Looting the mysterious drawers of dream mansions

Last night I missed kj's play in the South Bay because I couldn't face the drive to Burlingame and back to Shallow Alto and then south and then back to Shallow and my car and home to Deadwood. And sitting up during the play. Instead I dropped Moomin off at Hamster and SuperT's house. It was boiling hot. She came out of the shower in a towel and a towel turban to serve me fizzy italian lemonade.

We sat beside her fans - or I laid on her couch with my feet up -- and commented on the architecture of the ceiling molding and the state of our marriages and relationships as well as our friends', and the way our kids played, and all that. Talking about a marriage of a person we know. "It's not like she'd divorce him because he doesn't like to French kiss while it's one of her favorite things to do for hours and hours." "Yes but can she face the whole rest of her life without ever French kissing for hours and hours, ever again?"

She had empty boxes out for the kids to play with. they made "animal habitats" and i admired her new outside porch space -- she took the little concrete patio and made it a place a bit like Jo's monkey pit, with a scavenged persian rug and some cushions.

Then to Zond-7's where I lounged in bed all evening with fancy pizza and computers and an extremely entertaining visitor, Rain. Rain is hyper in mind and body in the way of people who might in the past have done a tad too many drugs and were left sane but more interesting and open to ideas than they might have become otherwise. We gossiped about multiple layers of things at a fair amount of depth - of recent history of the valley, of startups and web 2.0 culture and this time around's boom, and of specific personalities, then of people we knew, and nifty projects, and that's all I'll say because it was a gossip session of extreme and frightening and pleasant frankness because I felt like we clicked and also because Zond-7 seems to know her well. This, all from bed... with computers... the nicest way to have a conversation.

We ate pizza with corn, pineapple, black olives, green bell peppers, and grilled chicken and it was fanfuckingtastically delicious late at night... again the best way to eat anything... in bed. I played with Quicksilver and started exploring it. Zond-7 started teaching me some of his more useful keystroke commands to do things. We both tried working but fucked off a fair bit reading blogs and news and exclaiming at the world's fuckedupitude and marvels.

I read a bit of a Dover book about pirates, a sort of 1930s-ish feeling book or maybe 1890 and it is funny that I couldn't tell, because you should be able to tell that!!! Or, I should! It was timelessly Britishly imperialist in tone and I'm not sure if it's worth reading all of it. It was good enough for a long hot bath.

Then we stayed up super late talking over our relationship. What do we want it to be? How will we know if we're fucking it up? What about times like just now when we're stressed for time and can't balance life very well? What do the failure points in our previous relationships mean? How much were specific dysfunctions to those relationships and how much are our own individual failings we bring with us? How will whatever damages we carry forward affect us now? You know you aren't fucking it up when you end a conversation like that feeling very peaceful and content and comforted and good.

I woke this morning having had an intense dream. I was doing some sort of intense super technically giant work project with an event. (Ahoy B--C----Block, you haunt my dreams.) All sorts of things had to be coordinated and fancy tech totally new displayed involving odd internet holographic thingies. As I was walking past a grocery store in this dream, I noticed a bunch of tables in the parking lot, set up with obviously free food ! I mean, hot damn! I started stuffing things into my shoulder bag -- jars of peanut butter, 6 packs of fancy italian fizzy lemonade, loaves of bread -- thinking "hot damn! free!" but sheepishly realizing I didn't need to take the free peanut butter since I could afford to buy it.

Then in the dream I was inside the doors of an enormous mansion. The owners had died, or gone away, and there was something like an estate sale except more like it was free. Just go in and ... they had taken the things they wanted, so it was okay to rummage. In a far-away room in this labyrinth place I found an enormous antique cabinet going all the way up one wall. It has always been my fantasy to own a cabinet with a zillion tiny drawers -- a card catalog or chinese medicine cabinet -- and this fit the bill. Enormous, dark polished wood, with baroque carved embelleshments and drawers of all shapes and sizes. They were full of all different kinds of colored dice and game pieces.

I resolved to find out who had charge of the mansion and buy this cabinet for Rook. How surprised he would be! Then I realized he might just be indifferent and be fine with his different dice in little plastic baggies and would not greet the enormous cabinet with a sigh of joy, as I would. Plus, I thought maybe they wouldn't sell it to me at all. So I looted handfuls of each different drawer into my backpack, thinking I would sort them out again later to present to Rook in a way he would like better. (Yet still ask about the cabinet, or look for a similar one, less massive and imposing but still pleasing to me.)

Next to the cabinet of many drawers there was a low bureau or dressing table with a mirror on top. When I was little I liked to explore my grandmother's and mom's bureau drawers. My grandma had things like very old-seeming gold-backed hairbrush set and perfume bottles on a silver tray. The texture of pantyhose in the drawers and the sort of mysteriousness of girdles and bra straps... For me going through her bureau drawers was like trying to understand the weirdness of femininity or womanhood. I tried sometimes to duplicate or echo this feeling in my own rooms, with top-of-bureau setups that had a ritual feel, like little shrines.

This dream bureau was very similiar to my grandma's, but more mysterious and... oozing the feeling of wealth. (Rather than shabby overly-cared-for just-post-Depression-era lower middle class fanciness 30 years later.) Things that seemed like they must have cost hundreds or thousands of dollars in department stores, golden handbags with delicate clasps, hose and lingerie that was like thousand dollar tissue paper. Gold tubes of rose-smelling lipstick.

Then there were drawers and drawers, flat like map drawers, of makeup of different shades, with everything labelled, poetic names of dreams and dawn and twilight rose and masquerade, starlight disco, ocean midnight shimmer.

I could not decide what I wanted from this. It was all attractive and expensive and yet nothing was my style and makeup, while fun, feels like drag. Finally in one of the makeup drawers I found an array of tubes and pots of glitter, so I took the nicest one to decorate my hair for the big party at the techie event I was organizing in the dream.

Down deep in the back of one of the clothes drawers there was a strange designer-y outfit. It was like a tight bodysuit that had a cartoon landscape sewn into it, patchwork style, with a dinosaur, and was clearly meant to be worn with expensive femmy things as a weird designer outfit and would fall apart in about a month. I took it to use it for pajamas.

I'm awake late, and have had coffee with condensed milk, graham crackers in bed, and to be nice, washed Zond-7's dishes, as he has one million thousand work things and deadlines before he leaves for Yurp, next week. It is cheating to take the easiest task off his hands.

I'm off now to the game con! I will buy dice and celebrate the synchronicity of my dreams.

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[badgermama]

No one comments on these long brain dumps, but I know y'all read them.