Day 23

I was really enjoying NaBloPoMo until today. I was expecting it to be a full thirty days of sitting here racking my brains trying to come up with something not too trite or dull or wacky, but instead it's been a really good way to force my mind to be a little more active, and the writing has come easier.

Until today. Today I got nothing. I was going to go to the gym but last night after hockey and Swiss Chalet, which was all very enjoyable, I felt like crap. My glands were swollen and I was nodding off by nine-thirty, when I am never, never, never asleep until after eleven. So I decided to hang out at home today, do some cleaning and go to the gym tomorrow. Except I'm afraid I won't. When I don't go on Monday, I have this superstitious fear that fate or my own laziness (are they so different, after all?) will intervene and torpedo the whole week. And I feel old and creaky. I've been walking more, and my knees and hips hurt and my right knee makes an unpleasant grinding noise when I walk up the stairs, and my right outstep (what do you call the part of your foot that's not an instep?) aches.

photo credit
creative commons license

Anyway, let's talk about the dream I had last night. We discussed the back-in-high-school rushing-around-trying-to-find-an-exam-we-haven't-studied-for dream. Last night I had the back-in-residence dream, except in this dream I'm myself, at this age, trying to start university and live in residence again, and then I realize I'm old and I have a husband and kids and there probably won't be enough room for them in my dresser. I don't always have the same roommate I had in actual residence, but this time I did, and she's one of my best friends who I never get to see any more (she lives in Halifax), so it was nice to see her, even in my confusing, slightly creepy dreamworld. There were a couple of details that I remember from this dream that struck me as kind of interesting. One was that, in order to get your student card, you had to walk around to a bunch of different tables looking at candid group shots taken around campus and find the one with you in it, and line up at that table. I mean, they would just wander around campus taking shots of people walking or sitting and then you would have to find yourself in one. I wonder if this was my subconscious's editorial comment on how arbitrary and confusing some of the university procedures were. The other thing was the anachronistic appearance of Facebook in my dream. You know how you can't dial a phone number correctly in a dream? Turns out you can't type an intelligible Facebook comment on someone's status either. And I'm a stickler about my spelling, so this was really frustrating.

I always wake up from these dreams feeling a little sad and embarrassed. University was a great time and I made some fantastic friends, and I loved having my own room but always being able to walk out of it and find someone to hang out with if I needed to. But it was a long time ago, and I guess I wake up wondering why my subconscious feels the need to revisit it. Maybe it's the newness of being away from home and the sense of endless possibility. I don't really want to go back there. I have a much better handle on who I am now, and I forgive myself a little more easily (a little. Very little. A marginal tiny microscopic quark-sized bit). And my knees and hips were younger and less creaky back then, but my feet always hurt (seriously, I was born with massively fucked-up feet).

It was just a dream. I'll just take what I can from it and move on. I'm going to email my old roommate and go play the piano badly, and celebrate the possibility that I can relearn that grade 9 Royal Conservatory book before I die.