Daylight Savings + Paper Cuts = Dreams of a Broken Camera

Ever since Daylight Savings Time began (last Sunday at 2am PST, in my world), the weather has been gorgeous. Nice weather means that summer is coming, so when it's warm out the Pavlovian effect of my years of student-hood is that I cannot focus on my work, home- and otherwise, because my brain is thinking, "A big long vacation must be imminent." Even though I have worked every summer since I graduated high school, I can't break the association of nice weather with carefree goodtimes...and with swimming. Luckily, Spring Break starts Friday, but I still have 5 weeks of student-hood after that until summer vacation (at which point I'll plunge into the terrifying abyss of regular person-hood...forever). Ironically, I am looking forward to summer because being free from school and homework will mean that I can find a nice grueling full-time job!

Perhaps with the thoughts of a potentially non-summery summer in mind, all I wanted to do on Sunday was float in a big ol' swimming pool. The world saw that and mocked me viciously. I went to the lab where my students were working and watched a man work on a film in which a girl jumped into a swimming pool over and over again. I walked past the McDonald Swim Stadium and saw a fully-clothed girl standing on the highest high dive platform and looking down at the water. I tried to go put my feet in the pool at my apartment, but I couldn't get my key to unlock the gate. Pathetic. True story.

I just finished reading two parts of Gertrude Stein's "Three Lives," entitled "The Good Anna" and "The Gentle Lena." Basically the stories are about women who spend their lives working hard at doing everything they ought to, and they are never happy and they die sooner than they should. So I was walking around thinking, This is a nice day and I shouldn't waste it sitting inside! (Well, actually I wanted to go inside a theater and watch "Compleat Female Stage Beauty," but when I got turned away that seemed like a sign that I should really go to the beach.)

So I called my friend and he did not want to go to the beach. He needed to go to Michael's (the store). Well, actually he wanted to go to a place called Hobby Lobby, but that store doesn't exist in California, as I had to remind him. And that's a stupid name for a store, so I'm glad it doesn't exist here. Anyway, he wanted to go to the closest Michael's, which is in Inglewood, but I told him I'd go along for the ride if we went to the Michael's in Santa Monica. So guess what? Next thing I know I've got my feet in the surf (and my friend is waiting for me on a concrete ledge next to the bike path because I tricked him and he doesn't want to walk in the sand).

In the past few days I was having a big debate with myself about whether I ought to move to New York City after graduation, but now I'm thinking that I haven't really had the living-in-LA experience. I've just had the going-to-college-in-LA experience. So I am probably not ready to leave LA yet. I like being able to go to the beach on a nice day. I know New York City has the Hudson River, but it isn't the same (only Kramer swims in it). Also, people seem to live in New York City because they hate LA (among other reasons-- and calm yourselves, I'm being facetious), and I don't hate LA enough yet to leave. I'm not really sure that I hate anything. My parents always used to say, "Don't say 'hate.' Hate is a strong word." It's interesting that the same word can have different intensities for different people. Also, would I really be hating LA, or my experiences with certain people here? (Or the traffic?) Just saying.

Okay, so my beach pilgrimage happened (the Chaucer kept running through my head: "So priketh hem Nature in hir corages/Thanne longen folk to goon on pilgrimages"), and I was pleased that I really actually acted on something I really wanted to do (although I never actually went swimming; walking in the surf was symbolic). I took a few pictures, which came out well considering that I can't really see my camera's screen in the sun.

The beach thing was also appropriate because I had a dream a few nights ago that I was sitting at a little outdoor dining patio overlooking the water and a sort of shiny city beyond it (possibly somewhere abroad), and Carson Kressley and George Clooney were there too. Carson was wearing these cool glasses with dark blue square (okay, rectangular) frames, and the glasses actually had many other layers which could fit over them, including goggles (for SWIMMING?) and sunglasses (which, yesterday while I was driving to Universal, my passenger/friend put sunglasses on over his glasses). In the dream, I tried to take a picture of Carson in these amazing glasses, but I couldn't, because my camera was not really working, and then some other people wanted pictures with him and my opportunity was lost.

So then last night I had ANOTHER dream that I was trying to use my camera and it wasn't working/wasn't taking the pictures I wanted at the moment I wanted them, and then the moment was lost. This is an interesting new dream, because for years my things-are-wrong dream was the ever-popular teeth-falling-out dream, which is not very cool at all. I don't even need to try to breech my subconscious to know that I really AM worried right now because in two months I will need to start a new life with a new job and a new apartment and blah-de-blah and I have no major prospects yet...and really no minor prospects either. And also--I need to get a new camera. Mine IS kinda shitty.

Oh yeah, and I keep carelessly reaching into things and getting paper cuts. This is real life, not a dream...er, nightmare. I reached into my bag yesterday and got a juicy paper cut on my left middle finger, right on the pad...and I extremely dislike cuts (I typed HATE at first, haha hypocrisy). Then today I reached into my sound locker and got a cut on my right side-pinky. And I keep accidentally sticking my hands into crazy painful things like salsa and mango juice and In 'n Out secret sauce (I ordered my first "secret menu" item last night-- protein style!).

I just had a thought-- I always say that I had a lot of dreams, or I had a bad dream, etc...I very rarely say "nightmare." I wonder if other people would categorize some of my dreams as nightmares...it's all semantics, I say. It's all personal point-of-view.

My roommate read some statistics that claim that there are more suicides during the months when Daylight Savings Time is in effect. I can't really understand that because it's during the summer and there's more light later into the night...isn't that conducive to cheerfulness? I just went and looked it up on Wikipedia and it turns out that many countries (such as Kazakhstan) don't observe Daylight Savings Time because of possible health complications. I guess it really does a number on our circadian rhythms, that bumped hour (notice I didn't say biological clock...I love it when people confuse the two and accidentally make ridiculous statements).

My, look how the time has flown! And I thought I had nothing to post about.