Merry Christmas & Happy New Year

Been a tough year. I am patient and comforted in my greater hope, but damn. Circumstances are much better than those of many less fortunates, and yet the challenges get to me.

I'm grateful for my job, grateful to be living in L.A., but the job has been very frustrating from the beginning. Nicole and I hadn't been married a month before this gig began in Fall 2006. Seems to take eigthy percent of my energy. Haven't managed to be creative when I'm off of work. Feel like I'm out of juice much of the time.

In addition, we're still contending with Nicole's health problems. Much improved, but she's still getting chest pains, dizziness, fluctuating heart rate, fatigue. Not life threatening stuff, but it brings her down, and that brings me down, affects quality of life. Been about six months. Say a prayer.

So, for about eighteen months I haven't been able to communicate with folk as much as I'd like. Excuses, excuses. Neither have I been able to keep up with movies or music, I don't know what's going on. Some improvement in 2008 would be nice.

But Thank God it's Christmastime, it's very cheering. I rarely drink coffee these days, but, for the next two weeks as I'm celebrating the holidays, I'm having coffee every day. This is going to be a major binge and I'm looking forward to it. I'm going to read a load of Anna Karenina and a lot of H.P. Lovecraft. I have a John Waters DVD from Netflix called "This Filthy World" and it looks like it's going to be pretty funny. I finally got some new shoes on Friday. They are black with steel toes and silver buckles and have tremendous tread. Nicole and I are going on many walks in cold weather.

I hope y'all are having a great Christmas season. Wish we could have communicated more this year but there's a good time coming! I know it! Eat the holiday food and watch the holiday moives and I'll see you in 2008!

bad dream adulthood horrible

Friday night I had a bad dream that gives a pretty accurate picture of how work is going these days. I’m hoping the Christmas season will cheer me up.

I dreamt that Nicole and I had moved back to Los Angeles again. We moved into a large, odd-looking rented house. The house was in a ridiculous place for me to be living in, somewhere like urban Long Beach, on a busy street. Either the house or my new job or both were handed off to me by good old Jaime Hessel. She left me a list of instructions written in red ink.

The job seemed perfect at first but turned out to be horrible. All I had to do was assist a woman who was an instructor at a college that was a lot like UCSD. The woman handed me some electrical cords and told me to deliver them to another instructor on campus. I started bundling the cords then the room darkened. The cords turned into something else, like old, rusty wires, unrelated to what they had been before. These old wires slipped out of my hands and disappeared. This seemed to happen several times.

The instructor asked me if I had delivered the electrical cords yet. I told her no, but that I was working on it. She told me to take some sound baffling boards to the cubicle of the same instructor who wanted the electrical cords. She also introduced me to a student assistant who would be helping me. He was a young blond guy from the college, he seemed like a recovering skate boarding enthusiast. I asked him to look for the electrical cords that I had lost.

When I went to pick up the sound baffling boards they had grown much larger. In addition, they had disguised themselves amidst a collection of lumber and I couldn’t find them. I considered taking all of the lumber to the second instructor’s cubicle and sort it out when I got there, but I couldn’t lift any of it.

I asked the student assistant if he had run across the missing electrical cords. He hadn’t been looking for them. Instead he had drawn a diagram of the electrical cords, which he showed me.

I went to the cubicle of the instructor that wanted the electrical cords and the sound baffling boards to see if they had arrived on their own. The instructor asked if I had brought the cords and the boards. I said no. She looked disappointed but not surprised. Then my clothes started falling off.