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

So, Internet, it's been a pretty okay summer. I've been working hard, in more ways than one, and it is starting to pay off in small, incremental ways, although it is a hard road to hoe, not to mention slow going.

The business is coming up, even if it is at a sluggish pace. I finally feel fully confident in my skills, and my ability to sell those skills to just about anybody. I haven't gotten any aghast reactions to my rates in a while, which means I'm selling to the correct market, at last. Now I just have to find the time to seek out more of that market.

I joined a gym a few months ago. I pour lots of time into walking briskly on a treadmill, and once a week I see a personal trainer who kicks my ass. My first week, I had personal training sessions on both Monday and Wednesday, and on Friday morning I was slowly waking up when I asked my half-awake self, Was I in a car accident?

Nope, I realized. I'm just that sore. Read More »

Weird dreams I've had lately, in chronological order of occurrence:

• I woke up to find there had been an earthquake, and my door had come off its hinges. My already small studio apartment was about half its real life size. My computer got ripped off while I was sleeping, being that the door was off the hinges, but instead of it just being gone, it was replaced with the small monitor and Windows 3.1 computer I had in my bedroom in 19971. This random guy appeared at my broken door and started trying to convince me that this old computer was my (current, XP powered, responsible for my livelihood) computer. I was livid, and yelled at the guy, and he just smiled at me and shrugged. Then I decided I needed to move back to my parent's for some reason, and as I was walking out with my stuff (which in the dream somehow fit in a single box, like I was getting fired instead of moving) the whole building caught on fire, which was inevitable, because the whole town was in shambles from the earthquake.
• I had a long extended sex dream, where I can only assume that I was doing LSD, because the walls kept melting and morphing and the furniture kept floating around. All the rooms were decorated bordello style, with dark colors, lots of plush fabrics and big soft pillows. One wall was always made of glass and looking out onto twisting red metal architecture set against a clear blue sky. I was in some kind of mansion with Jean Val Jean2, and we did it in every room.
• I caught an employee in my (fictional? future?) company selling off trade secrets to my competitors, and as punishment, or maybe torture to get more information, I was making them run on a treadmill. I was walking around the treadmill in a business suit, looking hot, I have to say, and I think I was holding a whip, and calmly asking questions. This feels significant because the treadmill looked exactly like one that I've logged some hours on starting a few weeks ago, when I joined a gym. Or it could just be that my subconscious is bleeding gym imagery into my dreams now, since I spend a bunch of time there.

1. 1. When I was 14, and living with my parents
2. 2. Actual porn star, so doing a search for his name may not be safe for work, although I'm pretty sure that is also the same name as the main character in Les Misérables

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.

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 »

Last night I had a dream that I got my old job back. It wasn't a fun place to work anymore. My coworkers all hated me for some reason. The ceilings were much lower and more oppressive than I remembered. I sat with my back to the aisle, where I sat before I was promoted the last time. I clocked in at eight, worked all day with my headphones on, and clocked out at five, not speaking a word to anyone and trying to ignore every one's dirty looks. Last night, this went on for weeks. Everyday was the same. The weather outside was in constantly thunderstorm-like, grey and dark and dusky. My superiors yelled at me constantly and tore me down. I was miserable, and I felt trapped.

However, there was another emotion making a play: relief. Misery or none, I had a steady paycheck again, so I knew I would now be making rent on time and eating on a regular basis. And in this dream, this paycheck was worth my self respect and my freedom.

In real life, I got a few calls from recruiters last week. I don't know what happened, but I seem to be something of a hot commodity suddenly, or at least a lukewarm one. The problem is everything involves permanent positions and relocation and worst of all: going back to work in a cube, with a manager, and all the Office Space like trappings. There would also be a steady paycheck involved.

I have to admit, it's tempting. Quite recently it feels like my priorities have shifted from finding happiness in this life to just plain surviving. Every day it seems like there is a new crisis; I feel like I'm spending all my time catching up with the rest of the world and putting out fires. There is a part of me that wants to go back to working for someone else; I like the idea that there is security there. But you are never secure when you are working for someone else, because you are taking your fate out of your own hands.

I know where my heart is, and I'll tell you why: when I woke this morning, the relief that I hadn't gotten my old job back completely outweighed the relief I felt when I thought I had. I'm broke, and I'm stressed out, but I'm free, and in control of my own future. Even though things are bad now, I have a really good feeling about what's to come.

I didn't get to sleep until six this morning. I had been nothing but exhausted all day yesterday, but when it came time to actually relax, my brain was having none of it. There is way too much crazy bullshit going on in my life lately, and as a result I'm sort of trapped up in my own head all the time.

Ironically enough working — actual problem solving and coding, not this 24/7 hustle I seem to have going lately that consists entirely of solicting — is the one thing that makes me focus on something that is not me. Unfortunately, at the moment, I am not getting enough work, and that is causing a majority of the stress. I'm not sure if that's the correct English professor definition of irony but it's damn close enough for me.

So I finally get sort of unconscious, and I kept dreaming of being trapped in a haunted house with the ghosts of some sick people. I don't mean ill. I mean ill in the head. It was terrifying. I'm pretty sure I woke up about every five minutes, until my empty stomach said “No more!” and forced me awake for good. That was 8:30 this morning.

So here I am, awake and oh-so refreshed on a bright Tuesday. I'm not going to go into specifics but so far today has been nothing but bad news. I'm guessing I have until end of business to turn things around, but lately I don't feel in control. I feel like I'm at the mercy of the universe, and if I believed in God, I would have to assume I'd done something awful and I must be smited. As it is, being a non-believer, I think I'm just running into multiple random acts of badness. Even so, I'm not sure how much more of this I can take.

I had a terrifying nightmare last night, disturbing enough to cause me to not even want to write about it now. It woke me up in the middle of the night, but I had already forgotten it and didn't know why I had woken up. Being the geek that I am, upon waking I wondered over to my computer to check my email. I was in the middle of surfing Consumating five minutes later when awful flashes of it suddenly started coming back to me, and I immediately opened up Notepad and typed out the details as they came back. Then I couldn't sit in the dark at my computer anymore, and I got back into bed, curling into a ball under the covers to wait for dawn, when things hopefully wouldn't be so scary. I fell into a restless sleep, and when I woke up at 6:30 I watched some Sopranos and stayed bed until the sun came up.

After all that, when I started to work this morning, I was tired and couldn't concentrate, not to mention sort of traumatized by what my brain is capable of producing. So I took up my long-dead habit of drinking coffee. Four cups later I'm wired and can't concentrate, not to mention sort of traumatized by what my brain is capable of producing. I drugged myself into mania and nervousness.

I think I miscalculated.

“You sent me a text message yesterday, right?”

“Yeah... about the dream I had. You and I were shopping for ice cream. We were going store to store looking for some specific flavor.”

“Damn Rocky Road or something?”

laughing. “I don't know what flavor it was. But that was the whole dream. You and I shopping for ice cream. For a long time. It was weird. I don't know what it was about.”

“It's because I'm so damn sweet, ain't it?”

Last night I had a dream that I lived in a large houseboat with a couple dozen other people. It wasn't really like a houseboat but more like a small steamship that had been converted on the inside to house people. The bedrooms were long and narrow, with a dozen people in each one, kind of like what you might imagine an orphanage might look like, but with bigger beds. I remember havings the distinct feeling I was living here because my parents lived just up the dock, on land in an actual house, and even though I had to share a bedroom here I actually got more privacy. I have no idea where that idea came from but to my dream self it made lots of sense.

When the dream opens up it's night, and I'm walking into my bedroom, and getting into the first bed, my bed. A tan heavily tattooed young man is lying next to who I presume is his sleeping girlfriend in the next bed, and he watches and smiles as I get into bed and then take my clothes off once under the covers (apparently, I sleep naked even in my dreams now). Then I turn over and go to sleep. Read More »

I had a strange dream last night where my old supervisor called me up and asked me (more like begged me) to come back to work for him. I only had to come in 20 hours a week and I could do it around my own schedule, even though my hourly rate had not changed. This new schedule basically gave me the freedom I needed to run my own business. The dream was hyperreal, insofar as when I woke up I had a pretty hard time sorting out if it had actually happened.

In the dream I went through a whole working week, but I never seemed to get any work done. My new-ish job seemed to involve lounging at my desk a lot with my feet up, bellowing orders at the others in my office, and laughing in a menacing, threatening and non-friendly way.

In essence, I think I was in management.