Wednesday, October 22, 2008

things on my plate, plates in the air

I am having one of those weeks where I feel like I am treading water, accomplishing really much of nothing in the way of any actual productivity. I'm no further along now than I was on Monday in terms of various projects that need to be done..including printing the B-side of one chap, re-laying out another one and designing its cover, drawing up a wholesale price list for someone on bracelets, photographing and finishing Christmas ornaments, finishing some new notecard designs and stationary sets, work on the feasibility of some new little blank journals I have planned, as well as some cool decorative letter openers I just got the makings of this week (I know, who DOESN't get excited about decorative letter openers?). This is all in addition to reading press submissions, making decisions, and well, any writing of my own I might want to get to this week.

I'm also having problems concentrating lately, feel slightly off, and possibly like I'm coming down with something. I can't seem to get enough sleep, no matter how long. Lats week, I fell asleep on the ride home and missed my stop by two blocks. I'm loopy, forgetful, like if I don't write it down, I'm sure to forget about it completely. I have these moments where I swear I'm daft.

I had this dream the other morning, again about my grandmother's house, in which I somehow convinced myself, in the dream and for about 20 minutes after I was awake, that she had a soda machine on her back porch (a small detail but it figured prominently in the dream, which I don't really remember much of except for the end). She, of course, did not, and when I thought of it again, later in the day, it was so glaringly apparent that she never did. But somehow, I'd convinced myself, could even remember what it looked like (one of those older machines that had the soda cans lines on a shelf inside the glass, and in this case, they were all Shasta. The machine, I realized later, was in fact familiar (a grocery store we always shopped in when I was a kid, had one right when you walked in and my mother always let us get one if we shut up and behaved ourselves while she shopped. I was mesmerized, I remember, by the pretty fruit colors of the cans. )Somehow, I placed that machine on my grandmother's porch in the dream as if it'd always been there. I was crying in the dream, I remember because I had lost something important and people kept revealing things to me to elicit emotional response, and when someone revealed the soda machine, I associated it so distinctly with my grandmother I started sobbing. Of course, WHY is still a mystery.

I am too nostalgic lately for my own good it seems. I've also been paying attention to my dreams more since I've been finishing up the anxiety dream poem sequence, which may get longer. I dreamed the night after that I was driving around with my parents past our old house in Loves Park, and after driving past it twice, determined that it had either been torn down to make the house next door larger, or had been replaced by a horse pasture. What was important, however, was not this, although I seemed to be in tears again because the house was gone, but that, when driving, I happened to glance up at the sky and saw weird space lights (a la close encounters). After we had determined that the house was in fact gone, we were driving through the country and evading what looked to be WWII-like missles and debris being dropped along the road. (This was so freakishly like that nasty spate of post 9/11 dreams I had it freaked me out a little..) In the dream, we find a church in a field (the same church it appears this was also the scene of this dream)...where they were apparently having some sort of picnic in the dark with haystacks and guitars...and we were all going to hide from the aliens there, or something like that. This is probably why I feel like I don't get any sleep...

No comments: