Month: July 2021

Dream Journal 7/31/21

Wow.

So, I’ve been fighting a headache today, so I decided to take a nap.

Okay, more than that has been going on today. Alex borrowed my car to rescue a friend who was stranded in Waco and on the way home, he had a blowout.

So, I got up as early as I could stand to and took my car in for new tires. I decided to get all new tires, rather than just the one, because I figured that the blowout probably was a freak accident, but I want to take my car on actual road trips, so I upgraded all of them.

After dropping my car off at the shop, *that* is when I had the headache and took the nap.

I started out my dream working as a paralegal and our client was named Jennifer and had the same last name as my cousin. I was told that I’d have to withdraw from the case because she *was* my cousin. Only, my cousin’s related to me through our moms’ side of the family, so we have no blood relations with that last name.

At some point in the dream, her last name changed to my maternal grandmother’s maiden name and, well, I do have a cousin named Jennifer with that surname. Two of them, in fact. Well, I only have one, the other died of a drug overdose years ago. In my dream, I just had the one and that was the one that died of a drug overdose.

The attorney who told me that it would be a conflict of interest to help my cousin told me that she wasn’t *that* cousin Jennifer but a completely different one who is way farther apart on the family tree. He said that my boss could show me the family tree and I could see what he means.

So I went to my boss (who passed away about the same time my mom did), and told him that I couldn’t work on that case anymore and he said that they’d find a new case for me to work on. He couldn’t find the family tree when I asked him for it.

At this point, I said that I knew this had to be a dream, not because my boss is dead, but because I couldn’t remember anything about this job prior to that conversation about my cousin Jennifer.

I’m not sure if there was a transition or anything, but somehow I was going to a concert with a coworker and realized that Deimos (my cat) was in the car with us. There was no time to go home and I could neither take him to the concert nor leave him in the car, so we went to her house to leave him there. Somehow we were unable to leave through the front door, so I went through a sort of tunnel to get to their back door, which was locked and the door had a combination lock. So my coworker had to come and open the door, and she didn’t have to go through the tunnels.

I got upset with her for lying to me about having to go through the tunnels and left for the concert by myself. There’d been a third coworker (who looked like the singer J. Balvin?) in the car with us and my coworker had left him behind because he took too long getting into the car after stopping to talk to a friend.

I got into contact with him somehow, but I never made it to the concert, because I was apparently getting married.

My fiance had a boisterous apparently warm family but the longer I spent with them, the more dysfunctional they appeared. I was at this point being pursued romantically by the real J. Balvin who in my dream had been a dermatologist before becoming a singer.

That realization is why I decided to leave my fiance and give J. Balvin a chance. I have mild eczema and I realized that I could have access to the latest research on eczema.

This dream was, at least in part, brought to you by 23 and Me, because I have opted into research and I did an eczema survey last night.

For today’s Gratuitous Amazon Link, um, well . . . Ooh! Solutions and Other Problems by Allie Brosh! Imagine me dancing badly.

There’ve been three books that I’ve waited for for years, and so far, this is the only one that I’ve been able to hold in my hands. And it was *so* worth the wait!

For those unfamiliar with Allie Brosh, she wrote a web cartoon that is a masterful combination of poignancy and laugh-out-loud humor, Hyperbole and a Half, for a long time, and her two books, this and her other book, also titled Hyperbole and a Half, are more of the same. Awesome, amazing, just all-around fantastic.

And someday, maybe, I will be able to hold the other two books in my hands and bring you reviews of them, as well. Hopefully.

This Week Has Been a Health Adventure

Actually, July has been a health and fitness adventure. Hopefully the fitness part will be a good thing in the long run, but for now, let’s just call it an adventure.

At the end of June, I decided to sign up for Wally World’s gym membership program. One of the gyms in this program is literally down the street from here. I can walk there from my house.

So I went and introduced myself to the manager/trainer and was actually starting to get the hang of going in and working out a bit.

Then I decided to get rid of the ugly volunteer pecan tree in my front yard. For those unaware of the term “volunteer” plant, this means that it grew unplanted by human hands. I’m pretty sure it was planted by a squirrel.

I left it for a while, wondering if it was ever going to become actually attractive, but it just stayed awful looking and started to kill the plants that were growing beneath it.

So, a week ago, I broke down and cut it down. This used a whole bunch of muscles that I’m not used to using, even in my fledgling workout schedule. Or so I thought.

Turns out I actually injured myself a bit. On Sunday, I went to work and whenever I had to sit down, like to take something off of a bottom shelf, I had just an awful pain in my back, and towards the end of the day, I coughed and gave myself a stabbing headache.

So, I rested on Monday and tried again on Tuesday, and found that my back still killed me when I bent over or sat down. So I called my telemedicine company and got a prescription for a muscle relaxant.

Both the doctor and my pharmacist said that the medicine would make me sleepy, so I should take it at night before bed. I was in such a hurry to get some relief, I took it at 9:30 that night and promptly discovered that I’m one of the minority of patients who get insomnia from this medication. I was up until the medicine wore off at 3:30 in the morning and then I was called in early on Wednesday.

I worked the early shift on Thursday, also, which did give me a chance to take the relaxant three times in one day. I tried to go to sleep an hour before the relaxant wears off, but just lay there awake, which is how I came to be posting this now. I still have half an hour before it wears off.

The good thing is that my back feels much, much better, even when I’m sleeping. It doesn’t hurt to sit down, and I may go back to my gym early next week. I’m afraid to go right now, since, well, my back.

My next relaxant dose will be at 9:30 in the morning, then 3:30 in the afternoon, then we’ll see how I feel about trying another one at 9:30 at night.

Time for a Gratuitous Amazon Link. Today we have Mexican Gothic, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. This is one of my favorite selections from the book club I joined last year. Our heroine, Noemi, gets a letter from her cousin begging her to come to where the cousin is living with her new husband to save her from some unspecified danger.

Mexican Gothic is based on the old formula for gothic novels from back in the day. Young woman moves to creepy old building, meets two men of near her own age, one of whom turns out to be creepy and dangerous and one is helpful, and the heroine has to sort out what’s going on with the house and which of the two men is really the dangerous one.

This is one of my favorite stories and I’ve taken a couple of stabs at writing gothic novels myself. Maybe I’ll dig one of those old manuscripts out and work on it for a while. Later. My typing has been going steadily downhill this whole time and I don’t think I can cope with it much longer.