Twiddling-Thumbs Post (and Thanksgiving Weekend Report)

I think this is probably the first time I am writing a blog entry just because I have to do SOMETHING while things are uploading very slowly in another window. (I had promised a few of my students I would read their research paper outlines and get back to them before tomorrow. For some reason, scanning the copies with my penciled-in comments seemed like a better idea than just e-mailing the comments. Having already committed the time to penciling and scanning, I am now committed to uploading the files, very very slowly with my dial-up connection, in e-mails to said students.) There is a lesson in here, I think, about letting go of bad ideas, or not letting go.

So, while I am uploading and twiddling, here is my report on Thanksgiving in my neck of the woods:

Thursday, with the family, was lovely. Pretty low-key, just five of us.

Friday I ventured out into the maelstrom of "Black-Friday" shopping, because I had a gift certificate to an electronics store from last December that I wanted to use to buy myself a little audio system. I never have a day off from work to do things like this and the weekends always seem to be taken up with other things. So, there you have my reason for joining the crowds the day after Thanksgiving: not because of the sales, not to "get a jump" on holiday shopping, but just because I was off from work. I will say that the store was as chaotic as you can possibly imagine, people clustered around the displays of computers, games, and audio systems, long lines at the register, the store assistants criscrossing the store with stock on dollies, looking as if they could barely restrain themselves from barking any time someone had a question. Either that or they just looked pathetically listless. The one person I got to answer my question (after about four tries) very creatively made up an answer. (Why, I wanted to know, couldn't I get the radio to change stations on the model I was looking at? Because, he said, we're in the basement and there's no reception down here. But, I said, I can listen to the radio on these other models. That's because we have an antenna behind them, he said. When I got the system home, I discovered you had to change the stations with the remote control--that's why I couldn't get them to change in the store. I had to admire the clerk's inventiveness.) I did buy a system, got out of there pretty quickly, took a cab home with my purchase, met a friend for coffee and then went to yoga, so the day got a lot more serene as it went on.

Saturday I set up my little music system, did some cleaning, went out to dinner with my sister.

Today--well, mostly commenting and uploading. But, defeating the oncoming tide of winter, my friends and I went out into the mild afternoon and played volleyball! I managed to get out there at around 3:30. By 4:30, sadly enough, it is getting dark now, so I only played for an hour. But it made me happy, as always.

Skip This One if You Don't Like Reading About Other People's Dreams

In my dream I was getting married. It wasn't clear to whom, but I had the dress ready. The dress was perfect for the person I seemed to imagine myself as in the dream--someone no longer young and with good taste. It had an antiquey, vintage feel, two pieces, not white but an off-white, deeper than ivory color, I can imagine it being called bisque, perhaps. It was flattering but not form-fitting. The top part may have had little spaghetti straps or maybe it was a jacket. The skirt was a number of layers, cut jaggedly, I mean like Flintstones-wear jaggedly, so that you could see parts of the different layers on top of each other. Some of the underneath colors were a dark gray, to contrast with the bisque. The layers flared out in a way that I liked. I was very conscious of the fact that the outfit was utterly comfortable yet, to my mind, very attractive, or that I was attractive in it. I had shoes, too--they were kind of a bronze color, leather, also antiquey looking, kind of a cross betwen ballet flats and Mary Janes, with lots of little punched out or embroidered designs around the edges. I think that I was looking at myself in the full-length mirror in what we called "the little room" in the apartment in which I grew up--different people slept there as we all got to be different ages and my older siblings left the family. Sometimes my mother slept there, too.

As I wrote above, it wasn't clear whom I was marrying. The putative groom seemed to waver between being (it's so hard to know what tense to use to describe the weird "mood" of dreams!) the guy that broke up with me a year and a half ago whom I still feel anguished over although the thinking part of me knows it wasn't working out, the guy whom I broke up with over eight years ago in a rupture that was very painful at the time but also seems now to have been for the best, and the guy whom I was with when I was 25 and who died suddenly and violently, a victim of street crime in a dangerous city. (In real life, the first guy is dating someone else and the second is married and just had a child.) There was something about a journey to go to wherever the wedding was supposed to be. The families--both mine and the groom's--seemed to know about the wedding, although it was not clear that the groom knew. There was a part where I was sitting and talking earnestly with someone, a woman professor at the place where I attended graduate school, and she was supposed to be the man's mother. Later, someone else reported to me that she had said, "I feel like Sarah is already my daughter," and that made me feel, in the dream, even more obligated to go on with the wedding.

So, yes, the wedding. Somehow I had to make a decision that I was going to go forward with getting married, without knowing if the guy was going to show up. (I guess that was me, the nondreaming self, knowing that each of these situations were really contrary to reality.) Even in the dream, though, I knew there was something wrong about each of the scenarios, that I was picking someone from my past that I didn't really know anymore. As I am writing this, I keep trying to hold on to the kind of thinking that was going on in the dream to describe it, but it kind of vaporizes in the light of day, doesn't it?--anyway, the issue in the dream seemed to be about me having some faith in whatever my decision was going to be, not worrying about whether the other person was going to do his part. So, in the dream, I tried to think about the issues involved in marrying any one of those men, or more accurately, about getting married in general. At one point I came to what seemed a moment of clarity--I thought, if I can just get this over with, this marrying thing, then it won't seem so important and I can just focus on the rest of my life. At that moment I think the picture in my mind of who I was going to marry was the guy I was with in my 20s, and the "reality" of that intruded on my attempt to think generically about marriage--I just couldn't imagine being married to him. I thought, but we haven't spent time together in so long, I don't know if there's any feeling between us anymore or if we have anything in common. (This is painful to write about. He is still and always in his 20s. I am 48.) Then I thought, again trying to reason all of this out, but if you get married, you will get to take care of someone, you would like that, it would be good for you. And at that moment I pictured the guy from eight years ago. Or maybe all of this was happening simultaneously--there is not really any time in dreams. But at any rate, I couldn't imagine being with him, either.

Then there was another part about the dress, where I was going to try it on for someone, a woman friend, who said, "Are you sure it doesn't make you look too old?"
But I still liked the dress and wasn't worried about that.

It got closer to the time when I would have to leave to travel to wherever this wedding was supposed to be, and I decided I just couldn't do it, even though I knew the families (!) would be disappointed. So instead of going to get married, I changed my clothes and got on the bus to go to this weekend singles-and-outdoor-activities place in the country that I've been to a couple of times this year, in real life. Once I got there, I saw that it was really beautiful, as always, and even though it was winter, people were swimming in the lake. Also, some people were walking on all fours (chalk that one up to a review I just read of a TV documentary about a family in some country, can't remember which, that does that, and how the local community reacts to them [mostly cruelly]). Then there was a lot of anxiety stuff about getting my badge (in real life, you don't get badges at this place!) and getting assigned to a cabin and thinking why did I come here, who am I going to room with, I want to go home. But then I got over that, and was on my way to some activity or other--volleyball, football, perhaps. True to the time of year it is, the ground was muddy. I looked down and I was still wearing the little wedding shoes and there was mud caked all around various parts of them. I had a pang of reget--I thought, now I will never wear these particular shoes to my wedding, that moment has passed. I thought about taking them off and frantically trying to clean them. I think even in the dream, I knew this part was very hokey, too heavily symbolic, but at any rate, then I thought, it's okay, you can let go of the shoes and this moment, you can buy other shoes if you ever decide to get married. I don't know if I believed myself, though, or in fact what I decided to do about the shoes, if I was really able to let go of them because then . . . I woke up! It was all a dream!

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Okay, back to real life, I am thankful to have had the opportunity to share this curious mixed bag of a dream. Thank you all for listening. Consider yourself to have done your good deed for the day and go have turkey! Happy Thanksgiving to all.

Grateful

Most of all, for a roof over my head and food in my tiny New-York-apartment-sized refrigerator.

For friends and family.

Health--soundness of body and mind. The ability to read, think, see, hear.

My kind and bendable yoga teachers.

The sky and the rain. The changeability of each day.

The kind man who got up to give me a seat on the subway, who left me no choice about it, just got up and said, "Sit down," the other day even though I am neither pregnant nor excessively old (?), nor was I wearing heels (all criteria in my mind for accepting a seat). I was anxious and stressed and tired, and somehow this nice man noticed and gave me his seat.

November Volleyball

We
played
despite cold
and wind and the sun
slanting away across the park
so quickly. How lovely, how brief the afternoon's reign.


Edited Nov. 10th. The syllables were all wrong! I'm out of practice.

Okay, now it's December 12th and I looked at this poem again. Guess what, the syllables are still wrong! Where's the two-syllable line? I have an idea--let's just call this a non-fib poem.