The Nightmare Drugs

I have a cold. I'm on an antibiotic with side-effects ranging from projectile blood coughing to violent nightmares to hallucinations to a complete loss of the ability to taste anything but metal.

Pretty sweet huh? Heh. Unfortunately after a week, I have experienced none of the aforementioned side effects, except the nightmares. But who knows whether that's me or the meds?

The first night felt like meds. Nothing but a serial killer hacking bodies. The entire dream done in black, white, corpse green, and red. The killer tied butcher knives to huge black parrot raven birds and trained them to kill people because he thought that would be funny. It's sort of funny after waking to think that giant killer parrots with friggin knives attached to their legs would be horrifying. Ah, but that's the way nightmares work.

The next night I dreamt about ... the rapture? Zombies? People coming back from the dead.. the first one was Seth Green. Too much [adult swim] perhaps. It started out sort of silly but then people started coming back incomplete. Corpses without heads or one missing his feet and hands and eyes... just writhing. One was up in my closet just hissing at me.

And then I dreamt of things that are worse than death. I haven't been able to do anything today, the nightmare still rolling around in my brain mixing with Stephenie Meyer's The Host, which is enough melodrama by itself. Luckily my family went to see a movie today without me so I can stare at the wall in peace. Or blog. Heh.

Jerry called me a supervillain, with admiration or disgust - it doesn't matter, I feel both about myself regardless. 'Ms. Hyde' might be more appropriate.

"Fix me now, I wish you would. Bring me back to life. Fix me now. Somebody should... " Do you remember that song? I love Garbage. "Things don't have to be this way. Catch me on a better day."

Oh and it was just Christmas wasn't it. A newer MP3 player with a video screen. A book. Some cash. The fat man can't bring me what I really want, sadly. Just another December to myself to chew slowly with cold leftovers. And one more beating heart remembers me as a glimmer of hope to stave off their own cold, but finding nothing but ashes in their hands the next morning.

2009, I'm counting on you here.

Power Nap

I think I just had the first 'power nap' of my entire life. I came home from work early and was inexplicably tired, mentally exhausted at the thought of finishing a 4 page essay final exam by tomorrow that I started on today. I drank a cup of coffee and passed out for half an hour. I woke up (from a dream about a leering postman) and I was suddenly a genius, these brilliantly composed essays just poured out of me. I finished 2/3 of the exam in a few hours. And I slowly returned to normal distractable me.

It felt like ritalin for a moment. But now I'm tired again and procrastinatory, which is not a real word. It's my birthday tomorrow, and like every year for the past 6 years it will be spent completing finals. Luckily after this week, I am free for the next three weeks. Free to sleep 14 hours a night and eat oreos at 2pm while watching TV. The good life. I chopped all my hair off again - I was inspired by the chick in Transporter 3. It's her cut but shorter in the back, boy short. A shout out to David Martin for being a badass hairstylist, doing in 1.5 hours what took 3 hours the last time.

I'm hungry. Someone outside is cooking pizza or something.

I Am My Own December

I went home the weekend before Thanksgiving, to celebrate Thanksgiving, a wedding, or the premier of Twilight (depending on who you ask).

I had interesting airplane conversations. The first leg, I was hopelessly trying to ignore an old woman sitting next to me. It's the first time I've used my occupation to intentionally be a douchebag. Then I thought about it. It's hard to talk to strangers about what I do without sounding like a douchebag. That's why I try not to.

"You're about the same age as my granddaughter. What do you do in college?"

"Microarray analysis to analyze small RNA differences in tissues as they develop with the ultimate goal of guiding the differentiation of stem cells along a specific developmental lineage.... I sound like a douche bag don't I?"

"I teach art in an elementary school, what do you do?"

"I um grow heart cells in a lab from stem cells and also from induced pluripotent cells, which are going to replace the need for stem cells and really clear up some of the red tape keeping us from killing babies......ooh. Fuck."

This old lady on the airplane though. I was on my laptop fighting with a Perl script, probably furrowing my eyebrows and mumbling a lot. She kept trying to strike up conversation like 15 times. I gave her clipped answers and was being openly rude to shut her up. But then I finally looked her in the face and I swear she looked just like my estranged... b i o l o g i c a l grandmother (that's for you Cam). It distracted me. I weighed the likelihood that she would think I was insane if I asked her very seriously, after an hour and a half of the trip, "Are you my grandmother?" I never asked her. But I decided she probably wasn't.

The next leg of the flight I talked to this guy. My immediate thought was "30 year old man, overly friendly, 280 pounds, chewing gum, baseball cap, proceed with caution". He started talking about his wife and kids, so I quickly recategorized him as non-hostile. He talked about his work, which was pretty interesting - designing wind turret fields for wind energy companies. Then he cleanly segued into a conversation about how people are electrochemical transmitters and receivers of brain waves. And static electricity improves the conductivity. He had written several hundred pages on the subject hoping to publish it. I asked him about the Schumann resonance and he said it was all rubbish..... huh.

He was pretty confident that the world was not going to end in 2012 too.

That's good to hear.