Dancing Days

Kenna told me to google the dream, so I did.

I don't have anything better to do right now, admittedly. I'm thinking of a photo for today and waiting to take a shower (I just went for an 18-mile bike ride... and it's hot out).

Anyway:

On birds:

To see deformed or odd birds in your dream, indicates that you have a unique outlook and perspective on romance and love. The dream may also represent a lack of understanding in affairs of the heart.

On Asia:

To dream that you are in Asia, suggests that you need to adjust to some situation. If you are traveling to Asia or thinking about visiting Asia, then your dream may indicate your anticipation of such a trip.

To see an Asian person in your dream, represents an aspect of your own self that is unknown to you. Additionally, to see an elderly Asian person, represents wisdom and knowledge.

On airplanes/airports:

To dream that you miss your connection flight, indicates that you are feeling helpless and trapped by some situation. You feel that you are being held back, either physically or mentally. Alternatively, the dream may also suggest that you are feeling disconnected in some aspect of your life - work, relationship or home life.

To see a busy airport in your dream, signifies the desire for freedom, high ideals, ambition, and hopes. It is an indication that you are approaching a new departure in your life. Some new idea is taking off or is ready to take off. You may be experiencing a new relationship, new career path or new adventure.

On being in a taxi or hailing one:

To dream that your are hailing a cab, suggests that you need to ask for help in order to be able to move forward in some waking situation.

To dream that you are in a cab, indicates that you are being taken for a ride. Someone is taking advantage of you.

So... I need to ask an elderly Asian person for help, and they will then take advantage of me?

I'm seriously chuckling at the thought of someone specifically being Asian having ANY kind of meaning. Aren't they just people? What if you're an Asian and there's an Asian person in your dream?! If you're Asian and YOU are in your OWN dream, does it mean that there is always an "aspect of you that is unknown to yourself"?

Also, the site told me what seeing my own grandparents meant, but wtf does it mean if you see someone ELSE'S grandparents?

God, what a total fail!

Strange

I had the strangest dream last night. No, really.

First, Polly and my Dad told me that I could go to the Philippines this summer if I wanted to. I said yes, of course, and we tried to plan it out. I got on the plane to go there and we stopped in Thailand first. We were at some strange kind of wild animal park, but it was part of the city, and I just wandered through alone. I started to feel a little nervous. I saw these strange birds on top of a few poles, and one flew down into my hands. It started to burrow, and created a little suction pocket so that it was actually stuck to my hands. They were like some strange combination of cat and bird. Other people noticed and did the same thing. I realized I didn't have my camera with me and started to freak out a little bit, and decided to go back to the hotel or whatever to make sure I'd left it there. I saw a few people I knew on the way out (I think that was part of a different dream, though).

Somehow, I ended up instead at the Manila airport (though in my dream it wasn't SUPER ghetto). I was going to catch my flight home. I went through security and everything and then I realized that I didn't have any of my luggage or my passport, and that I couldn't go home. I started freaking out a little. I took a shower in the airport bathroom (which had showers?) and walked around in a towel. I ran out of the airport dripping wet and wrapped in it, trying to find a taxi. I didn't have any luck on the top floor (where you catch the airport-endorsed ones), and instead people just gawped at barely-dressed me, so I went outside and ran down to the front of the building, which looked more like a courthouse or something from outside. All of these kids were in some weird kind of internal part of the first floor, having a party. I tried to talk to one of my friends and ask for help but she was on drugs. There was a creepy-ass basement thing with a strange elevator of sorts that was more like a small metal cage, but I quickly realized that was incorrect because you couldn't take your luggage up or down it.

I stood around on the street for awhile, trying to see a taxi to hail. Found one, waved my arms like a maniac, and he came over. He wouldn't take me back to my hotel unless he could see my passport. As I talked to him, a car full of Indians was making fun of my rapid arm movements and laughing disdainfully. I was crying and I didn't know what to do and I confronted them. They told me that my smooth-talking skills were lacking, and that I should've been able to get him to give me a ride. I asked where I could catch a taxi that wouldn't make me show a passport, and they said that the only other place was across the street. We all crossed the street (?) and I started to talk to them. I said I was nervous because I wasn't supposed to take taxis alone (totally true, who knows where they might take you?) but didn't have a choice, and that I only had a few hours or I would miss my flight and not be able to get home. They softened a little towards me and understood more. We talked for awhile, and they were still kind of mean, but not as mean. Then I looked at my phone and realized that the time it listed was 1 pm, and my flight was at 4, but my clock was actually off. Kevin told me the real time was 4 and I had to just scrap the whole "catching my flight" idea.

After awhile I realized that we were actually in the Indian grandfather's limo, heading who-knows-where. It was packed full of strange people. Kevin was there, somehow, and I asked him when HE planned on going home, since I was trying to leave as soon as possible. He didn't understand when I told him I was trying to rebook and I had to tell him like twenty times. We got back to my room (incidentally, it was the REAL room I stayed in in Manila last year) and I straightened it out.

I don't know how anything resolved, but when I got home I realized that my parents had been playing tons and tons of computer games in my absence, because there was a scoresheet tacked up on the fridge.

Shut it off!

I am really kind of scared about what the next three months are going to be.

I cannot, cannot, cannot be my mother's therapist. And yet I'm the only person around, and so it's falling on me.

I am completely and utterly the wrong person. I can cope with this objectively. I can't cope with it when you tell me every single detail of how fucking terrible you feel and how awful my father is UGH. I want to scream. I am SO incredibly fucking angry but there's nothing I can do about it. It's misplaced rage that can't be released, ever, because I can't hurt you anymore than you're already hurt.

This is so fucking unfair. I feel like everything in my life is conspiring to ruin my happiness. What the fuck?! Finally I'm intrinsically, actually happy, and finally I feel at peace, and that's when everyone else in my life decides to try to make me as fucking miserable as they possibly can.

I'm okay. Sigh.

A Mini-Project of Sorts

I started another 365-ish project, except it's just for the summer this time. I'm on day 20.



It's a relief to have a real camera now, instead of a point-and-shoot. The results are so much more satisfying.

Summer is usually a big long period of reflective thought, for me. A lull. What the hell am I going to do when I'm a part of the real world and get two weeks of vacation a year, tops? That'll be fun.

I've been thinking back to my past selves and musing upon how distanced I feel from them. I was never the kid who wore her search for self on her skin. I wore what felt right, nothing crazy. No statements, just a nice shell. I didn't go through those phases. I was never a punk, or a skater, or a goth, or even one of those middle school nerds (I was nerdy, but not in the same way). I did start listening to Sonic Youth and Elliott Smith in seventh grade, but that's something else entirely.

Instead of trying on different clothes, I tried different outlets of expression, different modes of being. Nothing ever seemed to stick. I read a book every day in elementary school, absorbed in fantasy worlds, devouring anything that fell into my lap. I miss that. I played sports - soccer and then basketball and then softball, for five or six years. It stopped being fun. I used to write poems everyday; I used to think in verses, stumbling upon couplets in the middle of the night. I wanted to be a writer, but my stories petered out and died in the middle, and the characters never had the ring of truth. I stuck with poetry longer, but I don't do that anymore. I remember when that was "my thing." My teachers would coo over them and praise me, have me read them aloud (while I died of embarrassment, seriously), submit them to contests. I was good. And then I just... stopped. I didn't know what to write about anymore. I was smart enough to know that my angst was dumb but too young to have anything substantial to write about.

Impasse.

I played piano and then violin for six years, but as with everything else, I just kind of hit a wall. I was good but nothing more than that, and I didn't enjoy it enough to be more than that. Our house is full of the flotsam from my attempts at self-actualization.

Eventually I found photography, and I think that's the one that's stuck. For eight years now, I think. I think it allows me to look for what my poetry was getting at all along - capturing a moment, evoking a visual, restructuring a sublime mental image. The paralysis I felt with everything else - the inability to fully express what I meant because of my own limitations or because of the medium's - is generally eliminated. Photos can be a halfway point between reality and theory, and I think the constraints inherent in the medium make it more challenging and fun.

I don't know, but I think I've found it. I can't think of a medium of expression that would better suit my personality, or something I would be happier doing for the rest of my life.

Unemployment Blues

Kevin and I saw a turtle yesterday when we went for a walk. He was cute, and couldn't run away. HA.

Anyway, the job hunt is going shitsauce. I kind of figured it would. I got offered interviews while I was still at school and then they'd hired everyone by the time I could come in person.

I don't really know what to do. I'm pretty sure trying brick-and-mortar stores is going to be a crapshoot. I've just kind of been browsing craigslist, which actually seems to be working better. We'll see, I guess.

I'm not sure how much I care whether or not I make money this summer, which might be problematic for my parents. I don't know what to tell them.

Money made so far this summer: $88 in photo royalties. Received one large photo of my face, a weird book, and a $40 computer manual as compensation. So far, my hobby has been paying off in the form of weird odds and ends and foreign magazines. I should have a shelf devoted to it. Maybe if I put some more stuff up for sale I can make at least a little more. Better than nothing.

I'm kind of feeling like this will be a summer of odd jobs. I don't know what else to do. I should just try phone sex, really. That shit pays a lot and the stories would be great.

In other, MUCH BETTER news:

1. My sister got a cat! His name is Laurence and I am SO jealous.

2. KENNA IS COMING IN A FEW DAYS OH MY GOD OH MY GOD I AM SO HAPPY

:D

Back in the US

I don't know how to feel (not about being back from the UK, just about life in general).

It feels kind of like watching a bad movie that will just end, eventually. As though it's life projected onto an astral screen.

I feel intrinsically happy but also frustrated and helpless. I want out, a little. I want a year to pass.

What purpose in these deeds, oh fox confessor, please?

My parents are pretty much getting divorced.

If not officially, in every other sense of the word.

I've seen this coming since I was ten, but it I can't make it stop hurting. When I'm at school I can ignore it. When I come home, my mother is an emotional wreck and my father is just gone.

It's no one's fault.

Life is shitty sometimes.

I shouldn't be that upset, because I can't do anything about it and I'm getting older and soon I won't come home for extended periods of time and it won't matter if my parents live in the same house or are together. I shouldn't be upset because I had a great childhood and a fantastic relationship with both of them which is more than most people can hope for.

Part of me wants to break things and just sob and sob, but a larger part of me recognizes the futile nature of getting deeply upset over this. Life is not perfect; sometimes things that really suck just happen and you have to deal with them. There isn't really another option.

I kind of wish I didn't know that. I want to act out or be awful or just run away from it. I am jealous of my sister for being older and out of the house and more distant from it emotionally. I want it to be three years from now when things have worked out. I hate being confronted with the ugly reality of someone I love feeling totally shattered, left trying to pick up the pieces and start over at 55. I don't want to be the one comforting my mother; I don't want to feel like someone needs me. I don't want to know that she doesn't want me to feel this way but that there's no other way for me to feel. I don't want to see the faults in people I really, really love or see them wound one another or have either of them cast in an evil light.

I can't put my finger on what part is breaking my heart. My parents are human and there is no point in placing blame, and realistically things might not change that much. They'll probably be happier in the end.

I think it's just the feeling of "home" crumbling apart, the death of a concept and the realization that what I thought the future would be is not what will actually happen. It has to happen sometime.

I feel like I'm falling into ice water every time I think about it.