Jenna's House of Idiosyncrasies Version 10.0 [Focus.]

Last night I had a dream that I was in a neighborhood, with streets and sidewalks, but all the places where the houses should be were just paved over with asphalt, covered in a layer of fallen leaves. There were large beautiful trees everywhere that created a hazy canopy over it all, with beams of light sneaking through in all the right places.

Every few dozen trees or so had a white painted spiral staircase wrapped around it, but the stairs didn't appear to go anywhere. They were for show, or more likely leading to some hidden door. It was a magical place, but I had the impression that there was some darkness I was missing.

I heard something like a truck backing up (Beep! Beep! Beep!), and I turned around and saw one of the white painted spiral staircases being pushed up to an especially large tree by a giant fork lift covered in Georgia red clay.

And then I just started running down the sidewalk. I ran tirelessly. I could hear my breath, in and out. I could see my feet, clad suddenly in some surprisingly supportive New Balance sneakers that I do not own in real life, hitting this pavement with an almost perfect stride. I saw my calves, tan and lean. Those are not my calves in real life. No one would ever know because I would never be caught dead in shorts, but I can assure you they do not look like they did in the dream.

I was a runner. Not by choice, but by necessity. I got the feeling that as much as I was running towards something — and I was — what I was really doing was running away from something. I had been running in fits and starts for as long as I could remember, and at this moment I couldn't stop. Not for anything. My chest started to burn, but I concentrated on my breathing. I couldn't hear anything else, even though leaves crunched under my feet. Everything around me was completely silent. I watched the wind move through the trees above, and then somewhere in the far, far distant, I heard wind chimes.

The chorus of the Jackson 5's “I Want You Back” broke through all the silence. I kept running but dug into my pocket for my cell phone.

I fished it out and checked the caller ID. JJ was calling me. I stared at the ID as it rang, still running, not tripping all over my own feet, no doubt due to some divine intervention or more likely, dream logic. I couldn't answer, because I had to keep running.

I came to the crest of a hill, and the tree canopy opened up. I looked into the sun, and woke.

“Life never gets easier. It just gets harder and harder until the stress kills you.”

“That's about right.”

“Then what's the point?”

“You just have to enjoy each day while you're here.”

“It's not enough.”

“Maybe we need to get you on mood altering drugs. I know a guy who sells speed.” Laughs.

“It certainly would help with my productivity.”

“I was kidding.”

“Well, it would.”

“Until you crash and burn.”

“Eh, I'm always gonna crash and burn anyway.”

“Ultimately all you have are your experiences, and it's hard to write about that because if you do—”

“—everyone will know.”

“Exactly.” He took a long drag on his cigarette.

We sat side by side in silence for a full minute before I got the courage to speak up. “I used to write characters that were just thinly veiled versions of people I wanted to be. They had all the qualities I wished I had.”

“Fight Club syndrome.”

I turned to look at him.

“You know, ‘I look like you wanna look, I fuck like you wanna fuck, I do what I want to do’.”

I looked at the sidewalk between my feet and smiled. “Yeah, that was pretty much it.
“The problem was they were so perfect that they were never in peril.”

Tell Me All Your Thoughts on God from Jenna Tollerson on Vimeo

There are few things more fun than capturing your drunk friends singing along with all of their might to a Top 40 Dishwalla song.

“He has Jesus hair.”

“Yeah, I'm just like Jesus, except I can't turn fish into liquor.”

“That's not how the story goes!”

“Are you kidding me? I thought Jesus turned fuckin' trout into wine!”

I had a dream last night that I was an orphan, living in an orphanage that was some cross between a warm version of the one in Annie and the dormitory in Real Genius. There was some cookie and lip gloss eating contest going on, in which I was not participating, but I remember feeling that the stakes in the contest were quite high; the winners were to be spared from some unnamed but dark fate.

I snuck through some small, short door between the contestants, who were measuring their success somehow by filling large, Plexiglas bins that resembled aquariums. In the dream I was a child, but I still had to duck and shimmy through the door, which was square and only a few feet tall. The door was sunk a couple of feet into the wall and had aged iron hardware; it felt very Alice in Wonderland. I came out into an empty, sun filled room. The side that I had come out of mirrored the opposite wall; both walls had the same small wooden doors in the center and were otherwise covered with large planks of light colored wood, that had been finished and polished to a high gloss sheen. The floor was covered with the same wood. The walls to my left and right were painted an eggshell color, and above me was a dome of glass. The room was easily half the size of a high school gymnasium, but I remember thinking that was secret, that it was a place only I knew about, even though I had never been there before, I had known all the time of its existence. Read More »

There's a feeling I sometimes get before going to a party. This sensation that I'm about to step into a den of lions, where I have no control. Where there is a possibility, though sometimes faint, that I'll be eaten alive.

I've always been fairly big on comfort zones. I like knowing my surroundings, spotting all the emergency exits, finding my allies in the crowd. Not having these things makes me nervous, not just for comfort reasons but also for safety. Read More »