Personal Perestróĭka

So earlier I sent my sister a MySpace message to ask what mom was doing because I needed to call her.  Here is an edited (only took out the irrelevent parts) of my exchange with my awesome baby sister:

CrackerjackSis:  speaking of which, is it weird that i feel like Zooey is our family combined? I kept thinking it when I was reading that story

me: like Franny and Zooey?  Salinger?

CJSis: yeah

me (later): Mom just told me that she couldn’t ever understand what Seymour’s problem was, that she always wanted to live with the Glass family. I told her apparently she’d managed to make her own Glass family.

CJSis: Yeah. I read the two stories like 4 months between each other and I totally forgot the whole story (I don’t even remember if they explain Seymour in Franny) but for most of Buddy’s letter I thought Seymour was his boyfriend.

AHAHHAHA!  Seriously, she’s like the best teenager ever.  And she’ll be here in two weeks! I will be smarter when she leaves.  That’s just how it goes!

There has been huge hawk circling my house and yard this morning.

Yes, okay, I get it.  I am focusing now.  Just as soon as I eat.

A conversation I had last night with Whopperjaw prompted me to dig up this CD my mom gave me a few years ago. It’s a recording of my grandfather telling stories about his childhood to my cousin, T, who was 8 at the time (so I was probably about 19, I guess). The recording is probably 18+ years old and made just a couple years before my grandfather died. I’ve never listened to it, despite knowing the tapes existed for many years and having had the CD copy for several years. I’m torn. Like I really, really want to hear those stories told again, to hang onto that piece of my childhood, but at the same time, I’m not sure I can deal with actually hearing my grandfather talk. It just seems like it might be too upsetting. He’s been dead for 13 or so years. I’d expect my sadness at his loss to be lessened by now, but really if I think too much about it it still makes me cry. Like I am doing right now just typing this. I will, however, probably give the CD a try. Hopefully it is interesting enough to report back on. Maybe it will help me push the happy memories to the forefront and feel less sorry for myself about my loss.

I dreamt of a place that looked very much like where I grew up. My whole neighborhood, the city of my youth, bent to hideous dystopian proportions. Grim, darkly terrifying, very unsettling. There were giant spiders of all sorts, creeping in windows and trying to fill rooms when you weren’t looking. And I was still so young, my mom trying to protect me, even though I was about to rush off and get married. I had bodyguards to carry me through the city, until one slacked and another made a mistake and then I was alone, in a gorgeous, richly and multi colored, bejeweled, handmade wedding dress, running through the terrors of the city alone, trying to find someone to help me. Ugh. (Robbie Bunny, if you are reading this, you were one of my bodyguards in my dream, the one who tried to save me).

Earlier in the dream, before it got terrifying, I was looking around for the coffee shop that is about to open next door to me in real life. Except I was in the neighborhood I grew up in. I finally found it, behind the gas station on 10th/Broadway and Roy. It was strange. I can’t remember the last time Seattle appeared that prominently, that clearly in my dreams. It was a very specific Seattle construction, that looks a little like the city, but appears in my dreams, always in that form and often with same emotional tenor, which is full of fear, and sense of always being rushed, and loss of privacy and security. Yet it feels strangely like home, or a place I’ve known as home even if it isn’t now.

I also stayed up too late working on some coding problems and dreamt snatches of code and fleeting ideas to solve problems that I can’t grasp the tail of now that I am awake.