cleolinda | Hello, peoples of the internet

In case you missed it yesterday: New Moon in Fifteen Minutes. I spent something like ten days in the comedy mines on that thing--not sure why it was so much harder than even I thought it would be, but it was, although I feel like it turned out decently well--so trust me, I will not be letting you forget it any time soon. And yes, I do read every single comment that comes in, via my email, so if you go over and say something, no, I won't miss it.

So, as promised: I did not do a damn thing today. I didn't even turn on the computer until 6 pm. I did read email comments and Twitter on my phone, wrote in my diary, sat outside in the very pleasant chill for a while, played with the dogs--honestly, I do not know how I actually spent the hours from eight to three. I was kind of bored the whole time, but in a very nice way.

I also had a very strange dream--my birthday's in a couple of weeks, I'm turning thirty-one (31), and while I'm being slightly less of a whiny baby about it this year--well, first of all, I should tell you why. It's not that I feel like I'm getting SOOOOOO OOOOOOOLD; it's that I feel like I've overslept. Noon is still really early in the day, but I was supposed to be up and doing things by 8 am, and where did all the time go? Why am I so far behind where I wanted to be? Etc. I also tend to have the OMG I WILL DIE ALOOOOOOONE whinefest crop up around now, which is where this dream came in. And I think that if you're single and you spend too much time exposed to the deleterious fumes of the Twilight phenomenon (read: if you are me), you start to wonder who your perfect man(s) might be, because LET ME TELL YOU, HE WILL NOT BE LIKE THAT TWINKLY FREAKSHOW. My big goal for the next year is to get out of the house more, particularly to travel a little bit and visit some out-of-state friends, and so I very well might actually meet some new people, which is mostly my problem right now--I'm not even meeting single guys so I can get rejected. Pretty much every guy I've met in--oh, the last five years, at least--has been married or otherwise occupied. Even the gay guys I've met are taken. (There are two ways to look at this: 1) Birmingham is a ridiculous place for a single girl. I mean, my small liberal arts college was like 60-70% female, and then you have to discount the gay, the taken guys, and the more pretentious art majors on top of that. RIDICULOUS. 2) Birmingham would be the best place for a single guy to move ever.)

So this is the kind of thing that occupies your mind, if you are me, right before your birthday when you're feeling restless and sorry for yourself. And I had a bit of a lie-down for the sheer cussed laziness of it, and: I had ths dream. I was sitting with a guy at a long, school cafeteria-style table, but it was a brightly-lit classroom (I seem to be having a lot of dreams about brightly-lit classrooms lately). Panel lighting: the sexiest atmosphere. The thing about the guy was, I couldn't ever quite get a clear look at him, even though he was pretty much the central feature--you know how dreams are. I couldn't see him very clearly, even though he was sitting about two feet away as we talked--even the details I could see (like hair color, skin tone, clothing--although I had a vague idea of--a shirt in blue-green plaid?) (it was a really beautiful plaid, too. What the hell) kept changing every time I glanced away and then back again. You know how, in dreams, you're sort of seeing things from two different, simultaneous perspectives--the "character" you are in the dream and then the actual you watching the dream? (Or maybe this is just me.) The Dream!Me in the conversation itself didn't really think Shifty Man was odd; Actual!Me was getting kind of frustrated with it. But I tell you what--I saw his smile very, very clearly, and if I ever saw it in real life, I swear to you, I would know it instantly.

The other thing was, he was holding my hands--not all sexy-like; he was rubbing them, like he thought my hands were cold or something. Mostly the backs of my hands, but in the dream I really wanted him to rub my palms. Also, his own hands were big but not rough, long fingers, and very strong. (I've also been dreaming about hands in additions to classrooms, and I really don't want to think about what kind of developing kink this may indicate.) Then he started rubbing my wrists; the one thing I clearly remember him saying was, "You work too hard," so... thanks for getting all Captain Obvious on me, dream. Eventually he started rubbing my left forearm (I notice that left and right tend to make a difference in dream interpretation), gradually up to the inside of my elbow, which was... oddly vulnerable. So... that happened. And then it was like the conversation came to a close, like at the end of a meal, and we got up and the room wasn't a classroom anymore, it was a more dimly-lit cafe or hole-in-the-wall restaurant in the middle of the day, like we had gone to lunch or something, and he asked me to walk him to the door, where he kissed me on the cheek--very casually, the way you do with someone you've been with for a long time. Then when we were outside on the sidewalk, he smiled at me and walked into the street--straight into an oncoming train (not a bus, a train, like a full-on subway train) and it went through him like he wasn't even there--which, after it passed, he wasn't. This seemed a bit mysterious, but fairly normal at the time. Of course.

So basically, the man of my dreams, literally, could be anyone who looks like anything and doesn't look before he crosses the street, but by God, he's got a great smile and he's wearing plaid. Thanks, brain.

(Zomg e-book! The Annotated Movies in Fifteen Minutes: Wizards!)