Time Warp

Found a old notebook with some sporadic "journal entries." From one dated March 28, 2010:

When people ask me what I aspire to be, I'd like to say, "I think that ambitious people are the most dangerous people on the planet. I think that ambition is one of the most dangerous forces in the world. I wish to be one less ambitious person. I wish to reduce the number of ambitious people in the world by one. It's my dream."

To 21-year-old me: You'd be pleased to know that excess ambition is the very least of your worries. Also, improve your handwriting. It's terrible.

 Good to know that while it may seem like I am unmotivated,  I'm actually just fulfilling my dreams.

Dream Salad...and Other Things...But Mostly Dream Salad

Via this blog, via google image search for "dream salad"

Dream Salad
 I have always been fascinated by dreams. Apparently most people are not? I've heard people say that dreams are the kind of things that are only interesting to the people that have them, and no one else. I disagree! I have a bad habit of asking people about their dreams, and then badgering people for ever more details until they want to kill me. If you want to talk about your dreams but are facing an unreceptive audience, get in touch with me.

Why do I love dreams so much, you ask? Well, I ask, why don't other people love dreams more? Personally, I am amazed that my unconscious mind can devise nutso scenarios that my conscious brain is not even aware of.

I started writing my dreams down in a little notebook (sporadically) this winter with mixed success. The idea is that you wake up and immediately record your dreams while they are still fresh in your mind. But I'm really lazy, so I never wake up early enough to have time to both record my dreams and get ready for work. Normally I record my dreams once I get to work. Sometimes I wait until even later in the evening. Sometimes I even put it off for a day or two. Invariably, I forget a lot of dream details. But then, dream details are almost impossible to capture in words anyway.

So today at work, I was recording a dream I had over the weekend in my little dream notebook. The dream begins with me in the cafeteria of my elementary school. I am eating a chef salad out of a beige plastic bowl (reasonable). There is iceberg lettuce, and boiled eggs, and cheese, and ham. When my dream pals and I finish up lunch, we go exploring in the school's old creepy basement (not reasonable). We open a door and unleash a dark force that can only be described as a Shadow Lion (not even sort of reasonable). The Shadow Lion chases us, and we try to hide in a library (reasonable, but my school did not have a library), the perimeter of which is entirely surrounded by a narrow catwalk (not reasonable). The Shadow Lion gets into the library and chases us around the catwalk, but it eventually gets stuck behind an obstruction on the catwalk (not logical) and my dream pals and I get away.

But I don't want to talk about fictional Shadow Lions. I want to talk about real salads. This little detail was fully elucidated when I recorded my dream today. Suddenly it occurred to me that, at some point, my elementary school actually offered salad as a an alternative to hot lunch. It was real! The long forgotten salad option!

So what happened was: I remembered something in my dream that my waking, conscious mind had forgotten! Or, in more imaginative terms: My dreams were sending me messages from my past! Or something. I don't know. But I feel like this is profound. Not the salad, exactly, but what it represents.

There are a handful of settings in which a lot of my dreams take place. Now I'm wondering if these places are actually real places (or at least representative of real places)  I went to (or saw?) as I child that I no longer consciously remember. For example, I've had a few dreams that take place in a museum with a sand sculpture and a big hour glass. Maybe I actually remember a museum with a sand sculpture and big hour glass? Which elements of my dreams are ridiculous fabrications of my mind, and which are ridiculous memories? Wow. So many new dream layers. THINK ABOUT IT.

Blogging
So. I'm starting to think that this trend of personal blogs (of which I am casually participating) is seriously the worst thing. Even I, with my amateurish, rarely updated, prefab layout-ed blog, have found myself turning disturbingly inward for blog content. Some introspection is healthy, but I think that I, at times, am partaking in lethal levels of self-involment with this blog. And I don't even include pictures of my face!

Oh, the face pictures. So many, on every post. And the staged photoshoots of, like, picnics. And bike rides. And walking down the street. I'm so confused by this. Sometimes I see pictures of bloggers crossing the street. Do they stop in the middle and ask someone to take their picture? Do they set up a tripod? In the middle of the street? I just can't imagine it, and I just wrote like 400 words on dreaming about salad!

I think that having a successful blog has the potential to change how you look at the world (in a bad way). For example, I was reading this really terrible (but popular) DIY/fashion/lifestyle blog the other day, when I came across a post titled something like "10 ways to wear a scarf." It was like: Tie it around your head! Tie it around your neck! ect, ect. You just know that the blog author, desperate for content, was putting on a scarf when and thought to herself, "Yes. That's it. This will work."

And then in the comments, all these girls are like "Wow. So inspirational. I never thought of wearing a scarf around my neck before!" But what I think they really mean (whether they know it or not) is "I never thought that you could write a fucking blog post about how to wear a scarf and publish it on an income-generating blog." Because yeah. Now that I think about it, this is really kind of brilliant.

It just seems like you'd reach a point where you'd start  experiencing the world in terms of what could potentially be, or could not potentially be, blog content. So instead of going on a whimsical picnic and then blogging about it, you go on a whimsical picnic so you can blog about it.

I am no where near that point because a.) I write one blog post a month, b.) maybe two or three people read my blog,  c.) I don't include pictures, and d.) I don't really write about the day-to-day. But it's the principal of the thing, of writing about the details of your life as though someone would want to read it.

I started writing here when I was really lonely and did not want to drive my remaining friends away with my bitching and inanities. But now I have, miraculously, managed to meet some new people and I find myself with less of a need to take my Europe stories and dumb reflections to the internet. I had pretty much resolved to delete this blog when the salad dream happened. The internet needed the salad dream.

So, I guess the blog will remain, new content pending whether or not I have additional incredible epiphanies that must be shared. But, I will never include pictures of my face. Never.

Social Media and Me

It is 2012, and I go online to learn how to be. So now I say and write things like "lady friends" and "because ___," omitting the pronoun for trendiness. And when I feel really overwhelmed by my hatred of something, I proclaim that "I just cannot." I learn a whole new language with its own grammar and its own idioms, but pretty much none of my friends and definitely none of my family speaks it.

And I also learn that striped sailor shirts are appropriate in any situation and probably no one can ever have enough. And that matte nail polish is slowly being replaced by shimmer nail polish on the hands of all the cool (but adequately self-effacing) girls.

I fall in love with the babies of strangers and am shocked by the changes in strangers' lives. And I look at rage-enducing things for hours because the anger feels so good. And I look at stuff I hate for hours because it is really stuff I want. And then I open my mouth to tell real people about it, and I learn that this requires that I speak in a weird pidgin, an inelegant mixture of my new language and my old one. But then I realize that it doesn't matter, because real people have no idea what I'm talking about regardless.

Stuff that Happened in Europe: The Hostile Hostel

I really don't know how to write this post without sounding like a overpriveliged, sheltered, boring, spoiled American, because I'm getting ready to complain about minor inconveniences. After some brief contemplation, I've decided I'm just going to go ahead and write the post and sound like all those things, better judgement be damned. But I'll include a warning, because I'm considerate like that:

Warning: If you have a low tolerance for first world problems, do not proceed beyond this point. (I will totally understand.)

SO, at the end of our harrowing night train experience, we arrive in Trento, Italy. Trento is a smallish town in the northeastern part of the country, and although it gets its fair share of tourism, it is not exactly on most people's Must See lists. Morgan and I put it on ours because it is the town that our paternal great grandparents are from, and we are not immune to that pitiful white American desire to get in touch with our ancestoral heritage (even though I pretend that I am, and I will probably secretly mock you if you have a celctic knot tattoo).

It's really early when we get to Trento, and I'm sleepy and overwhelmed. Tento feels tiny compared to Vienna, and I think to myself that maybe this is one of those places where everyone knows each other. I have this feeling--the same one I get when I go to parties and bars now, the one I used to get when I went to church or family gatherings with my friends when I was small--that I don't belong here, that I have no right to be here, and that everyone knows it. I feel like someone may walk up to me at any moment and demand to know what I'm doing here. I have no idea what I'm doing here. I want to leave, badly.

We search for the hostel (the Ostello di Trento,* if anyone is planning a backpack trip) and find it without much issue. As we wait in the lobby, a group of maybe 20 blonde children emerge from the hostel. For some reason I assume that they are Russian orphans, probably because the girls are wearing little triangle shaped kerchiefs on their heads. A man and lady appear behind the lobby desk, and we ask them if they speak English.  They tell us that they do. I explain that we have reserved two beds and thrust my reservation confirmation forward.

They seem sort of confused, but eventually allow us to pay them. They explain that we can't check in until 2:00 pm. I feel like they are smirking as they say this. I'm sure that they actually weren't.

I am hungry and tired and wondering why I decided to come to this place, and I really really want to go somewhere where I don't have to interact with anyone and just read blogs or something for a while and regroup. Instead, I sleep on a bench until 2:00 pm while the Russian orphans play soccer  in a nearby park.

We go back to the hostel and get our room keys. The hostel is pretty huge, but I assume that they only have a couple rooms open because my dorm is pretty full but there are never very many people mulling around the building. There are four sets of bunkbeds in the female dorm. Two girls who appear to be younger than me occupy one set. I'm not sure what language they are speaking, maybe Romanian? Another set of bunkbeds contains two older Asian ladies. They are both napping. One is naked. A third older lady of unknown national origin sleeps on the bottom bunk of the last set of beds. We share one bathroom, which really isn't a big deal except that I can't communicate a bathroom schedule with anyone. I basically just resort to getting up really really early every day to ensure that I would be able to get in.

I guess the weirdest thing about this arrangement is that my doormmates are always in the room. Always. The Asian lady who was napping naked when I arrived naps naked a lot. The older lady of indeterminate national origin occasionally does exercise videos in front of her bed.  The only exception is that the Romanian (?) girls leave every night wearing clear high heels and tube tops. Probably, they are going to Italian nightclubs, but I imagine that they are hooking because it makes the story more interesting.

Morgan didn't bring an alarm clock, so I have to go to the male dorm and knock on the door every morning. One morning, I learn that one of his roommates has stolen his damp towel. Probably a mix up? Fortunately, Trento is absolutely packed with high end outdoor equipment stores (serioulsy, it is), so it's not hard to get a replacement.

More of an inconvenience is the hostel's single washer, which requires nine freaking euros for one load of laundry. If the desk guy and desk lady were not smirking before, they definitely are now. As we wait for our laundry to dry, we read in a lounge-like room, accompanied by more old people. Seriously, there were so many old people in this hostel. And orphans, so many Russian orphans. I hope they were all adopted.

*Hey look! My review is on there!

By the way, Trento is seriously beautiful. You should definitely go there, but maybe just stay in a tent or something.

Blah Lazy Fluff Post

Right now I'm working on (okay, thinking about) a post about cartoon food and post modernism and the comfort of sterile public spaces, but until I sort all that out:

Twelve Scandalous Confessions!!!!

1. I have a personal Netflix account that I only stream on my laptop. I use it to watch embarrassing things.

2. I got a new supervisor at work, and she's been keeping me pretty busy. Even though I talk  about how I'm "self actualized enough to not need a job or career for personal fulfillment," the added responsibilities secretly make me feel a lot better about myself.

3. More frequently that I would I like to admit, I mistakenly believe that a person staring out the window/at at TV/etc. is staring at me. I am extremely flattered and then greatly humbled.

4. I think I used up all my willpower during my perfectionist years. I can't make myself do anything even vaguely unpleasant anymore. Including getting up in the morning. I was late for work so frequently that I just decided to tell everyone that my hours are ten to five.

      4.1. I let my coworkers believe that I'm a student so that they expect less out of me at work.

5. Sometimes I think that I'm on the verge of a personal literary breakthrough. (This might be the most embarrassing one of all.)

6. A bag of recycling blew off our porch last week during a storm. I avoided picking up the bottles and boxes for like five days, and then the stuff was gone. Did our neighbors clean up our yard?

7. I don't put laundry away anymore. I have a clean clothes basket and a dirty clothes basket.

8. Sometimes I become convinced (By advertising?? By blogs I read?? By advertisements on blogs I read??) that a certain product will solve all the problems in my life.

9. I can't decide whether or not having a blog is stupid.

10. I think that I am nice on the surface, and then mean just underneath the surface. And then nice again under that. A mean sandwich. With nice bread.

11. Occasionally, something annoying happens in my house. Maybe a shampoo bottle is sitting in the shower empty or some belonging of mine is out of place. I instinctually get angry at my roommates before realizing that the annoying thing is actually my fault.

12. I am really happy right now.

When Cat Worlds Collide

Sometimes I feel like there are as many incarnations of "me" as there are people I know (or at least know well). It's not that I'm creating fake personas or acquiescing to the expectations and desires of whoever I'm around, or at least not entirely. Actually, I feel like each "me" is as real and fully me as the next one.

 And really, when you think about it, it makes sense that it's this way. The prominence and influence of a certain friend or family member in your life ebbs and flows with time, and so does your personality. I am different than how I was two years ago, but I was no less fully me two years ago. If I spent a lot of time with someone back then, but rarely see her now, she knows that particular past me (Two Years Ago Me, we'll call her) but not so much Present Me.

So when I visit this particular friend again, she will likely interact with PM as though I were TYAM. And I, in return, am likely to respond as though I am still TYAM, not because I'm interested in perpetuating an elaborate farce, but because, in my old friend's presence, I start feeling like TWAM again.

Sometimes I, and I'm guessing a lot of other people as well, seamlessly and subconsciously slip into a past or alternative self when the appropriate situation arises. But other times I notice it, and noticing it might as well be reaching through a tear in the space-time continuum. A lot of times, I don't even realize that TWAM (or whoever) and PM have diverged until I notice myself becoming TWAM again. It's always uncanny. And it always makes me desperately miss all the things TWAM saw and did and ate and felt and thought if I can remember them. And if I can't remember them clearly, well, then I mourn my lost memories.

When I came home to Beckley for Christmas this year I definitely, definitely "noticed it" a lot. Normally, when I go back home, I slip pretty easily into Daughter Me, who is also kind of Teenage Me. Occasionally, I'll "notice it" a little, especially as I try to flatten out some of my multi-dimensionality for the sake of my parents, to smooth down a few of the most foreign facets that have developed since I moved out and went to college. It's not that I become this simpler person because my parents are simple. I become her because I still have to be someone that they can fully know, someone who has not yet been separated from them forever by the barrage of realizations that is young adulthood.

But this time I brought some things home with me that threatened to prevent the transition, to make the gulf between DM and PM impossible to jump. Those things were my cats, Nona and Bear.

I got Nona and Bear last June, right after I graduated and moved into the first pet friendly place I've ever rented. My mom basically discouraged it, perhaps because the me with whom she’s best acquainted is somewhat more irresponsible, immature, and self-absorbed than I'd like to think that PM is. And I, admittedly, was somewhat wary myself. I'd been wanting to adopt a cat for a while, but I kept having these nightmares in which I'd suddenly realize that I'd left several puppies/kittens/etc. unattended and neglected in a closet or something for weeks. I was concerned that this was my subconscious trying to tell me that I just wasn't ready.

  

But my need for feline companionship outweighed my fears, so when my roommate came across a lady in Cheat Lake trying to find homes for a litter via Craigslist, I was on board.

And good news! I never once left the kittens unattended in the closet for weeks. In fact, I turned out to be a much better pet owner (resisting the urge to use the term "cat mom" here) than I ever could have guessed. I fed the cats twice every day! And scooped out their litter boxes! And took them to the vet! And administered their antibiotics when the vet said they had worms!

My point is: Nona and Bear, in all their robust, well-cared-for glory, are a symbol of my burgeoning adulthood. And I'm pretty in to them. They are the best damn cats ever.

My mom loves cats, and our family cat, Ralphie, is an important part of her life. I thought that if I brought Nona and Bear home for Christmas she and I could bond while enjoying the company of all three cats.

But as soon as I hauled Nona and Bear's very luxurious cat carrier over the threshold of my childhood house, everything just felt wrong. Firstly, it was clear that my mom was just not as in to my cats as I am, but I do appreciate her effort to muster enthusiasm. I don't know. I guess I just wanted us, as a mother and daughter, to revel in Nona and Bear's otherworldly amazingness. But she didn't know N and B like I did, and really, Ralphie is her one true cat love. Her inability to understand that N and B are The Best Cats created a chasm between us, which may have actually been a chasm between PM and DM.

  

And I know this is going to sound weird, but another thing that contributed to the chasm was the fact that I was responsible for the health and well-being of these creatures. My role as a responsible pet owning adult was alienating PM from DM, because DM is neither an adult nor responsible, and she definitely isn't a pet owner. I can only imagine that this phenomenon plays out on a grander scale when you have actual children.

  

My inability to reconcile PM and DM was accompanied by an acute awareness of my current life situation and of how much I have changed in recent years. It was all very conflict-y. And then, when N and B finally emerged from the cat carrier, my emotions manifested themselves metaphorically in a hissing match between Nona and Ralphie.

  

By the end of my visit, however, the three cats were coexisting, not entirely peacefully, but with minimal conflict.  So I guess that the conclusion that can be reached, if one cares to extend this metaphor (and I'm sure that one does), is: My days of fully becoming DM may be over, but that doesn't mean that DM won't occasionally surface and for a time exist, not entirely peacefully but with minimal conflict, alongside PM.

Stuff that Happened in Europe: The Night Train

The following is the first installment in a series of posts in which I explain what I was doing in Europe instead of getting drunk.

One reason that I didn’t go crazy in Europe is that I never go crazy. Another reason is that I went to Europe with my brother, and it’s just sort of weird to party with your brother and only your brother. Our sibling backpacking duo was confusing to everyone we met. First, they were like, “Are you engaged?” And then, when we explained that we were brother/sister, they were like, “That’s really weird. Don’t all normal, well-adjusted people go to Europe with their friends?” And then they judged me. And they asked me if I was a senior in high school.

But going to Europe with Morgan had many advantages. First, he’s a good navigator. Second, he’s responsible and plan-oriented. Third, he writes everything down in this tiny bound notebook, so if, for example, we were trying to buy train tickets and having trouble communicating, he would just flash the ticket person the train info that he’d written down, and he or she would suddenly understand what we needed. And fourth and finally, he was willing to loan me large sums of money all the time.

His responsibility and planning and money lending and commitment to tiny notebook documentation were all invaluable, and I can’t help but guess that if I had attempted the same trip with my friends, we would STILL be lost somewhere in the Dusseldorf airport (No offense, friends!)

However, I cannot overlook the disadvantages of going to Europe with Morgan (and only Morgan), as they were very present and very real. First, we are both self-conscious, shy, and easily embarrassed.* This made trying to communicate in foreign languages that we didn’t even sort of know extremely difficult. Almost everyone** could speak English, but the fact that we were always feeling apologetic for wearing synthetic, brightly colored clothing, and taking pictures of everything, and being American, and existing made us desperately want to use the native language. Most people detected our bullshit immediately. A typical exchange went like this:

Morgan: Ich wants einen Kaffee? : /

Barista: Was???

Morgan: Einen Kaffee…bitte? : (

Barista: Oh. You want a coffee. Asshole.

Second, train seats are usually grouped in fours, so when you’re traveling with only one other person, you are at the mercy of fate regarding who fills those two extra seats. 

The exception to this is the night train compartments, which are exactly like the ones on the Hogwarts Express, sort of. You’ve got two little compartments on either side of an aisle. Each compartment has two rows of four seats that face each other and a sliding door that closes it off from the rest of the carriage.

The only time we took the night train was when we traveled from Vienna to Trento, Italy. We arrived at the station around 9 p.m. and waited eagerly on the platform. Soon, we were approached by an attractive and stylish young Viennese guy. He explained that he was taking a break from his year of mandatory civil service to meet some friends in Italy, and did we want to drink in his cabin with him? “Yes. Absolutely. We’ll meet up with you there soon,” I told him. I definitely did not join him for drinks in his cabin. He was cute and interesting, but then, so was Joran Vandersloot.***

So we finally boardered the train and were so excited to locate our very own, totally empty, murderer-free compartment. Seriously, we were giddy. We had a bag full of cookies and some wine and all this space to ourselves and were ready to ride into the Alps. We felt like intrepid, savvy, murder-avoiding globetrotters. Life was amazing.

Oh how naïve we were, very Americanly forgetting that Eurorail is not Amtrack and that people actually use trains over here. And soon enough, this older man joined us. Which was whatever. It sort of ruined our private cookie party, but at least the cabin was still empty enough that nobody had to sit directly beside each other. 

But then, at the first stop, this extremely thin, rough-looking guy staggered into our cabin and sat down beside Morgan. For some inexplicable reason, this guy reeked of not booze but vinegar. He immediately fell asleep.

Well damn. Now we felt all weird and it smelled too bad in our compartment to want to eat cookies. But it was getting really late, so we decided to try to sleep.

But at each stop, more and more men (invariably men, never any young guys, never any friendly-looking Eurogirls) trickled into our compartment, at one point filling all eight seats. It was extremely tight in there, and it smelled horrible. The middle-aged vagrant that was sitting beside me kept asking me questions in German, so I pretended to sleep. I desperately wanted to actually sleep, but I was worried that I would accidentally drop my head onto his shoulder. Also, the temperature was dropping rapidly. So I fitfully dozed and shivered beside the vagrant until we reached our 4 a.m. transfer station, silently wishing all the while that I had gone ahead and allowed the Viennese guy to murder me.

Next time, The Hostile Hostel: Naked People, Prostitutes, Russian Orphans, Towel Thieves, and Nine Euro Loads of Laundry

*Parents, I’m blaming this on your belief that children “should entertain themselves.” This directly resulted in hours of early social isolation in which Morgan drew Dungeons and Dragons style monsters on the inside covers of his textbooks and I searched for the portal to Wonderland that I was convinced was somewhere in my backyard. Damaging, obviously.

**Exception: In Trento, a waitress who could speak absolutely no English got so (rightfully) frustrated by our shitty attempts at Italian that she just abandoned our table.

***Just Google Image Searched Joran. Not that cute, actually.