the souls of stars

Last night I had a dream that I had a magic telescope that would let me see the souls of stars. At the beginning of the dream I was standing on top of this round hill looking up at this amazing collection of stars in the sky. I pulled out my telescope and looked through it. The sky looked the same. But then I switched to the telescope mode for looking at souls and every star turned into a painting or a card or a poem.

Some of the cards were actual, like, Hallmark cards, and one that I saw had a cartoon birthday cake on the front of it. When I opened the card (because I could some how do that with the telescope) it said "Happy Birthday! Love mom". I thought it was weird that a star would pick that as its soul representation.

Next I looked at a star with a poem representation. The poems were written in star script so I couldn't read them, but this guy who suddenly appeared next to me on the hill, who looked like a monk or something, would start reciting the poem in English when I would look at it in the telescope. If I moved between stars that had poem representations he would stop mid sentence and start reading the next poem, like switching forward to the next song on an MP3 player.

The stars with paintings were my favorite. Some of the paintings were real world paintings like the Mona Lisa. Others were paintings I've never seen before.

It was a really cool dream.

Then I woke up , and it was only 4 am, so I went back to sleep. This time I dreamed that I was on this huge white cruise ship kind of boat, but Angelina Jolie and I were the only ones on the boat. We were going to somewhere in the southern US to do an ice climbing demonstration, because it turned out the hull of the boat was made of material that was like ice that we could climb up.

So we pull into the harbor and I go to put on my crampons but they don't fit me anymore and they keep falling off. Angelina says they must have gotten swollen in the ocean air (even though metal doesn't really swell because of air). She was kind of pissed at me about my crampons, so then I told her that I remembered my ex boyfriend worked at a climbing shop where I could get some crampons.

So we go to the climbing shop and it's this guy I used to date in Ouray, and he says he can get me some crampons if I let him have a party on the cruise boat. I agree even though Angelina thinks it's a bad idea and doesn't want him on the boat. So he brings all of his friends over and they start destroying our boat, throwing beer cans everywhere and smashing up the sides with their ice axes. Angelina tells me to find my ex and get him and his friends off the boat immediately.

So we start going down a hallway when I see the room to my cabin is closed, and I can hear my ex in there with some girl. So I look at Angelina and tell her I can't believe, with all the open rooms on the boat, that he would pick mine to have sex in. Then I also realize the girl he's with is the girl he was fucking while we were dating. And Angelina asks me why I think he would act any differently than he did when we were dating. And then she asked me if I even cared.

And I decided I didn't care, so I opened up the door and started yelling at him. He and his friends left. And then Angelina said that since I did such a good job with my ex, I would get a pair of magic shoes that had retractable crampons so I would always have them with me. And the best part is the shoes were really pink flip flops. So then we went ice climbing on the side of the boat and a bunch of people were watching us and clapping and throwing confetti.

Then I woke up.

Ellington, my octopus

Recently I've decided I really like octopi. I've liked them for a long time, but now I like them even more.

If I had to be friends with any sea creature, it would definitely be an octopus, hopefully one named Ellington. Octopi are the smartest of all the non-vertebrae creatures. They're always doing bad things at the aquarium like causing floods in aquariums (http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090227/ap_on_fe_st/odd_octopus_flood), hiding in lunch boxes (http://www.wsoctv.com/news/18868489/detail.html) and throwing rocks (http://current.com/items/89593010/octopus_gone_wild.htm).

Because octopi are nocturnal, I could stay up with Ellington all night drinking, and at 2 in the morning he would make us some snacks. Ellington would be able to cook really fast because he has 8 arms so he could chop up four vegetables at the same time and make stir fry in seconds. Then he would probably get really drunk and start laughing and spray ink all over my couch. Normally I would get mad but in that case I would just sigh and say "Ellington, I think that's enough shiraz for you". And he would get all melodramatic and say "I'm so sorry I ruined your couch. Here, cut my arm off!" because he knows he can grow a new one. I might even have to tell him to not say that in bars when we would go out drinking. I would be like "Ellington, girls really DON'T think it's cool when you cut your arm off. They think it's gross."

Because the only hard part of Ellington is his beak I could get him to dust under my sofa because he would fit under there. Also, he would probably enjoy shopping for flip flops as much as I do, and we could both buy four pairs and then I wouldn't look like an excessive flip flop shopper. If we went out with friends I could send him to the bar and he could carry all of our drinks back without spilling them.

Ellington would play pranks on people at work that would make me laugh. My favorite would be if he went up to any one I didn't like and then acted like he was picking lint off their face. But really he would be making a suction mark with his suckers on their face.

He wouldn't like sharks as much as I do. He would probably be like "what's so GREAT about great whites, anyway?" Then he'd say "Why can't you like a nice sea creature like a star fish? Why do you have to like the bad ones? You know that great white is only going to hurt you. Oh sure, he's mister popular and all. But do you really think he's a nice guy? He seems a little sinister to me, frankly." And then I would give him a hug because he would just be saying that out of jealousy. And then he would make me lemon cupcakes. and some mussels for himself, and we would watch season 2 of abfab, and he would be so smart he could translate the French bits for me and he would get the Gaultier jokes.

King David

Last night, in my TV, was a show on that David guy from the bible. I started watching it because there was a scene where this littler dude hit a bigger dude with a rock and knocked his head off. I was wondering what was up with that so I kept watching.

David means beloved. And that's a pretty good description of the way people in Judah and the Kingdom of Israel felt about him, even though he fucked some stuff up.

He was married to a woman Michal, Saul's daughter, who protected him when Saul was trying to kill him. For her sacrifice she got married off to someone else. David, meanwhile, kept marrying other women, and then demanded that Michal be returned to him because they had never officially gotten a divorce. She died childless which people in the bible saw as punishment because she yelled at David for dancing around naked while he was bringing in the ark of the covenant (I think that's the box kind of ark that had something to do with Moses and ripping off people's faces) into Jeruselem after he captured it. Which would be so typical, a woman says one little thing to her spouse and she's punished, but I bet all the time David was like "you're fat" and "I don't like that dress" and "I like my other wives better".

Meanwhile, David also had a relationship with Saul's son Jonathan, suspected to be sexual by some scholars. Or maybe they were just platonically in love with each other. Or likely David was just pretending to be in love to get Jonathan to tell him secrets about what Saul was up to. Also, Jonathan was supposed to be king, as Saul's son, but recognized David as the king (give a guy a blow job back then, and get a kingdom...those were the days).

David went off to fight a bunch of battles and stuff after he became king. When he gets home he falls in love with this woman named Bathsheba and he has sex with her. She gets knocked up, which is bad news because she's actually married to someone else, a guy named Uriah who fights for David in David's army. I think they were kind of friends, but that wasn't really clear. So David, in typical simpleton male logic, lets Uriah come home for a day to sleep with his wife so he won't figure out David's the one who knocked her up. But Uriah is a total idiot and comes home but doesn't sleep with her because none of the men he fights with are getting to sleep with their women. So David kills him, and God gets mad, so God kills David's kid. Which seems to make no sense. Why would you kill someone just because someone killed someone else. A baby no less. You don't hear those right wing Christians all upset about abortion talking about that, do you.

Then one of David's other sons, Absalom, rebels against David. But the dumb ass gets himself somehow caught in a tree by his hair and so this guy Joab, who was a general in David's army, kills him while he's trying to get out of the tree. David was really sad that his son died.

The Jews believed that David was so holy he could "bring down things from Heaven". Like maybe lemon cookies if he was out riding his horse and was hungry. Muslims believe that David was so good at reciting the psalms that "fish would leave the sea to listen to him".

I bring this all up for the purposes of wondering how people can take the bible literally.

sugar sleep, but still no explanation on the lipstick

I just read this article on Yahoo about what causes vivid dreaming. I think it's fair to say I'm a vivid dreamer, which is why I read the article.

The study of dreams is called oneirology. We spend, on average, 6 years of our life dreaming. That just makes me even more shocked when I meet people who claim they don't dream or don't remember their dreams. It's like they've lost 6 years of their life that they can't remember. Dreams occur during the REM stage of sleep, where the brain is as active as it is when you're awake (well, some people's brains are active when they're awake, but let's not generalize too much).

Besides being caused by diabetes (don't have that), bipolar disorder (I think I'm pretty sane) and other neurological issues (I'm not plotting dastardly deeds against humanity) three big factors in vivid dreaming are an excess intake of vitamin B6, spicy food intake, and low blood sugar.

I definitely could have an excess of B6 rolling around in my system since I take vitamins every day and usually drink vitamin water. Apparently this is a bad thing. But, compared to nicotine, probably not something I'm going to worry about for now.

Spicy foods...that could be a problem too. I eat jalapenos on almost every thing. Apparently spicy foods elevate the body's temperature and disrupt sleep. This is especially true if the food is eaten right before bed. Given my schedule on the road (customers who want me to work until 7 every night, trying to get in a workout, trying to find food that I actually want to eat) I usually don't get a chance to eat until right before I go to bed. And if I ate more protein that would help with the nightmares, supposedly.

As for sugar, in the past I've had low blood sugar. Last year I fainted in a department store in Arkansas (I was there because I had forgotten to pack any shirts for my consulting engagement). Fainting worked out well for me because I got to sit in the dressing room with a cool drink while a sales lady shopped for me.

Though, after I got back to my hotel room noticed I had lipstick on my big toe. I have no idea how it got there.