hazy

Albert Einstein asked a question that sometimes drives me hazy; am I or are the others crazy?

Still Life of Illness

I've been ill a long time. A cold/bronchitis/borderline pneumonia thing. No worries, I totally expect to be fine. I started a 10 day course of antibiotics yesterday. The side effects are ick, but I expect to be feeling better once I'm off them.
But on to the still life: my kitchen looks like a study of illness:
The dish drainer is full of dry, clean dishes. The side of the sink that's not full of dish drainer is full of dirty dishes. The counter next to the sink has a few more dirty dishes, a bowl with popcorn kernels in the bottom, an empty but still inflated microwave popcorn bag. On the tiny stove is an empty cracker box. On the floor in front of it is a trash bag, not quite full, slouched against the wall. On the floor is a laundry basket full of clean clothes (the washer and dryer are in the kitchen) and the dryer is full of clean, dry clothes too. On top of the dryer is a bright magenta stain the size of a quarter: cranberry juice. There are long, thin dried leaves on the floor that I tracked in.
It's kinda depressing in there. I imagine some day I'll do something about it.

When I first noticed this kitchen still life, what I thought was "Wow, my kitchen looks like depression."

Weird Dream

Had a really weird dream last night. Worth noting: last night was the solstice, a full moon, a total lunar eclipse, and a meteor shower. So, stuff in the air, I'm sure.
The dream:
A lady who is kind of heavy, with short blond hair, a little curly. She's in something like an interrogation room in a police station. A gray room, one-way mirror, just a table and two chairs... a very Hollywood version of such things, I'm sure.
There are two FBI agents in the room. I know where these guys came from; they are characters in a show, Criminal Minds, which I've been watching lately. Gideon is the one sitting at the table, across a corner of the table, to the right the woman. Reid is standing against a wall, a little behind and to the right of the woman. The rest of the team is watching through a one-way mirror.
The woman is a serial... injurer? She doesn't kill people, she just hurts them. Not sure if she hurts others or just herself, but the team is desperate to find the victim she currently has. The victim is her right arm. She has it tied to a board which is full of nails; like when yogis lay on beds of nails, you know? A board like that, that her arm is strapped to.
Periodically during the interrogation she tightens the straps so that the nails bite further into her arm. The team knows they are running out of time and are desperate to find her arm... but the thing is, her arm is right there attached to her just as you'd expect it to be. They just can't see what she's doing. They know the current "victim" is her arm, but they seem to think she's got it hidden away in some clever hideaway type of place.
Through out the dream I can feel how desperate the FBI team are to help this arm, how much they are studying everything she does for clues, and how much pleasure the woman is getting out of keeping this secret from them, and being able to hurt the arm right in front of them.
So... interpretation ideas?

Update: as I read this I realized, I'm pretty sure the woman only hurts herself, not others. Also, the FBI team's main motivations are to help the "victims," not to punish the woman. They are angry at her, but mostly they just want her to stop hurting... herself. Although the "victims" are bizarrely divorced from her self, as indicated in the dream.

Great Things

Grover

 

Abed

Giant billy goats made of straw

Mail

Christopher Moore

Bubbly water

Hot tea with honey

 

People who will be silly with you

Single Socks

I always figured that the reason people lose socks while doing the laundry was pretty logical.

Laundry machines are generally big, with curved sides. When you are at the laundry mat and a sock gets left behind in the washer or dryer, it would be fairly easy to miss it if you weren't being careful. Especially if your socks are white, which is usually the color of the inside of a washing machine. And you wouldn't notice til you got home and found a mysteriously single sock.

Or maybe your laundry basket was pretty full, so you didn't notice that a sock, a rather small item, had fallen out of it in the parking lot, and again you have a single sock mystery when you get home. It would be pretty easy to have happen, so it would happen a fair bit, there ya go, the legend of single socks is born.

Makes sense, right? So riddle me this: how come, now that my washer and dryer are in my very own kitchen, I am still losing socks?

Thanks, But...

To the people who have suggested I just start celebrating Christmas as a nonreligious, secular thing, and those who are thinking it... thanks for your replies/thoughts. That doesn't feel like the solution to me right now, though.

Christmas Trees

For those of you who don't know me (Hey, don't laugh, I do occasionally get comments from people I don't know, or don't know well. And they aren't all spam, either!); I don't celebrate Christmas. I didn't celebrate it growing up. A lot of my friends don't celebrate it. Most of my immediate family doesn't celebrate it. Aside from some annoyingly repetitive songs in stores and a couple of scary shopping days, Christmas has just never played a huge role in my life.
So, why, when I just drove past a Christmas tree lot, did I have an urge to buy one? Not a big one. One of those kind of table top sized guys. With maybe a star on top and some white lights around it.

 This year, and maybe some last year, I'm feeling pretty left out of the whole Christmas thing. It never really bothered me before, even as a kid. My religion (I'm a Baha'i) has a gift giving holiday at the end of February called Ayyam-i-ha, and I've always looked forward to that and not felt like I was missing out on things by not having Christmas.
I think maybe it has to do with tradition. In my nuclear family we had some Ayyam-i-ha traditions, like decorating and baking and stuff like that. I remember getting really excited about seeing the Ayyam-i-ha decoration boxes come out of the attic and choosing where to hang them and all that. I think my mom was the one who kind of kept those early traditions alive. With her gone, it's not the same. I don't have living children to pass these things on to, and doing them by myself seems a little anticlimactic. My brother has 3 kids, and we do celebrate Ayyam-i-ha. I look forward to that, and I like it, but they are kind of making their own traditions. Which I'm all for; families doing things in ways that are important to and work for them is totally the way to go. And to be fair, some of the stuff they do is a lot like what I did as a kid. Maybe I'm missing having someone to do things the way I would do them? I dunno.
But somehow, this year I feel like I'm missing out by not being a part of the zeitgeist of Christmas.

Wow, Been Awhile

Here is a quote.

"Happiness is not a matter of intensity, but of balance, order, rhythm and harmony" - Thomas Merton

I like it because I do confuse happiness with... I dunno; excitement or joy or hyperness, even. Sometimes I forget that happiness can just be generally liking how things are, rather than being constantly filled with the feeling that you just have to smile or burst.
I had that confusion with the word "fun" for a while too. I thought I didn't do anything fun because I don't generally like things people consider fun, like parties or clubs or dancing and things like that. I was equating "fun" with "wild" or "energetic" or something. Really, though, fun just means anything you enjoy, which means I have fun pretty much all day every day. And I am happy most of the time, too.