Svapna Trouble

Well, now, let’s see. I’m tired of applying for jobs: sending heartfelt pleas to invisible strangers. It’s no more productive than firing a rifle into moonless night. Dozens of missives and nary a reply. What for? to quote my dear friend MB who gave me the best tea and hot bath the other night, before we retreated to talk in his trailer that used to be a whorehouse.

I’m recently back from what Eleni terms a “lost weekend.” I went to Sac spur-of-the-moment on Saturday night and stayed till Thursday, arriving back in Bayland in time for Spanish class. I am very confused. I don’t know what I want to do for a living or where I might be able to live. And I can’t help but interpret my increasingly frequent nightmares about intruders as signs of anxiety about letting someone closely into my life. I scared that same someone out of his socks the other night with my svapna declarations in the dead of night. I just discovered that word. It’s Sanskrit for something like “dream-state.” Ironically, shortly after I woke him up with my yelling, he woke me up with menacing shouting of his own: “Get out. Get out of here. Get the fuck out of here.” I am assuming he wasn’t talking to me.

During my Valley time, I got an hour with Lulu who has just started her last year of college and who bought me coffee and let me wrap my arms around her with reckless abandon.

In Sac I made a vase out of cottonwood bark and embarrassed myself by running the drill into my hand. Only a flesh wound, which I tried to conceal from my friend with frequent blotting. I was busted when he looked at my creation and demanded, “What’s this blood all over everything?” Here’s the objet d’arte on his wall, taken with a crappy cell phone camera. You can’t see it, but there’s a large, carved rat climbing up the bark.

Today I went by Yo-Nenny’s and picked up a bunch of baby things — clothes, carseat, bathtub, sling — and stored them neatly in “the baby’s room” (aka Lulu’s room) in my house. I’m haunted by the prospect of imminent grandmotherhood. It’s much weirder than having your own baby: in my case, a conscious decision and one about which I always had some measure of control. This time I didn’t ask for no big ole baby nohow. I already know I will love it profoundly, yet it’s not under my care and I have no power to guide decisions about its life or keep it safe and happy. My mother-in-law often used to quote a Greek proverb: “Your child’s child is twice your child.” She was one of many who’ve told me that the love of a grandkid is in its own category, equally potent as that for your own kid. Yet even an involved grandparent is a marginal factor in that child’s existence and well-being.

I just hope Yo-Nenny and Jason don’t do with the baby what they do with the minuscule canine creature that seems happy to go along with their whims.

[No animals were hung from clothes hooks in the taking of this picture.]

What I’d really like to do is get a grant to develop a Web presence involving the digital stories of English-language learners. I’ve been doing some research but funding is iffy.

Then I thought I should toss my past and learn something like vet-teching, but that takes a few years. I thought about driving a truck like my brother-in-law, but that’s brutally hard work and I fall asleep at the wheel after half an hour anyway. Or maybe I should learn carpentry or welding a little, enough to get a low-level job in a skilled trade. But that takes years too. I just don’t want to work as a secretary or a waitress or some other thing where my task is only to serve people whose job it is to boss me around, and not even for a higher social purpose. I would rather sell my house and move to North Dakota.

I’m starting to get ready for the academic paper I’ll be presenting in Atlanta in two weeks. I don’t want to do it but I must. It’s on Eleni’s due-date, and I hate talking in front of crowds, particularly when I doubt the worth of my wisdom. But at least I get to see two of my dearest friends from SIT: G2 and Tati.

A few years ago when junk e-mail first started, I collected some of the sender names. They were much more inventive than they are these days. There was Roosevelt Cotton and Cleo Champagne, Effie Sharp and Jolene Butts and Kabloom Flowers. Some had middle initials, like Prickle A. Faithing, Verdicts G. Carafe, Baddest V. Reaction, Hummocking H. Affinity, and of course Barroom G. Ventilation. Ah, the good old days.

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