Pilcrow

Yesterday I did drag myself out of bed as planned—well, about 15 minutes after shutting off my alarm, but still, I did get up then instead of sleeping in another couple hours—and after having my usual light breakfast, went on a bike ride around Lake Union. It was rather nice actually, not too strenuous, and I did not get any cramps as I feared I might from cycling not too long after eating. I figured that it would be better to have my bowl of cereal and glass of orange juice than to try cycling on an empty stomach first thing after sleeping. So that was a good start to the day. I had lunch with Tony, spent a few hours at Bauhaus doing work, and despite feeling pretty tired when I got home, still took the time to make a decent dinner. I didn't leave myself time to make a journal post, but otherwise it was a pretty satisfactory day.

Today had a much rougher start. After getting to bed unexpectedly later than intended, I slept for a few hours only to get into a nightmare and wake myself up by screaming. (I was checking lights in my childhood home, someone left one on in the garage (accessed through the spooky basement), and when I opened the door to the garage, there was some guy there! Who then lunged at me, screaming in surprise or terror, in much the way that I also then started screaming.) Fortunately the sun was already well up, so it was much easier to calm down than when I wake in the dark. But still, that basically killed my resolve to get up as planned and do some kind of upper-body stretching or exercises. Instead, I went back to sleep… only to have another nightmare a couple hours later, about killing a large moth in my kitchen only to see it was full of larval moths which I was then terrified would hatch on the spot, and I woke myself again with another (shorter) scream. It's very unusual for me to have two screaming nightmares in one night. I don't feel like I was under any extra tension or stress, so I'm not sure what brought that on.

Anyhow, it consequently was a pretty unproductive day. The main thing I did was to pick up my tickets for Bumbershoot and check in at KEXP about what I'd be doing for them this weekend. I'll have a media pass for Saturday and Sunday, and will be posting photos to Facebook and Twitter from KEXP's Bumbershoot Music Lounge performances. I'm looking forward to that and to also catching some of the other acts later in the evening. I'm not sure yet about Monday, though—the online team won't need me, I might still be able to pick up a shift helping the info tent, but probably I'll have to buy a ticket at the gate that day. As there are several bands on Monday I really want to see, I expect I'll be there regardless. I'm particularly interested in Craft Spells, Beat Connection, and Pezzner on Saturday; Com Truise, Warpaint, School of Seven Bells, and Lusine on Sunday; and Head Like A Kite, YACHT, Ill Cosby, Phantogram, and, yes, Hall & Oates on Monday. 

Because I'll have my laptop with me on Saturday and Sunday, I may be able to get a quick post done here as well. I'll be borrowing a camera from someone in order to do the Facebook posts, so I may be able to get a photo post or two. I don't know yet about Monday. I really can't wait to get a new iPhone—I'm definitely missing having a camera available, and I'm getting more annoyed about not being able to run apps because they require a more recent OS that my iPhone doesn't support—but unfortunately I'm caught between the lack of any definite news about an iPhone 5 release and the strong indications that such a thing is indeed very likely to come out within the next month. So I'll just have to continue to be patient.

I had several vivid dreams last night, which as I recall included arguing with my younger sister, and attempting to get onto I-90 from somewhere on the Eastside only to have my car race off, disappearing without me into some kind of short tunnel, and me trying to intercept it (on foot) on the other side of the tunnel but learning from a trooper that traffic would be backed up for 15 hours. The one I remember best was this:

A woman was making corrections to a document by hand. The document was written in red ink, and she was making her corrections in red ink as well, crossing things out and drawing lines to additions and changes above each line. She was standing at some kind of white table as I came up next to her on her left side to see what she was doing; she may have been left-handed. I made some remark about her doing it wrong, which I think was supposed to be joking, I forget for sure, and then apologetically said that I shouldn't be looking over her shoulder like that. I might've been serious about correcting her, and then apologizing for doing so. She replied that maybe I should stand on her other side, at which I moved to stand right next to her and put my chin over her right shoulder, asking if she meant like that, which was definitely a deliberate joke on looking over her shoulder. She was dressed in black trousers and a black blouse. I immediately returned to my former position near her left side and again started to say that seriously I did apologize for looking over her work and shouldn't be there, or something to that effect, and started to step back and away. She turned toward me as I was speaking though, with a smile on her face; oddly, she might've been wearing a black kerchief and domino mask over her face rather like pirate Westley from the Princess Bride; I have no idea what that's about. Anyhow as I started to step back, she caught my right wrist with her left hand, tugging on me a bit as she stepped in to give me a big kiss. As she stepped back still smiling, I was smiling too and started to say something… as the dream faded into wakefulness early in the morning, by myself. And I'm not being coy there, that's really how it ended. 

It was a nice way to wake up. It'd be nicer to wake up with someone there for me to kiss for real, but that's another matter.

Last night during my dreams, I ran across a couple women I used to work with, one from each of my retail jobs. I was passing them in the streets of a city that I think was supposed to be New York (although I also have a vague memory of California somehow being relevant), and as we passed each other I recognized them and said "hey, I know you!" (I know it'll bug me later if I don't record who they were and then forget, so one was Holly P, whom I worked with at Bradlees Department Store, and the other I actually have forgotten her name but it was the redhead who wasn't Becky, whom I worked with at Market Basket. Also for the record, in the dream there were a couple other people with them, including one who was also supposed to be a past co-worker but I never identified.) So we stopped to catch up, I talked a bit about how I'm now living in Seattle, and one of them asked the interesting question, "Have you spent more years yet working in offices rather than working in retail?" I believe I gave an answer and the dream continued a bit before fading out, but I woke up still trying to figure out the answer to the question.

Ignoring the 4-5 years I had a paper route, I started working in retail during the summer of 1987 when I got a job with Bradlees Department Store. I worked there as a cashier/supervisor through 1990, and then quit so I could attend the sophomore semester in Rome with my college, Thomas More. So that's 3.5 years. After I got back, I got a job at Market Basket in June 1991 and worked in the deli through October 1995. That's about 4.5 years, so that's 8 years in retail. Starting in June 1995, I worked for the U.S. Postal Service as a temporary employee doing data entry, working both that job and the supermarket deli until more hours became available for the data entry job. That job wasn't retail work as such, but it wasn't a professional "office" job either (and because the data entry center was always planned to be a temporary facility, it wasn't going to lead to permanent jobs either), so I'm counting it with the retail work. I worked there until June 1998, so that's 3 years, but because of the overlap with the supermarket job it adds only 2.5 years to the non-professional total, now 10.5 years. I knew I was getting nowhere with my job search so I finally quit the postal service and started working through temp agencies. Although the temp assignments were office work, I still wasn't employed full-time on my own as a professional, so I'll count that into the non-professional total too. I worked as a temp for about 8 months before being hired full-time by one of the clients. I'll just round it off and say that's a grand total of 11 years working retail/non-professional jobs.

So, my professional career began in March 1999, working for a construction and engineering management/legal consulting group essentially as a para-consultant. I stayed with them through February 2002, then moved to Seattle and began working in the software industry as a technical writer and editor. My first job ran from March 2002 to February 2003, and my second from February 2003 until March 2007. That's 8 years actually working in offices as a professional. Now that I'm freelance, I no longer work in offices, but it's still professional work, so at the end of this month I will have finished the ninth year of my professional career.

The answer, then, to the dream question is "no, not yet." I've still got another couple years to match. But overall I'm happy with the direction of my professional career, and I'm fairly confident in March 2010 I'll be looking forward to my next 11 years as a working professional.

I'm updating from my parents' home in New Hampshire. My last remaining grandparent, my dad's mother - Me'mere, as we French-Canadians called her - passed away on Friday. She'd been gradually getting worse for a while, so while the particular occasion was a surprise, it was not unexpected, so to speak. In fact I had decided a couple weeks ago that I would have to go home for Christmas this year, expense be damned, because I figured if I wasn't going to be here sooner for her funeral, then Christmas would be the last time I'd see her alive. Instead it's turned out that last Christmas was the last time. Early afternoon on Friday when my phone rang and I saw that it was my parents calling, I knew immediately what the call was about.

Last weekend I'd had a dream that I was back at home in my old bed and I could hear my mom downstairs saying something to my dad - I think maybe it was something about me still being upstairs sleeping. (Arguably this wasn't a dream so much as a sleep-time rememberance.) It was a little disorienting to come awake and realize I wasn't in that bedroom. I actually had that dream twice that night, too. Then, Friday morning I had a dream that I was playing in orchestra, and one of my younger cousins was there too, but he was messing around some, and Me'mere got up from the audience and stepped forward to scold him a bit, in her good-natured way. Then when I awoke I thought, wait that's all wrong, that cousin belongs to the other side of the family! Anyhow, the night before as I got ready for bed, I had actually been thinking about Me'mere and the chances that I'd have to come here for her funeral before Christmas, so I'm sure both dreams are just coincidental, but still it was a bit weird.

So, I flew out here on Saturday, attended the wake and small family gathering yesterday, and the funeral today. It was very good to see my extended family again - some of these people I haven't seen since my grandfather's funeral seven years ago, or even longer, and in all honesty some of them I'm not likely to see until the next funeral happens. More than one person said how nice it was that I'd come all the way out for the funeral. I really couldn't have passed on it, but still I'm glad that they appreciated it.

There are two short stories about Me'mere that I'll share, one from before I was born and one that I remember. Me'mere never drove, but my grandfather (Pe'pere) tried teaching her once. Their driveway was on the side of the house, and Pe'pere told her to back the car out of the driveway. Apparently she started it moving and attempted to turn it onto the street, but she cut the wheel so sharply while stepping a bit much on the gas that the car lunged around the corner of the house and hit the front steps. As I've heard it, Pe'pere was laughing too hard to stop her, though I'm not sure how true that is. In any case, only yesterday was I told that apparently she did end up getting her license, but she never actually drove again after that.

The story I remember is from one time that she was babysitting us. After dinner, there wasn't quite enough vanilla ice cream to go around, and there also were only a few Oreo cookies left. But Me'mere said that was okay; she put a cookie in each bowl, added a little ice cream to each, and mixed it up. Nowadays you can buy cookies and cream at the supermarket or ice cream stands, but in the late 70s no one was doing that commercially; it was the first time I'd ever heard of such a thing, and it'd be a few more years before I'd see the first Steve's Ice Cream parlor in Boston, which claimed to be the home of "smoosh-ins" as they called it. Friday night, when I was at the grocery store, I knew that I needed more ice cream, and as I stopped to think about what to get I realized there was of course only the obvious choice, and brought some cookies and cream home.

Tomorrow I'll be flying back to Seattle. This coming Saturday is my "condoversary" as I've been gleefully calling it, and I'm having a party to celebrate. I'm glad that I didn't have to cancel that event, but if this had all happened a week later, I'd have cancelled the party and come home for the funeral, and I still wouldn't regret it.