There's a sea secret in me

Last night I had a dream.  I have dreams every night, always intense, but this one is sticking out at me for some reason.

I was at the aquarium.  Katie was going to teach me how to scuba dive, and I was excited, but as I was getting ready to go and finding the gear I suddenly became petrified of the claustrophobic effects of being underwater.  Presumably I ran away, because the next thing I knew I was in a bedroom with a friend ( i don't remember who, but someone comfortable and familiar and female) laying on the bed, and I noticed a chiton crawling across the pillow where we were laying.  This bedroom was located in building 2, so I took the chiton back to the touch pools in building 1 and put it in one of the tanks.  It seemed very ill at ease there, rapidly changing colors, and moving at least 5 times as fast as chitons normally do, seemingly towards the other tank.  I remarked to one of the senior aquarium staff that it had probably come from the other tank, and that it was trying to get back by using magnetic north to locate it  (Chitons really do do this, they use the tiny bits of metal in their radula - the special kind of tongue many mollusks have- to detect magnetic north and find their way back to their favorite spot on the rocks.)  We moved it to the other tank, and it seemed happier.

Then there was an impromptu meeting of all the volunteers, where one of the higher-up people told us that we should have all met our 100 hour requirement by now, and that if we hadn't we were out of the program (I'm currently at 88 hours, so this was very devastating news).

Katie found me again and said she still had time to teach me to dive, but I was late to meet my mother.  In London.  We went to the British Museum (a location that factors in my dreams in various guises all the time) and then I woke up.

Here is a picture of a lined chiton.  I discovered this little guy in the touch pools at the aquarium the other day (there's always something new to discover, there was also a baby nudibranch which was only about as long as my pinky nail).  I'm sure that my long minutes of staring at the lined chiton with my face inches above it heavily influenced this dream:


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My grandmother is apparently very sick, and has a mass around her pancreas.  I spoke to her this morning, and she didn't mention a word about it to me.  I found out later in an e-mail from my mom.  It hasn't really hit me yet, but it will.

My Grandpa Warren died.  My dad didn't tell me about it for three weeks, and then only because I called him.  I didn't know about the funeral. 

I'm grieving for my Grandpa Warren, and I'm bemoaning the fact that we did not know each other better, and that in the past year that's been my procrastinating, cowardly fault for not calling him.  I was afraid he wouldn't know who I was, and that combined with my fear of phones meant I kept putting it off.

I'm also grieving for the fact that my dad feels I am so distant he doesn't need to communicate with me when his father dies.  I'm hoping this says more about him than about me, but I don't know.

Seattle is depressing.  I want to go back to Maui.

Work at the aquarium is hard.  Really hard.  I like people, but I hold so much contempt for them, and it makes me want to cry when it's obvious that they hold contempt for me in my role at the shop.  I can tell I've grown because I don't actually cry, I stoop down behind the counter to get a bag and I silently mutter what I'd really like to say to them and then I come up smiling.  Or at least grimacing. 

Today a school group of teenagers came in, and they all had hundred and fifty dollar bills in their wallets.  They bought 50 dollar jewelery on very light whims.  One of them impulse spent the value of half the paycheck I just picked up.  It made me sick.

When I ask people if they need a bag, it makes me crazy when they say "sure".  For one thing, I say "need" because I want people to think about whether they actually do need a bag or not.  Most of the time when they say "sure" they really don't.  They have a tiny magnet, or a necklace, or something else equally tiny.  Furthermore, "sure" is not an appropriate answer to the question "do you NEED ______".  The word "sure", in this context, is equivalent to "well, why not?" which is not an appropriate answer to a question of need.

I am too pedantic to work retail. 

Being at the aquarium and volunteering is easy.  I love it.  It feeds me.  I saw the sea otters mating today.  I think the females are on birth control, but oh god, I hope not.  A baby sea otter would be amazing.  I got to help a 2 year old little boy feed sea urchins.  He was very enthusiastic.  I learned that the pink sea star can stretch the tube feed around it's mouth/stomach up to 12 inches, and that it will position itself around a clam's siphon and then stretch it's tube feet down and pull the clam up.  Amazing.  I made friends with a tiny kelp green gunnel, and by "made friends" I mean I became totally obsessed with it, it's the cutest fish ever.  I learned about hooded nudibranchs.  etc. etc.

Kerenza makes me happy.  Tammy makes me happy.  They are very sweet ladies.  I feel let down by certain other individuals. 

Yesterday I celebrated my anniversary with Dev (6 days late because of work) by packing a romantic picnic complete with wine glasses and sparkling cider and a rose and unveiled it on a ferry ride to Bainbridge Island.  I was quite pleased with myself, and it was fun to treat him.  He made me a fancy dinner on our actual anniversary.  Taking the day to be with each other was exactly what we needed- things have been a little off course and it felt like they righted themselves that day.

I want to buy lots of buiscuits and crisps and condiments and sweets from brtisuperstore.com.  I shall resist, but only because I'm poor.

I like my life, but there are several ways in which I would like it to improve.  I think the root of all of these is that I would like to not be a (semi) responsible adult.  And by that I mean that money is boring.  If I could somehow volunteer at the aquarium full time and not have to worry about monetary concerns my life would be 90 something percent perfect.

blah blah blah.

The following is for my own use, I don't expect anyone to read any or all of it, although you are welcome to.


A very strange dream:

I am at an aquarium.  It might emotionally be the Seattle Aquarium, I cannot tell.  Physically, it's not, although it is on a waterfront.

The sea otters are taken outside and led to a pen where they will be fed their "dessert" food, a special combination of shellfish they don't usually get.  They are clearly excited about this, and there is a fairly large crown gathered around to watch on the docks.  In my obsession, I am crowded up close to the pen.  The man in charge asks some of the children if they would like to feed them, and a little boy next to me says yes.  He is part of a Chinese family, apparently an only child, with his mother and father.  He bites the Oyster in his mouth and bends down and the sea otter takes it out deftly.

As we are standing there, the water becomes choppy, and the water level begins to rise.  The little boy's parents can swim, but because they are so much shorter than me they can not stand on the dock with the rising water and hold on to him, so I offer to.  I carry the boy, who is about 7, into the building at the end of the docks, which is not at all like an aquarium anymore, more like a large sterile medical facility.

The family is grateful to me, but once inside, the boy notices he has developed a rash, dark red-purple blotches all over his torso and limbs.  I also notice that his left arm is covered in recent wounds and scars, like he's been cutting himself.  Suddenly he falls down and begins to have convulsions.  The parents look on as if they've seen this before, while I hold him and put my finger between his teeth so he doesn't bite off his tongue.  It is incredibly intense.  The father looks at me, and tells me to take him to floor 9.

I start climbing the white grey silver staircases up.  There is nobody else around, and it is as if I am not meant to go up.  The staircases start from nowhere, behind railings, and I have to crawl over them and around things and struggle to get up, all the while holding the boy, who has stopped siezing and is now chatting to me like a child would.  He is also getting smaller. 

When I reach the 7th floor I appear to be in a cafeteria area for hospital staff.  The boy is now unconscious, and small enough to hold in my hand.  A doctor (who is bailey, from Grey's anatomy) rushes over to me, looks at the boy, shakes her head and clucks her tongue and directs me up the remaining flights of stairs.

When I enter the 9th floor I am in a completely different world, it would seem.  Everyone is dressed lavishly in long flowing robes with velvet and silk and embroidery, and there are rich colors everywhere, and lots of gold.  However, this room also seems to be a caffeteria, with families sitting at tables eating dinner (it is evening here).  One family gets up suddenly when they see me come in holding the boy in my palm, they have been expecting me.   They are not chinese, the man and the woman, middle aged, are white, which throws me.  They are both attractive and well dressed, the man with dark salt and pepper hair well trimmed, and a powerful, tall build, the woman a little shorter than me with long wavy golden hair.  They have a daughter, who is about 9 and also has blond hair and is dressed very much like her mother. 

The daughter takes the boy from me and puts him in a structure that looks very much like a wooden rabbit hutch on one side of the room, complete with straw.  It has rows of shoeboxes in the back, the perfect size for the boy to sleep in, and it is in one of these that the girl makes up a bed for him and puts him to sleep.  I talk to the parents about him - they are surprised that I don't remember the name of his sister from the other world, and I tell them that he does not have a sister in the other world, and that I hadn't actually exchanged names with anyone there anyway.  I ask them what the boy's name is.

The little girl looks up from the hutch and says:

"His name is Xian Tao"

I ask the father about the cuts on his arm.  Is the boy suffering from depression, possible related to this illness?  The man laughs and says that his son has probably just been experimenting with medical techniques with his friends, and it might even be one of these experiments that caused the illness.  He get's a little tetchy.  Other people in the room urge him to listen to me, but he is becoming enraged, and I let myself out, somewhat satisfied that the boy is now with people who are, in some sense, his family.

Then I wake up.

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The dream that leads into the dream about the little boy:

I am at an aquarium, and I am feeling very low.  I let myself into a pen where sea otters are sleeping, not on their backs on the water, for their is no water in this pen, but on concrete pallets that jut out from the walls and remind me of a prison.  I let myself in to the pen and lie down on one of the pallets.  A se otter comes up to me and asks me if I'm sad and need her to help.  I say yes, and she wraps herself and her gorgeous fur around my neck and head and stays there until I feel better.  Sometimes I'm a little smothered and have to ask her to adjust herself, but for the most part it's lovely.

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The dream that made me wake up crying:

I am in a gorgeous field with orchards around it and lots of birds in the trees that I haven't identified yet, with peachy plumage and orange plumage and some blue.  Gorgeous.  There is a house, and I go into it to look at my bird book a lot.  I think my grandmother Marge, my Dad's mom, was in the house.  I see a new kind of Flamingo in the distance, and I'm looking it up in my book, when I hear my Dad calling from the other room,  "Kate, come here please".  I say I'll be there in just a moment, and he roars at me "Kate, I want you to get in here RIGHT NOW".  I go, shaking and crying, and he's standing there smiling and holding a little white box and tells me he has a present for me.  I get into a fight with him about how I was just looking up a bird, and he can't order me around like that, and he certainly can't order me around and then expect me to be happy to recieve his tokens of affection.  He yells back, I yell back, and I wake up crying, cling to Dev and go back to sleep.  It almost felt like a nightmare.  Emotionally, it was, because the general theme seems to be: You've already terrified me with your anger in the past and I'm not a little girl any more, it's too late to make it up.  Which most of the time I feel is the truth.  Ugh.

I woke up to snow today.  It was the lovely sort of snow that isn't thick enough to get into your shoes or slippery enough to cause you to fall over, but it is enough to lightly frost every bare twig.  I went to Twin Ponds park to take pictures, stalked some interesting ducks, and got pelted by melting snow and bits of ice from the trees.  It was like being caught in a sudden downpour.  on my way back home I heard my new neighbor across the street calling for help.  He'd locked himself out on his second story balcony and needed me to go through his house and let him out.  It was very surreal walking into the home of somebody I've only met for about a minute in order to save them from inconvenience/peril.  He was very grateful, and I got to cuddle his dog, who was very excited that I was helping her person. 

Eleanor has new oil and a clean bill of health from some truly lovely mechanics.  A bit on the expensive side, but she got a full check-up and all is in working order.  While I was waiting for the oil change I had a lemonade across the street, and got almost totally taken in by Rolling Rock's new spoof campaign, "moonvertising".  Pepsi and coke were talking about doing it around the millenium, and I was afraid that the nightmare was coming true.  I've very glad that it turned out to be a hoax, and I'm feeling very foolish. 

I'll be spending nearly every day at the aquarium in the next few weeks.  Oh my. 

So, my life:

I got a job at the Aquarium gift shop, which all in all is a pretty nifty job.  I have to work weekends, and that is extremely lame, but I get to play with bubbles and stuffed animals and toddlers, and I get to visit the sea otters on my breaks, so all is well.

I'm also more than halfway done with my volunteer training at the aquarium, and it's wonderful and fascinating and I can't wait to actually start volunteering.  I do have a volunteer badge already, which unlocks the doors and lets me visit the aquarium whenever I want, which is excellent.  On Sunday we learned about orcas and I talked to a marvelous woman with Brooke who shared all sorts of career resources with me.  Life is very good.

Things are very good with Dev, my dear friend Kerenza (from England) is going to visit me soon, my little brother and his mother got the money from the government that they desperately needed, I'm creating my own space in my house and trying to spruce everything up, and all is well.

Enjoying the pain in my belly, the gnawing of emotion and emptyness.  This is the top of the spiral staircase.  I've been singing my lungs out all day, it seems the only appropriate way to deal with my emotions.  It isn't true, but it feels that way.  I'll give in, I always do, but I wish I was courageous enough to be in control in the stupidest of ways. 

I've been fooling around on the piano.  Re-teaching myself a bit of musicality from my choir days.  It makes me very happy to have a grand piano in my house, and I plan to stop abusing this unlooked for privilege and learn to play it somewhat properly this year.  I'm also goint to tune my beautifully blue guitar and re-learn and re-build my callousses.

I've been reading all the Nick Bantock books I can get my hands on.  The Griffin and Sabine books are wonderful and make me have good dreams.  The Museum at Purgatory is interesting, but not my favorite.  I'm very much looking forward to re-reading The Venetian's Wife, because I remember it being wonderful, and solving the riddle of The Egyptian Jukebox (probably with much help from cheats on the internet, I'm not all that clever when it comes to riddles.

It's been very foggy and atmospheric around here lately.  Ice covering everything every morning.  I like it, except when I forget about it and I have to de-ice my car in a hurry.

I had another dream incolving loads of marine mammals lately.  Hundreds of dolphins, a beluga whale walking about on it's hind legs, looking for food in the trash cans like it was homeless, it's white skin smeared all over with trash residue.  And a beautiful blue whale that was breaching very close to where I was on the shore. 



We have a new president.  I cried throughout his speech, and the preliminaries, and I was so happy that I was dancing with Dev in the aisles of the community center where we were watching the proceedings with the 32nd district democrats.  Kerry Lee and her family were there, and it was wonderful to have friends to share the moment with.  I dressed up in my Paris dress, because it was a special occasion and you dress up for those, and also because it was a reminder that I can now travel abroad and not preface every conversation with "I don't like Bush" before people will talk me and direct me to the nearest underground station.  I can be proud of my country, at least in some measure, although we still have a lot to apologize for to the world, and to ourselves.

I would like to state my concern that people are pinning too many expectations on Obama as an individual.  He is not a messiah.  He is a man, who we have put our trust in to run the country, and I believe he is up to the task, but he is still a man.  It's a wonderful thing that for the first time in a long time our president is smarter than most of us and more articulate than most of us, and has surrounded himself with people of the same caliber.  But it isn't as those opposition forces have slunk home with their tail between their legs, and it isn't as though he has the right opinion about every issue.  He can do a lot to turn this country around, and he's a very powerful symbol, but people need to remember that we haven't waved a magic wand and made all of our problems melt away by electing Obama.

Nevertheless, I am currently heading to Capitol Hill, where I will meet Maia, find the Brazilian band VamoLa, and dance in the streets.  We do have a lot to apologize for, a lot to be cautious about, a lot to struggle for still, but I believe tonight is a night to celebrate.

I'll probably regret writing this, but whatever.

Apparently Lea Culver can't be in contact with me or be my friend anymore, because "she's respecting her sister's wishes".
The kicker is that she ended the friendship silently, without explanation, just like Alisha did.  She unfriended me on facebook, she didn't respond to follow up friend requests or very polite enquiries about what was going on, and then when I finally bothered her with appeals for information, she sent me a very short message saying we would not be in contact anymore.

Seriously, what the fuck?

I never did a single malicious thing to Alisha or anyone in that family.  Everyone who is a mutual friend of both of us, including responsible adults who are far removed from the situation, think that she overreacted to a stunning degree over something that was not meant to be a slight to her in the least.  It is the most absurd bit of drama I have ever encountered.

But Lea and I have talked about this.  We've talked about the situation, and she said that our friendship was not affected by the failure of my friendship with Alisha, because we had a separate relationship that was not touched by what happened. 

Suddenly, over 2 years later, she has to respect her sister's wishes?  Whatever happened to making up your own mind?

This is a family I grew up with.   We attended numerous birthday parties and halloweens and camping trips together.  I never acted in a purposefully cruel way towards them, I was always the first to say sorry when we had a fight because our friendship meant more to me than being right, and this is the gigantic slap in the face I get in return.  Clearly they aren't worth getting this upset over if they won't spare a shred of rational thought to the situation, but for YEARS I thought of them as family, and I can't help it.  It is a hideous blow when people you thought of as sisters disown you for something this trivial.

A recap for those of you who are not aware of the original circumstances:  I was home for the summer from England, and finances in my family were extremely tight, so tight that we weren't sure if I could come home for Christmas (which would have meant the entire school year spent away from home).  I sent out an e-mail on the UU church listserve to see if I could do some odd jobs for people to help me raise the money for my plane ticket.  One family that Alisha was the primary babysitter for responded, creating a few jobs for me that they didn't actually NEED covered in order to help me out.  I also worked a few childcare shifts at the church, which was pirmarily Alisha's job, but I worked shifts I was told she was busy for.  For this I was shunned, because APPARENTLY I should have been more compassionate to her financial situation, since she had just (voluntarily) quit her job, which was not a horrible employment situation, it was just more hours than she wanted to be working.  Nevermind that her job was for extra cash and I was trying to scrape enough money together to see my family for the holidays, and nevermind that I explained that the family had specially created the jobs to help me out.  She gave me the silent treatment for weeks and then waited until I was out of the country again to infomr me (via e-mail) that our 10 year friendship was over.  So over the issue of babysitting, with no malicious intent on my part, I have lost an entire family that I was once extremely close to.  It's an incredibly ludicrous scenario.



I'm off to lick my wounds and try to clear out the space in my head that this situation lives in, so that I have room for friendships with rational and unselfish human beings.