After flying in, I had left my luggage on the subway track, both suitcases. I was almost certain they’d been retrieved and were waiting at lost and found, but no one would drive me back to the airport to pick them up. I continued to text the lost and found system and received messages alerting me of the status of my luggage, but none confirmed that my belongings were safe.

I struggled in vain to obtain this luggage for the duration of my trip, which teetered magically between riding with my sister in brightly colored minibuses on improbably steeply tilted stone roads overlooking an ocean (we got out once to climb the stairs of a bell tower and, as I looked down on the rugged drop, I feared for my safety) and my parents’ living room, where I didn’t have any change of clothes — my suitcases remaining as they did on the subway tracks or adjacent lost and found.

We ate raw limes as my parents prepared my sister to return to Seattle and I voiced jealousy of all the help she got in moving. “You’re on the east coast,” my mom said, “if you were here, we’d help you too.” Yet every time I tried to get someone to take me to the airport to fetch my luggage, they delayed or demurred, and I remained stuck.

While I was away, my neighbor sent me a Tumblr message to inform me that the gnome in my back lot was missing, and my reaction was, “He follows me on Tumblr! Oh no! That means he’s seen all my posts mentioning him having loud sex.” Still the specter of my retrieved luggage haunted me.

Suddenly I was walking through a mall, set in a desert, with a boy who (in real life) is trying to date me. We were en route to try outs for a band that would play in Cambodia and I really wanted to make it, but he was trying to persuade me to stop by his place (located in the mall) for a drink. I didn’t want, to because I knew we’d get drunk and miss the audition, but I couldn’t stop myself.

I woke up while we were still in the middle of the mall, me trying to resist being pulled away from the audition but stuck with the sinking feeling I’d fail.

There was a bird and a fox, and they were good friends, but the fox would never admit to the bird how much he cared about her, and it made her sad.

One day she had to go on a long trip and before she left, the fox, in a moment of weakness, nuzzled the bird’s beak with his nose. The bird said that she loved the fox, but the fox couldn’t say how he felt. This made the bird more sad, but she didn’t say anything, she just left on her long trip.

She was gone so long, the fox thought she would never come back, and he became sad. He thought about how he had taken the bird for granted and hadn’t been honest about how much he cared, and he thought he’d never have another chance.

Then one day, the bird flew back, and the fox was delighted. Bird, he said, I missed you so much! And you were right, we have a very special friendship, and I love you too. And then he nuzzled the bird’s beak with his nose again, and they were both happy.

I’m not making this up. This was literally my dream last night. Who wants to illustrate the soon-to-be-hit children’s story of the bird and the fox?

youngmanhattanite:

etceterawhatever:

and I was still in law school, and I missed my first class on my first day of classes on my final semester. He thought it was because I got drunk even though that wasn’t the case. So he gave me a lecture on how I needed to be more responsible and set better boundaries, and cited my lavish dinner parties as an example of my irresponsible excess.

Was he wearing a t-shirt that said “Another Child Executed By Your Police”?

No, he was watching a rom com. Also I believe his exact words were something like, “I’ve spoken to my friends, and they’re scandalized by the lavishness of your dinner parties.”

and I was still in law school, and I missed my first class on my first day of classes on my final semester. He thought it was because I got drunk even though that wasn’t the case. So he gave me a lecture on how I needed to be more responsible and set better boundaries, and cited my lavish dinner parties as an example of my irresponsible excess.

Complete with sound. I woke up with the tune of her “new song” in my head.

It was a breakup song, LG sadly leaving a good man she loved because they weren’t right for each other. One of the lines was, “And so I tell my Everything, goodbye, Everything.” (Somehow I knew in the dream that “everything” was supposed to be capitalized.) Another line was something like “Just because you wouldn’t have left me / doesn’t mean we are meant to be.”

There was a scene where it looked like she had two heads, one with a huge pile of white dreadlocks and the other a mirror image, but with black dreadlocks. Like she was her own Siamese Twin. In another scene she looked remarkably like short-haired Michelle Williams; wore a really simple dress; and sang plainly and sadly, directly into the camera.

nybg:

We’re not alone in trying to puzzle out the weird weather of 2011. In England apple trees are still bearing fruit, and many plants are sporting a second round of blossoms and fruit.

Weird. This picture just triggered a memory of a dream I had last night, in which my NYC apartment had a yard full of fruit trees, many of which were bearing fruit now, in January, in particular, some luscious plums.

I dreamed I was living in an enormous, kind of woodsy two level five bedroom apartment with only 2 other people and we thought about renting out the other two rooms but one guy was like, nah, I’m allergic to cats, and those rooms are my cat-free rooms. So we were like ok, we won’t. We’ll just go swimming in the enormous pool in our backyard instead. Totally normal.

I think this apartment/swimming pool have appeared in my dreams before. They must be lodged in my neural circuits somewhere. I wonder what they mean.

about that dream I had the other night where we collectively created this infographic about wealth disparity and money in politics in the US … in the form of a Christmas tree. I think there were ornaments that represented different groups’ financial holdings & input? 

A long time ago, a man would listen in amazement to the sound of regular beats in his chest, never suspecting what they were. He was unable to identify himself with so alien and unfamiliar an object as the body. The body was a cage, and inside that cage was something which looked, listened, feared, thought, and marveled; that something, that remainder left over after the body had been accounted for, was the soul.

- Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

***

Last night I dreamt I was stranded in the open during a magnificent lightning and thunderstorm. Glass shattered; buildings shook; I was in mortal danger. I awoke from a deafening clap of thunder, although it was not storming outside my real Brooklyn apartment, then heard the sound of a rapid, regular pulsing echoing into my head against the sheets of my bed. It took a few frantic breaths to realize it was my own heartbeat, quickened with the residual fear from the dream.

• Lots of lightning was visible from our (above ground) subway car
• Likewise, the car was moving side to side quite a bit, more than, say, is typical of the 2/3 or even the C
• We all checked our iPhones to find out what was happening
• The weather app had an icon showing that the end of the world was happening
• I determined that I had to immediately go to Long Island - to use up a groupon for a helicopter tour of New York City before the world ended and I didn’t have a chance
• I tried to drive there in my rental car
• My mother (who lives in Washington state) suddenly appeared and lectured me that I was using the rental car longer than the time for which I had rented it, and would therefore incur major fees. Hence, she would drive me to Long Island.
• Long Island quickly morphed into po-dunk eastern Washington state, where I’m from.
• We went shopping.