My mail truck was not fixable, so at 338,000 miles, it was done for. It's been a week at work that was shortened by Memorial Day, but feels like it should have already been Friday today. Getting things done, but my anxiety is up a little. The dentist came back with information for me and an estimate - it will be a big thing to get my entire top denture done and it still feels like I'm not ready for that - but there are four big teeth to pull before that, too. I need to schedule for the first half of those to happen sometime soon - the estimate is to work on it over the course of a year - I'm sure that is their financial idea and they actually intend me to do it much quicker, but with my reduced healing, it might be wise to take it slow, maybe not that slow, but slow.
Doing Japanese, and French-to-Spanish. Studying small bits more of Japanese cookery. Needing to get myself to bed so I can do work and get the animal feed and something for Mark on the way home tomorrow.
but I want to rant a moment on motivation, and how that relates to 'reality'
I've heard others talk about how hard it is to get out of bed at all in the morning - how they want to stay in bed and call in sick. They say this like a joke. And I'm always doing my alarms in the morning so I can turn my hips and knees and shoulders over and eventually get them centered and feel right to get up and not jar anything. Some days I feel that much more fragile than others - and sometimes I am so focused on what a dog is barking about that I get up anyway without doing that... and pay for it for a while afterward. But no, I don't think about calling in sick. I think about moving my body forward and making it do the things it has to do - and seeing if it cooperates and what must be done to make it do so.
What I've found works really best, besides the turning back and forth a few times - is to imagine what time it is, and what an hour or an hour and a half from now should look like. Where should I be? I imagine that future me looking back at this me and saying 'hey, we're here because you got your a** in gear and did the things it takes to get here', and then I lay out what those things are, superfast, like a trail leading me to that future if I just make all the hops and hoops. And then usually that visualization - which I often call 'kick my tail', or 'hike my tail', is enough to get me to do the next things, and the next.. until it really is an hour and a half later and I am driving, or sitting at my desk, and saying 'yep, did that, check...'
This is especially helpful on mornings like this morning, when I've had intense vivid dreams that were not reality the night before and it is so hard to break out of what was unfinished etc.. but it's not real, it was the past, or a conglomeration of multiple bits of my past (oh how fun the 'you don't remember your login and you work at a place that calls itself something familiar but is a conglomeration of three places at once, joy - fun - take a few minutes working out what detail is from what and what the simulation has in store to try to stress you with! Will this be a dream where nothing works right no matter how hard you try, or one where you can circumvent the laws of physics to solve the problem, or both?)..., or a different dream like Aladdin's Cave or etc.. Aladdin's Cave is a common dream of mine as well, the Cave of Wonders - a store or a house or a library, some place that is full of interesting things for sale or for the exploration etc etc.. and I feel I can choose this or that or nothing at all, and I wonder where all of those things come from that I see so intricate and detailed in those dreams, the books with titles and stories that do not exist, necklaces, contraption machines, statues, clothes, trinkets, maps, globes, dishes, stones and minerals and other artifacts etc etc...
The helpful bit - and my reason for ranting on - is that my visualization of what will really happen in real time can come true - I can look back and see myself in the real past from the real future. When I am in those dreams and attempt that - I realize that it is futile, and that the dream is fleeting and immaterial, and that I cannot plan a future within it or see it's past.
The only exception to this are the 'million miles' dreams, where, for some period of time in the dream, I am in 'another world' - still not real, but it is lucid to a point much greater than Aladdin's Cave, or the Great Library, or wandering through supermarkets or such... but those dreams also slip through my fingers and most of the million miles dreams -dreams of another life down to the toothbrushing and dish washing etc, fade away with only impressions that remain afterward, but when I am in within it I can think of what I did 'yesterday' in that place and what I might do 'tomorrow' in that place, if I remain there - and usually at about those times that I am thinking deeply about that, I realize that the time is still illusory there and that I do not belong to that world, somethings are just slightly not real enough, the memories are not quite complete enough - and someone pulls the weft out of the weave and it begins to fall apart - I am capturing only a few images of myself on my fingers - that self - but maybe still remembering the map of the city, the way the room looked, the textures of the fabrics, the iron railing at the window, the fireplace, climbing those stairs in the city and looking down again at the sidewalk, those 'tastes' remain and sometimes return, days, months, years later - I will be in that place again, but not that self.
I call these 'million miles' dreams because I wake up feeling like I've traveled, lived days and weeks and months away, and then suddenly it is only the next morning here, in reality, and I am not older, perhaps not wiser, but I do appreciate a lot of things more, for the feeling of 'having been away'.
But in the real world, the real real world, I kick my tail, and turn off the alarms, and crack my unruly knees and put my feet into slippers to gather all my clothes and pick my way down the stairs one by one, each second following each other one in correct order - until the hour turns around again and I look back at myself and say 'Well we did that one, on to the next'
