Dialogues & Somniloquies

I've been stuck inside my apartment all day with spurts of horrible cramps. I'm sorry if that's TMI for any of the males who read this, but I'm in pain right now and can't get my mind off of it. As I type this, I'm using my laptop as a sort of makeshift heating pad for my midsection. It's not really helping, but I figured it was worth a shot. GAH! PAIN! It's like my body is warring against itself.

And so is my mind, actually. There are two different posts that I want to write, and I can't decide between them (being decisive has never been my strong suit). I guess I'll just sort of squish them into one and pray that the result isn't too jarring. So here goes.

The last few days have been marked by long conversations and vivid dreams.

I ran into my college friend Charlotte as I was wandering around downtown looking for boots earlier this week. Strangely, she was out doing exactly the same thing. We walked around for awhile, chatting more than shopping. We discussed our simultaneously similar and divergent love lives at length. It was exactly what I needed. It's lovely to talk to people who are completely removed from your situation, but still know you as a person well enough to understand what's at stake and why you've handled things the way you have thus far (did any of that sentence make sense?).

The horizon of my love life isn't completely empty, stagnant, or static, but I haven't felt right about spewing anything here. First of all, it concerns at least one person who may or may not read this blog (he knows the address, although he reads it somewhat sporadically). Second, I haven't sorted out everything mentally yet, so trying to compose anything would be more of a goulash than an actual stream of thought. Third, once I do sort everything out, I feel I owe it to certain people to discuss it with them before discussing it with the electronic world. Lastly and least importantly, I suddenly feel the need to censor myself, now that I know that certain friends have access to this (including a brother, an ex, and a couple of coworkers... no offense, John & John). It was easier when mostly strangers read this. I didn't care so much what they knew.

Suffice it to say, I have a friend who is "in love with" me (his words, not mine), and words like that tend to complicate lives.

Moving on.

I went to my company's holiday party on Friday. The party was held at ESPN Zone. It's a cross between a restaurant and an arcade, but with only sports-related games and no prizes. Instead of letting free alcohol flow and creating the awkward drunken social environment that one might normally associate with the holiday season, each employee was given a card pre-stocked with game credits. We got to leave work at 11:45, but were paid for the full day. And on top of that, we got a free meal out of it. Long live corporate America!

Really, it was a splendid idea for a holiday party. I enjoyed letting loose with my coworkers in a fun environment. Everyone was acting silly, which is normally territory that only I dare to enter. My boss' boss' boss' boss (I'm incredibly low on the totem pole) complimented my skills on a game (more on that shortly). My boss offered to buy drinks for my department, leading a coworker to say, "This is the best day of work ever!" as his giant mug of beer arrived. I played games against people who apparently work in my building but whom I swear I've never laid eyes on in the past.

One of my coworkers beat me at air hockey. One beat me on dirt bikes. And I think all of them beat me at basketball. Not only am I completely lacking in skill at sports, but apparently I'm devoid of the ability to master their artificial arcade-style counterparts as well.

Anyway, I played this game called Pump It Up. It's similar to DDR, except it came out like a week before (and won a lawsuit against DDR which is why that had to change to a plus-sign configuration from the x-shaped one). I'd never played before, but I gave it whirl. I beat three coworkers in a row. A guy who worked at the place said I was quick learner. He then demonstrated his own warp-speed skills in a special mode in which he used BOTH boards, and occasionally had to hit four buttons at once (meaning both hands and both feet became necessary). It was so insane and incredible. And one of those things that I could never, by any stretch of the imagination, ever physically accomplish.

(As a side note, I've decided I really want Monica's power from Heroes. She's a mimic. Anything she sees someone else do, she suddenly knows how to do. It's a great power, especially since it makes you more of a genius than a freak. Possibly the best power ever. Except for maybe having a "save game" function for your life. That would be awesome... whenever you screwed up, you could just "revert to saved". Brilliant.)

Non-coworker Ben (of the purely platonic pudding) challenged me to a game of table hockey (imagine foosball, but with hockey players), which he used as a platform to metaphorically slaughter me. So I brought him over to my turf and schooled him in three consecutive rounds of Pump It Up (I got three As, he got three Fs). After that we had a lovely, lengthy discussion, that spanned from the bar to beyond the L stop. As a result of it, I've decided that he and I are going to be good friends.

Saturday night I had dinner with John, a friend from college (it recently occurred to me that I know a large quantity of Johns). We've been living in the same city since August, but this is the first time we've actually been able to see each other. After dinner, we walked around talking in the blizzard for a long while until we were both covered in a layer of white and losing feeling in our toes. John is among the extremely small contingent of people who has figured out the art of teasing me without incurring my wrath. A rare skill indeed. He's fun to be around, which is why it's strange that we don't hang out more often. Every time I get on the phone with him we talk for long periods of time, but then I guess that happens more often than not with me.

And now for the unconventional section of the post (not that there's ever any convention utilized here...):

I've had more frequent dreams lately than usual, and they're all pretty strange. Maybe it has something to do with the accident? I don't know. I've been waking up in the middle of the night a lot (not all that unusual, sadly), so I've been remembering multiple dreams per slumber period. I had two dreams last night that I feel are worth mentioning, despite the fact that I haven't properly analyzed either of them, if only because they were somewhat lucid. I remember them both rather vividly, and I'm curious as to what I'm trying to tell myself subconsciously. If you have a guess, feel free to share it.

In the first, I was at a formal, old-fashioned sort of party. The kind that you might see in a movie version of a Jane Austen novel. It was the middle of winter, and everyone was in intricate ball gowns except for me, and I was in a contemporary party dress. A friend introduced me to an attractive man, who started staring at me to the point that I became uncomfortable. He approached me and asked me to dance. I said no, because everyone was doing some sort of complicated waltz-like thing that I'd never done before. He insisted, and he said I needed to change my shoes. So I took off the high heels I'd been wearing, and put on socks, and then he put a pair of Keds on my feet (my favorites!) and laced them up for me. Suddenly, swing music started playing, and I sort of knew what I was doing. We began swing dancing, with him spinning, twirling, and flipping me in ways that made me feel more like a baton than a dance partner. It was a blast. One by one, the room, the people, and the snow all melted away, and we were left standing outside in a field in the middle of spring. Then I woke up.

In the second dream, I was on some sort of a boardwalk or pier or something, running around with friends like I did when I was a child, without a care in the world. I had a kindergarten mentality throughout the dream. Between spurts of running, we were all reading things from scraps of paper (lists or something) and laughing wildly. We went to get ice cream, but the stand was running out of strawberry, so they only partially filled my gigantic cone. I started eating the cone first, saving the best for last. I offered a bite to a friend of mine (who, in the dream, was played by Prince Harry of England... no idea why... don't think it's important, but figured I should mention it). He took a bite, and promptly threw the entire cone into the water. He laughed as I yelled at him. I tried to kick him and hit him (again, kindergarten mentality), but he just batted away my hands and legs and kept laughing. I couldn't understand why he would do that when I hadn't gotten to eat any of my ice cream yet. If I weren't so angry, I surely would've been crying (they say not to cry over spilled milk, but spilled ice cream is an entirely different matter). He said that it tasted bad, and that he'd take me to a different stand he knew about that had better ice cream. So we separated from the rest of the group in search of this superior ice cream that he most definitely owed me, but by the time we got there, it was closed. He offered to break into the ice cream stand, but I told him not to because I didn't want to get in trouble. Next to the stand, there was narrow, lemon-lime shack with a door on the front. We walked over to it and discovered that it was unlocked. When we opened the door, there was just a staircase in front of us. We walked upstairs, and there were three rooms. One of them had a bed and a trunk in it. We began trying to open the trunk. And then I woke up.

I woke myself up from both of those dreams by talking in my sleep. I do that a lot. I think it's hereditary, because my mother and one of my brothers do the same thing. My mother cries and screams in her sleep as well. I don't scream. When I'm about to scream while sleeping, I swallow first for some reason. The swallowing wakes me before I yelp. I also have a cousin with a history of sleepwalking, but I'm not sure if that's connected.

There's actually a really lovely word for sleep-talking: somniloquy (I swear I'm not making that up, although spell-check dislikes it). I rather like that, as it sounds sort of theatrical. Even in my sleep I'm a performer.

A friend of mine once claimed that he heard me singing in my sleep. I thought he was joking, but to this day he swears it to be true. He said he didn't recognize the melody, and he thinks I may have made it up. He couldn't decide if it was cute or creepy. Neither could I.

I want to go on and make more sense of this entry (edit it and whatnot), but I really can't. Pain, pain, pain. Every few minutes while writing this I get a lightning bolt through my body. In light of the way I'm feeling right now, I'd say I've done pretty well with getting out what I wanted to, even if it's somewhat jostled. But I'm not even going to reread this before posting tonight... So please forgive any glaring spelling, punctuation, or grammatical errors that you may have noticed.

May you have outlets to discuss your problems, awake or asleep.

~A~

P.S. The band Semisonic has a song called "Singing in My Sleep". It's actually about hearing someone else singing to you while you sleep, and not singing while you're asleep... but I reminded myself of this in the post. I enjoy the song, and Semisonic in general. Overlooked group. People only seem to know "Closing Time" and "Chemistry". The lead singer, Dan Wilson, is doing a solo thing now. He's a Grammy-winner, because of co-writing that ubiquitous Dixie Chicks song last year... but anyway. Semisonic. Yes. Good group. Look them up.

P.P.S. GAH! PAIN! Will it never stop?!