It's March 1st. Technically, it's 2:57 am on March 2nd but well, I haven't gone to sleep yet so for me, it's still the 1st. And this day marks two important events: my 5th year anniversary of living in Seattle and the entrance into the month in which I am likely to hear about my graduate school applications. The latter of the two holds the most significance for me. Going through the application process, I made myself just do it and told myself I wouldn't think about what acceptance would be like until March 1 - although, to be fair, while I didn't think of grad school necessarily, I did count down the days to today. March 1 has arrrived. And so has my insomnia.
It's getting harder to sleep and when I do, my dreams are getting much weirder - which is odd in itself because my dreams have always been vivid, movie-like, acid trips. As my anxiety and impatience overwhelms me, my unconscious state is upping the ante.
Last night I dreamed (really spell check? dreamt isn't a word? what the shit? how bout dreampt? no?!!?) that I was being hunted by a particularly nasty militia group in the Congo wherein my father was helping to cure thousands of inhabitants of preventable diseases and I had to get to him with a 40 foot tall tree whose sap was critical to his treatment plan. I was with a team of moderately trained combatants, scientists, lumberjacks, medical practitioners, hippies and ex pats. After an especially grueling day of heaving the entirely intact 40 footer through the Congo, we stopped to bed down in the offensively humid swamp, some of us near heat stroke, all of us with layers of clothing pasted to our bodies. As we made temporary shelter in the branches of trees, someone said tomorrow was expected to be hotter than the day we just endured. At that moment, my tour guide, very close nearby on the next branch over, lunged across the distance and clutched his hand over my forearm, startling me and silencing me simultaneously. I didn't see or hear movement, but I sensed which direction the shot to my head was coming and jumped awake.
The night before that, I was vampire food. They were hunting and hungry and seriously less amiable (and attractive) than the Twilight line up. I've got to find a way to dream sweet little dreams and wake up without sweating through the sheets.
In addition to ameliorating the ramped up and thoroughly developed narrative lines of my schizo dreams, I think I need to disconnect from the news (my only news source, other than The Daily Show, is NPR. Yah, I admit it - so what? Comedy and commie pinko left wing reporting). Even still, it's too much. I've got to turn the dial to the golden oldies or the smooth sounds of the 70s or some other happy-pappy-crappy stuff that's conflict-free rather than listening to the world's crises.
The stress of waiting to hear about grad school while Aydin waits to hear about one of his visa-providing-stay-in-the-States proposals getting the funding it needs from our absurdly fucked up partisan political grind machine wherein the majority of those fuckfaces want to cut funding to most things humanitarian and productive (certainly that crazy magic that some people call the sciences) and then hoping that our paths line up because if they don't, moving to Turkey might be on the table and while I want to visit, I'm not super stoked on moving there sight-unseen or instead of going to grad school if I get in... it's too much. I can't listen to the news without possessing the ability to do anything about what injustices are going on AND navigate the uncertainty in my life. I just can't do both right at this moment. So goodbye KUOW and hello KMCQ (I'll be back late nite for Jazz on the Grooveyard at KPLU!).
I need to step out of the information fast lane now. I need smooth jazz and bubble baths, RomComs* and bonbons, star-gazing and kitty cat snuggles. Just till mid-April. Then, no matter what my admission status, I'll go back to my snarky, sarcastic, biting regularly programmed self - with all my normal capabilities - like being able to listen to NPR and deal with the new Hitlers cropping up across the globe promising annihilation to their opposition and then trying to convince reporters that there are no protests and everybody loves said regime. Or my own government wanting to cut support to the most needing (poor, women, children, minorities, etc.) or deserving (teachers, scientists, students) in my country from an impressive number of angles because of course the multimillionaires who we elect to represent us (on both sides of the party line) are only naturally detached from our (the bottom 90% income-earner's) way of life so how could the plights of our lives resemble much more than an extravagant game of Risk or Life to them?
Anyway, I'll silence myself on these topics, relax my clenched fist, and exhale my scathing rage as thoughts on the grotesque display of asinine politics playing out in our nation's capital while millions hold their breath for how badly their lives and livelihoods will be impacted fade from my mind's eye... I'm calming my shaking hands by placing them in Aydin's. The next 6 weeks, worrying about my future is all I will allow, if anything. I'm turning my head around and focusing on the good things in this life: I am disconnecting from the news machine. I am buying oreos and drowning them until they're buttery. I am kissing my boyfriend 18% more and reading cartoons. I'm painting my toenails and watching Friends. This is life in the bumper lane.
*RomComs = Romantic Comedies (a.k.a. bad movies made by talentless, story-regurgitating hacks for mass marketed audiences, see also: movies that Lena loves when under a certain amount of duress.)
