Guacamolly!!!!!

Oh man, last night as I was drifting off to sleep I had realized that I should have titled my last post GUACAMOLLY. That's what I'm going to call guacamole from now on. You try it too and see if anyone says anything. Guacamolly. I just googled it and apparently other people have already thought of it, but since I came to the idea independently I shall still claim it as my own.

Anyways, I was too tired to get up and edit the title of the last post, so I am posting this as an addendum to the last post. Unfortunately, no dreams about guacamolly pools and popcorn stars last night. Instead, I dreamt that Sarah Palin made fun of me and that I did this really fancy dance down a flight of stairs. If this dance were to be performed in real life, it would likely result in a broken neck, so in dreams it shall stay.

a dream is a wish your heart makes

You know how people tell you to have "sweet dreams"? Well, last night, I definitely had a sweet dream. Actually, sweet and savory. I dreamt that I was floating on a giant tortilla chip in a pool filled with guacamole. I could break off little pieces of the tortilla chip and get some guacamole without ruining my raft. The moon was a chocolate chip cookie and the stars were made of popcorn. Here is a drawing depicting my dream:

Dreamers's note: I did not dream that there was an ice cream cone next to the pool of guacamole. It was just something I added in while I was drawing, because it seemed like a good thing to have there.

squirrel burgers

I did not sleep very well at all last night. I only got a few hours of sleep, and most of those hours were spent dreaming that the end of the world had come. I guess we were all getting ready to head into some sort of nuclear winter scenario, so everyone was trying to make an end of the world survival bag, which would have some necessities to get us through. I remember I was really focused on trying to get a toothbrush for my survival bag, and then I went to a “Build Your Bag” party sponsored by some celebrities, and the celebrities had nothing useful to offer for the bags. I kept trying to tell them what nuclear winter would actually be like, based on my reading of Cormac McCarthy’s “The Road.” Then, this guy I went to high school with showed up and we decided to go watch a boat race, because what better way to celebrate the end of the world than a boat race with a guy you haven’t seen in nine years? But it was a terribly sad boat race, because everyone was upset about nuclear winter.

As you can tell, I had a pretty rough night, and I woke up very early and couldn’t get back to sleep. Eventually, the sun rose and businesses started opening so I figured it might be nice to go outside and try to calm down a bit. It was also the free museum weekend sponsored by Bank of America, so eventually I ended up at the Atlanta Botanical Garden.

Usually, the garden is crowded, but since I was there so early, there was no one there, I started to get kind of nervous that maybe the world had ended and that I was the only person still alive. For the first hour or so I was there, the only person I saw was literally made of stone! Like the people at Pompeii, she was frozen in time.


Just like this creepy little boy, who I guess spent his last minutes on earth naked and holding frogs.

Everywhere I turned, things had been turned to stone. No humans anywhere.

Well, except for their decapitated heads under trees!

Here was a stone thing I found comforting, though: A frog sitting on a bench pondering the end of the world.

Normally I’m not a fan of holding one’s arm out to take a picture of oneself, but since there was no around, I kinda wanted evidence that I still existed. I went for it:

While I was sitting there, trying to ask the frog about potential food sources, I did spot something living – a squirrel. Good news, everybody, squirrel meat!

But I was still creeped out. WHERE WAS EVERYBODY? Not helping matters, I don’t know a lot about how to take pictures, which means that I probably don’t angle properly in terms of light, which meant that there was this kind of reflection-y glow in my pictures, which made it look like THERE WERE GHOSTS IN THE PICTURES!!!!!!!!!

Luckily, though, I found our new overlords, and they seemed friendly enough.

Finally, finally, after I walked around for awhile, I started seeing other people walking around. There were a lot of young families, dressed up all preppy and trying to get artsy photos of their children with the flowers and the statues. I felt better about the world immediately. Clearly, everything was still right in this weird world of ours. So I went to the grocery store, bought some eggs, and came home to make a veggie omelet. Hopefully I will get better sleep tonight.

a perfect day in D.C.

Not this week that just ended, but the week before, I was up at the University of Maryland for a conference, learning about things to help me do my job better. It was very exciting for me to go to a work-related conference that involved flying, because at my previous job, work-related trips were limited to driving a cargo van to various Seattle neighborhoods and suburbs. I can tell you, getting to fly somewhere and stay in a Marriott is much, much better.

My editor and friend Katie also went to this conference, and we made our travel arrangements so that we could have an extra day in D.C. before heading back to ATL. After the conference ended, we headed by cab into the city, and we were delivered a devastating blow: the Smithsonian Museum of American History was closed for renovation. It had, in fact, been closed for two years. How could this be? The airlines should give you a little pop-up window when you buy tickets to D.C. that says something like, "Just so you know, the Museum of American History is closed." And then when planes actually land in D.C., there should be another announcement that goes, "Just in case you got your hopes up during our flight, we wanted to remind you that the Museum of American History is closed." Do people come to D.C. for things besides that museum?

Since I had really been looking forward to going to that museum and seeing some first lady gowns, I was initially crushed. What oh what could we possibly find that would replace such wonder? I started to feel a little better though when I got to the hotel and saw that above my bed was a gorgeous photograph of Abraham Lincoln, the stone version that sits in the Lincoln Memorial. Then I took a nap and felt a lot better. I think Abe affected my dreams, and I also think that I was just really tired.

When Katie and I awoke from our naps, we showered and headed to a restaurant that had been recommended by a guy who went to the conference with us. It was called Brasserie Beck and it was an amazing meal. If only I had studied the subject of writing in college, and if only I wrote things down for a living, then maybe I could tell you how good that meal was. But words are inadequate.

For an appetizer, I had an onion and shallot soup that ruined me for all other onion soups, while Katie had some oysters. I tried one and those were also delicious. Then, we had a cheese course. Then, I had duck almondine, and that was a quacking good time, while Katie had a lamb shank. At first, Katie was upset they didn't bring her a knife for the lamb shank, but then she realized that little lamb was so tender that it just fell off the fork. "Melts in your mouth like candy," as my parents used to describe meat when they were trying to make us eat it as kids. But this meat really did. Adding to the enjoyment of the meal for me was a beer that is only available in America at that very restaurant. And it was an amazing beer. I feel sorry for the rest of you that you will never have this beer, unless you go to Brasserie Beck. It was everything a beer should be. Rarely do I eat a meal so fancy and wonderful.

It was during the first course that Katie and I realized that we had the potential to have the greatest 24 hours in a row known to man. That's how good the meal was, and we were determined to not let this meal down. So after dinner we headed off to Georgetown to meet up with a person we met at the conference. We went to Martin's Tavern, which had a wonderful little handout letting me know that every president since Harry Truman had enjoyed a meal or a beverage at this establishment. And if I counted the tables correctly, we sat in the Nixon Booth, where Richard Nixon used to eat meatloaf. And that put us just one booth over from the booth in which JFK proposed to Jackie. This is when I finally got over the pain of the American History museum's closure. Why just look at something that a president has touched when you can sit somewhere that a president's ass has touched? I was in heaven.

By then it was the wee hours of the morning so we skipped off to bed and I again had sweet dreams because I had Abraham Lincoln standing guard above my bed.

The next day proved to be nice as well as the rain predicted by forecasters did not fall. We headed out to see sights that weren't closed. I did make one wrong turn in navigating Katie around the city which resulted in a bum yelling random obscenities at us that I shall not repeat here. But that was a temporary blight because we came across the most wonderful sandwich shop. How did we have such good luck finding food? I think it was the spirit of Abraham Lincoln guiding us. We walked by the White House and I used my powerful mind meld to will the next inhabitant to be Barack Obama.

Then we went to the Corcoran, a lovely little art museum. The big draw was an exhibit of the work of Richard Avedon. It was called "Portraits of Power," and I think every school picture photographer should attend this exhibit. I think it would provide some very interesting ideas about how to make yearbooks infinitely more entertaining.

Here were the portraits of power I liked the best:
-Dwight D. Eisenhower
-Charlie Chaplin
-Adlai Stevenson
-Rudolf Nureyov (he was naked!)
-Bob Dylan
-W.H. Auden
-Malcolm X
-George Wallace
-Billy Graham
-a leper
-Joseph Brodsky
-Salman Rushdie
-Ronald Reagan
-Barry Goldwater
-Barack Obama

I don't know what that grouping says about me, but those were the ones I wrote down at the time. And here were the paintings I liked so much at the Corcoran that I wrote down something about them in my little notebook:
-a bunch of dead buffalo
-Niagara Falls
-a clown
-horses fighting over a trough of water
-a series of Dutch landscapes
-a fisherman
-a homestead by the sea
-a monastery
-some weary wayfarers, one of whom might have been a ghost

I did NOT like any painting that involved people washing something. You try to stick the women of the village down by the river washing clothes in there, and I am guaranteed not to like your painting. I don't know why.

After a few hours of art, Katie and I headed down to see some monuments. We stopped by the new WWII memorial, which was very nice although a bit confusing because there was some weird photoshoot going on that involved a girl in a gigantic orange dress. Katie thinks it was her quinceanera.

But then we went to the best monument of all, the Lincoln Memorial. I was glad to find that Abe was there, because I bet sometimes he likes to wonder around D.C. and look at stuff and observe people. But as if he knew I was having the perfect day, he stuck around and sat stoically. I think he winked at me, but I have a tendency to think most presidents are winking at me. That should not, however, be seen as any sort of endorsement of the winkings of Sarah Palin.

Then, as if God or Abraham Lincoln or the entire city of D.C. knew that Katie and I were there, a rainbow appeared over the Washington Monument. A rainbow over the Washington Monument!!!!! Are you kidding me?

Then we went to the airport, and thus ended the perfect day in D.C.

update: giant bug still on the lam

Good news. I survived the night with a giant bug running around my apartment. I didn’t have the best night of sleep, simply because I kept imagining I felt things running up my legs or getting in my hair and whatnot.

I also had a dream that the bug somehow got inside me and laid hundreds of thousands of giant bug baby eggs and I became the carrier for all these eggs, and I became increasingly more moody and irritable until one day my skin split open and the bugs came out of my skin and every orifice and I didn’t sleep too much after that.

Oh! But before that, I had a different dream, which was my brothers built a boat by hand, and we took it out on the water, and for some reason we gave Lindsay Lohan a ride. When Lindsay Lohan got on board, there was too much weight and the boat started going underwater and Lindsay Lohan got all wet. She was not too happy.

Sorry, it can be pretty boring when people talk about their dreams. I’m just so happy to have made it through the night.

So far this morning there has been no sign of the giant bug. He is probably biding his time until I go to work, at which point he will eat my fish Alvin and do generally awful things to all my belongings.

Okay, gotta go eat some waffles. The baby bugs inside of me are hungry.

an apartment on the 99th floor of my block

There’s nothing quite like apartment hunting to make you feel like you’ve picked the wrong place to live. I spent three days last week with my mother, looking for a new place to live in Atlanta. It seemed like every flaw of the city was magnified—the layout, the traffic, the weather—and everything was working against us. Ultimately, it all worked out okay, but man oh man, there were some miserable moments in there. I am still tired from it all.

Maybe the biggest problem is that I expected it to be easy, and got frustrated when it wasn’t. After all, finding the job in Atlanta was fairly easy, much easier than I’d expected. I thought the apartment hunting would be fun. Instead there were apartments that my mom wouldn’t even get out of the car to view, because she thought they looked so dirty and unsafe. There were apartments that were beautiful but they were in crappy locations. There were apartments that were dumps that were in great locations. There were apartments that were seventy billion dollars a month. I thought about calling Emory to see if I could just move back into a dorm room or something. Any dorm. I wasn’t even going to be picky about it.

We’d check into hotel rooms and I would try to figure out how many square feet were in the room and how that might equate to a monthly rent figure. I started thinking how awful it was that job hunting and apartment hunting are two of the hardest things to do, since a person is pretty much always either at their job or at their apartment. It seems to me that finding the places where you’ll spend the majority of your life should be more fun. As I was drifting off to sleep the first night, I started thinking that I wouldn’t mind a world where you just get handed a job and a place to live, just so I could avoid the stress of finding it myself. “Oh dear,” I thought. “I hope I’m not a communist or a socialist or something.” I couldn’t really remember which one I was thinking of.

Then I started thinking about this story in my middle school social studies book about a guy who lived in the Soviet Union under communism, and how he purposely would get shoes that were two sizes too small, so that when he took them off at the end of the day, he could experience a little bit of pleasure in his sad, harsh life. Then I started thinking about the shoes that I wear to work and how they’re also pretty uncomfortable, and how taking them off when I get home is a relief as well, and about that time I fell asleep and I dreamt about Ronald Reagan fighting communists.

I forget where I was going with all that. Sometime during the trip I had worked out some elaborate communism metaphor but I forgot what it was.

Anyways, with the help of a perky apartment finder (and man, do those people have the worst job in the world or what?), I found a nice apartment in a fun neighborhood. At first, I was concerned that the apartment’s one drawback was that it didn’t seem to have enough room for all of my books, but I think I’ve gotten Mom to agree that I can use the entire front closet as a book closet. Mom’s rule for this new apartment is that I can’t have books in my kitchen cabinets like I did in Seattle. I guess I have to learn how to cook.

cinco de mayo

This morning I went to the gym. My bus to downtown was driven by a driver-in-training, who I don’t think is going to make it…she kept “spazzing” as she put it and not listening to the guy who was training her. It took awhile to get downtown.

Then, I was walking to the gym. Outside the gym is a sandwich board with balloons, advertising the smoothies and the membership specials. As I approached the gym, I watched a homeless man take a cigarette, and hold it to the string holding one of the balloons, until the balloon burned off and flew away. The man kept walking at that point, satisfied, I guess, by the destruction he had created.

Things like that make me realize that I can’t say anything to anybody, because you just don’t know what people are capable of anymore, or what they’ll do to find a little peace of mind.

In happier news, I went to see the Decemberists last night. They put on a great show, but since I’ve seen them a few times before, I was also happy that it wasn’t the same show over and over. I would really like to be friends with Colin Meloy…I think we would just go to coffee shops and read stuff.

But I did come up with a theory of work at the concert, that might be naïve, but here we go…obviously all members of the Decemberists are talented and original, but in concert, people watch Colin, because he’s singing songs he wrote, playing guitar, jumping around, etc. But everyone has to play a part, and they have to put up with a lead singer who gets all the attention. I should probably remember that at work, that even though I would like to be Colin Meloy, I might just be a drummer or an accordion player right now. I hope that is suitably vague, but even so, I can probably never tell anyone at work about my blog now.

But back to sad/weird things: last night, two seconds after I got dropped off, a truck crossed over from the wrong side and drove into a telephone pole. A few seconds later, the car I had been in might have been hit, or if I hadn’t had a head start walking away, something might have flown off and hit me. If a pole hadn’t been there, he might have driven into an apartment complex. This morning, I saw a car that had been in the way…the side of it was almost completely destroyed. It was the best advertisement for off-street parking I’ve ever seen. Anyways, very scary.

Now I’m doing laundry because I had a dream that I did laundry last night. In the dream, my clothes got completely dyed and destroyed, and I couldn’t figure out how to work the machine. I hope it goes better in real life.

know-it-all

Last night I was having all these weird dreams about celebrities, and when I woke up throughout the night, I'd think, hmm, interesting. Blog about it tomorrow. But of course when tomorrow comes I can't remember all the dreams, just the fact that I kept having interesting dreams. But that begs the question, are any dreams really ever that interesting.

Well, here are the two I remember:
1. Angelina Jolie was adopting another baby, and she named the baby Dixie. In the dream, I commented to someone that I doubted that Angelina would ever really name a baby Dixie, but the other person in the dream said that Angelina had adopted so many babies that she had run out of names and was cycling through names like Dixie.
2. Stephen Colbert and I were on a train trip, and we were updating a website all the time with things about our trip. I feel like we came to a lot of profound conclusions on the trip that were very vivid at 3 am but in the morning, I couldn't remember any of them.

Here's something from today that was not a dream:
I was driving north on Aurora and I passed a few guys on motorcycles, and one guy was up on one wheel! But not just a little bit up on one wheel; he was perpendicular to the road. He was like that for at least the ten seconds that I saw him, and who knows how long after. That is just crazy.

Worms don't dance

I generally think talking about dreams is boring, but on blogs, everything is boring, so here's what I dreamt last night:

Somehow I got the job of being Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie's nanny. They liked that I treated them like regular people, and also, the baby (Shiloh) absolutely loved me. Unfortunately, as happens with most nannies, the dad started hitting on me. It was nice, but I had the feeling that Angelina would knife me if she found out. At this point, I woke myself up with my loud breathing (I am a little congested and my nostrils were making some weird wheezing sounds).

Luckily, I fell right back to sleep and right back to the same dream. Unluckily, Brangelina had adopted another baby in the time that I was awake. This fourth kid was just a head. It was part of their quest to adopt every single kind of baby in the world. So they just adopted a head. The rest of the body was blown off in a landmine. The head would just sit on the coffee table, and it was still a little bloody in the back. The head would try to talk, but it couldn't make any sounds, so it would just mouth things at me. It was creepy. So, despite being this kid's nanny, I just played with the other kids, and even one of the other kids was kind of mean to the baby head.

Then, I was helping Brangelina take all the kids to the movies, and who do we run into but Jennifer Aniston. It's the first time she has seen Brangelina with the kids, and understandably, she is shaken. She is so upset that this giant orange cat jumps out of her purse and she doesn't even notice. So I save the cat for her and give her a hug.

That is all I remember from this dream. There are many life lessons and keys to my personality in this dream, but I don't have time to go into them here.