Alex's Journal

My sister had gone to live with our (favorite shared) aunt and uncle in the States for several years for school. It wasn't dog grooming, but it was similar - not something "intellectual" but rather more practical and physical. Towards the end of her schooling, I went to visit her.

While my aunt and uncle have always lived in beautiful homes as far as I can remember, this was... rather ridiculous. They've never lived on a waterfront, let alone in something that could almost be called a biodome. Water surrounded their house, and green-grey stucco walls that flowed. We had to cross a pier to reach their door. The stucco needed painting and they told us that we could work on that later.

On the way across, I found a book comparing my aunt and my sister. I read the first few pages, which were about my aunt, accompanied by my sister's renditions of my aunt's high school years. In these pages, my aunt played basketball and was involved in many sports, while also being quite talented scholastically. (I have no idea if this is true of my aunt, though it is true of my mother.)

The four of us went for a walk. My uncle pointed out that they had had their phone number changed to a much simpler 514-543-5453. We laughed about this. (That is a Quebec area code. However 314 is a valid Missouri area code, though I have no idea if it is theirs and suspect it is not.)

We went through a stroll downtown (visually it was through suburbia). I said that maybe I would come live with them for a few years and take my postgraduate courses in St. Louis. Escape from my reality for a while. They could build me a tiny little cottage all to myself! Then we returned home to deal with the stucco.

We painted for a while, but eventually my uncle became frustrated. I suggested turning off the water and holding the fish in the lake elsewhere for a while until the painting could be done properly, but my aunt encountered problems with the fish and the idea was aborted for the day.

I started to read the book about my sister in more depth. It started with a review of my sister's artwork. It started with anime-style pictures, mostly of her, then drifted into pictures of cat-people, then animal-people as a whole (bear people and skunk people - mostly men - featured prominently). Eventually there was a strong slash component to the art.

Then the book turned into more of a journal on my sister's part. She talked about how she loved the beauty of the Vatican, "but it always felt too masculine to me. It wasn't until I discovered the beauty of eggs that my spiritual development began. I became arrested by eggs." (My sister, for the record, doesn't talk like this and would probably need me to explain what the hell that meant.) This was followed by some egg-designs, like Faberge eggs.

A brief flash-forward (or, I suppose, thoughts within the dream) where I was giving a speech at my sister's funeral. I would talk about how my sister loved eggs where I loved roses, and how these two things were combined in the anime Utena as symbols, and how the chick has to break the world's shell... and then my dream-within-a-dream-mother chastised me that talking about anime at a funeral wasn't right, but all I could think was that it was something we had shared.

(Thank you, Nanami.
Also, both those symbols are pretty tied to womanhood/femininity.
Also, my sister and I are both atheists, possibly agnostic-leaning atheist in my sister's case.)

The journal went on, this time with an entry about how our aunt had let her redesign the bathroom. She had chosen cream, grey, a pale green and a darker green. It was actually pretty beautiful.

I woke up about there. I wanted to go back to sleep to see if I could learn more about my sister, but I was afraid of losing... this, whatever the hell this is.

1) Going to downtown Toronto to visit a friend, and the two of us coming out of a restaurant or something and being attacked by three guys, one of whom had a baseball bat. It had a very early-Buffy-esque feeling, which could be chalked up to watching too much Buffy, right up to the point where rape became their motive. Which was, er. (The friend got away, in the dream, which I recall feeling kind of vindicated for amongst the FUCKED UP.)

Then this rape scene turned into a porn shoot in a bathtub? for about thirty seconds before sliding into...

2) Lost in the woods. I know I'm supposed to be at camp, so I'm trying to find my way out. Having trouble finding my way out, panicking, seeing a person, with a friend watching them. Feeling thankful up until that person starts walking out onto an old fallen tree trunk over a giant drop, the thing cracks, I don't want to see this person die so I run like hell.

Eventually I find the other campers, running kayak relay races across the lake. Unfortunately, the lake is HUGE and no one has a two-person kayak so I can ride in with them, and most people want to continue the race. One guy, however, agrees to let me hold on to the nose of his boat and swim, so I don't drown while trying to get back to the camp across the giant freaking lake.

Of course, this didn't help as I started to wake up just as I realized how exhausted I was in the dream and my grip was slipping...

*All week* has been like this in dreams. Being chased, killed, lost, whatever. On top of that my stomach and intestines have been going "FUCK YOU ALEX" and rebelling.

Who have I pissed off? :P It's seriously starting to anger me (or would if I weren't exhausted).

I had bad dreams this weekend.

The first one (that I remember, anyway), was that I had invited a whole bunch of people over to my place for a party!! The only people I remember being there were Chantal, Celia Gibson, Patrick and Min, but I'm sure there were others. We were having a dance in my basement.

Anyway, so Celia brought a CD to dance to. I put it in, but I decided I wanted it on random. Unfortunately, all the other CDs in the player were oldies/kids CDs, so I spent like 20 minutes dicking around with the CD player. By the time I'd convinced it to do what I wanted, Patrick was being all annoyed with me ("come ON, Alex, I want to get back to Waterloo"), Min was watching Firefly in the basement living room, and everyone else had left without saying goodbye.

This prompted me to have a fight with Patrick in which he also left, except instead of sneaking away he stormed out.

Moral of the story: only Min loves me.

I almost cried when I woke up. And I was still angry at Pat.


The second one is not as complex, but it basically involved Mal (yes, Firefly Mal) becoming a total asshole. This culminated in him slapping Inara/me a few times.

Lemme tell you, that was almost as (if not MORE) traumatizing than the first one....