I have been in a miserable, hateful mood all day today, I forgot my coffee this morning before leaving for work, and I had a dream last night that has knocked me so thoroughly out of sorts that I’m genuinely starting to think I need to look into a therapist. I have been a fucking mess for the entire day, to the point where one of my third hour kids noticed. The last time I tried talking to a therapist was quite a while ago and didn’t really do me any good, but there’s probably more than one out there, right? Maybe I’ll try one of the others.
Tag: dreams
Whoops
I swear to you that I woke up in a cold sweat at 3:17 in the morning last night, unable to remember whether I had written a blog post or not, and had to check my phone and confirm that yes, I had managed to deliberately skip a Saturday update and then accidentally miss a Sunday, and then fell back asleep and managed to have a nightmare about missing the meeting that I had to go to for work this morning. I did not miss the meeting, although I did manage to oversleep a little bit and then dragassed my way to work, making myself one of the last people to actually arrive for the thing.
Which … whatever, no one cares so long as you show up within the first 10 minutes or so.
Today was kind of a momentous anniversary; while it’s not literally a calendar year according to the date, I started at my new job on the Monday before Thanksgiving week last year, and this is the Monday before Thanksgiving week. I continue to believe that taking this job ranks among the smarter decisions I’ve made in my lifetime, and in all honesty the last year or so has finally been clearly trending upward after a whole lot of years in a row that I had described as the worst year of my life.
This is gonna be a weird week; we have NWEA testing tomorrow and Thursday mornings, and Wednesday morning there is a big choir practice that will take a fairly large number of my kids away for the morning. The combination of both in the same week, especially knowing that next week is only two days, has made planning … tricky. We’re starting slope this week, a topic so complicated and fraught that talking about it in public caused a man to threaten my Canadian teaching license several years ago. Hopefully it goes better for me this time; I miss teaching in Canada.
In which this is never going to stop
Had a full-blown Teacher Anxiety Dream last night, where I was in my first Chicago classroom in my first post-certification job, and I decided midway through class that I needed to quit. Only somehow I was also still working in my current district, only at a different school, and I was very concerned that everyone understood that I was quitting only the Chicago job and not the Indiana job, because the Indiana job was better.
And then, because I was quitting, I had to talk to the assistant principal about it, only it was my current assistant principal, which in the weird awareness of dreams I knew wasn’t quite right but couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t right. And she brought me downstairs, carrying the few possessions I’d decided I was taking with me, and then I realized that the building had been extensively renovated on the bottom floor, somehow looking like yet another middle school, one I’ve never actually worked in, but hugely ornate and gorgeous inside the rooms.
I’m pretty sure I actually woke up and fell asleep at least once during the dream, too, and went right back into it.
Stupid brain.
Last night’s anxiety dream
Sunday night’s dream was that I was late to a concert and then when I got there I was the only person in a mask, plus a nice little dab of high school anxiety. Last night, I had a dream where I was the only other person nearby while a cop was being brutal and abusive toward a Black woman at a traffic stop, only I couldn’t figure out how to get my phone to record a video and by the time I managed to parse the UI he already had her in his car and had driven off.
The really ridiculous part is that the dream also included the post-arrest Twitter rant I went on, which was about, not policing, not a description of the arrest … but about how app designer’s obsession with subtle UI elements has led to a world where something simple like “I want to record this thing happening in front of me” requires me to carefully look at every part of the screen in case there’s a tiny, 50% transparency circle in the top right corner that I’m supposed to naturally realize means “record.”
Which, uh, isn’t how my phone works at all— the “record” button is literally giant, centered, and red– but hey, dream.
More later. If nothing else, I know Mark Oshiro put up another video from Remember that I need to watch and post.
It is too early in the morning for this shit
It is 9:09 in the morning, I have been up for approximately 39 minutes, and I have not had my coffee yet. I had a dream last night where I won tickets to a Phil Collins concert, was late to the concert, showing up only after the entire first set had finished, and then realized that not only was I the only person at the entire show wearing a mask but that somebody from high school who I never want to see again was sitting right in front of me.
Since waking up, I have checked my email, to find a message from the guy who is supposed to be my new partner teacher this year. He has sent me a couple of emails over the last week or two. I did not respond to the first one, and just replied to the second last night saying that I had basically been ignoring my work email (true) and that I would be in the building sometime this week to move my stuff between classrooms and that if he wanted to get together I’d let him know when I would be in.
I received a response this morning. He will not be in this week, because he is driving with his daughter to South Carolina to attend a wedding. South Carolina is currently in worse shape than Indiana is, and I suspect anyone dumb enough to be holding a wedding right now is also dumb enough that there will be no masking and/or social distancing involved.
This motherfucker doesn’t get to come near me for two weeks after he gets home. Sorry! Except not.
I’m done for the day now, I think.
In which that’s a bit on point
I had a dream last night.
My dad and I were driving me to college, and for some reason we’d rented an SUV– specifically, a royal blue Ford Escape– in order to get me there. I was driving, and for some reason I was having an immense amount of trouble keeping control of the car– any touch of the accelerator was pushing us back into the seats, tapping the brakes was tossing us into our seatbelts, and I kept trying to make minor corrections to how we were driving and ending up in the wrong lane or nearly off the highway.
At some point, one of those accidental lane changes ended up with us on an offramp and on a new, unknown highway, now definitively going in the wrong direction.
So: I was going back to school, not at all in control of the vehicle I was driving, and going the wrong direction.
My brain does not deal in subtleties.
In which I’m not here right now
I slept last night, at least in the technical sense, and I vaguely remember even being pretty comfortable, so it wasn’t a tossy-turny sort of night, but hell if I didn’t spend the entire night having constant, vivid anxiety dreams of the sort of “I’m late for work/unprepared for class/can’t find my clothes/everything is going wrong” sort of genre, along with a handful of actual nightmares that I don’t remember as specifically. I still owe you guys a post about the training last week and I want to review a game called Salt and Sanctuary that ate a large chunk of my free time last week (and is about to eat an hour of tonight) but I’m going to bed early tonight and I’m going to hope I’m more of a human being at work tomorrow than I was today.
That said, briefly: I’ve had a couple of days recently where I know good and goddamned well that I’d have come home from work and immediately spent the entire evening stressing out and looking at want ads, and since I’ve been on the Effexor … well, the job and the kids aren’t better, but my reactions to them have been a hell of a lot healthier. Like, I can have a bad day at work now and come home and just lay the shit aside and have a nice night with my family. This shit is a miracle drug, which is not something I’d ever have said about Lexapro. I could be writing more fiction, but … well, that’s never not true, so meh.
I’ll try and be more productive tomorrow.
Hooray for metaphors!
(Writing this at work, on my phone, so expect typos and formatting nonsense.)
I had a dream last night. I was at the Student Union at Indiana University, where I went to college, and I came out over this large staircase they have in the back of the building.
The stairs led down to desert, which is not there in the actual building. I got halfway down the stairs and realized that ahead of me there were snakes– sidewinders, specifically– as far as the eye could see. Thousands of them.
I turned around, and the path behind me back to safety was full of angry hornets. Where I was was moderately safe but I still had to kick a snake away or swat a stinging insect every few seconds.
I stayed there, growing gradually more terrified, until I woke up.
Shut up, brain.