dreams, anne, hot

1.

Dreams. So intense. So awesome.

Last night I woke up around 2 am, naked and sweating (per usual), picked a booger, did a couple turns and tosses, and fell back asleep. My subsequent dream was about creatures called "neck thrashers"--neck and gut-eating beings who lurk in shadows waiting to bite you and make you a neck thrasher in their neck thrashing collection of lost souls. So, zombies, totally, but different enough to be yet another distinct breed of scary monster for us to obsess over. The thought of all that perfectly good brain-power going into and movie scripts and television series' round table sessions and poorly-written blogs with ugly fonts is terrifying.

In my dream I live with Ben (which is real), his sister is in town (pretty usual stuff), at one point I go window shopping for medical marijuana at midnight the park near the grocery store (totally normal), and then come the thrashers. Another terrifying thing about them--each has his/her own minion whose sole job is to distract/attract you into being thrashed by the thrasher. It's unclear if the minions too are undead, or where minions come from, but these bitches are CRAY. There's a girl I met through a coworker who I occasionally see around town who DEFINITELY inspired the minion standard. Small, pale, mid-neck-length hair that's always a little too frizzy (brush that shit, girl), looks like she has a lot of sex but is also an elementary school teacher. A disarming person--great prototype for thrasher entourage. 

So per usual of dreams, my mind speeds up the movie plot line so that within minutes the scene goes from "oh man, there are these crazy creatures that exist so I hear! gotta come up with a game plan to never interact with them." to them being EVERYWHERE. 

And then I am bitten, but the transition for me to go from normal to demon creature cruelly happens in slow motion. So I go through the duration of my dream doing regular things like hanging out with Ben and his druggie friends, all the while feeling bad about it because I know I'm about to turn and thrash the shit out of their necks. (Ben will forever be a doper in my dreams ever since I accidentally left his pipe out when my dad came to visit and inspired the joke "Tell Ben to stop smoking doobies and start cleaning his dust bunnies.") Then I thankfully wake up, though I wish it could have played out that Ben becomes a minion because he's really good at acting creepy on command. 

2. 

Anne is moving to Thailand. 

That's right, Anne Byrne is doing it. And she couldn't wait for an era of super-fast/cheap trans-Atlantic travel for those of us who are and will be perpetually broke. Fuck that noise. For those of you readers who don't know Anne (maybe four people? I think >50% of you are field hockey players.) imagine your seventh grade self walking into your first period math class the first day of school. You look to the chalkboard to find a clone of Mila Kunis writing her name as "Ms. Byrne" on the board. Holy shit, you think, mouth agape. This woman talks like Mila Kunis; she's funny like Mila Kunis; she's smoking hot like Mila Kunis. This is going to be the best year of your pea-brained life.

Two nights ago was Anne's going away party, and in true going away party fashion, I put too much alcohol into my body and made bad decisions. The last going away party-mistake (courtesy of Hilary O'Byrne-Byrne) was making out with a wookie on a plastic chair that immediately shattered into five hundred pieces. This one--better for the host's furniture, worse for the pH levels of the backyard plants--was merely continuing to put alcohol into my body. I pulled it together and redeemed myself, though! At 3 AM I successfully warded off a potential invader tongue (strange musician former-bread truck driver from Tennessee) from advancing down my throat. Nice work, formerly-drunk-then-sober-from-puking self!

I could speak more to that tangent, but for the sake of Anne's Denver 2012 memory I will speak to her instead. Anne will be teaching mathematics, econ and a creative writing class at an international school in Bangkok. She will be travelling to some other places that are equally far away from me, like Japan and China and maybe Vietnam (are you going to Vietnam Anne?). I wish she would hire me on to document her adventures for her, but the chances are high she'd have to fire me for continuing to write about unrelated stuff like puking and sweating and boogers and zombies. So I'll respectfully decline your offer, ANNE, and protect my career prospects as a professional bull-shitter. Thanks but NO THANKS.

Seriously, we'll miss the shit out of you.

3. ("Another one??") 

It is fucking hot in Denver right now. 

"Unseasonably hot" according to Denver Parks and Recreation. They're offering one dollar fare to any of the city's public swimming pools on the weekends now through August. Four dollar savings from regular pricing? YES PLEASE. They call it a goddamned BARGAIN people.

Chunks of the state's mountain forests are still burning, and I am still burning down my bedroom on a nightly basis. My sleep has been consistently restless. Anne has offered me the use of her air conditioned apartment in the down time before the lease is up, which I'm considering so I can start have conversations of substance again (not "It's hot." "Oh girl I know, it's soo hot." "Oh girl, you don't even KNOW.")

Like the other night (substance-less anecdote, here goes): I was trying to type an EMAIL. I'm going to give you the numbers and let you do the wpm calculation because I'm embarrassed. So here's me trying to maintain my leg up on people who can't do math...

two hours of typing...127 words

Got it? Are you revolted? You x out the tab yet? HAVE YOU Xed OUT THE TAAaaaaGGGHHHH---*click*

Yeah, if you were smart that's what you would have done. Granted, it WAS an important email in terms of this week of my life, but not THAT important. No parents were informed of their child's untimely death in battle or anything. Such a ballooned brain! Heat so rough on the little thang! 

Now if I wake up in the middle of the night craving a good neck thrash, well, then this will all make sense. In the meantime I'll pretend I'm still me, the world's still fairly normal, and there are still ways to evade those GLOBAL WARMING FIRE CAUSING KILLER DEMON NECK GNAWING ASSHOLES before they completely ruin everything. Like getting on down to the air conditioned apartment. And going back to sleep already.

tribute to my father

Earlier today, I noticed my "O" key was stuck. I know to fix it by pulling off the key and wiping the dust beneath, but I usually just pound until the letter pops up on the screen. In tribute to my father, today I pulled it off.

Last week my dad came to visit me from Michigan. He came to Denver for vacation, but his visit was consumed with activities I would consider the opposite of relaxing. He helped me move two carloads of boxes and furniture. He bought cleaning supplies and cleaned my new apartment.  He fixed about a hundred broken things on my car. (Though the tape job he did on my broken driver's side mirror has since melted out of place, it was a really awesome and helpful gesture.)

I had braced myself for it, but my father helped without lecturing or imposing guilt. I imagine that from his perspective I'm his prodigal daughter, trying to find herself on the other side of the country while he wakes up each morning hoping for an end to the adage and to find me working a real job, owning a house with a husband and some kids, within a three-hour drive of home. I keep waiting for the fuse to blow, but for now, all systems are functional. He lets me live out my haphazard existence and helps me pick up some of the pieces whenever he's around.

Happy belated Father's Day, dad. You deserve canonization, but the best I can do right now is the card and bag of coffee I'll be mailing you tomorrow.

(Also, may Rodney King rest in peace and the Thunder tie up the series tonight. And may my indoor hockey team beat Spencer and Schui's team by a double digit margin. Amen)

a pilot post

When a move overlaps the end of the really intense school-year job and the start of the less intense summer job, it's enough to make you wanna head-butt your window open to chuck random shit at dogs until your collection dwindles from endlessly heaping to just heaping.

After you do chuck that stuff, then lug what's left from cheap apartment A to cheap apartment B, then FINALLY settle down to a glass of wine on the front porch and realize B is in the epicenter of a construction zone AND shares a wall with seemingly unemployed boys who love smoking, yelling AND pro-wrestling...well...

you rip your hair out.

But before pulling enough to really detach the roots, you realize that those kids sound really happy and those construction workers are gettin er done and YOU'RE the one sitting naked on the floor thinking about how lucky you are to know the code to the car wash down the street and how you're just not as into raisins as you used to be. So here is my attempt to get up, put some pjs on and actually lie on the couch or bed and DO SOMETHING:

See, last weekend I was in Chicago (for a field hockey tournament) and five minutes into the L ride from the airport we (my teammates and me) were joined by a mentally ill old dude. Think: small guy with white cornrows and super small space boots and half-frozen bottles of water. All of which was cursory to his token article, headphones and an MP3 player, which he listened to in mentally ill old dude fashion.. He serenaded the cabin. He conferred with men close to him on the quality of songs. He made sure we all knew the TRUTH: rock is where it's at, rap is garbage.

This dude kind of straddled the line between being totally out of it and kind of in it, which didn't seem too far off from regular funny people except for the space boots and yelling bit. Of course, crazy overshadows funny more acutely in the tight confines of a train. So there was a lot of him calling out people that refused to look at him.

Unfortunately I suffer from the personal problem of not being able to keep my eyes down when somebody screams, "YOU DON'T KNOW ALICE COOPER? WHAT ARE YOU A NERD OR SOMETHIN?" from two feet away, which totally egged this guy on. (I can't help it! It's just too much fun to make eye contact with cross-eyed people. Which eye do I look at? Exactly what part of my face is he looking at right now? etc.) I was actually not the alleged "NERD OR SOMETHIN"--Spencer was the receptor of the all caps memo, (I was one of the "gorgeous girls", THANK YOU VERY MUCH) and the response is yes. Spencer is a nerd. Apart from sports clothes the only outfit I've seen him wear in the last two years is a polo-khaki combo with five-fingered barefoot shoes. He dressed up as Captain America to see the Avengers. He spends days off playing piano at coffee shops. AT 26, HE IS AN ACCOMPLISHED ACCORDION PLAYER.

He is a nerd, but he is a LOVELY nerd and we would not change a THING about him. He also has a super hot girlfriend, so he's doing fine.

Homeboy seemed to inherently know that Spencer was great, which made the whole exchange kind of sweet instead of awkward and sad. Until he started screaming about how much he loves slasher movies, then the line was crossed and everything was awkward. But I still gave him a little wave on the way out. I liked him overall.

And then last night I was reading this book my cousin gave me, this girl's memoir about one-night stands, A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER, and it was BORING. Just nothing turning the pages there. Which made me think about writing...

And then TODAY I was eating some frozen trail mix I found in the freezer (belonging to Ben, my new roommate) and was perusing the internet instead of calling that person back and trying to fix that thing that's jacked on my car when I saw that boring book, and...

I wrote what you just read (i.e. conclusion). More to come, though probably not all about bums on the train.

(Also, hopefully there's no you-just-moved-in-why-are-you-already-eating-my-trail-mix tension between me and Ben after he reads this.)