Maura's Illuminated Manuscript

Three tea bags, even if all consumed before noon, will rob me of sufficient sleep. Dang it. Two it is.

At the tail end of last night's sufficient sleep, I dreamt that I was in something like the house that I grew up in as it was taking a direct hit from a hurricane. Water poured in through the corner of the ceiling above the front window. I tried to keep the double front doors from getting ripped off their hinges, but I only succeeded with one of them. As the wind died down, one of my brothers-in-law walked up and we heard a sprinkler spraying.
"Is that a sprinkler?" I asked.
"Yup. Some people just have to water."
We laughed.

Context? The house where I grew up in had its roof replaced a few years ago, plus some repairs to the kitchen ceiling. Good Sister corrected my memory of that just the other day. Even though I lived in Florida for seventeen years, I never lived through a storm that bad; indeed, I was far enough inland that nothing that bad has happened there in my lifetime, even with the ravages of global warming.

Bad: I woke up at 0500 from...

Bad: ...a nightmare wherein I caught COVID.

Bad: I'm wearing leggings and a bathrobe right now. I am not overly warm.

Bad: I discovered yesterday evening that my son didn't know the difference between streaming and downloading. He's on my cell phone plan, so I'm paying for all the streaming via cellular that he does while he walks his mother's dog, waits for the bus, etc. "Digital natives" my butt.

Good: There were no disasters during my little on call shift yesterday.

Good: I leave for San Francisco this afternoon to go to the Folsom Street Fair. I think this one is the really important takeaway from this entry.

Good: I'm half packed already.

Good: I got seven hours' sleep, even with waking up early.

Good: I have turned off the alarm on my phone.

Good: It's rained, so I don't need to water the outdoor plants.

Thinking ahead to the road trip to scatter our parents, I texted Good Sister to ask which is her favorite DC-area airport, seeing as how she's lived there for a while now. There are three to choose from – DCA*, IAD, and BWI – and I've only ever used the first.

She said first choice is DCA followed by IAD, however, she'll have to go to Gainesville, FL to pick up Mom's remains; I have a dim memory of her saying that the US Postal Service refuses to (knowingly) transport human remains. This may mean that I have to fly to Florida to meet her, and we'll drive to Virginia from there. I'm not crazy about that idea because

1. Fuck my home state and its current fascist government.
2. I don't relish the longer drive, even with my sister whom I haven't seen in person in at least four years.
3. That longer drive takes us through much of the length of Georgia, which has been a scary place for a long time.

The irony here is that the drive from Gainesville to the Blue Ridge was a joyous one when we were children: there were grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and mountains at the end of it, and possibly that exotic phenomenon, snow.

And my whole immediate family showed up in the dream I just woke up from. Mom, lucid and standing with me and Good Sister. Mom asked me, "Why do you tell [GS] all this?"
"Because she's up here** and she speaks to me," I replied. I could see through some kind of joint in a partition that Evil Sister was watching me. For a split second, we made eye contact. She looked much younger than she is.
After Mom, GS, and I walked our separate ways, ES caught me in a hallway and hugged me. She was wearing something funky, with lots of brightly colored details; no one in my family has ever dressed like that. I cried in the dream, and I woke up crying. I blame last night's estrogen shot.



*I will not use the current official name of DCA.
**In the way of dreams, we were all living in the same general area. That hasn't been true in at least forty years.

I hate nightmares. They mess with the rest of my life. I'm lucky my employer is cool with my coming in late, having gotten reasonable sleep.

I hate dating. No, sweet thang, I'm not giving you my phone number so soon even if you're cute and don't seem like a bot. I've had it abused by an apparent nut in the past, and it could be misused.

I hate cancer. Taller Woman is going in for a biopsy that she says is not routine. When I met her years ago, her hair was just starting to grow back from chemo.

And once again, I hate the cold and dark, literal and otherwise.

Do you repeatedly encounter in your dreams the same places your waking self knows you've never been to? And do they involve a lot of stairs up into an attic or down into a basement? I dreamt last night that I was at Re-bar*, only it didn't look like Re-bar and there was a dungeon in the basement. Yes, that kind of dungeon. I'd dreamt of it before.

Fun fact: I didn't live in a place with a basement or attic until I was 19. I can't help but wonder if they have a stronger hold on my imagination than they do for people who grew up with them.



*Re-bar was, until a few months ago, a beloved kinda-gay bar in Seattle that also played host to a lot of theater. Nirvana got themselves kicked out of there in 1990.

I keep coming back to that dream I had last Thanksgiving wherein Trump died. It featured a man with a German accent speaking. I was reminded of this after I watched Arnold Schwarzenegger's video the other day.

And speaking of US politics, now that it's winter I walk around my neighborhood quite a bit because it's too wet to ride. My ZIP code is pretty solidly rich White liberals — think Buddhist prayer flags, kumbaya lefty signage, and nosebleed house prices. So naturally there are tons of Biden signs around*. Note the tense of that verb: not one has been taken down yet. I guess they'll stay up as long as the people who put them there think they need to. If I had one, I wouldn't take it down either.

But speaking of something completely different, I'm on the HER dating app. Yeah, I had a creepy experience when it first launched, but I decided to give it another shot. I keep getting friend requests from much younger women, like 20 to 30 years younger. They don't have any bio on their profiles, but their photos look plausible. I haven't responded to most of them. Honestly, what the actual? Are they looking for hookups during a pandemic? Are they doing smarter-than-average catfishing? Are they chasers? Or are they just lonely? Big mystery.



*I think my favorite is, "Flush the turd November 3rd."

This is one of those times when I feel like I should post something, but I don't really have anything to post. Here goes:

1. Good Sister says her efforts to get Mom's long-term care insurance switched back to the way it was before she was under guardianship have run into stonewalling from the insurance company; she forwarded a letter that was basically a long, detailed "Screw you."
2. So GS is flying to Florida, which I'm really not thrilled about, to meet with our hotshot lawyer about next steps re: the LTCI and, of course, the reverse mortgage. Good Sister herself is running up against a court-imposed deadline that she wasn't aware of until recently to put a big chunk of Mom's assets someplace less liquid.
3. A sex dream about a certain much-younger queer of my acquaintance. Ahem.
4. Speaking of sexy stuff, my wrist issue has returned.
5. Work: still ass. Looking forward to some time off.
6. I've been doing Duolingo Spanish for the last month because like so many of us, I have time on my hands.

I had two Christmas dinners: an early one at a Chinese restaurant with the Wendling, Ex, and a bunch of her relations; then another one at R&Js. Both were tasty. Taken together, they were pretty filling. Uff da.

The above probably explains why I had a nightmare about a giant asteroid - 700 miles wide, which would make it among the largest in the solar system - coming close to Earth. Actually, rigel_p's annual presence in the area may have something to do with that too, along with a depiction I recently saw of dinosaurs getting blown around by the Chicxulub impact.

And this morning's oddity was a call from Mom - often cause for alarm - while I was riding my bike. While I was at her house a week ago, one of her neighbors had stopped by to invite Mom over. Mom wasn't home, so I took the invitation. Mom said this neighbor, who'd never met me, said I looked good.

But then Mom also said that my Aunt H had told her that she (Aunt H) had also told me I looked good. The thing is, Aunt H hasn't spoken to me in decades. And Mom told me years ago that Aunt H doesn't approve of my changing sex, so it would have been pretty unlikely anyway. Aunt H is a schizophrenic; my mom has advancing dementia. Which one of them is hallucinating? My money's on Mom.

...you dream that you really have to pee, and one or two people with English accents tell you where the bathroom is, but when you get there, the toilet is shooting water out of the bowl and it falls into a basin, apparently by design, so you have no idea how you're going to use the damn thing?

No? You don't know?

Well, if you ever do, you'll probably wake up needing to pee badly at 0415 as did yours truly this morning. Hey, it's better than Monday morning's 0338.

Suuuper messed-up nightmare involving my son coming entering into a suicide pact with some dude I didn't recognize. I ended up complaining about it to Kate Winslet, who was sympathetic, but that didn't make it not a nightmare.

I'm hoping it was just the spicy goodness from Thaiku.