Nightmares and Dreamscapes. True Confessions.

(Just out of curiosity: do these pictures make you feel warm and fuzzy, or do you kind of want to barf?)

My friend, mentor, and fellow BBC drama watcher, Daniel, hates to hear people talk about their dreams. HATES IT. (I dedicate this post to him, though he doesn't even read the slog.)

I had this dream last night...

I was doing a crazy round of speed-dating in an empty parking structure. You know how it is. For each round that a girl makes it through, she runs up a level on the structure. The goal was to reach the top, and be paired off with the person of my dreams. But, I kept getting distracted, and then allowing myself to get swept up to the next level without actually choosing anybody.

When I reached the top, a bossy woman asked me who I chose. "I don't know," I wailed. "I forgot to decide." Well, she gave me a list of the names that were leftover. But she said I could pick two. The leftovers! I picked the first one, "Eric Smith." I remember so clearly, because I thought Eric Smith had had really cute glasses. (Who is Eric Smith? No idea. In my waking life I don't know any Eric Smith.) Then, I picked some girl, because I am apparently pansexual in my dreams.

But, when they emerged from the crowd, it was a different Eric Smith--no glasses. He stood there, smiling at me, not the person I thought I'd chosen, and then the girl came forward. She walked toward Eric, and he reached out and put an arm around her, and they started kissing. I just stood there like, "What just happened?" Even leftover, odd man out, not-the-right Eric found his match.

And the cheese stands alone.

I woke up in a cold sweat, with my heart pounding, knowing FOR CERTAIN that I don't want to end up at the tippy-top of the parking structure of Life, without having picked somebody.

When I forced Scott to listen to the dream, he said, "Well, there's not too much subtext to figure out there."

Here's why I had that dream:

1. My friend Wendy just recently told me that she knows someone who filled out an eHarmony profile, and was REJECTED. From eHarmony. Millions of people on the site, and a person can just get told, "Sorry, you're on your own"?? I've always assumed that if nothing else works out, there's eHarmony--but MAYBE NOT! This fills me with dread. If eHarmony told me they couldn't find a single match out of millions of profiles, what kind of chance would I stand in 3D? None. None chance.

2. At the grocery store, I told someone I was moving to LA, and she said, "Why not? It's not like you have a baby or anything." Which, though inarguably and wonderfully true, also unsettled me because...

3. I recently read an article about women having babies later in life. It said something like, "What most women don't realize is that their fertility takes a NOSEDIVE in their late twenties, and continues to PLUMMET into their thirties." And isn't that language dramatic?? But also, oh my god, I'm LOSING TIME!!

4. I watched a Paul Newman movie directly before bed. Suffice to say, of all people in the world, ever, he's who I would choose as I ran the levels of any garage--I'd pick him again and again and again. Forsaking all others.

In my waking life, I don't much care if I'm climbing the levels of the parking structure in solitude. I like it fine. But apparently, in my subconscious, I'm going just a little bit crazy.

Daniel would say it's something I ate. My subconscious brain free-associating. Nothing to puzzle over. But I'm puzzling.

In honestude,

Kendall

Well, this is weird. (To me. Maybe not to you. I don't know your life!)

Today was massively uneventful, except for a handful of less than eventful events. Like...I went to the grocery store twice. Twice in one day! Who does that? I'll tell you: people who have terrible pipes (house pipes, not personal pipes, that plumbing works fine if you wanted to know) and yellow water (again, not a euphemism, I mean actual tap water) that gives them soap-mouth and, also, unquenchable thirst from, well, from some salty Cheetos. People who sit on their futon, eyeing the diminishing amount of water left in the last remaining bottle, and realize that if they're going to make it through the night with all its salty snacks, another trip to the grocery store for potable water must transpire.

[I reuse. I fill the same containers again and again.] [Yes, thank you, I feel very good about it.] [Reducing, reusing and recycling are part of my spider-killing, plant-killing, no-platform platform.]

And it's a good thing I went back to the store, because I wandered over to the Paperback Section of the Grocery Store. Warning: I'm about to get a little judgmental. But books are sort of my thing, and everyone should be an elitist snob about something in their life. I'm sorry if you read paperback novels that are sold by the greeting cards at the grocery store, but I think that aisle is where sentences go to DIE. It is like a word graveyard back there, next to the reduced-price greeting cards.

There were so many amazing covers, and so many brilliant titles, particularly with the Harlequin imprint (The Maiden and the Magnate; Too Hot to Handle; The Spaniard's Defiant Virgin). Then, I saw a section with covers that looked like this:

These are apparently part of a growing body of romance novels about pregnant heroines. I'm just surprised. I'm surprised that pregnancy would be so central a factor in bodice-ripping, bosom-heaving romance novels. It's sort of like the first time someone gave me a bacon flavored chocolate bar--never would've thought of it.

Slog-readers, is it a strange connection between the purple prose of Harlequin romance, and the hard physical labor and extreme joy of bringing people into the world? It's weird to me, but so are lots of things.

Ravished and aquiver,

Kendall

Kendall Makes a Surprising (Not Too Surprising) Discovery

Last year, to announce my thesis defense, I printed up a bunch of clown poster that I thought were really funny and cool and weird, and posted them all over the English department. Most everybody else found the posters not so funny, not so cool, but definitely weird. And creepy. I was accused of causing nightmares. I heard more than one person announce how delighted they would be when my thesis defense was over and the awful posters came down.

I was so confused, because I didn't feel frightened by the clowns. If anything, I felt a degree of identification. And yesterday, looking through old photos on my computer, I figured out why:

Me, surprised, at my twenty-fifth birthday party (surprised by not only the birthday party, but also by James Joyce's erotic love-letters to his wife, which were a unique gift from a dear friend who went to the trouble of printing them off the internet):

Chucko the Clown, surprised for reasons unknown:

Apparently, we're related.

Honey is what??

Sometimes, I see something and I find it so thought-provoking and surprising, that I get all fidgety and anxious about who I can tell. Then, I remember. The blog! I can tell the blog.

Blog, listen to this: "Honey is bee vomit too."

I know this not only because someone scrawled the message across a sign outside of the arboretum, but because, after seeing the sign above, I did some serious, hard-nosed research. I pulled up my Google task bar and entered, "honey bee vomit."

Turns out, honey is regurgitated by bees after they consume nectar. If you really want to know (and you do, don't you?), bees consume nectar, and then the nectar hangs out in their "honey stomach," which is different from their other stomach. We're supposed to be comforted by that. Also, once the nectar is turned into honey by the enzymes in the honey-stomach, the bee voluntarily regurgitates it. And we're supposed to take comfort in that too--that the regurgitating is voluntary, which somehow distances it from the involuntary vomit that is totally gross.

Why did someone go to the trouble of writing this message on the "Pets Prohibited" sign? To point out how often something lovely (honey) is linked to something profane (puke!)? To remind us that, in life, the lovely and the ugly are interconnected and mixed together, and you can't have one without the other? Want beautiful flowers or big, tasty vegetables? You'll need some crap to make them grow. Want honey for your tea? Well, some bee is going to have to put its finger down its throat to pull some back up for you. Want love? Well, you're going to have to put up with some crap, too. (And this is supposed to be comforting: the crap we encounter and work through is part of the nature of the thing, and it might--if you follow the metaphor far enough--actually prove nourishing.)

Nourishing like bee vomit. Or manure.

Basely yours,
Kendall

PS: Obviously, the person who tagged the sign was protesting the park's apparent objection to dog poop. I'm pretty sure the arboretum was more concerned with maintaining its trails and keeping animals from wrecking their exotic, delicate plants. Still, I'm happy that person took sharpie to sign. I can't tell you how often in the past few days I've thought to myself, "Honey is bee vomit, too." Try it. See if you don't feel comforted.

Lah-di-dah.

You know how when something sort of awkward and embarrassing happens, and you're humiliated, then you mentally rewrite the embarrassing event as a touching, poignant moment in a charming movie of which you're the star?

Really? You don't?

Last night for instance. I attempted to make my big, Saturday night debut back in Moscow. I was hoping to see people who hadn't seen me for several weeks, and surprise them with how good I looked after my time in the big city. I made my shaggy hair extra large. I put on my legging-jeans, my jeggings, and my cool black boots.

Then, I ran into one individual who I actually, really want to see me looking good and acting normal. (If you know me at all, and especially if you spoke to me even one time in the months of May-June last year, you can guess to whom I refer, and you understand why "acting normal" is imperative).

I came around the corner, all ready to order a nice tall water, because after one hundred glasses of wine I always order a water (I'm responsible like that), and blammo! There he was, at the bar, ordering with his very pretty girlfriend.

Me (desperately cheerful): Oh hi! How are you?
Them (polite): Good, how are you?
Me (idiot!) : I'm good! How are you?
Them (confused. slowly.): Um. We're good.
Me (manic): Good. Good. (to the bartender): Can I please have a glass of water?

Do you see what I did? I totally blew it! I did the "how are you" twice. Like a schmuck. I did not seem cool or especially normal. It might not seem so bad to you, but it feels so bad to me. Because it is added to a mountain, a truly mountainous pile, of other embarrassing events with this person. Like the time I made a lame joke about cheese; or the time I physically ran away while he was talking to me; or that time I flipped him the bird.

So what I've elected to do is rewrite the whole (brief) event, so that it makes me seem all the more endearing and irresistible. I mean, just look at how hard you fall for Annie Hall in this monument to awkward social interactions:



World! I'm not going to let my repetitive, parroty way of greeting people (how are you? how are you? seriously, how are you? squack!), or my lame cheese jokes, or my tendency to flip people the bird, get me down, because I've got this pretty stellar movie going in my mind. And in my movie, I'm a hard to resist, vest wearing, lah-di-dah saying, Annie Hall.

Conveniently, I already have her entire outfit.

Weird Science

Wow! Did you miss me?!? It's like I got to Portland, and I was so busy talking to everybody all about my blog, that I forgot to write the stupid blog! But now, I'm back.

If the next few entries look or smell weird, it's because I'm writing them from Portland. It's different here. Portland is weird. I've come home to celebrate Christmas, but mostly to watch hilarious interactions between my mother's cats (the bulimic one versus the one with cacne, "cat acne"); to do a bunch of laundry for free; and to try to eat more than my brothers. It seems only natural that I blogtalk, for a hot minute, about Portland (though, who are we kidding, I live in Beaverton, which is a whole different ballgame. An altogether boring one).

A classic Portland bumper sticker says, "Keep Portland Weird." (This sticker may have originated in Austin TX, then P-town just changed the name of the city to suit our weird needs.) The slogan is meant to call attention to the fact that Portland is proudly, determinedly weird. Just a few examples: there is a velvet painting museum (I think there might actually be two velvet painting museums). Female strippers here get totally, totally naked. It rains all the time but you hardly ever see an umbrella. We've built a whole city for books. There is a forest in the middle of town. Etc, etc.

But what makes one place weirder than any other? One could argue that Moscow is weird. Is it not weird to live in a city that smells like a sewage treatment facility? A city that has cows with glass windows built into their stomachs? And a billboard outside a gun store that reads, "Your wife said it's okay, Buy a new gun today!"?

Still, I've compiled a list of events that have happened to me here in Portland in the past few days, and have never happened in Idaho.

*Hottest Bod in the USA. I met several friends out on Friday, where we drank fancy drinks, talked about online dating (good), online stalkers (bad), the inevitability that we will all accidentally bonk our future, hypothetical babies' heads on things based on our tendency to bonk our own heads on things (we decided they will turn out fine anyway), and of course, discussed who to vote for in the Hottest Bod in the World contest. This is something that happens when your friend is a public relations guru. JLG represents Bodman fragrance (we've all seen the "Hot bod!" commercials, right?), and she told us to tell the world--I was like, I'm bringing it to my blog, so don't worry, the world will know--to vote. Everyone, vote for Jordy! Not convinced, yet? Watch this video--and be warned, not totally SFW, since it features some awesome objectification of the male body. It is important to be an educated voter. But I think we can all agree that Jordy is the hottest bod.

*Singing Christmas Trees, and Progressive Political Carols. Notorious KMW suggested we go to a bar called the Slammer, because, as she said, "They kind of go all out with the Christmas decorations." She was not lying. I didn't get a photo, but it sort of looked like this, except a dive bar:

While we were there, guess who came in? Some progressive political carolers! They sang a song that went something like this (sung to the tune of "12 Days of Christmas"): "In the first year of Presidency, Obama promised me..." then, there were twelve things that included (I can't remember them all, but I think you'll get the gist): closing Gitmo, repealing the Patriot Act, reforming schools, no home foreclosures, and, instead of "a partridge in a pear tree," they sang, "open gays in the military." I said, "Toto, we're not in Idaho anymore."

Then, the owner of the bar gave the carolers twenty dollars, and the head caroler said, "Alright, now let's go to my Dad's!" And they were gone.

All that Christmas activism made me have to go the bathroom, where in the stall, right next to the toilet, I found a singing, gyrating Christmas tree! The song was an obvious one, "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree," though of course, in the bathroom I had to change the words to "Squattin' Around the Christmas Tree." There was a woman putting on makeup at the sink and I said, "It's weird that this tree is singing to me right now." She said, "Just be thankful you're not really messed up. I was in here last week, and that tree totally freaked me out." I was like, "Keep Portland Weird!"

*Inappropriate karaoke ballads. The progressive political carolers, and the singing Christmas tree in the toilet, got me in the mood to sing, too. So, we went to a karaoke bar where I decided that probably, in honor of Weird Portland, I ought to sing this song to a room full of strangers, with much love and deference paid to Wanya, Nathan, Shawn, and to Michael, above all others:

*POUTINE. Singing that totally seductive karoake ballad made me hungry, and KW said not to worry, that "the carts" were just down the street. I was like, "What are 'the carts'?" And she said, "You know, just a bunch of food carts." I was all, "No, I do not know. Where I live, there is only sometimes a single hot-dog cart that sometimes runs out of hot dogs before you can even place your order." So, we went to The Carts, which was, as she described, a whole wagon train of food carts, circled up, with Christmas lights all around the outside signaling "Come, Eat, Be Merry." So we did.

We ordered poutine from the Potato Champion. Do you know what poutine is? It's french fries, with cheese curds and gravy! It's apparently a French Canadien snack, and it is delicious. To the great dismay of my friends, I took some pictures of the cart, because I think it is the best idea ever that these little food villages are popping up late at night, for people who have gotten really hungry singing all FOUR parts of a Boys II Men song.



Do you notice that the Potato Champion is also the "Department of High Fives"? They were getting high fives right and left (literally, get it, left-handed and right-handed high-fives). I was like, "Weird. Portland is weird."

But synonyms for weird, according to thesaurus.com, include "awe-inspiring," "funky," "kinky," and "magical." Yes, yes, yes and yes.