So, about my dream last night. yes, I know how fascinating dreams are to other people but I’ve been having some doozies lately – stark, incredible landscapes.

Well, last night’s took place mainly on a large swampland that lifted up into lightly forested hills. So, I was out there walking around and I ran into this shaman I know and somehow s/he knew about my crush (god, just the word humiliates me). So I felt embarrassed about this, but I knew the shaman had met the person I liked. So I asked her if she didn’t think the person was very crush-worthy. The shaman laughed at me, very gently though, and said she was going to show me something.

She put on this leafy outfit and started dancing with a bunch of other people who turned up for the ritual. I watched from a tree the first time. What this group did was form a long contra line and start doing abstract animal dance-motions, but then it slowed down and the shaman said they had to do this hand motion (waving their hand from their nose to their ear, keeping it vertical) until “the energy is right." One person asked, “what if the energy never is right?” and the shaman said, “then we will make this motion for eternity. You up for it?”

I thought the person would leave right there, but instead he nodded his head and kept making the motion. Pretty soon, the shaman declared, “the energy is right” and then told everyone to envision themselves as a bee, and to move like one, and to be a bee. So, they all start buzzing and moving and dancing in the line, but I could see it, this ecstatic energy taking over and everyone got really into their own world, but then they were moving faster together and suddenly everybody took off running in different directions through the swamp.

The shaman smiled at me. Anyhow, I thought about it for awhile and then told the shaman that I wanted to do the ritual too. And so that’s what we did… the ritual exactly the same, including the man’s question. And when we did the honeybee motions, I felt this feeling swelling up through me, not any definable feeling, just a sensation of connection I guess, and suddenly it was uncontainable and so I took off running in the swamp. And it felt perfect to be running, my feet in non-running shoes but touching the ground like I were 50 pounds. And I saw a little kid I know and ran after him, tickling him and shouting some story until he laughed and climbed some stairs. And the swamp had frogs and other animals, and I felt delirious with running. At some point I found a stray horse without a saddle and I rode him for awhile (but he was a plodder), and then I got off and ran some more, until:

“Wham!” I ran back into the shaman. And s/he smiles at me again and says, “you know I ran into xxx back in the swamp, right?” and I said yes, and the shaman said, “Well, you asked about whether she was crush-worthy, and now I’m going to say: I thought her beautiful and loved her with the same love I have for each member of the universe.” And I knew exactly what s/he was saying, and then felt a little laugh at myself because the feeling of running was huge.

*

So, that was my dream and it’s pretty much how it was… I took out a bunch of random shit that happened in the swamp that I wouldn’t even know how to describe, but my dreams have been very story-like and mysterious and long, since I’ve been sleeping about 10 hours a night trying to fight off this bug (not a whine, g, just a statement of fact).

And I've made some big life decisions recently; namely, I’ve decided I’m going to move, and I’ve told my roommate. I was really really stressed about telling my roommate. I think I imagined tears and thrown objects and such, but she was just like, oh, okay, when you leaving? It made me reconsider the apple crisp I had baked to bribe her back into a good mood after all the tears and stuff.

Later, she got her revenge though… I showed her the little chapbook I’ve been working my ass off on for the past few days – it’s nothing super huge, obviously, but I was feeling overly-pleased with it until she said, “oh, that’s cute. Are you making them to give to your students?” And when I said, "no, they’re for the holiday art sale," she looked kind of dismissive and said, "well good luck."

I think I needed that comeuppance, because I’ve been floating high on the idea that I might make money on the sale and buy all my Xmas presents, but now that I think about it, I’ll be lucky to cover my costs and maybe I should just shoot for that and be pleased if it happens. Hopefully it will, since my costs weren’t so tremendous as to be out of reach. And really, I’m pleased just to have had the experience of whipping together a few of my pieces and thinking about how I could set them up… it was a very basic process, since when I started working in Adobe InDesign, I just about had a heart attack out of confusion, and swapped back over to Microsoft Word (haha). I only used Adobe Illustrator for the cover, so it’s a pretty low-tech deal.

Anyhow, I finished it and I’m happy with that, I should back away from the high it creates in order to be realistic before I go to the sale.

But I’m still moving. To a place with heat. And it’s by the lake and I’ll talk more about it later, once it’s cemented down, blah blah. The most exciting part of this however is that by deciding to make this move, I’ve pretty much committed to being in Chicago and finding a real job this summer, which will be the first time I’ve lived in the city during the summer since I stayed with my dad in Seattle. I’m a bit scared about being away from the ocean and the forest and my family, etc, but I’m also excited because it feels like the first commitment I’ve made towards growing up for a little while. So, that’s exciting.

Oh, and I want to start a log of bad pick-up lines for me to think about, so if you have any exceptional ones, you should post them (exceptional bad pick up lines).

And TOtP was weird yesterday. But good. I feel like maybe the universe heard me whine last week and so adjusted. But it makes me nervous, kind of like I said something that should make me run out and knock on wood. One girl in class, who was using pill boxes as monsters to chew on her friend’s hand when she thought nobody was looking, said what I thought was the nicest art thing I’ve heard in a very very long time: “Just imagine what you want, get a good image of it, envision it, and then make it work. You can make anything work that you want, without it costing a million dollars or anything.” And what a great way of looking at creating, and I’ve felt that it was true before, but it made me so happy and really happy to hear lb say it, and offer to help make it a reality. Kind of like the artistic equivalent of having someone say, “it’s all going to be okay.”

Which it is. Kindred is nice.