual school, or the fact of us as a team....

Often my dreams are full of weird symbols of other things (like the dream I had that OHS had been put on trucks and driven to Fitchburg and set down at the bottom of Ledgemont Court, so as I sat in math class I could watch my dad getting into his van and driving off to work — helped me realize that my idea of what school was, as I was looking at colleges, was moving closer to home – and then I decided to go to college in Iowa), but these symbols all seem pretty straightforward. After all, the educator/artist balance is one I’ve been struggling with for at least seven or eight years now.

5. Zeke.
He’s stretched out across my bed with his orange Desert Dog neckerchief on, sniffing and kicking in his sleep.

6. Tea
Tonight Danielle and I got sucked into Wild Oats on our way home and I found two of my favorites: Almond Sunset & Irish Breakfast. Hooray!

7. When life gives you sour grapes, make wine?
Okay, so my back yard and front yard and side yard are all full of speedy cockroaches, and okay, when I ran out to the truck just now there were four on the exterior wall, each longer than two inches, and yeah, so Danielle said that once or twice a year the city flushes out the sewer system and all the roaches start climbing up through the drains and end up in sinks and showers and toilets like crazy (if we hadn’t been in Home Depot and surrounded by old people looking at faucet handles, I would have screamed at this news) . . . . . and my closet and bathroom are both full of magic death-resistant spiders, and Robert said he killed a SIX INCH LONG centipede in his garage last night . . . . . . . but it could be worse, right? At least my house isn’t full of tarantulas, and the cockroaches in the yard could be scorpions or maggots or centipedes or. . . crocodiles . . . or . . . .Republicans . . . . . . .