Well, I made it to neither the fanime staff meeting nor the ratpoisonvalē; instead, I ended up sleeping about fourteen hours and had an incredibly long series of dreams; the gist of them was that I had to choose which of two groups I was going to belong to in a secret universe that was only accessible through the back wall of my parents' garage that only these weird spectral cars could drive through. I asked the person at the registration desk what the groups were, how was I supposed to choose? Her answer was to offer me a plate with two kinds of pastries on it: chocolate brownies or baklava-like things. I chose the baklava (I'm a sucker for baklava), and that corresponded to the Change/Chaos group; had I chosen the brownies, I'd have been part of the Order/Static group. It was odd, because earlier in the dream I had been hanging out with the Order people; they were a little stuck up, but were mostly pretty cool, had great clothes, and I played video games with them for a few hours. The Change people were a little duller, but were much more down-to-earth. I realized that when I was lumped with them that my actual goal was to be on the interface between the two where they met up and all the interesting stuff happened, the dynamism between order and chaos. (No Amberites showed up.) It was a damn nifty set of dreams; I only wish I could have had them at some time when I wouldn't miss out on the awake things.

And to go off on an almost utter tangent, here's something I wrote the other day when I was waiting three hours for Costco to put new tires on my car.

When talking goes bad:
I feel my grasp on communication slipping away - not so much the words as the connotations when the words are put together; the inferences that I make - or fail to make - are completely at odds with how they're understood. My chain of reasoning gets myopic, I can't go any farther than what the words literally mean. At the same time, I see the person whom I'm talking to getting upset, and the more I talk the worse it becomes. Soon it hits the boiling point - I can no longer stand my own lack of communication, my empathy perhaps getting in the way. I have to withdraw, to remove myself, to stop things from getting any worse. I'm not quite sobbing yet, the little rational part makes sure everything is ready before I do that: my shoes are off, my snotrag is at hand, the blankets to muffle my noise are there. I lie down, and cover myself, bury my face into my pillow, and whimper. It's a few sobs at first, staccato and unsure, but it soon becomes regular: breathe, wail, choke up, breathe. Sometimes I start watching myself then. Sometimes the voice of me asks what happened, why am I crying, when will it end? These days, it's often too painful; it stays quiet. That's when the screeching begins - no longer a cry, no longer anything but some weird primate call, raw, too sad and slow to be a scream. The voice usually wakes up for this, marveling at the monkey sounds, wondering how my throat opens up to howl like it does. Sometimes it can tell what I'm really upset about, sometimes it can't. When it does, relief is in sight, there's some sort of reconciliation? resolution? ahead. When it doesn't, I howl and cry and howl until I'm too drained and exhausted to do anything but lie there and wonder why I do all this - or fall dead asleep without even that.