Dreams and space walks

Oh, it only takes 5 months to come up with something to say. I have a nasty case of bronchitis right now, and I am taking way too many drugs for it. Finally after 4 days of not sleeping longer than 45 minutes at a stretch, someone told me, "Oh, the steroids are doing that." Hm, guess that is why the drugstore gives you a list of all the side effects to read and maybe I should not be so anxious to recycle it next time. So, tonight I am not going to take the steroid before bed and pray that I get sleep.

Here is the problem with sleep, though. I DREAM. My dreams are so complicated and detailed that sometimes I wish I could wake up with a flow chart describing them because they rarely have anything to do with reality, and I am pretty sure that Freud wouldn't touch them and he would just send me to a padded room. For example, last night. Last night, I dreamed that I was a nurse. Fine, I completely stink at sympathetic care, BUT I was wearing one of those cool little white hats that nurses don't wear anymore. The weird part was I was a nurse who followed an anarchist band of people around and helped all the people that their destruction hurt. The leader of this band was a boy who lived down the street from me when I was a kid, and his name was Glen Campbell in the time when the other Glen Campbell of Rhinestone Cowboy was famous. Glen was a child that I am betting would get lots of IQ tests that proved he was brilliant today while at the same time recommending Prozac or Ritalin or some such, but growing up I just thought he was a little bit crazy in the best possible way because he knew all the words to Pink Floyd's "The Wall." It is perfectly logical that Glen would be the leader of this anarchist group because he and I used to play a game where we would throw knives at each other's feet and place our foot where the knife was until we would end up in the middle splits and the person to fall over first "lost." Glen and I climbed many trees, played many a game of hide and seek, and then when I moved away, we lost touch. I saw Glen 8 years later, he acted like he didn't know me. Broke my heart because Glen had been the first boy to ever ask me to couple skate and the first boy to pop my bra strap the very day I first wore one. So, anyway, I am following this anarchist gang around and the main objective of this group was to eliminate the Marlboro Man. I don't know why, either, but whenever a cigarette sign got blown up, fireworks went off, and I could watch them from the tower that was only accessible through my friend Melissa's parents' closet. All of this is happening in Leland, Mississippi.

And then I had a new nightmare. I dreamed I was an astronaut, which is ridiculous because I have absolutely ZERO interest in how most scientific stuff works. So, of course I was on the space shuttle and I had to a space walk and my cord connecting me to the space shuttle got cut so until I woke up for the eighth time that night, I was slowly dying in space. Awful. However, the zombies of several months ago have not returned, so I will take my blessings.

When I was little, I watched a movie of the week about the nuns that got killed in El Salvador in the early 1980s. This was the first step on a path that I am still stumbling down where I am sure that I am supposed to some kind of mission work. It doesn't necessarily have to be religious, but the problem is that the idea of danger is kind of irrelevant, too. When I told my mom that I wanted to go and help these nuns, my mother pointed out 1) I am not Catholic 2) the nuns are dead 3) you aren't allowed to go to El Salvador while under my care. So, my new crazy plan is I want to go to somewhere and teach English. Our book club is reading this book called Half the Sky, and there are all these horrible stories aboout how women are mistreated around the world, and I realized that I really want to take a couple of months to go somewhere and teach English. My problem is I read the paper and think, "I should go to Yemen." I have not suggested this to my husband yet, but I imagine he will respond much as my mother did.

That is all. Can't promise I will write again within the next five months.