I Dream Of Oranges

Ease My Mind

Friday night I dreamt of pulling a bag of peeled oranges from the bottom drawer in the fridge. I wanted to give them to the kids, but then noticed they were covered in black spots and rotting, so I threw them in the trash. After reading dream interpretations of oranges, I was excited. Oranges are a sign that something great is going to happen. But mine had those little, teeny-tiny, itty-bitty, rotten spots.

Last week I saw a psychic healer, the one whose book I read, Journey Into Grace. In the book, there were a couple cases where she cleared evil entities from people, and of course my boundless paranoia needed to know if there was something lurking within me.
The session started by us sitting on a a giant bed, and I told her a couple of my deepest secrets, shit that weighs on my mind. She was laying on her side, with her hand holding up her head. I felt at ease, considering what I was saying. After the chat, she started her healing by standing over my head. She then knelt, eye level with my head, and chuckled, saying I have an interesting energy. We talked about things she was seeing as she worked her way down my chakras. 

At the end of the session we sat back on the bed, and had a discussion. After easing my mind, by letting me know there aren't any evil entities, she asked how I felt. I replied, good, my auto-response, but after thinking about it, I answered, I feel sad. And I strangely did, like really, really sad.

She said that is normal. In fact, she said I might find myself randomly breaking down into tears the days following our session because she brought up so many repressed emotions.
She then reassured me my goals are inline with my destiny, and told me, "You have such a quirky, funny energy, and your so soft and intelligent." Flattered, I smiled and said thanks. I felt like saying, "I bet you say that to all the ladies!" while flipping my wrist.
I admitted, maybe I just needed to tell someone this stuff, and she didn't deny that. She gave me a list of books to read, and asked if I want to join her feminist yoga club.
The days following, I shed random tears, and felt somewhat disconnected. In the end, it was therapeutic. I'd compare it exactly to therapy. I'd also compare it to a 5th grade slumber party, but only the part where everyone huddles up on sleeping bags and spills their secrets, without any fear that comes along, like Why'd I say that to big-mouth Marge!? She's going to tell EVERYONE. Fuck! I was under the influence of an extra-large Slurpee, I didn't know what I was doing! Whaaaaa!

After two days of being a curmudgeon, my husband asked if I'm depressed. I let my inner-goth-child shine, when I retorted, "I feel like I'm on the verge of a breakthrough."
It occurred, Saturday night. When we went to dinner, and I told him about an idea for a story. As I started talking, more and more came to me, and I spun a great little web right then. JK Rowling once said the quickest way to kill an idea is to talk about it, so when I started to tell the story, and my husband's eyes glazed over and he said he was confused, I chose to ignore his reaction, and said, you can't kill my idea, and took to paper, where I'm translating it from this glob in my head to a cohesive story, following a timeline.

Today I'm starting a Master Cleanse. Since hearing it's going to rain Halloween night, I decided I might as well eat the candy I bought for trick-or-treaters, and our turning into The Icecream People, has made my skin look like a hormonal teenager, pimpled as fuck. I need to shock my system, and then get back to a non-dairy life.
A friend posted a picture on Facebook from our freshman year of college, and my skin looked absolutely radiant. My twenties, although it was a time I neglected to deal with my emotions, was a time where I treated my body like a damn temple. I don't think I ate a piece of cheese between the ages 19-29.

This morning I woke up from a strange dream. I was in a room with a bunch of people, everyone was sitting on couches that were set up in an oval formation. A friend of mine, who died shortly after college, was laying with his head in my lap, and we were talking about how he's changing his ways, to be more healthy and safe. It was so fun and casual, but sad when I woke up, since the changes we were talking about was how he died.
I don't remember crying about his death then. I decided to move. Thats how I dealt with things. When life got complicated, I just made a fork in the road, and went in a different direction.

Having kids is melting my frozen heart, in addition to melting away any regard I held toward dairy intolerance. About my oranges, and how they were not exactly a pristine omen of prosperity since they were speckled black with rot. It turns out, dreaming of fruit that is not fit to eat, is a sign of a project which has not yet been started. Which was quite perfectly timed with Scorpio entering my house of creativity, and my great idea for a 90's homage femme thriller that lightening bolted into my brain when I started talking about Lifetime movies on our infrequent night-out-on-the-town Saturday night.

We defied trends, since last week we saw a Pixies concert. Twice in one week, its unheard of. When we got home, I said, I have a lot in common with Black Francis. My husband said, Oh really, whys that? And I said, We both always have whores on the mind.

In Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing, Hero is compared to a "rotten orange." A shameful insult because no one wanted to be called a whore back then. (Leave it to the old-timey-to-modern-translation-experts, but orange = whore)

Were all whores to some degree, taking that metaphorical dick for money. Hell, traditional whoring is in my lineage, but being a rotten whore is an entirely different thing. 

The oranges in my dream were already peeled, and to me thats a great sign, It shows Im not trying to hide whats within my mind. To look at an orange, and its promise, delicious fruit, but then peel it and find its rotten, and inedible, there is an accompanying feeling of loss. 

The mind, hidden within our physical bodies, is potentially blemished. We don't see this mind, that continuously gets misclassified as the brain, but there is the fear of the unknown, unseen, and much like my concern over evil lurking within me, I want to be sure the whores in my mind don't poison the entire thing. My mind's little rotten spots make me quirky, give me a bizarre sense of humor, and can make me feel a little too sad at times, but without them, I'd be a ridiculous bore, and that, to me, is by far the worst fate, a thousand times worse than adult-acne. 

The best thing to do with rotten oranges is plant them in the ground, so more oranges will grow. Many of those oranges will end up rotten, as well, but they too need to be replanted. Nurturing the rotten orange, perhaps that has been the meaning of these last few nights. Either way, I've started my project, I'm dealing with emotions I stuffed away, and I'm always holding onto the prospect of great things.

My greatest thing, pigged out.

December Alicia

Dreamscaping

The Bee Gees' I Started A Joke has been playing on repeat in my head for at least a week. It started after watching the first episode of the new HBO series, Divorced. Sharon Horgan's Catastrophe is such a great show I binge watched it in one evening, so I knew I would love Divorced before I even started it.

I played I Started A Joke during a dance party with my kids, and George loved it, because it is one of those songs that leads me to dip him and swing him around like a monkey, but Kiki was perturbed. "It's a sad song," she complained, "Turn it off!"
"Sad songs are the best songs!" I said, quickly amending, "In moderation." I know from experience, the after math of listening to too much Elliot Smith, that a debilitating depression can settle in one's mind after wallowing in someone else's misery.

HBO isn't on board with the new major players of media content, Amazon and Netflix, and they still piecemeal the episodes, one a week. So I'm left empty handed for the rest of the week. Usually it doesn't matter because my library books and magazines are stacked two feet high on my bedside table, so I'm committed for every evening till the end of time. But I can't read when I'm on the treadmill. The spiders's webs hanging from the rafters in my dark, humid and over crowded garage, loose their appeal after a couple minutes, and I started watching Sex In The City while I run.

I haven't re-watched these episodes in quite some time, so I'm having a revelation on how anti-feminist this show is. It's like reading Bridget Jones as a thirty year old as opposed to a twenty year old. I didn't realize then that BJ was calling, oh about 80% of females fat fucks, and I didn't realize then that SITC relies too heavily on the perpetuated fear that women lacking a man are lacking in themselves. Miranda is the only one of them with a clear sense of self, and whats so hilarious, is she has a butch haircut and always wears unflattering business suits. Miranda is in butch drag since she fails to suffer the same levels of desperation as her cohorts.


The other night I had a dream that two of my aunts were making fun of me, so I stuffed cheese down their throats and smeared it over their bodies in retaliation. I'm not sure what this means, but my best guess is that I am concerned about people's negative perception of me, although I could never confirm if a negative perspective actually exists. It would always only exists within my own perception of their perspectives. Thats a doozy. But there has been this nagging issue in my life where I get very upset when being judged by others.

I'm reading Miracles Happen: The Transformational Healing of Past Life Memories by Bob Weiss. It is a compilation of stories people tell about their past life memories. Some of the stories are much better than others. My favorite is from a woman whose husband died. She dreamt about being with her husband around the turn of the last century, they longed for each other, but didn't end up together because he became a monk and her a nun, so they both lived sad and lonely lives. In her current life, they lived happily together. After having her regression, she writes it off as a figment of her imagination. She meets up with a friend who says, "I have something to tell you, and it's going to sound very strange. I had a dream where your husband came to me, and he said, 'Tell my wife she lived 900 years ago, and that I am a dolphin.'"
The friend told her this convinced it was gibberish, but the woman was taken aback because it was not gibberish at all. It turned out her husband was a fighter pilot and early in their marriage he went on a mission, and told her before he left, "In case I get captured, I want you to know that any message you receive will be from me so long as it contains the message, 'I am a dolphin.'"
Chills, right?! I think this story is the Pièce De Résistance of all the stories in the book.

There is not a cataclysmic turn of events after one diagnoses their present fears based on past life experiences, time doesn't cease and their lives become a melting pot of all experiences. What does occur, is the healing of mental trauma, phobias and or chronic pain. So nothing quite as exceptional as one would hope.

I think my concerns with reincarnation and the past life theories is just the size of our population at present time compared to a thousand years ago. Does this mean that many people existing now are soul-less, or could it mean there is soul duplicity; where a soul exists within many beings simultaneously, and filters these lives from each other. Or maybe more souls are being created. Or maybe souls are split. I could think of twenty things here, but will spare the listing.

Last night before I went to bed I decided I'd ask for guidance since I'm reading about dreamscaping also, so I posed a question right before I fell asleep.
I woke up twice in the night and felt very warm on my shoulder, like someones hand was there. I had three dreams. In one, someone I know had a baby, in another, someone I know dies, and in the third, I was getting naked to take a shower in a crowded RV, I was trying to shut curtains around the shower to get privacy.

There was definitely no solid answer to my question, and I felt terribly unsettled after dreaming about a person I know dying. I conducted some Google research, and the death could indicate pregnancy, which is funny since I followed the death dream up by dreaming about a new baby.
And the RV, and trying to hide behind the curtains for privacy, that must be more concern about shielding myself, and not wanting to be judged, more like not wanting to feel like I am being judged.

The last three weeks I've felt over scheduled. I read that this full moon is difficult for everyone, and I'm no exception. I wake up and have the sense that every minute of my day is accounted for, and it gives me that infinite feeling in my chest. Like Im weighted down. I just go with the flow, but its been daunting. After soccer ends this week, and my poorly thought out Saturday class ends in December, I'll be back to living my life without a rigid time schedule where a 15 minute daydream disrupts my entire day.

The reason Im having to run in the garage is not just the rain, but because the ten minute drive to the gym would make me late to pick up the kids. My schedule feels like a string of standing up dominos, where I have to delicately maneuver through the day or I'll knock the entire thing off track. I don't like to spend my day feeling so robotic and pressured by a time schedule, but this feeling came at a perfect time, as Im reading this book, because just last night there was a section on staying aware of the greater purpose and meaning, and not being distracted by the sometimes overwhelming day-to-day grind.

Basically, it's the old adage, Don't sweat the small stuff, or the big stuff, and appreciate the things that make me feel good; like double dosing on SJP, which sends unhealthy messages about smoking in moderation, and thinking about how I'm different now from ten years ago, and how I'm different now from the Alicia in my dreams, and how Im different now than the Alicia who lived before me or after me (either of which I have yet to come across). So right now, when my schedule is demanding, I'm happy, and yes, it has a lot to do with Alicia two months from now. December Alicia looks like she's managing things just fine.

Whose In Charge

The footage of Donald Trump is not surprising but it's the timing I find peculiar. This level of egregiousness doesn't just fall from the sky, or rather, become excavated from the Access Hollywood archives, at this juncture in the race.

Making Trump the republican candidate then releasing the video one month before voting, this is strategic, and, possibly, interesting. 

Interesting because there is now obvious intention in making him the republican candidate.

This entire election has played out like a brilliantly orchestrated drama. It's almost too good with the DNC scandal, Melania's speech, and now this video of Trump "grabbing pussy." 

As America votes for the first Female president, we as women, need to ask ourselves why this charade, pitting her against a vile sexist, was plotted from the get go because Trump would have been ruled out last year with the release of this video. He had to become the candidate, he had to be Her opponent, so there'd be no forgetting who has the dick in the room.

We couldn't just get a female president. No we need to get a female president while simultaneously being degraded. It's the workings of the oppressor. You'll be granted this achievement but never once will you forget who you really are, not man.

The momentous occasion of electing a woman president is backhanded by  FORCED sexism, and the timing of this video proves it!

Big Plans for Turning Five... And Six

Today is my daughter's 5th birthday and I've been crafting my ass off for the past week to prepare for her upcoming party. I tend to over promise, but since I come really close, she is always overjoyed.

When my daughter was three I told her I'd take her to Paris to celebrate her fifth birthday. In August, I became a bit itchy around the collar when I realized she is a bonafide student and I'm a bonafide teacher, who have to adhere to an academic calendar, so we can't just drop everything to stroll around the city of love hand-in-hand.
Although the landscape was looking quite grim, I didn't completely abandon the dream. However, last Friday I accepted the reality. I said to my husband, "I don't think were making it to Paris on Monday."
He cheered me up, and said, "we'll just have to celebrate it when we make it there."

This is true, and so we will. My daughter, like me, has an elephant's memory. And so she never forgot about Paris. We spent quite a bit of time talking about how we'd celebrate, and even when we weren't talking about it, I'd picture it in my mind.
Her thin mop of white hair tied in a top knot on her head. She wore a faux fur leopard jacket and I had on a chic black moto leather jacket . We both wore oversized tortoise shell sunglasses. I imagined us sitting at a bistro table enjoying lovely cups of coffee for me, and hot chocolate for her. The Eiffel Tower is in the background and pigeons pecking at bread crumbs are in the foreground.

I suppose I should have bought her the jacket, and maybe the dream would have come true.

Her Actual party is Wizard of Oz theme, and so I painted her a Pin the heart on Tin Man game. It took me an entire day and ten dollars in supplies. I stole the idea from a product sold on Etsy for $4.95. Thats the thing with crafting, it costs much more than just buying it (and thats not even compounded with the fact that time is money) but it feels so good to be the creator, it's worth the added effort.

I also told her I'd make all her friends little Dorothy aprons, and after getting the patten and examining it, I had to modify it to a pinking sheered skirt apron. Ten of those turned into another day-long effort. The morning I started to make them, I called my mom who said, "Stop what you're doing and go buy that shit at the dollar store." She let me know, it will end up in the trash regardless of my craftsmanship, to which I had to defend my crafting, and tell her I don't care, I'm making them.


This morning we had to rush to her school for her birthday celebration. We sat perched on teeny tiny plastic chairs, and she circled the sun holding a globe in her hand. After each rotation she told her friends what she did when she was one, two, three and four, and then she told them what she is going to do when she is five.

She told her friends she is going to learn how to read. We've let her know that after she learns to read she will be able to stay up as late as she wants reading her books. Now, she has to rely on one of her parents, and if either of us are in a state of exhaustion, then there is a good chance we'll be snoring in her face before we make it though a three page chapter in The Wizard of Oz.


It timed out perfectly that tonight, on her birthday, we get to read the last three chapters. I'm expecting Dorothy will get to go back to Kansas. The book is so much different than the movie, but equally exceptional. What it lacks in musical genius it makes up for in it's brilliantly spun tale.

They (and by they, I mean Big Hollywood Hot Shots) should stop making every Disney movie into a live-action, and make a live-action of the true Wizard of Oz. Perhaps this is what I can promise for my daughter's sixth birthday.

She won't mind when I can't deliver, because I'll blow the news to her as were adjusting our berets while sitting next to our transportable art easels we've set up along the Seine where we advertise to paint people's spirit animals for three Euro each. Who am I kidding, we'll do that shit for free!

Let's See It

"So you got something you want to show me"

Today at the gym, the man with the staring problem was being especially annoying. I chose a treadmill in the empty row that gave me a good view of all the hanging flat screen TVs. Minutes later a woman came to the treadmill next to mine, where she walked at a snails pace. Her hair was wet, like she just showered, and combed it, and she was wearing jean cargo pants, with her keys dangling from her belt loop by a carabiner.

Right when I came into the gym, his eyes locked on mine like a fucking heat sinker. I nodded to him as I pulled my equivalent of the hotel do not disturb sign out of my purse, my headphones, and stuffed them in my ears.

As the woman next to me and I occupied the treadmill section he was at an arm machine facing us, continuing to stare, in a very rude manner.

My daughter stares at people in the changing room, and we've had talks about giving people privacy. She is very interested in naked people. An old Japanese woman swims every day, and after the kids do their pool time, we see this woman frequently in the locker room. Kiki is fixated on her. I tell Kiki, "Privacy please! Don't look at people as they are changing."

The woman always acts like she doesn't notice, which is difficult since a couple times I've looked over at Kiki after getting George dressed, and she has her hand over her eyes but opened her fingers in a v shape, so one eyeball is exposed, looking at the changing woman.

The last time we saw her, the woman dressed, and hobbled by on her cane. She stopped in front of Kiki, looked at her and said, "You are very interested in me, aren't you?"
Kiki looked down at the ground, and didn't say anything.

It didn't take the man long to make his way over to the treadmills, and of the empty row, he chose the one next to me. When the woman next to me finished her stroll. I tried sending her an ESP message,  "Please don't leave me next to him." because I had a feeling he was going to try and talk to me.
She didn't pick up on my mind message, and left.
My headphones remained in my ears as I wiped the machine down, and picked my purse up off the floor. As I turned, I heard him say something. I couldn't tell you what, maybe something about my distance, or perhaps about how I cleaned the machine, but I just chuckled and shouted "bye," to emphasize that I am listening to loud music, unaware of the world around me. I walked away, mildly ashamed. I didn't want to give him free laughs.

Last night, as I read to my kids the word chuckle came up, and I explained to them that this means to be amused, most of the time when laughing at your own joke. They thought that was funny.

By laughing with him, I contributed to his problem. I need to ovary-up, like the Japanese woman, and ask him, "What the fuck are you looking at?" It's not like I'm in fine form when I'm at the gym. I usually look like ass.

There's one woman there who I call Hot Mom because, just as you'd expect, she is super hot. Aside from her body, giant butt and tits, she has the necessary confidence. She usually power walks on the treadmill at a 45 degree angle, and then does squats in the middle of the gym, at this point I chuckle to myself because I think of Ned Flanders.

I wonder if creepy staring problem man would have the balls to go sniff around Hot Mom's crotch. Based on her disposition, I'm pretty sure she'd whoop his ass, so maybe he knows his audience. I look passive enough to dish out free laughs at his bizarrely inappropriate way to engage in conversation.

I can imagine the retaliation though, for me calling him on his shit. He'd say something, like don't flatter yourself sweetie, then spew an onslaught of insults at me. In order to protect myself from that type of self-esteem damage, I'll keep up my MO of completely oblivious with my music too loud to ever hear what he's saying.

I can already see how a conversation with him would play out. He'd blow out a bunch of gratuitous compliments, so I'd feel rude telling him to fuck off. His intentions are confusing though. His staring at me is forcing me to look at him. This entire charade is a way for him to make me acknowledge him, most likely as Man. The quickest way to squash this would be to appease by saying, "Ok, just show it to me. Pull it out so we can get this song and dance over with."

Then he'll pull it out, and hold it in his hands. And I'll say, "Well, that is exactly what I was expecting. You are such a Man." Then he'll be so pleased with himself he'll chuckle, and I'll get back to not being disturbed.

Avoiding A Strange Trip To Self Help

Sunday night I watched the Tony Robbins Netflix documentary called I Am Not Your Guru. The film was inspiring, and a good reminder to maintain high expectations and not fall victim to your personal story. Throughout the documentary we're shown "interventions" from members of his Destiny seminar. In an intervention, a person stands up and tells their story, then Tony gives them harsh questions so they deal with their issues head on.

The first intervention is a petite young woman who wants to get her eating under control. When the "problem" came out of her mouth I thought, this poor idiot is in front of the greatest motivational coach and she wants to talk about how she has problems eating, life must be good if this is the extent her issues. At this point, I was apprehensive the film would really be worth my hour and fifty minutes, but minutes later I saw it was a setup to demonstrate people distracting themselves from their inner turmoil with nonsense. Tony, being the non-guru, identified it as a stupid problem she  cooked up to avoid dealing with the real issue. After two questions he finds out her dad is a prick with a drug problem. Then he told her to call her dad, and thank him for being that way because it made her who she is. Let go of any anger, and replace it with gratitude.
An intervention that follows, I think, really takes the reigns of the film because her story is more powerful than the damn seminar. Dawn says she was born into the Children of God cult in Brazil, and brought everyone to tears describing her traumatic upbringing, and that now she is left trying to help her depressed family, and all she wants to do is kill herself because she has been unsuccessful in finding a model for love. Tony assured her through the massive crowd that she is loved, and that love does exist. In addition to support, she was given a career and $100,000 from other participants.

That night I laid in bed, and thought about her, and what she went through. I tried not to. I couldn't calm my mind. It is so terrible to think about the magnitude of evil in this world. I read a Sonia Sotomayor interview, and she said this was the reason she had to stop working as a public defender,  living a life where she has to stare into a deep well of evil is too burdensome. I was hollowed out after reading that. It is something people don't like to think about. This truth is the greatest flaw in Idealism which neglects to acknowledge the darkness in a balanced universe.

Last night I finished reading an autobiography by a psychic paramedic, Journey Into Grace, an interesting story of a woman who was brought up by a terribly abusive mother and fell into a wealth of personal problems, but overcame it all and harnessed a power she developed at the age of 7. The book maps out her traumatic adolescence, wayward youth, finding her path and ends describing her practice as a psychic healer. Although I had a hard time visualizing the "color grids" she explains when working on people, it was captivating. She talks about interfacing with evil entities, and how combating them only brings on more combat, and so what has to be done is acknowledge their existence and ask what their intention is. She repeats, "I see you," to the entity, so it feels loved rather than hated, and then through her healing powers, draws on energy sources that clear out the evil through love. This reminds me of the Martin Luther King quote, "Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that."
In the book, her psychic stories sound other worldly, which I suppose they are. For example, she explains being in another dimension, talking to a hissing black serpent whose taken space in a woman's body, a woman who is sleeping on a table in the other realm, visible far below. The stories sound so crazy, they just have to be true.

Like the author of Journey Into Grace, Tony Robbins had an abusive childhood. I wasn't as extreme, I don't think she would have made it out alive if she weren't always on high alert. Tony says he has no anger towards his mother, in fact he thanks her for all the abuse and neglect, because it made him into the man he is today.

I went to yoga this morning, and felt such a release of tension. Maybe it's because of the full moon. I  recently finished a huge goal of mine, and although there is still tending and follow through needed, I'm ready to take on a new project. I have so many ideas, and I struggle with choosing one thing and focusing on that, rather than having ten things going that I'm unable to fully dedicate myself to. I'm excited to be at a point where I can start up something new, but I just don't know which project to choose.
In shavasana I spoke to myself about what I want to do next. I have a short list of three things; writing projects that will likely take a year or so each. I was able to say, ok, what should I do next? And I told myself to write out what I'm grateful for, but not the obvious things that I'm grateful for; the love of my family, the love I give and receive, feeling challenged creatively and acting on these ideas, having money, health and happiness, but writing down the things I don't talk about. I don't feel like I hold onto anger, but I never give any attention to skeletons in my closet. Its sort of like I ignore them, trying to push them into my subconscious. I need to write them out, Thankful for all the dark shit because it allows me feel so much light. I'm able to feel love because I know there are spaces in this world without it.

This week's New Yorker has an article by Ariel Levy about Ayahuasca, the hallucinogen that is sweeping the nation by storm. Unlike most drugs, where teens are the target audience, this is a drug taken by adults on a quest to better themselves. Tim Ferris says he takes the hallucinogen frequently, even though the first time he took it he experienced two hours of the worst pain imaginable, having seizures that left rug burn on his face, because after the experience he felt like he let go of all the anger he'd been holding onto.
It sounds preposterous that people would want to take this drug, even with the execptation of a lightened soul because the effects when under the influence are horrific; barfing, hellish visions, and pain. Levy does take the drug, but her trip is not described in detail. Were told after she barfs she feels a calming, but nothing about visions or life guidance.

I have absolutely no desire to take this drug in order to confront my subconscious, and attain greater inner peace. I did mushrooms too much in my youth. I had the habit of laughing so hard I peed my pants. While on a freaking mind trip, acknowledging, you're a grown ass woman who just laughed so hard at a dancing mole on someone's face that you peed yourself. Great job, Alicia!
Aside from not being able to control my laughter (and bladder), I spend the entire time battling my thoughts, worried sick people can read my mind, trying to not think bad things in the case that they can read my mind. That command, do not think bad thoughts, only makes me think bad thoughts. After a couple experiences where I felt powerless in my own mind, I decided it's not worth it for me.

I think the subconscious exists for a reason. There is a place where things are sent because life functions much better without having them swimming around in our thoughts, let sleeping dogs lie. Drudging up the sludge will create silt in a calm, yet shallow, mind. It seems that the trend in taking Ayahuasca is in line with the the psychic's beliefs as well as Robbins; let go of anger by acknowledging it's existence. Allow the mind to be deep, even if it's swirling with murky water.

Since I can't risk laughing till I pee my pants, or relax when I'm told to relax, I have to stick to writing lists while in reality (or whatever we'll call present time) and hope for the same type of release one gets from Ayahuasca. After I feel a lightening, and a clear direction for my next project, I can spread the word, there is no need to torment yourself with hallucinogens, just make a list! It sounds so simple. Then I will know what I want to begin next. I think it is fantastic a femme thriller I've thought up, like the movie Deceived starring Goldie Hawn. Oh, that movie is so good. When I was ten years old, I used to watch that movie, peeking over the back of the couch. This is why I can't take a trip into my subconscious, I don't know what could be in there. My trip could end up being John Heard chasing me around an abandoned loft and I have to kill him with the rickety old elevator, but only get to use one eye, lurking in a shadow, to see. What a strange thrip that would be.

Stress Relief

Yesterday I had the flu. It wasn't a head-in-the-toilet-and-fever type of flu but my joints were aching and my body temperature swung from freezing to sweltering every ten minutes. My body has been in mayhem since Saturday when I woke up with a cold sore itching my lip. That was the day of my brother's wedding, so my sister and I went on a Valtrex mission in Salt Lake City so I could stop the cold sore from getting any bigger. After an hour at CVS, I got my medication and started taking high doses a couple times a day before the lip sore started to eat my face.
I told my grandma the next day at lunch, "I have no stress, I don't know why I got a cold sore!"
As I told her this, George ran around us like a tasmanian devil, and occasionally I'd frantically chase him down before he ran into the valet parking lane. She looked at me like You're delusional.

We returned to Sacramento, and the flu picked through my husband and me. The kids probably had it first, and we didn't notice because the fever was low grade and the only obvious ailment has been congestion. This flu is best described as being severely hungover, and anyone knows, pairing a severe hangover with parenting is a fast way to bring on sobriety.
My husband had the flu first. I didn't really believe him, so I glared at him as I frequently passed the bedroom, watching him lay in bed while I played with the kids. The next morning he was cured, and flew to Las Vegas for work, and I thought I was coming down with a terminal illness. I always like to advocate being married to someone who travels a lot for work. It's the perfect prescription to any marriage, time apart. But as I lay on the couch wishing I could go take a nap, I thought, well having a partner who is gone a third of the month does have a drawback, someone to take over parenting duties when on death's doorstep.

The day we left Salt Lake we spent some time in my parents' hotel room. My dad tickled George till he peed his pants, and then they watched a movie. I told my parents how I feel a lot better now that I quit drinking, but I think I need a weekend a year where I meet my sister in an undisclosed location, so we can party down. Then I'll return home and suffer through a hungover-parenting day, and swear off booze for 365 days. My dad said, "That's a terrible idea." and my mom said, "Can I come?"

Of course it would start out as a great time, but I'd probably end up getting arrested for pissing behind a dumpster, or even worse, someone would record me trying to fuck an aspen tree, and that shit would go viral. Then I'd get a cold sore.

If I can't get Valtrex, I could buy a mask