3rd House Journal

Dream lines

Dreamed I was washing my face with a warm stock of broccoli.
Dreamed I sat between two men, holding their hands.
Dreamed I considered sprinkling pot on my take-out sandwich, but was afraid I wouldn't be able to drive.

Work, again

Tightly balled in a word-woven clot, working, source-citing through the night, waking with an urge to uncurl and grow wings.

Body painting

A large white sheet on the floor, the performance artist rolls herself in paint and then bounces horizontally across, rolling, leaving prints in the shape of large cigars, mummies. Then she rolls in another color and bounces across again. Each color is for a nationality, and its human rights abuses. The audience murmurs in approval. "Yes, I am from Honduras," a man says, after she leaves olive-green prints across the sheet. At the end, the performance artist is left panting with the effort. I wake up panting.

Anyone for a frigid round of golf?

Friday night, fatigue and an endlessly throbbing elbow (apparently golfer's elbow, minus the golf part), devolved into general meltdown, extending into Saturday morning. In between, the dream worms did their best to churn through, pushing up indigestible bits, rancid old bones gnawed and gnawed but still there and still nowhere to put them.

The frigid temps outdoors were uninviting, but eventually I had to get dressed, bundle up, and go out to meet a friend who'd promised to help me pick out new glasses at the optician's (I have FSA money to burn through by the end of the year). Her college-age daughter showed up, wanting lunch at Za just up the street, so we ended up having lunch out, too, which was unexpected and delightful. A freshman at Northeastern, M has blossomed from a disinterested student and difficult teen into a focused and charming young woman. It made me ridiculously wistful. Where did all the time go? How did I waste so much time? Sigh.

This morning I have a brunch/housewarming to go to, followed by a walk with my walking group, despite wind chills in the teens. But I think Beth is right about the need to get out and move and do upbeat things. Maybe I've just been getting SAD.

[Lunch (or what's left of it) at Za in Arlington; 3pm, 11/22/08]

Rewind

I dream of driving a cart through dry fields buzzing with insects, backwards, using a mirror to steer clear of obstacles, people, stopping just shy of a ditch. Happy.

Sorting

I am rearranging the furniture in a place I'm apparently moving into. My brother is there, and we move a tattered old couch, looking for somewhere out of the way to put it. The apartment is very cluttered, and the white walls are scuffed and need painting. But squinting out all the stuff, it's a fine space. Just needs a bit of heavy lifting, sorting, elbow grease.

I read that rearranging furniture means sorting out priorities and conclusions within the mind. I buy that.

Heat and Dust, and Consequences

It appears that my condo simply will not sell with my tenants still in it, and not without a thorough painting and re-carpeting and a few other fixes. That's just to sell at around market value, maybe less. That's the straight talk I got from my realtor early yesterday morning when I went out to meet with him at the condo.

I realize that I'm lucky compared to people who are losing everything now, owing money after selling. I have equity after 20 years, though much less than I should have because of refinancing to survive during all my years of being a starving freelancer. I do have a line of credit to draw on to pay for renovations. I have no savings. After the tenants move out this summer - and for however long it takes to sell the place - I'll be paying the mortgage, etc. there while also paying full rent for my own place when I move out from living with K. Rents are very high here; things would have been tighter even without adding the condo to cover. Alternatively, I could continue to rent it out for another year (or two, or three) while the place slowly falls apart, opening up my wallet up whenever anything breaks. I'm disinclined to continue to be an absentee landlord. I'm also disinclined to share another apartment when I move. I'll be 50 this fall. Can I please now have my own place to myself?

---

I dragged myself out to a movie event last night, meeting people first at a local restaurant. I'm so glad I went. I forgot about everything else. We saw the 1983 movie Heat and Dust at the Harvard Film Archive, which has been running a series on Merchant Ivory Productions in India. James Ivory was there (he's about 80 now, and still producing and directing movies) and spoke before the film and answered questions afterwards. Like the movie itself, he took awhile to get warmed up during the question session, but he had some interesting things to say about how he came to shoot films in India (he and Ismael Merchant, who died in 2005, did several films in India), how he is written about as an English filmmaker (he's American), his collaborations with Merchant and the writer Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, and so forth. He said that he could never shoot films in India today (presumably, like the ones he has shot) because India has changed so much.

---

Visiting the heat and dust of the film for two hours or so was a welcome little vacation from the freezing cold in Cambridge last night. The wind chill must have been in the single digits, this in the last few days of March. Sigh. At least we were fortified for our walk over to the HFA by the good hot, spicy food we had at Tanjore, chosen for its ability to accommodate a large table of people, but fortuitously Indian. Also by chance, I took with me on the T the novel I'm reading, Brick Lane, about Bengali immigrants living in London. It's more about the life of one Bangladeshi woman and her family and community than about culture clash (at least at halfway through), but the most similar theme between it and the movie is the status of women (see Roger Ebert's review), their romantic choices as acts of dissent, and the consequences of those choices.

---

I woke this morning dreaming not of India but of my condo living room, filled with scaffolding, ladders, drop cloths, and dripping with paint. I could smell the latex.

Settling, thickly

[Intersection; 12:30pm, 1/27/08]

Emerging from the stupor of my cold virus this weekend, I had another wave of idiotic bliss in the midst of grimy urban/suburban life in all its glory. I drove to the grocery store Sunday in the slush-dirty snow -- my grocery store, where I now know where to find things, more or less, where I'm familiar with the quirky cashiers, where I know the unofficial cross/no-cross pedestrian rules of the parking lot. To get there, I first have to navigate the side streets in my neighborhood, which are really too narrow to park on and it's not allowed overnight, but come daylight people do park on the street, creating a slalom course or dodge-'ems ride to get through.

[Benches across from the grocery store]

I felt it again on my way to J's Sunday afternoon, just a couple of miles away through a bit of jostling Sunday traffic to the quiet snow-covered streets of her neighborhood. She had a nice party. J's daughter T and her adorable (and typically active) 3-year-old grandson were there, along with T's very tall and very handsome Turkish husband. T told me about visiting Istanbul and how much she loved it, her enjoyment of the Turkish women she met, how she'd move there in an instant if her husband wasn't so attached to Boston.

[J shares Ben & Jerry's Heath Bar Crunch with her grandson; 8pm, 1/27/08]

Although there was only the one small child at the party (3 years old but already as tall as a 5-year-old), something must have stuck in my brain. I woke this morning dreaming of many small boys playing a game to lodge themselves in my windowsills. Most were on the outside of the house, but I found a couple of them trying to fit into my inside windowsills and I had to shoo them out.

Dumbstruck

Waking between Nyquil-drugged sleep interludes, I find I've been traveling. The other night I visited Dave in Plummer's Hollow where he had some hilarious nonsense verse hanging in the air, but I couldn't salvage a word of it when I got back. Last night I visited someone I used to go out with and I wanted to express my feelings for him but all around his house were beautiful, creative things his new wife had decorated the place with, and he seemed happy, so I left and woke up happy too.

Which was very good, because yesterday I felt really lousy. I left work early and went to bed before dinner and soon again after. On the emailed advice of my Chinese medicine person, I began taking my regular homeopathic remedy in water, which may have helped because I felt much better today. I wore down by mid-afternoon, but at least I feel on the mend now. Still whispering all day, by 5:45pm I had to call my yoga teacher to say I wouldn't make it tonight and, lo and behold, I was able to produce enough sound from my inflamed vocal chords to be audible. He understood -- both my squeakings and why I couldn't make it yet again, having missed last week's class at the start of my cold. I'm shooting for Thursday night for a makeup class. I expect to be on speaking terms again by then.

From the 'Could be worse" files...

I dreamed last night that I began an illicit love affair with Javier Bardem. I presume this one needs no interpretation. :-)