Cimorene

A few weeks ago I trimmed my hair slightly too short. My intention is to always be able to tuck it behind my ears, but although I could then when it was all stretched out (right before washing), it shortens a bunch after washing because the front bits are the curliest, and now I have to wear a barrette or a headband constantly to keep it back again.

This has been an exceptionally cool summer so far. I think the season has been drifting later though, and we can probably expect the warmest part to be in the end of July and August again, so maybe it will even out. But right now it's past Midsummer and I have only worn shorts outside twice, and one of the times it was too cold and I had to go in and change. Having the warmest winter ever and then following it with a cold summer... it's weird. It's more pleasant than record highs though, probably (which are still not hot like my childhood in Alabama, but unlike there, there's very little air conditioning here, and there's also a lack of cultural knowledge and preparation for heat: people don't dress appropriately or take advantage of shade, for example, and employers don't make allowances or arrangements to help people cool off). It's definitely better than long droughts like we had a few years ago, but it's still uncanny.

In my dream last night I was trying to remember the correct route through Turku's student village (lived there my first year in Finland and walked all around it with the dog) and stumbled into a bunch of political gatherings both for and against the establishment of a new community of nuns in Finland (lol) that were going to be in the student village (impossible because they're not students), and were causing controversy, among other reasons, because their habits were too sexy (?), only then I walked by them in a procession and they were just wearing normal shapeless floor-length black robes but with yellowed lace tabards over top that looked like someone's granny crocheted them as a table runner.

Two days ago I dreamed I was watching a late 1970s/early 1980s movie starring Angela Lansbury and Al Pacino about an organized-crime connected Showgirls-esque club.

The showgirls themselves were a mixture of women and drag queens, but they all had a shared dressing room with the top half of the walls covered in wig stands and the bottom half covered in shoe stands.

Al Pacino was running this club with another guy representative of various organized crime entities and they were hiring an emergency replacement for someone who had gone to jail, and Angela Lansbury was sent, looking very prim in a tweed suit, but backed by... some other organized crime interest I guess?

At first it looks like this isn't going to work, because how can someone so prim and proper (and wearing such a long skirt and such low heels) be - whatever job she's supposed to have, doorman? Hostess? Bartender? Idk - but Angela Lansbury was told to show up and she did and she is sure she can do whatever this job is, because she's nothing if not competent. Then there's a humorous scene with playful music where the girls transform Angela Lansbury into a sexier version of the secretary look she's got going on while they're also getting themselves dressed, putting on wigs and stockings and shoes (and drag queen padding and makeup for about half of them).

Then they have one night's business (and presumably some minor conflict with the Bad Organized Crime elements, elided) and after closing they're laughing and taking off makeup in the dressing room pointing around at the wig stands and talking about the ones on the wall and whose they are and what act they're for and then someone playfully asks Angela Lansbury to guess one, but they don't know that she realizes it's a challenge and does a masterful Sherlock Holmes style deduction that it's Al Pacino's. (Correctly.)

Tragically I woke up, but Angela Lansbury was obviously going to join them and help them kick out the other guy and the 'bad' organized crime connections, leaving, obviously, only the good organized crime, while having a playful sexual tension romance without the actual romance with Al Pacino.

Tragic that this isn't a real movie.

I dreamt that my parents and sister and I were impromptu participating in some kind of walking marathon event or foot race that we saw in passing from a car, and there was a guy with a clipboard taking registration and he asked me how old we all were, and I said - exact quote! -

"These are our parents and they're the same age as each other. I must be, uh, maybe about forty five? And this is my sister. She's nine years younger than me so about thirty five."

I am actually forty two. My birthday was in December.

Tristana woke me up after that. I never even tried to tell the guy how old my parents are aside from this Alice-in-Wonderland-ass answer.

Last night I dreamed that Wax's mom had rented a share of a summer cottage in Hawaii because that was where everyone was getting them now because they were cheap there, for her summer vacation, and she took us there, but it turned out to be inside a mall and then she said to me, "They have your daughter here, you know."

I was like, "But I don't have a child! Wait, you mean they cloned me?"

Then she nodded really solemnly and said "Count Chocula does."

"The breakfast cereal?!" I was so confused for a second and then I realized it must be because of that spelling bee I won. (In reality, I've never entered a spelling bee. ) "Is Count Chocula just out in Hawaii cloning all the winners of that spelling bee?!"

and she was like "I guess so! They've got plenty of space!"

I read about half of R. Austin Freeman's early Golden Age detective series about Dr. John Evelyn Thorndyke, so that's ten or so, and as reviewers indicated, they get slightly less interesting and original with time so I saved the rest for later (I posted previously about this here with some favorite quotes and details about the setup). However, I've been reading some of the British Library Crime Classics series [complete list at Goodreads] (as mentioned here in my review of #1-10), and it includes several anthologies of short stories grouped by theme, so I've encountered several further short stories about Dr Thorndyke in the past few days.

Just to briefly sketch the setup for readers uninterested in the detailed run-down above, Freeman's sleuth is a gas-age precursor to CSI in Edwardian London, a distinguished gentleman who is a medical doctor and lawyer and spends his time doing consultant investigations for the courts using all kinds of (for the time) advanced scientific methods and knowledge. This Edwardian-CSI angle renders the mechanics/plot points of the books fairly fascinating, and a couple of the best known novels are truly worthy classics of the genre (most highly recommended: #1 The Red Thumb Mark and #3 The Eye of Osiris. - Both are in the public domain and easily available from, for example, Project Gutenberg Australia).

He's a kind and handsome paragon of a detective who is smarter than everybody in the story, a nerdy workaholic who delights in puzzles and conundrums, and an eternal bachelor with no interest in women. Possibly he was intended to be cerebrally ace, but when one looks at his cozy cohabitation with his polymath genius artificer lab assistant-manservant Polton, the impression is rather of a happily married courtly old queen who shares his calling with his partner. Polton is like the uncredited wife of the scientist or writer of this era (although in this case class and lack of formal qualifications and not gender account for his lack of credit - although since the books are written contemporaneously, of course the writer sees nothing wrong in this situation and neither do the characters).

In the stories, Polton is typically more of a background character, with the narrator of each story acting as a temporary sidekick to Thorndyke and visiting the crime scene and meeting the suspects with him and so on, plus providing a sounding board for Thorndyke's smug mysterious hints about how he secretly knows what happened already but he won't tell them because they could figure it out themselves if they had been paying attention. Polton does most of his work in the lab and hence offscreen: he appears only when the narrator visits it or sees Thorndyke at home. As a result, in spite of the appearance of their relationship, it never looks particularly romantic or slashy on the page (too est rel, no UST, etc).

However, last night I dreamt I was reading several pieces of fanfic in this pairing, and my reaction was like, "Of course, obviously." Then later in the dream I decided to write some, and I clearly remember Thorndyke and Polton sitting down to eat together up in the lab and Thorndyke broaching the subject - which in the dream I thought made perfect sense! - by saying "Correct me if I'm wrong, Polton, but I deduce that you, too, are an invert." Absolutely stellar beginning there. Very sad that I woke up before I got to find out what else dream me was going to write.

A couple of weeks ago my parents mentioned some hometown gossip about people I knew growing up and since then I've had a few dreams where my childhood best friend showed up:

• Discovering, along with my childhood best friend, that her parents had been immortal fae undercover from the future all along and had another, secret basement beyond their basement with a portal to the future office building where their past-spying agency was based, and then being forced to break the secrecy to get my favorite aunt and uncle's help to remove the time-travel artifacts when they were stranded in the future and someone was coming to demolish their house.



• A caper plot involving my (deceased) paternal grandfather the park ranger and nature/wildlife specialist, a bunch of lesbians on the way back from a pride parade, one of them coming out as trans and needing help dyeing her hair, my childhood best friend looking for a place to study for a quiz bowl competition but being harassed by a Straight White Boy, my two bunnies, and a giant Invisible Crab, a fictional and really annoying species of aggressive crustacean who are only occasionally visible from the corner of your eye, for an instant, and from certain angles, which makes them really hard to catch. (It's good that invisible crabs aren't a real thing, but they're also pretty cool: like ghost crabs if the transparent bits were actually invisible, only more the size of a rabbit.)

When my brain starts chewing over someone I've lost contact with (usually in a series of dreams), I start to wonder if I should make an effort to reach out to them, but I usually wind up at no since I'm the one who chose to delete Facebook in the first place and it's probably kind of weird, and not like I'm likely to succeed at keeping up the contact anyway (and in the case of my cousins, or my Japanese exchange student, they were even worse at email than I was). I'm pretty bad at these social contacts where you have to try to maintain a relationship with someone who isn't on the social media I use; even before I deleted Facebook I had too much aversion to it to make use of it properly (and also it's designed to prevent you from actually using it to keep up with people since it algorithmically censors out their posts), and I have too much email anxiety to keep up email exchanges consistently.

But maybe I should try with my childhood best friend again. I'm slightly better with inboxes now, if nothing else.

And also related to that last dream, I should rewatch The Brittas Empire. I've never seen another show handle that type of caper/farce so successfully in every episode.

that I was reading Dreamwidth and saw the username electricshoon and said to myself, Whose new username is that? And it was torachan's wife's. I thought "Huh, I didn't know she liked medieval shoes, and why electric?" and then the cat poked me in the face and I woke up.

I almost always remember my dreams when I wake up, ever since I started taking Venlafaxine really, but even more so in the last year or so since the dose went up.

And people I knew from childhood show up really frequently in my dreams - my extended family, most of whom I haven't seen in person for years, family friends and neighbors, and also my middle school friends and girl scout troop members (age ~12-18, which I guess also makes them middle school friends). Not only do I see comparatively little of my high school friends in dreams, whom I mostly didn't have contact with after age 20 or so - I very rarely see more recent acquaintances from my adult life.

My wife's extended family, who have pretty much functioned as my extended family for 15 years now, and her mother, are often referenced but they're usually offscreen. I've made plenty of friends and long-term acquaintances in my adult life... who have mostly not shown up in Dreamland. It's like my long-term memory filled up the cast a long time ago and lost the ability to create new characters????

I'll even dream about things obviously related to my daily life, like about one of the schools where I studied Finnish or one of the schools where I worked, but when I get to the workplace it will be a made-up place that doesn't exist in the real world and the people there will be equally fictional.

But any dream, no matter how unlikely, has decent odds of my parents and sister or my aunts, uncles, and cousins showing up. I guess it's a credit to my parents that all that extended family played such a significant role in my mental life even though they all lived 8, 11, or 14+ hours' drive away...

A lot of SSRIs affect sleep and dreams. The one I'm taking now is known for increasing waking time and time in sleep stage 1, suppressing REM (? though this was a sleep laboratory and they only tested for a short period, whereas in RL you tend to get used to a new dose after 6 weeks or so), and sometimes producing that involuntary leg movement thing.

When I was easing up to the current dose, I had trouble falling asleep and was annoyed by waking up frequently at the slightest disturbance, which accords with studies. I no longer am aware of waking up frequently, but since then I have frequently had

• lucid dreams


• dreams where I can control things in the dream to some extent, not always remembering that I'm dreaming but frequently
  
  • a lot of the time I'm repeatedly struggling to remember that I'm dreaming, and repeatedly remembering but forgetting in between and consequently losing some of my ability to influence the dream
  
  
  • it's never effortless to control the dream, though. There's a lot of trying different things and seeing if they work.
  
  
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