Weird Little Things

Wow, I didn't realize how long it had been since I last updated. Sorry about that! It's just that I was completely drowning in work last week. Seriously, I was. My midterm just about killed me, although I'm proud to say that I finished it exactly half an hour before it was due on Monday. True, I had to wake up at 3 AM on Monday morning to pull it off (after not going to sleep until 12:00) and then hole myself up in the library for a couple of hours in the afternoon because I still find it impossible to get any serious work done in my office, but it was due at 4:00 and I e-mailed it at 3:30. Go me! I'm not saying it's brilliant. In fact, I'm pretty sure it's crap. But on the bright side, it can only get better because I don't think I'll be nearly as busy when I have to do this again for the final next month.

I did have a birthday in the middle of all the madness. Thanks to everyone that sent cards and messages and called, by the way. It made my day! So now I'm an age that rounds to 30 rather than 20, which kind of freaks me out if I think about it too much, so basically I just celebrated without bothering to really consider the implications. I had a great time in New York over the weekend hanging out with Kiki and celebrating. It was totally worth staying up working almost all night on Sunday in exchange for getting to spend Friday and Saturday nights in the city. We did a lot of fun things in a couple of days: hit a few different low-key bars, had dessert at Serendipity, ate at a fun barbecue restaurant, shopped (we went to Steve and Barry's and I bought a bunch of stuff from Sarah Jessica Parker's new Bitten line), went to see this guy Kiki knows from dance class in the revival of Terence McNally's "The Ritz" on Broadway. And then afterwards we went to the stage door to say hi and the security guys let us just go backstage and down to the dressing room to wait for him, which was pretty cool (although he had actually already left for the night; he must have changed in record time, which I guess is easy to do when your costume consists of nothing but a towel draped on a HOT body). I was joking about how going backstage at Broadway theaters is becoming so passe now because I get to do it every time I go to New York. Haha. Anyway, all told it was a really fun weekend, and I had a great time hanging out with Kiki. I already can't wait to go back again.
On my actual birthday I wasn't going to do anything special, but then Stacy decided she wanted to celebrate finishing our midterm so we went down to City A and went to my new favorite place there (the place with the awesome pineapple vodka infusion) and had a few drinks, which was a lot of fun. Or rather, I had a few drinks and Stacy had a single drink and got drunk, because she is the biggest lightweight in the WORLD. [She fairly recently broke away from an extremely conservative lifestyle; not too long ago she was teaching at a school where she had to sign a pledge saying she would not drink. Or dance. Isn't that insanely draconian?] Sometimes I wish I could get drunk off of a single drink, if only to save some money. Not that I actually drink very much these days, I've actually had more to drink during the past week than I had had in the past month, and even then it wasn't a notable amount.

On another note, here are a few weird/humorous little stories, completely unrelated to anything, that would have worked better as individual entries when they actually happened except that I was so freakin' busy before that I'm just going to have to post them all together now:

1) One day last week I came home and as I pulled into my parking lot there was this old man standing by the dumpster frantically waving his arms to get my attention. So I rolled down the car window and asked what was up, and he goes, "Are you in the military?" Incidentally, it's possible to make many assumptions when looking at me, but I don't think "military" would ever logically be one of them. Ever. Mostly because I'm really scrawny. Anyway, I don't know what being in the military had to do with anything, because when I said no, he said, "Well, maybe you can help me anyway. My wife threw my plant away, can you help me get it out of the dumpster?" My inner monologue was, "Uh, that's pretty freakin' weird" but out of my mouth came, "Sure, of course I can help!" You have to understand that I am a complete and total sucker when it comes to senior citizens and their weird fixations. I recognized this guy as my neighbor, so it's not like he's a total stranger, and he just looked so sincerely concerned for his plant. Desperate, almost. Plus I thought that helping would involve like, fishing it out with a fishing pole or something like that. But oh no. No. Once I actually discussed the plan with him, I realized he wanted me to climb INTO the dumpster. He had a pretty ingenious plan, actually. He had a regular ice chest and then one of those styrofoam ones you get at the grocery store, and his plan was for me to use the regular ice chest to get enough leverage to climb into the dumpster and then I could get the plant and hand it to him. Then he would hand me the disposable ice chest and I could use it as a stool to climb back out of the dumpster, and it could just stay in the dumpster and get thrown away.
So did I climb into the dumpster to retrieve a plant for my crazy old neighbor? A plant that was absolutely nothing special, the sort of plant you can buy for three bucks? A plant that his poor wife has probably been trying to sneak into the dumpster for weeks, because you know how men are about getting attached to dumb things?
Um, yes. Yes I did. Because I had already said I would, and his whole face just lit up when I said I would help him. I just couldn't take it back. Besides, the dumpster had been emptied early that morning so the plant was the only thing in it. And I had time to take a shower immediately afterwards, which I did. And I just felt so sad for him! Plus climbing into a dumpster for a total stranger has to earn me major karma points, right? That's what I'm hoping, anyway.

2. This might be too much information, but please tell me that this happens to you sometimes so that I'll know I'm not crazy: do you ever have a really intense sex dream about someone that you're not interested in in real life at all whatsoever? I have sex dreams once in a while (yay, too much information!) I mean, not like weekly or anything. Not even montly. But every now and then I'll have one. Usually they're vague enough that I can't really tell who I'm with. Very occasionally I'll have one about an ex. But three times now I've dreamt vividly about people that I wasn't interested in at all. Once it was actually a sort of creepy dream about a guy I knew in college (who was actually a nice guy and dating a friend of mine at the time), once I dreamt about a guy that worked for me when I was an MA managing a bunch of undergrads (a day later he changed clothes in front of me in the office, which was kind of weird...I can make people take their clothes off with my mind!). This time, the dream was about one of my office mates! And when I say this dream was intense, I mean it was really, really intense, in a good way. While I was still half asleep I was lying there thinking, "Wow, that was pretty amazing for a dream. I wonder if I could do that in real life? Hmmm...that was good. That was...AUGH?! Why the hell was I dreaming THAT about HIM?!" Because I swear that there is no interest there during waking hours. Physically I suppose he's my type, now that I think about it, but I just never think about him like that at all. Plus in actuality, we would be awkward beyond belief, and not just because he has a girlfriend. At any rate, I had the dream on Thursday night and was glad that I didn't have to see him immediately that morning because you know how even though logically you know it was a dream, emotionally you sometimes still feel mad or upset or, uh, horny anyway? Yeah. By the time I went into the office on Monday morning, I had laughed about it with Kiki and gotten it out of my system and was over it. Or rather, I would have been if the first words out of his mouth as I walked in that morning weren't, "Are you dateable?" In my mind I was like, "What the-?! No way. He cannot possibly know about the dream!" Turns out he just happened to be reading an internet pop-up ad as I walked in. It was nothing. But it's a good thing I was hanging up my coat and not looking at him at the moment, because I'm pretty sure I was blushing. AWKWARD.
Then last night I had a dream that I gave birth to a baby girl. I dream that I'm pregnant and in labor a lot (I think I've mentioned this before). It's probably my most frequently recurring dream. I have no idea what it means, but it obviously ties closely to some emotion from my real life because sometimes I'll dream it again and again for weeks and then not have the dream for months and then it will start up again. I don't think I've ever actually gotten to the point of having the baby in the dream before, though, so that made last night's dream different. Interestingly, though, my labor dreams are normally extremely vivid, even actually painful. This one, though, wasn't all that vivid. I just woke up knowing that it is what I'd been dreaming about and that the baby had actually been born and had been a girl, although I remember very few details from the dream. What does it mean?! Why are dreams so damn weird?

3. Speaking of weird, remember Cake Guy, the guy I briefly dabbled with dating this summer before we both got too busy to actually see each other again, even though the first date was actually pretty good? Well, this afternoon for no reason at all whatsoever, he suddenly popped into my head. I was walking up the stairs to go to class and suddenly I was like, "I wonder how Cake Guy is doing?" And then I tried to remember why I only went out with him that one time. Thinking back, I can't really think of a good reason why we didn't go out again, other than that I was sort of busy and he was extremely busy and I was a little freaked out that he seemed to like me more than I liked him at the moment. So I was having those little thoughts that you have when it has been several months since you dated anyone and you're starting to run through all the people you rejected, wondering if maybe some of them weren't actually that bad and you just overreacted or didn't give them enough of a chance. (You do that, too, right?) And then I went to class, and that should have been that, but I'll be damned if he didn't text message me on my drive home! Freeaaaky. He texted me once shortly after I moved here to say that the bar wasn't as good when I wasn't bartending, but that's literally the only contact we've had since the end of July. So for him to text me completely out of the blue on the exact same day he popped into my head is pretty bizarre. We texted for a while tonight. There's a chance that if a couple of things happen with his job he'll end up in New York for Thanksgiving, and he mentioned wanting to hang out if he comes up here, and wanting to see me when I'm home at Christmas. I don't know what I'll end up doing about that. Mostly, I can't remember a single thing that I didn't like about him, other than the fact that he liked me too much. Which doesn't seem like a very good reason for blowing him off. So maybe I'll actually have a second date six months after the first one. We'll see.