!@#$% 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."

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.

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?

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.

Chocolate Man

Several times, lately, on my way to work, I have had a thought that caused me to say to myself, "When I get to work, that's going to be a blog post."  And then I get to work, and the idea is gone.  Completely, entirely gone, just a small echoing nothing, like the spot in your  mouth where the tooth was, and now is not.  Once I could even remember what the idea was about, something about a man...?  And chocolate...?  But no amount of thinking "man -- chocolate, man -- chocolate," over and over to myself; no amount of sitting with eyes closed and mind open, letting my empty brain drift, around the Man and the Chocolate; no amount of incubating the man and the chocolate caused them to hatch into the fluffy yellow chicks of the idea.

Drunk again, cooky, and this time on Gordon’s gin, which is a very good gin, I must agree, since it has made me drunk. I’m really truly drunk, too, with odd swayings and an inability to keep my eyes all the way open, and a lot of staggering sideways. It’s because there was more gin left in the bottle than I thought there would be, and after tasting and making the face of one who does not drink their gin straight, thank you very much, I made it into two drinks with the Canada Dry and put one of them in the freezer until the first one was done. And now the second one is also finished, and I am intoxicated. Not in the pass-out-forget-everything kind of way, but definitely in the can’t-walk-a-straight-line kind of way. And I just finished reading The Ruins for the third time, which I knew all along, with every turning page, was a bad idea, alone in the house at night and drunk. So I skipped the really heart-wrenching parts and just read the terrifying parts. Goody. Fortunately I am not quite drunk enough for anything in the house to start scaring me, although I turned off the circulatory fan, since its face kept looking at me.

This is the gin which Ruthie bought when she was here, last week, and the weekend before that – I bought Irish and she bought gin, and then Mickey came over and we drank it. And now I have finished it off. She told me that Gordon’s was, in her opinion, better than Tanqueray, which I took my leave to doubt, but let her buy it anyway. And it just might be. Or I might be drunk. Can’t tell you now, you know. Wait until tomorrow.

Ya Wanna Get Ants?

This morning I managed to shower, dress, dry and put up my hair, pack a lunch, make and drink my coffee and eat about half a piece of toast and marmalade, (Note: what is it about early mornings, that the effort of eating is so much more than the desire to satisfy appetite?  I was thinking and thinking of delicious hot, crispy, buttered toast, with fresh, tangy orange marmalade to try and stir up some appetite, and my stomach was not responding at all.  I made it anyway, thinking that the smell/taste would help, but it didn't at all.  I managed to take my vitamins, and then left the remaining piece and half on the plate on the counter -- "ya wanna get ants?  Cuz that's how you get ANTS!") all quickly enough that I was also able to put two quarts of oil in my car before the TIME TO LEAVE! alarm went off on my phone.

Morning View

This morning as I drove over the bridge shoulder to get to Burnside, I looked out over the skyline.  I always like to see the pattern -- new every time! --  of the old St Patrick church dome and cupola, within the larger dome and arch of the Fremont Bridge.  It was quite dark, but I saw that the sky, which was black, shading to deep purple, faded into a faint glimmer of green at the bottom edge, which was tipped with a fine, fine line of yellow.  It really looked like a dark shade drawn over a window with brilliant sun behind it, that can only be seen in a thin golden band at the bottom.  

As I drove through downtown Portland, the radio told me that Burnside had a burst water main -- chilly this morning! -- and I should look for an alternate route across the river.  As I registered this in dismay, I saw the orange Detour sign looming up in the spray of headlights.  So I went around a few quick blocks in a  square, which took me a little out of my way, and gave me a second view of the night sky, from a different and unfamiliar angle.  This time, the shades of green and yellow were completely gone, and the sky was a more uniform shading of deep navy, from darker to lighter, looking very like that crushed velvet skirt I used to have -- what did they call that briefly popular dye job?  Ombre?  Never knew what that meant, always made me think of a Cockney Spaniard.  Oy, 'ombre!

Half an hour later, and the sky is a pale Federal blue, shading through white into delicate seashell pink at the bottom.  Wouldn't it be fun to just sit and register, possibly write down, all the permutations of color that the sky goes through in the course of a year?  It would be different for every place, of course -- trees, mountains, pollution all making it change differently... and possibly it would be a terrible bore, but I think I would enjoy it.

Cold weather, the radio said!  At the moment it's 32, so right at freezing, and zero precipitation predicted, which has got to be unusual.  Funny, I came out without a coat, and didn't feel cold, but then, I am well-insulated personally, and wasn't standing about on street corners with cardboard signs -- the beggars I regularly pass did look uncomfortable -- I just climbed into my car and drove away.  Had to turn off the heater before I even crossed the river -- too warm.  Had I been waiting at the bus stop, I would have been chilly, but then I also would have been coated.