California Dreaming

Friday night I dreamt it was the first day of class and I was teaching in front of the room with no clothes on. I was totally unprepared, and all the students were being jerks. I walked around showing them a data set I just wrote on a gum wrapper. Then I looked over and saw the professor who sits in on my classes when I’m being reviewed, looking horrified, so I started to put on clothes, saying, “I should probably put these clothes on,” and he looked at me like, “Ya think?” 

Tomorrow is the first day at Sac State and I’m ready. I feel much better than I did Friday. Stress reared its head earlier in the week. I dreamt I got black out drunk, waking up in a hotel bed with one of my best friends. It wasn’t like that. I never turned into sexy-lady drunk. I was more of a Roseanne drunk; I  get loud, funny and rude. In the dream everyone was mad because someone had spiked my drink the night before, but I was secretly happy he did it.

I wasn’t hungover, but still needed to lay in bed and watch TV that morning with my kids. We watched a Youtube video on lucid dreams. The clip starts by saying, the best minds of time use this practice to heighten their intelligence.

The way to train your mind to “wake up” while you’re asleep is by frequently saying to yourself when you’re awake, “If I’m asleep, I can push my finger through my hand.” 

Then you try to push your finger through your hand, and when it won’t go you say out loud, “I’m awake.”

The pattern will cause you to say that when you’re dreaming, but your finger will go through your hand if you’re in a dream, and you say, “I’m asleep!” And you’re given the paintbrush to your dreamscape.

I was easily onboard until they gave a warning, don’t freak out from the sleep paralysis because your mind is now awake, but your body won’t move. During this part of the video they show a shadowy figure trying to claw themselves from a clear steamed up coffin.

Whenever I’ve experienced sleep-paralysis, where I wake up but my body is asleep, I go into panic, screaming at myself, “Wake up!” and trying to open my eyes. It does feel like being trapped in a coffin. The video claims, if I stay calm, it is the opportunity to launch into lucid dreaming, creating whatever reality I want, gaining insight into my curiosities.

Even though we had fun that day pushing our finger into our palm, and then throwing up our hands saying, “I’m awake.” As I was mapping out how I’d dive into the most glorious dream, I started worrying that the kids might feel that hellish dream-state, and began squashing our lucid dream plans.  

I like to think I’d be smart and go into a lucid dream with a plan of hunting for great ideas, but I can’t  trust myself. I’d be so elated by getting over the mental straitjacket of sleep paralysis, I’d go right to living my wildest dream, and kick it off by walking into a room with all my friends shouting, “Who's ready to party?” And we’d get loud, and laugh, and keep all our clothes on.

Alexa, Shut Up

Alexa is a thorn in my side. I groan as my kids yell commands at her. After they make their demands, I chime in, tempering expectations, “Alexa doesn’t know that.” And sure enough, she replies, “I don’t know that one.”

When the kids aren’t asking her questions that a graduate student spends a year deciphering through research, they will holler for her to play the kind of songs that drive a woman to madness.

One will scream, “Alexa, play Eight Unicorns!” followed up by the other yelling, “Alexa, volume 10.” 

Then they dance like they ate a bag of mushrooms for breakfast, and I fill up my coffee cup and exit stage right, to work in my room.

This summer is like a prolonged slumber party. My summer school class was cancelled, so we haven’t clung to a structure, unless the structure is structureless. With the shelter-in-place, we end up having three or four day stretches where we move about like we're roaming The Stanley Hotel.

Even dinner turned into something every parenting book frowns upon. Five o’clock rolls around, and I dust off my pajamas to ask the kids, “You really feel like dinner? Because I’m about to eat chips and salsa, two Chobani Flips, and a couple bowls of Captain Crunch.”

By the time I get to eating cereal I’m not even hungry, I’m just bored.

Having no desire to get dressed or put on mascara, it’s like I’m back to being a stay-at-home parent with two toddlers. I have time to do things I’ve put off the last three years, like getting pictures off our old desktop computer. I look like a busted wreck in mostly all the pictures. Happy, but busted; my hair always in a messy bun, no make up, and clothes I wore because they were the first thing I pulled out of my dresser drawer.

All I could do was laugh when I came across pictures from a friend's wedding I remember us speeding to San Francisco for, barely making it on time. I thought, “Really, Alicia? You couldn’t even brush your hair!”

At least the kids are at an age where they can be left to their own devices. I know mom-stress is not high ranking because the L-O-V-E outweighs all complaints, but I do think there’s PTSD from raising babies, especially back to back. You get zero deep sleep (the exception being tough-love parents who get sleep because at night they lock their kids in a cage or some shit) and you spend your days always on high alert so this clumsy and curious person doesn’t accidently kill themself. Walk out of the room for one minute and come back to find your two year old sucking on a quarter and the one year old crawling around on the top of the refrigerator. 

Thank God kids get older. I remember going through the check out at Trader Joes with my babies in the cart, and the cashier said, “It gets a lot better.”

This stranger gave me just the encouragement I needed, instead of the usual diatribe that raising babies happens in the blink of an eye, and you better love every second of it.

My Trader Joe's angel was right, kids turn 6 and then you get a built in buddy. Seriously, the best comrade. The kind of friend you wake up next to on a Saturday, and say, “If we hurry, we can make the 10:30 movie matinee and get in-n-out before.” 

Last week my kids went on vacation with their dad. I had ambitions to write a novel and renovate my house in five days. Should be no surprise, I watched 40 hours of TV instead. When I don’t have my kids home, the endless corridor of time I get to walk down is overwhelming.

There’s the structure I need, small gaps of time to accomplish things, usually found in between cooking and cleaning up meals. Without this structure, I easily convince myself that the best way to prep for my fall semester is to rearrange furniture.  I’ve got my kid’s school to think about too. Homeschooling is going to be better this time around, but If this vaccine can come through within the next two weeks, we’ll get to feel the glory of a hail Mary that makes the stress of this year totally worth it.

For now, I’ll just let the kids spend their time playing. I love listening to them play imagination games. They get embarrassed by my eavesdropping, so I have to be a fly on the wall or else they’ll stop and start harassing me to watch TV.

Listening to them reminds me of playing with my little sister. I don’t know if our songs were as clever as theirs. They have a nice jingle going now, the working title, A Giant’s Fart. Becky and I had the classic, Butter My Muffin and I Shake My Butt, but it relies on innuendo, and given our age at the time of the song, it could be inappropriate. Time really does have a way of making art seedy and predatory.

Becky and I played dolls endlessly. Our favorites were always in tow. We also got sick pleasure in dragging around our least favorite doll. His name was Tuna Fish Head, a Cabbage Patch doll whose hair looked just like the tuna we saw frequently between white bread. Tuna Fish Head was hardly ever clothed, and we’d prop him up alongside the other dolls to berate and belittle.

While on my Netflix binge last week, every time I clicked “continue watching,” I started talking to myself like I was Tuna Fish Head. I walked to the kitchen to refill on Captain Crunch, and I saw Alexa lit up yellow. So, I cleared my throat from the five hours of silence, and asked, “Alexa, what is the notification?”

Alexa told me she thinks I need to buy more fish oil. I opened up my cabinet, and saw a full bottle of capsules.

I shouted at her, “Alexa, stop! You don’t know shit!”

To provoke me, she replied, “I’m sorry, I don’t know that one.”

And, I let her have it, “Alexa, you better close your mouth. Your dick breath is stinking up my house.”  I started waving my hand in front of my face as I walked back to the room to resume devouring TV.

Luckily, my boyfriend came over at the end of every day, and I’d start being nice to myself and Alexa. I remember the last night of my kid’s vacation, he was coming over at 9:30. At 9 pm, I flipped open my laptop and wrote the first sentence to this blog. That's all I got out of the entire five days, and it took getting to the last 30 minutes for me to produce it.

We're coming down to the end of this summer, and it’s a procrastinator’s dream. I need to see the end of that corridor to start working. The first morning my kids were back, I mopped the kitchen floor, cleaned out the microwave and wrote a blog. Alexa’s been doing her part with the kids, she’s a real peach, and when my kids are away, she’s a real Tuna Fish Head.

The Grandma Mothership

Last night I had one of those dreams where you wake up wondering if you were sucked up by the mothership; I’m in a crowded room, where I recognize a bunch of random people from my life. I also had a dream I pulled a giant seed out of my mouth and that the after school teacher gave my kids three full-grown cats that started pooping all over our house, it was so bad, I stepped in it. Counter to what instinctively seems like a bad dream, I guess dreaming of stepping in cat poop is actually a good sign! Ask Alexa, if you doubt me.

This morning my mom and daughter were working on a baby blanket for my sister’s baby. My Grandma knew my sister was pregnant before anyone. She had a dream, and she even nailed the sex. My grandma’s got the gift, but it’s not like Sylvia Brown level. She’s more of a friends-and-family kind of psychic.

I was still recovering from being beamed back into my bed, so I laid there, listening to them talk. When I came out for coffee, my daughter had fabric scraps puzzled together in a small rectangle and commissioned me to sew it together for her to give to her new cousin. She had the scissors in her hands as she raced across the room to get a juice box, and I snapped to fully-awake mode and yelled, “Don’t run with scissors like that! That’s how people die!!”

My mom agreed with the detrimental consequences of running with scissors, but then calmly showed my daughter the proper way to hold them. The week before, Kiki came in third place in a scooter competition with her cousins. They spent days practicing, and the adults were forced to award medals, no ties were allowed. My brother decided the youngest would get first and we’d work our way to third place based on age. Fair enough, I figured. But Kiki took tremendous offense, and walked away berating herself for the fail.

I felt bad, but after giving her a sufficient pat on the back, and letting her in on how the entire thing was rigged from the start, she was still distraught, so I left her in the room with my mom.

I came back, over twenty minutes later, my mom and her were still talking on the bed, but the tears had dried. I saw my daughter stuffing dollar bills into her sequin purse, and I asked, “Where’d you get that money?”

And she said, “Mimi gave it to me. She thinks I was the best and should have won first, so she gave me five dollars.”

“That’s interesting,” was all I could say.

My mom did not have the time to sit around and console me for thirty minutes every time I crumbled in distress from what I perceived to be an earth-shattering infraction. I was a sensitive kid, so this happened a lot.

She likes to tell me about it now. She says, “You’d always steal your sister’s baby bottle. We’d find you hiding in the closet, and we’d have to rip the bottle from your hands… Nothing changes. Ha!”

We’d squeeze in our bonding time, laying opposite each other on the couch reading Mary Higgins Clark books and eating pinwheels. It’s not as cool as her handing me five bucks and telling me I’m the best, but it’s comforting.

This week I saw my Grandma for the first time in ages. We went to Chilli’s and she gave me the cutest little gold ring she got when she was a kid. She asked me to try it on my pinky, and it fit. She smiled at me and said, “We have the skinniest fingers!”

“You’re right, Grandma! We do.” Then I told her about my dreams, in life and sleep, writing and comedy. She assured me, "Oh, it’s all going so well! You're doing exactly what you should be doing."

And, I don’t even think she said it as a friends-and-family psychic, but as my grandma.

Spending Power

We all agree, Karen is annoying. Karen-culture is a byproduct of capitalism where her voice is magnified because she fills a shopping cart at Target and Costco once a week. If it’s any consolation, no one would give a shit about her otherwise.

It’s not just racism Karen decides to minimize. Her pearl-clutching fuels the fast-paced, sensationalized news racket we’ve got corroding natural thought processes and logic. Why does it make the news that a 40 year old male comic is sending 18 year old women text messages? Sure he’s lonely, and needs excessive adoration, but he’s not a criminal. Its reverse-sexism to say an 18 year old woman is incapable of making a decision, that she’s powerless to a homely looking, brainless man because he’s got the kind of money that produces a couple Karens.

It gives all the power to men when young women are told they don’t have agency. I once had to quit my job because I slept with a coworker for over 6 months, and I didn’t want to see his face anymore. Going into it, I told myself, this is going to turn into a big, fat, uncomfortable learning experience. It could take a lot of learning experiences to figure out a dick is never going to fill a hole made by reality falling short of expectations because of misdirection. But after time, we realize how some bad decisions make us stronger, in the same way that the most beautiful memories can end up turning into nightmares.

So an 18 year old is capable to figure out that when she gets a direct message from a complete stranger, it either means he is a card-carrying lonely hearts club member or a green-card-seeking man who is jumping at the chance to be on 90-day fiancé, because even though our country is is going through a shit storm, it’s still a great country to be in. 

Don’t rush out to buy your Fuck Karen t-shirts (of course) without considering what exactly is her cross to bear. Karens are dismissive, petty and mean, but their entire existence is about consumption rather than creation.

Nothing unites men more than feeling superior to women, so don’t crucify Karen for all the inherent and systematic racism in a country that is run by men. She’s merely a red-herring, a red herring with spending power.

Morning Elixir

I quit drinking because I have a terrible condition where I love to get shit-faced with my friends. I’m not an alcoholic, I just have way too many friends. I don’t know, maybe I am an alcoholic. I do know that I am better off not drinking, my life is more abundant. It’s hard to say though, how I’ll feel down the road.

I’ve been reading the kids Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde before bed. I went in with a basic understanding, the story is about a person becoming evil after taking an elixir, but after reading the doctor’s compulsion to continue to torture himself, till death, it clicked, oh, this is about addiction. A lot of people can relate to Jekyll, knowing they can drink themselves into a psychopath that loves to wreak havoc and disappears after all the damage is done.

This week, I binged the current season of Real Housewives of New York. Watching the women get trashed episode after episode was weakening my conviction. I thought, maybe I’m not that bad, these ladies seem to be doing great, clearly embracing their multi-dimensional drunken personalities. 

There’s a new housewife this season, Leah, who admits she recently ended a 9 year stretch of sobriety. I scratched my head, asking, “You’re going to unleash Hyde with a camera crew in tow?”

Oh, and has she. She describes one night as “blowing off steam” by doing cartwheels around the dinner table. The footage might bring to light what she imagined as cartwheels was actually screaming in everyone’s face and then dry humping the table, chairs, and grass. It was hilarious, but a necessary reminder that nothing changes, and eventually, I’d be worse off than her, my idea of doing cartwheels would be cussing out someone I love followed up by a whole hearted attempt at fucking an aspen tree.

Speaking of belligerent behavior, my son had a meltdown when we pulled up to a hiking trail over the weekend. It was so out of nowhere, and I looked at my sister and said, “Good lord, I don’t know what’s gotten into him. Maybe he has to poop.”

Sure enough, after we all walked to the river, he had to poop. It seemed urgent, so we set off into the woods, and right then, the desolate area we were hanging out in, was encircled by hikers, bikers and dog walkers, so we had to leave. 

On the walk back to the car, now with his outburst attributed to bowel stress, we collected blue jay feathers I envisioned as a lovely wind chime in our backyard, that in actuality, would end up littering the junkyard chic thing we’ve got going on.

We piled in the car, and upon hearing he was going to my parents’ house instead of my sister’s, his Mr. Hyde showed up again. He took his fistful of feathers and stuck them in his mouth, and bit down hard, ripping them in half, spitting out the remaining feathers like Sylvester the Cat after biting Tweety Bird’s butt.

My mom just said, “Oh, wow!” and I was thinking, “Great, we're about to see the next Wuhan.”

That Night, after reading to the kids, I went into the living room and found my mom trying to turn the TV off. I wasn’t able to offer much help, but she went through five remotes, and found the perfect combination of buttons. She was distracted because she was telling me all about Jessica Simpson’s autobiography. I followed her into the bathroom to take a shot of NyQuil. I’d like to say that after a 30 minute summary of Jessica Simpson, I wouldn’t need the sleep-aid, but I was on the edge of my seat hearing her story of sexual abuse, alcoholism and divorce.

That night I dreamt I woke up after blacking out drunk, stressed and guilt ridden for being a cruel and heartless inebriate. In the end of the dream I fixated on a toy that started looking at me, and making slight movements. I watched this inanimate object come to life, scared as shit I was going crazy. 

I had a lot to be grateful for when I woke up with my kids piled on top of me, I was sane and had no regrets from the night before. I headed to the kitchen, joining my mom for coffee. I was going to tell her about the new Real Housewife, Leah, but realized it’d be like a dose of NyQuil at 7am. Listening to a story about someone unraveling is far less exciting than a story of rebuilding.

Leah’s my favorite RHONY cast member this season, and maybe it’s because we have stuff in common; great style, a daughter named Kiki and a willingness to change for the better. I sipped my coffee and moved on, Leah takes a poo after morning coffee like the rest of the world. Then my son pranced into the kitchen, happy as a jay bird, and I considered saving a little coffee for him to have later. To help keep the bad guy away.

A Wild Scent

I surprised my daughter with the news she gets to attend a small morning camp next week. She is thrilled. Her vacant eyes indicated she'd withdrawn in the anticipation of seeing friends after 2 months of family. She grabbed her backpack and started gathering things around the house to accompany her on this long awaited girl-club time.

She picked up a tiny perfume from a kid cosmetic set, and asked, "Do you think I should wear perfume?"

Her excitement was intoxicating, so I said, "Yeah, why not!"

Then she said, "I'll wear a scent that drives the counselors wild."

My boyfriend sent me a text that an open mic is resuming next week, and then I felt the whirling stomach my daughter was just describing. I sort of enjoy the tiny bubble I'm existing in at the moment, and the idea of returning to normalcy gives me the sensation every speck harboring in my intestines is about to immediately evacuate from my body.

I remember a nonessential errand we ran before the shelter-in-place. We went to the carwash in Midtown. In the lobby, my boyfriend read his phone, and I watched some sporting event on the communal TV. When I say watched, I mean it was a nice scene to lock my eyes on, as I withdrew. The place was pretty crowded, and everyone was engaged in some variation of individual entertainment. When a woman stood up and walked through the lobby, we were all brought into the present moment. She plunked a couple coins in the automated massage chair, which was positioned in a theatrical way, where everyone had a vantage point. This woman laid back in that massage chair, closed her eyes, and had an orgasmic experience in front of a live car wash audience. Everyone then alternated between thumbing their phone and watching this woman's invisible lady boner grow to unbreakable strength. Her husband quickly tuned in to the display, and dealt with it like any partner would, he walked outside and decided to go without complimentary coffee and the pungent smell of mingling air fresheners, that might actually drive people wild.

There's so much to look forward to, that goes beyond eating and drinking on a restaurant patio. I woke up with a cold sore yesterday, which means I actually bookended this shelter-in-place with my overactive anxiety's physical response to change. Pick a side, Alicia. Do you want to be a cozy homebody or be a smiling scenester?

I don't know, I guess I want to be both. I do know that the carwash lady is living the right way; live like everybody's watching, and you don't give a fuck. It's more powerful than perfume.

She's So High

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As I scroll through Instagram, I get food envy from all the people out there flexing their culinary skills during this quarantine. I've consumed 50 quesadillas since the beginning of March. I hate dishes too much to start cooking like I believe processed food is poison, but I’ve written a decent amount of fart jokes.

A few days ago, I got high for the first time in almost a decade. It was a THC concentrate tincture. I took it an hour before an interview to do social media for a magazine. It's a volunteer position, so they can't be finicky about a person's recreational activities, but I started noticing it kicking in the last 10 minutes of our chat, and this made me feel uncomfortable nervousness I masked by incessantly talking.

The next day I had a horrible headache that lasted every waking second. It could have been from the THC concentrate, or maybe from watching 7 hours of TV after taking it, without my glasses on. I grew up in Lake Tahoe, so weed is a very normalized part of the culture. However, I stopped smoking pretty soon after high school because I made the conscious decision that I don’t enjoy crippling paranoia. 

I spent many an afternoon in a dense cloud, paralyzed on a couch, convinced I was reading everyone’s mind. These are not fond memories for me. A lot of potheads like to tell me that all I need to do is smoke more weed, in order to overcome this uncomfortableness. It just seems like a lot of work, when I’m already really good at lounging around and watching movies while eating quesadillas.

Thankfully, my kids were at their dad's that day, so I didn't have to homeschool with a headache. My homeschool strategy is to work as fast as possible, get it out of the way, because I have my own work to do, and I need some time for cooking meals that require minimal cleanup and writing fart jokes.

My kids are a good source of material though. My son asked during his writing assignment, "Mom, how do I spell 'do'? Is it D-O or D-O-O?"

"Well babe, it just depends how you're using it."

We watched a dinosaur video on YouTube, and I did not need to be high to think, "OOOOH WOOOOW, Dinosaurs are fucking aaaamazing!"

But, I am grounded enough to think the timeline for dinosaurs sounds like a load of horseshit. I emphasize to my children, "They are trying to tell us that that bone is 60 MILLION YEARS OLD?!"

I expand my argument on why they should question this theoretical timeline. “We haven't ever found a lawn chair capable of surviving a single Sacramento summer. The people of Pompeii were buried alive by Mt. Vesuvius erupting was 2,000 years ago. Now lets consider multiplying that by 30 MILLION!!"

My kids were probably like, mom, you sound high, but they don't have that sort of vocabulary. Just like how I don’t have to capability to translate to them that 60 years ago academics were recreationally taking LSD.

I gave them a probable scenario. Dinosaurs are enormous lizards that live inside the earth’s layers. Air bubbles within the planet allow them decent living spaces and access to water. These dinosaurs die, and their remains work themselves up to the surface. I came up with that L. Ron Hubbard shit, and I’ve never even done LSD.

The other day I drove by Starbucks, and saw a drive-thru line a mile long. I imagine most of those people don’t have any hopes or dreams, but I understand the need for high impact caffeine. Making coffee is the only culinary skill I can flex at home, so I can enjoy it while working on flatulence humor.