I’m losing it.

I’m starting to think that I am the caretaker. I’ve always been the caretaker. Grady ought to know. He’s always been here.

Okay. Maybe that’s a slight exaggeration.

Early in the day. Not happy, but not yet crazy.

I’m tired, and I’m sick of editing, but I can see now that it is soooo necessary (seriously. The delete key is wearing out in some instances) and thus (hopefully) worth it.

In other words, now I know why I was avoiding this: It’s hard friggin’ work, and not particularly fun.

Meanwhile, since it feels like pretty much all I do is read my own writing and tweak and hone and re-craft every paragraph, sentence, word, and syllable, my brain has decided to use the much-needed downtime otherwise known as ’sleep’ to torture me with wacko dreams.

Maybe it’s trying to entertain me or something?

I may have told you this already, but I actually had this idea to start a blog where I recorded my dreams so that other like-minded dorks could come and comment or do the same, and I even bought the domain name…but then I remembered I’m too dumb to figure out how to host that blog on the same server this one is on (even though my service contract clearly states I can host up to ten. They just don’t tell me how.) So, seeing as I’m clueless, I suppose you’re just going to have to put up with my dreams here.

And if you don’t like that, then too bad.

I’ve been editing all day, and I’m in no mood for your guff. I eat three of you for breakfast. So put a sock in it…and enjoy!

I call this one “A lot of stuff flying overhead, and none of it is good.”

So I was in this really nice, large, modern house, and it had a section that was like a high-end atrium. The entire wall was windows, as well as a significant portion of the ceiling, and it was attached to the main part of the house. I was standing between the kitchen and the atrium area when a hawk came flying down the stairs and toward the windows.

There were some other people there and we were all kind of alarmed by this, and I ended up running to one of the wall windows and cranking the top of it open so that the bird could wriggle out. It made it outside, and I quickly closed the window back up.

I turned around to marvel at what had just happened with the other people, when there was a terrible racket. I looked up and at least a dozen huge birds of different varieties were banging on the ceiling glass. There was another hawk – a huge one this time – and something that looked like a vulture, as well as a pelican and god knows what else, all banging on and swooping toward the glass.

It startled me, and I ran from the room. Then, just as quickly as they arrived, the birds flew away. I went to my computer and Googled a few inquiries like “Hawks in house” and “Why hawks in house” and “House swarmed with birds.” I found some stuff about birds getting in the house, and also a bunch of links to the military and different operations and things like that. I ignored those.

A few minutes later, there was a loud roar, and I looked out the overhead windows to see hundreds of planes flying together and in an extremely close formation and quite low. It looked like they were only a few hundred feet over the house.

When's the last time you saw a gold-plated TIE fighter overhead? That's what I thought.

In addition to your standard fighter planes and some larger jets, there were six or seven stealth bombers and at least a dozen gold-colored  Star Wars starfighters (I know, stupid right?).

It was completely crazy, and I yelled for everyone to come and see this. The planes just kept coming and coming and I got my camera and took several pictures, particularly of the starfighters.

A little while later, we all went to bed. I don’t know how long I’d been asleep when there was a disturbance in the hall. I came out into the hallway and seven or eight military officers were standing there. Two men came and cornered me into a hall bathroom and pulled out a weird gadget that they placed over my eyes.

When they turned it on, I could see all this bizarre and haphazard stuff like military plans and charts and all sorts of haphazard words, and then behind that was a scene of a man walking down the suburban street with lots of green grassy yards. Across the bottom of the screen was a bar that had started out orange and was getting redder and redder.

I realized I needed to calm down, and forced myself to open my eyes wider, relax, and breathe deeply. Slowly, the bar descended back to yellow and then became greener and greener. One of the men said something about “You did that just in time.”

It suddenly occurred to me that failing that test would be a bad thing. At the same time I realized I wasn’t wearing any pants…or underwear, just a tank top. I was slightly horrified and excused myself, and they allowed me to run and grab some shorts.

When I came back out, they led me to the couch where they were questioning all of us. I kept turning to the other people and whispering, “Did you do something? Why is this happening!?”

Although I knew I hadn’t done anything wrong (intentionally), I had an instinct that the Google searches I had done had somehow triggered all those planes. I asked one of the military men if that had been them flying overhead, and he said it had. I could only figure it had something to do with the word ‘hawk.’

They quizzed us for a while, and then took every electronic device we had – including my cell phone, camera (there went my gold TIE fighter shots. Darn it!), and my computer. I was pretty stressed about that, especially when they headed out the door with all of it and informed me it could be months before I got any of it back.

On the upside…no more editing!!!  ;)

Thoughts? Insights? Alarm and concern for my mental health?

In conclusion, and in unrelated news, I think I might be Facebook friends with a Catholic priest.

After six or seven grueling hours..

He’s actually an old childhood friend and my first big crush (in second grade at Catholic school. I was ready to maim anyone on the playground who even thought about holding his hand or any such thing. He was the best drawer in the class – besides me – AND he had a newborn baby sister. That’s attractive stuff. What can I say?)

Anyway, every day he posts status updates like the following (copy/pasted):

Jesus, You’ve captured my heart, and Im not letting go

Jesus, help me to take a stand against temptation

Jesus, pour out your mercy over our hearts

Jesus, there is freedom in your name

Today – without thinking it through – my status update (via Twitter) was:

Saw this headline: “KoRn Guitarist Gets Jesus Tattoo To Stop Himself From Masturbating.” Good luck, pal. My Moses tattoo did not work at all.

I figure it’s a matter of hours before I’m ‘unfriended.’

Last night I had a dream that I had four kids at same time. Quartuplets? Is that right?

Why is it you hear about triplets and quintuplets, but never the quartuplets? Or is that because it’s quadruplets? Either way, they don’t seem to get the coverage they deserve. Having been the mother of quadruplets – albeit in a dream and not in any way, shape, or form that could be considered ‘real” – let me tell you, it’s not something I would wish on an enemy.

Normally I wouldn't think anything of this, but after last night's dream this image makes my blood run cold. And it's short one baby.

There were two boys and two girls, and I was not doing a very good job at keeping up. Worse, I greatly favored one over the other three. In my defense, he was by far the cutest.

Possibly worst of all? I had only vague memories of even diapering them, let alone feeding time, bathing them, or showering any kind of attention necessary for proper development and/or to prevent them from growing up to write hateful memoirs about me and my sh*tty parenting skills.

Once I ‘came to’, as it were,  I set up a diaper, bath, and clothing assembly line. And that pretty much took all day. Midway through this, I started wondering how the hell this happened without any kind of medical intervention and why there didn’t seem to be a father (i.e. equally guilty party and fellow baby slave) involved to give me a hand with the chaos.

What kind of chaos? Well, let me tell you: While I was out walking on the sidewalk with all four of them (happily, as dreams sometimes go, there was a random time jump such they had all aged enough that they could walk on their own. I have to presume if I’d stayed asleep they’d have outgrown diapers and maybe gone on to become concert pianists or physicists or somehow or other done me proud. Or at least not wound up in jail.) and one of the girls bolted toward the curb and into the street. I ran and grabbed her right before a speeding car got there, but obviously leaving the other three behind me to get into god knows what kind of trouble, and the apparent stress was enough to wake me up.

That stated, I feel extra bad for the John and Kate + Eight people, especially now that the headlines show that John is stepping out on Kate.

John and Kate + 8 = 10

John and Kate + 8 – John = Nine and one life-crushing child support payment.

You and your friends will have a real laugh over this prank!

In other news, it’s May the Fourth, which (apparently) makes it Star Wars Day in a ‘may the fourth be with you’ sense. I didn’t get it at first, but now that I do, I’m none too pleased. I hate puns. They’re always stupid. My ears get angry whenever I have to listen to them.

Nonetheless, let me offer up some suggestions as to how you might go about celebrating Star Wars Day:

• Use a Taunton (ton-ton? Tauntaun?) as a sleeping bag
• Get a Tattooine
• Freeze one of your friends in carbonite
• Howl like a Wookie
• Grovel like Jar Jar Binks
• Talk all obscure like Yoda

(Any of the above three are guaranteed to massively annoy everyone in a ten-foot radius)

• Make your own Death Star plans
• Put on a hoodie and pretend to be the Emporer
• Worry like C3PO
• Become a senator
• Find a trash compactor, get in, and hope for the best

Greetings from outside The Coffee Bean, the world’s only coffee shop without wifi. Of course.

My mother dropped me off here for a few hours while she gets her hair done, so I could use their (non-existent, but free!) wifi. However, I have found a weak and moody signal coming from The Bon Bon Hair Salon next door, and with any luck the fates will smile on me, and I will be able to share my continued tale of woe with you.

This is obviously not my mother, but this is kind of like what her hair looked like when she drove up.

But the thing of it is, she doesn’t read the blog, so I figure no harm, no foul. If it will even mildly entertain you, it’s going in the blog. Moreover, as I’m sure you will agree, it was very nice of her to come mid-hair coloring session to try to help me out like that. As you know, I generally leave my friends and family out of the blog because I don’t want to offend them or reveal things that embarrass them and mostly because they don’t really have a way to state their own side.

However, when they start dying off? Look out. There will be some hard-core tell-all memoirs hitting your closest book stand. Augusten Burroughs ain’t got nothing on the yarns I’ll be spinning.

Meanwhile, I have pretty much no amusing stories to share with you, so let me tell you about this crazy scary dream I had last night (which somehow I ended up telling like a comedy when I was telling my mother. I don’t know why this happens. I can apparently never be serious).

Any amateur dream interpreters out there? Feel free to have at it:

Okay, so in real life I watch this show “Big Love” on HBO about this family living in plural marriage in SLC, Utah. It’s really well done and fascinating, and I guess that information was somehow in there with the other items tossed into my dream salad? Thus, in the dream I was one of many wives, and I had twins who were about 8 months old, and we all lived in this huge old house together. I put the twins down to nap, and was upstairs in my room when I became aware that this evil force was in my room. It scared me, and I went to leave the room, but it somehow made it such that I couldn’t reach out for the doorknob. I felt like I was arm-wrestling someone.

So I went to this old armoire in the room and opened it, and the entity (as it will henceforth be called as I tell you this story) had made this vacuum cleaner sitting inside the wardrobe start smoking. I threw a glass of water on it, and started screaming and screaming for someone to come help me because I couldn’t get out of the room.

Eventually this older man came in the room, and I recognized him as a leader of a different polygamist group (not the one we belonged to), and I wondered what he was doing in our house. However, I was so freaked out by the entity, I didn’t care. So I told him what had happened, and he looked around and everything seemed normal. Regardless, he appeared to be very shook up, and the next thing I knew, he had run out of the house and was getting in his car and driving away. I watched him leave through the window.

I should mention that I wasn’t ‘me.’ I was younger and looked different and had the twins that I already mentioned. So anyway, I was still in the bedroom, and the entity started slamming the doors of the wardrobe, and there was this intense feeling of pressure in my body, and I started to think I should get out of there. It was like the entity was trying to take over or possess me or something, and it was everything I could do to fight it off. I kept screaming at it to leave and leave me alone, but it seemed like it kept getting stronger.

I called a friend and told her I would be coming over and bringing the children, and she started fretting about how small her room was, but I figured if I could get out of there, I’d go there regardless.

I managed to get out into the hall, and there was another room adjacent to mine. It was a bathroom with a clawfoot tub, but also all my clothes were in there. I went in to grab some things, and somehow the vacuum cleaner (the one from the closet in the other room) was sitting in the middle of the room, and it turned on – unplugged – and came toward me and sparks were flying out of it and it was smoking. I briefly considered throwing water on it again, but decided to slam the door and run out of the room and just leave.

Then I heard this awful banging I presumed the vacuum cleaner was banging up against the door to get out, but it turns out in real life the door to my room was banging in the wind, and I woke up.

And there you have it. A little glimpse into my twisted subconscious.

With any luck, something funny will happen in the next twenty-four hours, and I’ll have some good tales to tell when we reconvene tomorrow for the next installment. Or if not, I’ll just have to see what kind of wacky trouble the people of the world are getting themselves into now…

That really is entirely too many children.

I’ve never had the courage to share this with you, but I’ve long harbored dreams of almost becoming a nun, being sent from the abbey to work for an uptight military captain, and playing governess to his seven repressed kids. But it doesn’t end there: I’d fashion them clothing out of table cloths and burlap sacks and old towels. I’d teach them to sing and we’d run amok. Then he’d bring home a fancy pants fiance, and I’d get jealous and resolve to show him what’s what and become a nun after all. But that wouldn’t work out, and I’d come back to the house, eventually winning him over with my charm, naivete, and skill with a sewing machine. Oh, and a little bit because he just got brutally dumped by said fiance. Inevitably and ultimately we would start our own von Trapp Family Singers, only we’d call ourselves Keepin’ it in the Family, or Wolfy von WolfWolf, or Whatchu Talkin Bout Willis,  or maybe KISS.

Nazis optional.

It’s such a simple dream, really. In fact, I’m surprised it hasn’t come true sooner. However, at long last, it looks like it could:

Austrian village offers free land to boost population

VIENNA (AFP) – A village in northern Austria, worried by its dwindling population, is offering free land to all who pledge to start a family in a decade, the Kurier newspaper reported Saturday.

Plots of 800 and 900 square metres(8,611 to 9,687 square feet) are up for grabs at Rappottenstein, near the Czech border, to both singles and married couples who pledge to have at least one child in the next 10 years.

Singles also have get married. Other conditions stipulate that the new owners have to build a house on the plot in three years. If the conditions are not fulfilled, the owners will have to pay 12,000 euros (15163 dollars).

I know we’re all sick of hearing about her, but bear with me on this one: I think this could be the perfect solution for the “Octomom,” Nadya Suleman. I’m sure there’s some nice Austrian sheep herder or something who would love to support an American wackadoo and her 14 kids.

Nazis optional.

I like this question. It is one of my favorite questions, if not my very favorite. I ponder it myself on a regular basis to try to stay focused on what I really want out of my life and what truly matters to me. I ask other people if it seems appropriate or they seem to want to share and have someone else to bounce their thoughts off. Admittedly, as a society we’re out of practice. I have seen others become flummoxed or even distraught trying to answer it, probably because life doesn’t usually allow for such ‘frivolity’. However, for me it’s fun. What’s better than fantasizing about what could be?

Meanwhile, it suddenly occurs to me that there’s clear fork in the road when deciding how to progress on your pondering session:

1. If money were no object, what would I do?

versus

1. If money and talent, training, skill, aptitude, age, and health were no object, what would I do?

Because, at least for me, we’re talking two very different lists.

Under list number one:

• Write a book or two or five

• Travel the world

• Have a child

• Volunteer four months of every year to aid causes that matter to me

• Have a greenhouse and grow a significant portion of my own food

Under list number two:

• Write a book that reaches people and somehow adds something meaningful to their lives and then win the Nobel Prize for Literature

• Open a restaurant and prepare the best food anyone has ever eaten in the warmest and most festive environment they can imagine

• Win Project Runway

• Have a platinum album and perform a series of sold out concerts to thousands of screaming fans

• Receive an Academy Award for my stunning and original performance

You get the idea…

Simply put, in list number one I’m ‘practical’. I limit myself to what’s plausible or achievable or, perhaps, safe.

At the same time, when I stop and compare the two what I start to see is that maybe the real issue here isn’t talent or skill. Arguably, I could do most – or at least one – of these things if I applied myself and went after it with all my heart. True, I can’t sing or sew and I haven’t been to culinary school and I’m not 21 anymore, but I could teach myself or get lessons or simply try and learn from mentors and feedback and my own mistakes.

At the same time, if I really think it through all the way, I wouldn’t want everything else that comes with some of these ‘peak experiences’. Last time I checked, having my entire life distorted and splashed on the front of the tabloids didn’t look that appealing, and has anyone who’s famous ever said anything BUT ‘celebrity sucks’?

So maybe the real issue is what it always is – the battle of fear versus faith. And the ‘what if’ question in the grand form serves as a springboard to determine what we’d do if we didn’t worry about the usual crap and buy into the naysayers around us and lose our faith. There’s nothing wrong with craving peak experiences. Hell, we deserve them. What seems to go wrong is that the rest of the world gets in our way. Very rarely does someone else actually destroy or prevent the realization of our dreams, but they talk us out of it on the basis of practicality or remind us of our shortcomings or waste our precious time and we choose to listen to that more closely than we listen to our own inner sense of greatness.

That stated, I still think there’s value in making both lists: What would I do if I stopped worrying about money and what would I do if I completely and totally believed myself capable of anything? And then take a look and search your heart as to why you want to be a rock star or a movie star or a super model or a culinary god. If you’re like me, it’s because you want to be financially secure and own lots of cool stuff while having the world know you’re special and have them love you and, well, because you want to matter. You want to die knowing that you gave more than you got and you helped make this world a slightly better place.

Those things, I would argue, are within the reach of all of us. They may not involve a posse or a personal assistant or fighting off paparazzi, but I think every individual on this planet can find a way to shine like a star if they simply figure out what they want – really want underneath it all – and put their mind to it.

And that, my friends, is the kind of random crap I think about when I’m riding public transportation, and the man in the seat next to me cranes gratuitously to try to get a look at the monitor. And for today, I’m going to let him read to his heart’s content…