the good, the bad and

the good...
I got a birthday postcard from germany today, hooray!
I also went to my first ever session of book club.
I used to wonder how you go about having 'book club.' ... I had visions of a Murray-from-Flight-of-the-Conchords type situation where we have a rollcall and all have to say "present" and then follow an agenda... which thinking about it might be kind of cute (it is when those conchords do it...). But it was more like what I alternatively imagined where you start talking about the book but then get sidetracked and eventually talk about the book again, then get sidetracked again, and one person has to block their ears part of the time because they haven't quite finished reading it yet and then you eventually try to sum up with final conclusions on the book but get a bit sidetracked there too and then you spend time trying to pick a book for next month through a process of excluding what everbody definitely doesn't want to read and then you pick one and go home. And in between there's eating and drinking. I liked it. Some interesting different insights on the book. Nice company. And some workplace gossip from not-my-workplace. Yay Kylee for organising. Now I have to read Kafka on the Shore for next time. Do my best...

the bad...
Yesterday I had to go to hospital and get sedated and filled full of tubes to check on a bellyache I have had for a long time. Thankfully no signs of imminent doom, but I now have a bellyache considerably worse than the usual one, from being stuck full of tubes. OWOWOWOWOWOW...

the ugly...
not much ugly actually... lucky me.

On not having an empty mind

I had a haircut. It's a little bit different to before. I've been trying to catch sight of myself in the mirror as though I was not me but a stranger I am looking at across the room, so I can work out what I think about it. I am not succeeding in not realising it's me, though, so I am still not sure what I think.

It''s unrelated to my hair but I have also tried this experiment, which is supposed to demonstrate the science of how cats are able to turn themselves the right way up when they fall, and also how skateboarders turn in midair. Don't ask why. That's not working either, I can't empty my mind enough to not know which way I'm turning, or else I don't decide quick enough to turn.

Lots of nice things have been happening, perhaps I will write about them later. There are things I am supposed to be doing now other than this and I am running out of excuses not to do them.

Reasons the post below might be boring

When you have a dream, it doesn’t do any good to tell all the details to another person. They won’t understand. A dream is only interesting to the person who dreams it; there’s never a way to convey what was interesting about it to someone outside the dreamer’s brain. If you decide that you need to tell someone about a dream, concision is key. Stick to the highlights and keep it as short as possible.

“I had the weirdest dream last night. I dreamed I was sailing in a boat with my father, and then he turned into my 5th grade art teacher, and we were eating asparagus, and then the boat turned into a disco from the 70s and a monkey was trying to lick my armpits! It was so weird! What do you think it means? Wasn’t that so weird? It was so weird.”

That does not work. No one wants to hear all those details. All dreams are weird; this one is not particularly weird enough to warrant retelling. No one wants to help you figure out what it could possibly mean.

“I dreamed that a monkey was trying to lick my armpits.”

That works. That is a story that people can get behind.

By Kevin Fanning of whygodwhy.com, via this site http://www.notablewords.com/archives/whygodwhy

Skip this if you don't like reading about dreams

For a reason that wasn't quite clear aeroplanes had stopped traveling to Canada. Melbourne was full of stranded Canadians, camping on the beach and beside the highway.

The desperate, homeless Canadians were a big story in the media. Their main complaint, when interviewed, was that they didn't have anywhere to cook. They were living on an unhealthy diet of junk food.

*News story cuts to dramatic closeup of Canadian woman camped on the beach, night time, camera crew's lights shining in her face, weeping in between mouthfuls of a barbequed chicken roll from KFC.*

I turned to my mother, incredulous, upon watching this. "Don't they know they can just go to the Vic Market and get some carrots and fruit and things?" I said. "What's their problem? Sheez."

I was living at home with my parents, in their old house. My mother had insomnia and to deal with it would get up and mow the lawns in the middle of the night. One morning I went out to discover she had mowed so emphatically that there were deep muddy trenches in the ground. No grass left.

I also found a series of five bloodied cat's tails which she had accidentally mowed off of the neighbour's cats. She was surreptitiously handing a tail to a cat that had come back looking for it. "Shouldn't you tell the neighbours?" I said but she got defensive.

I found three cats near the fence that had died after losing their tails. Along with the one tail Mum had just returned to its owner, that left one tail unaccounted for. It was a ginger and white tail. I held it out to a ginger and white cat that was walking past but then saw that he already had a tail. It was just a coincidence he was walking by. The tail remained unclaimed.

I decided to print up some 'FOUND' posters about the lost tail, in case its owner was still looking for it. I asked the ladies at Alice Euphemia if they could put one up in the shop but they seemed reluctant to do so.


[Dream interpretation, anyone?]