Friday, December 13, 2013

!@#$% Facebook! ARG!!

Oh, I'm privately giggling --!  One of the agents here in the office has an overwhelming temper, which causes him to behave in very unacceptable ways.  We have had two serious talks about this, and he has been behaving pretty well for the past year or so.  No kicking the walls, no punching the doors, no shouting cursewords -- he's been behaving pretty normally.

However, he grew frustrated with his Facebook page -- he was trying to set himself up with one, and doesn't really know much about how things like this work, and suddenly lost it.  Pounding with both fists on the desk, he began to roar, and then shout furious denunciations of Facebook, and the computer he was using, and every person involved in either or both.  Lots of loud cursing, and the more he yelled, the angrier it made him, and so the louder and more violent his rage became.  Much repetitive obscenity, roaring and repeated pounding of fists.

Well.  What he did not know, was that there was another agent in one of the front offices.  She was very distressed by this, and even though I tried to calm her, she insisted on hurrying back to his office and asking him if he was all right, and did he need help, and goodness, she was just so upset!  And what on earth was the matter?  Could she call someone?

He was very embarrassed.  And shamed.  And apologized, saying that if he had known she was there, he wouldn't have done it.  Which sort of clued me in to the degree to which he can certainly "help it."

Thursday, December 12, 2013

Other countries, other ways

I feel sure that I have mentioned this before.  There are two people in the conference room, an agent and his client, and they are speaking Romanian (I believe).  They have been here several times before, and each time this amazes me.  It is apparently a convention, in Romania, for everyone to speak at once.  They don't work their conversation so that Person One speaks, and then stops and Person Two responds.  They both just talk steadily, with pauses and giggles and expression, as though the other one was listening intently, (which, apparently, they are, I guess) and the other one talks just as steadily.  It is amazing.  Even when one of them is giving the other one information that they did not know, the other one does not stop talking in order to listen.

Thursday, December 5, 2013

Tangerine Dream

On my way in to work, the morning sky was a deep true blue with shadings into purple.  The weather is very cold, and there were no clouds anywhere, but along the eastern sky there were four layers of con trail, all pretty much straight, and evenly spaced, one above the other.  They were touched by the still invisible sun, from below, and were vivid shades of pink and tangerine.  But as I approached them, I realized that the colors alternated.  The bottom stripe was tangerine, the next one up was pink, the next one tangerine and the top one pink.

Now, what the hell?  How is that possible?  Was it a matter of depth, of distance from the earth, and it just happened that the stripes were arranged in that way?  It looked very familiar, so it wasn't until I started trying to figure it out that I boggled.  They looked all to be roughly the same size, and they all came from the same airport -- so what is the answer here?  Anybody?

Tuesday, December 3, 2013

Scary Chickens and Their Frightening Eggs

In what could be a result of my brain injury, seven or eight years ago, or possibly just a result of getting older, I have pretty much stopped remembering my dreams.  I mean, I still remember the frightening dreams that made me so afraid of the dark as a child -- one or two of them quite vividly -- but any dreams that I have now,  are gone within moments of waking.  I can try to hold onto them, and the feeling they gave me may last for half an hour or so, but none of the details.  Even while feeling the feeling, I often cannot identify it in words.  This makes me think it is a result of my brain injury, since I think I have always had words for what I wanted to convey, in my previous life.

However, last night I had a dream that I still recall quite clearly.  And last week I had a dream that I also recall pretty well.  So -- is this me, stepping out of the mists of Brain-Injury-Land, and back into the clear sunlit hill country of Dream Land?  Or is it merely an aberration? 

Last night's dream involved me driving repeatedly over the same terrain, in the first half  of the dream, just to get from place to place, but in the last half, to escape from someone who wanted to take a small child away, and was prepared to kill me to get to him.  I can't remember what relation to me this little boy, named Kenny, was -- but he was small and thin, and white-faced, and very obedient and quiet, which led me to believe he had already had a pretty hard life.  I remember getting out of the car and running into a house that I knew was empty at the moment and hurrying him upstairs into the wife's dressing room, which had a weird little offset closet space behind it, that you couldn't really see unless you knew it was there, and squeezed yourself into this corner to look. I bundled him into it and pushed boxes around him, and put an afghan over his head and told him to sit silently unless he heard my voice tell him to come out.  Then I squeezed out of the closet hidey-hole and got into the dressing room door, as the people who were chasing me for his mother, who wanted him for some evil purpose, burst into the room.  They were going to search that room very carefully, since they had found me in it, and I felt so bad for the tiny boy, hiding and then being found, then I wrenched myself awake.  My heart was pounding very hard.  So hard that for a moment or two I couldn't breathe, and had to throw off the covers or suffocate (I thought).  It took awhile to settle down and beat properly.

Now, on thinking it over, I wonder which came first?  Was I having a frightening dream, which caused my heart to pound, or was I having a heart problem which showed itself by pounding, which caused me to attach a dream to it, as subconcious explanation?  Like dreaming that the police are coming, when it's actually your alarm going off?  It's sort of a which came first, the chicken or the egg.  Only it's the scary chicken or the frightening egg.