Monday, January 26, 2004

SNOW DAY

It snowed today!
I must be getting old, because as happy as it made me to go smoosh my nose against the window and watch at work, I soon thought "Man, snow makes it suck to go places!"
It started a little after nine and contunied til after dark, to be replaced by sleet, and I fear, now, by freezing rain. They're calling for an accumulation of 1/2 an inch. A quarter inch snaps limbs and power lines. I remember only too well a week last December with no power... But still, it's pretty.
We got let out of work an hour and a half early, and Music Staff was cancelled, so I did what everyone should on a Snow Day: I wasted it completely.
I played Dragon Warrior 4 and did laundry, generally shirking my dramaturgical work and playwriting urges. I did ask my parents to pick up the $36 fee for reporting my GRE score to the US colleges I'm applying for. I hope they pick it up. (Civilized institutions in the UK require neither that score NOR an application fee...)
I also listened to If You're Feeling Sinister straight through for the first time in a couple months today. I had forgotten how wonderfully coherent it is, and how... generally perfect it is. And it ends with Judy and the Dream of Horses.
Speaking of dreams, I've had some strange ones recently.

Dirty Dream Number One: (no Canadians involved)
I'm in a hotel bedroom with my parents. They aren't sharing a bed, but each is sharing with one child. My sister is with my mother, and this new child -- a 16 year old adopted boy, who looked oddly like a just-past-punk kid from 80s London -- was sharing with my father. I think, "Oh, I'll share with my older [and real] brother."
But when he comes in, it isn't my /real/ brother, it's my friend Keith, who obviously for the purposes of the dream -- he was conversing with my father, both in a vest and jockey shorts and black sandals -- was my brother.
To spare myself from whatever pyschological weirdness that sleeping arrangement implies, my memory goes on pause here...
...And resumes with me in a train station in Philadelphia (?!) waiting to catch some form of transportation to Chicago. Everyone is dressed in odd 1940s-esque apparell and we're obviously on the viewing platform of a very tall building. I keep asking people I went to High School with for directions to the subway. They're all apparently irritated with me for asking, because they all keep saying "The bus station and the subway stop are at the SAME PLACE!"
Finally this guy Chad gives me the directions ("One street up and three blocks over...") and I wake up.

Dirty Dream Number Two: (It's pretty special, too...)

For reasons that are not clear, large bears are chasing me around my parents yard. But not the yard now, the yard as it was a decade ago. I climb up a ladder we haven't had for 15 years (which I for some reason deeply cherished) and realize I'm being chased by one black bear and one brown bear and the bears REALLY want to eat me. Just before they catch me, I wake up sweaty and gross.

Make of that what you will...

I also bough the Belle and Sebastian DVD, Fans Only. It is keenly, terribly, awfully wonderful. I've only watched three videos (LLPJ -- first of course, then Legal Man and Jonathan David) and I may just ration myself to extend the pleasure, a la Llew and A Conspiracy of Dunces. Also, in the videos, they run around Glasgow. A lot.
That's not a good reason to want to move there, right?

Book of the Day: Doctor Who -- Timeless
Soundtrack: IYFS and Duncan Sheik's s/t debut. God, this sucks so much. SO much. How did I ever tolerate it?

PS: Go here. Click on the Yeti. Click again to swing. Do it. You will understand. You will waste hours. "Ooof!"