A Strange Dream (and a Bad Case of Poison Ivy)

In my dream last night, it was the spring semester of my senior year in high school. I was friends with someone I no longer speak to. (The weird thing is in real life I didn’t meet this person until college.) So in my dream it seemed as though we shared some kind of temporary dorm room because we knew we were both attending a particular college in the fall. It wasn’t going to be our dorm room once we actually enrolled in school; rather, it was a temporary room we could come and stay at while we took care of our college preparations. (In the dream these preparations were extensive and required several visits over the spring semester.)

So we shared a room but we were rarely there at the same time. And in my dream we were having some of the problems our later friendship would face. Here’s the weird part. During one of my dream visits to the dorm I saw some of her belongings, which meant she was in town at the same time I was. Somehow I could tell by what she had left in the room that she had gone on a date. She left a notebook on her bed (not expecting I would be there the same weekend) that was filled with letters and pictures of her boyfriend. Some of those pictures were x-rated in nature.

In the dream I found myself reading all of the notes and looking at the pictures even though I knew it was wrong. Of course, she came home while I was reading and we ended up having a discussion about it all and clearing up a few things.

In real life, nothing like this ever happened. But what I think the dream means is that I perhaps I feel like I knew too many personal things about her, perhaps things I shouldn’t have known (in real life I didn’t discover these things through snooping, but in day-to-day life). I equated these things in my sleeping mind with sex/x-rated photos/very personal letters, etc. which, again, does not directly correspond to real life but I understand why those things came to mind.

This is going to sound a little strange, but sometimes I think you learn things about people that you don’t necessarily want to know. And they don’t want to tell you. But, like in poker, there are “tells.” There are some things you just can’t hide. And I’m not saying you should, but that once the knowledge is out there, knowing something can change a relationship.

I also find it interesting that the dream took place during my last semester of high school as I was preparing for a new phase. Because in real life, our friendship ended as I was going through a transition from one part of my life to another.

To me the dream means some things should remain private. Any other theories out there?

***
OK, this is more important than my dream but if you can’t tell, my dream really freaked me out. Nate has a serious case of poison ivy on his face, neck and arm. We think our cat is going into a neighbor’s yard that is seriously overgrown. We’ve seen a large poison ivy plant in the back. Our theory is the cat is going over there, rubbing against the ivy, and coming home and Nate is getting it on his hands. He’s had three serious outbreaks within the past year and he seems to have above-average sensitivity to poison ivy. So I think I’m going to go over to her house and volunteer to bring some roundup.

Austin Civil Rights Activist Dies

"Whenever Volma Overton tested the boundaries of segregation at Austin restaurants and other 'whites only' gathering spots during the Sixties and Seventies, he was usually accompanied by a small army of unlikely soldiers – his four children."

Read the rest on the AusChron site.

From "Gulf Coast Slaves"

"Halliburton and its subcontractors hired hundreds of undocumented Latino workers to clean up after Katrina -- only to mistreat them and throw them out without pay.

...
Still, tracing the line from unpaid undocumented workers to their multibillion-dollar employers is a daunting task. A shadowy labyrinth of contractors, subcontractors and job brokers, overseen by no single agency, have created a no man's land where nobody seems to be accountable for the hiring -- and abuse -- of these workers.

...
I was with Cintra when she received phone calls from several Latino workers who complained they were denied, under threat of deportation, the right to leave the base at Belle Chasse. Cintra also took me along on visits to squalid trailer parks -- like the one at Arlington Heights in Gulfport -- where up to 19 unpaid, unfed and undocumented KBR site workers inhabited a single trailer for $70 per person, per week. Workers there and on the bases complained of suffering from diarrhea, sprained ankles, cuts and bruises, and other injuries sustained on the KBR sites -- where they received no medical assistance, despite being close to medical facilities on the same bases they were cleaning and helping rebuild."

Read the rest on Salon.

Changing the Subject

I just wanted to tell you I am very tired. For the past three days, we've been painting the hallway. Ceiling, two wall colors, and last night we started the trim. One more day of painting and then clean up. Our house was a rental house and we find evidence of this all the time. All of the rooms used to be different colors and whoever painted the walls white (was it the tenants? the landlords who then sold the house to us?) did such a craptastic job that you can usually see the previous color through the white. They did only one coat and that coat might have been primer. So sometimes when I'm exhausted and looking at a can of paint, I remind myself why we're doing this. Which is, this is our house, something we waited for a long time, and we are now painting walls because we can. And, oh yeah, if we don't paint you can see some other color through the white.

The hallways is sort of divided into two sections. The regular long part that leads to all the rooms, and this one sort of small section that connects the entry way to the den. So we painted the long part a mellow yellow. Right away as the color was going on the wall, we agreed we liked it. In the small entry way section, I picked indigo. You've got to wonder what Nate is thinking when he agrees with my harebrained ideas. As the first coat went on, we kept saying, "I don't know." But I hadn't mixed the paint well enough (so it was going on sort of streaky) and now that the second coat is on, it looks better. It's very dark (I knew it would be) but I think I like it. I want to see how it looks when everything is done and the art is back on the walls. Worst case scenario: we paint over the indigo. But right now I think it could work.

I'm wondering how crazy I'm going to continue to be with these colors. My office is a turquoise. Nate's office is very chill. A grey and a blue grey. Then we have the yellow/indigo hall. I've thought about painting our dining room red and kahki. Too much? Maybe. Maybe I should be more sedate with two softer colors divided by crown molding. So much more soothing, right? Then I start thinking about my bright colors ...