Fun times and nightmares

I had a very good weekend this week. It was even somewhat productive thesis-wise, which is interesting because usually fun and thesis don't go together. Friday night Zenon came by and we finally had our Coupling marathon (the TV show, you dirty punners) that I've been excited about for weeks. Coupling is great on its own, but it's so much more fun to watch it with someone giggling along right beside you. On Saturday a very sleepy me had tea with Ashley and Andrea which was very pleasant, even if I was only partly awake. I had a delicious vanilla chai tea, and I got to see pictures of Andrea's doll house about which I've heard so much, and I also got to (finally) meet her cat Trinity, who is cute. After tea, a momentous thing happened, a thing that should be marked on the calendar. We went to the used bookstore and I didn't buy anything! I even discovered that they have a whole shelf devoted to books about the '60s. I very nearly bought a book about drug use in high schools that had the same alarmist tone as the movie Reefer Madness, but I put it back and decided to see if I still wanted it in a week.

Speaking of drug use in high schools, Mom told me tonight that Perth County, where I live when I'm at home in Ontario, made the Toronto Star as a place that's crawling with crystal meth labs - Stratford in particular. Apparently there's a seedy underbelly well-hidden by the culture offered by the theatre. We had a good laugh about that. It just seems so ludicrous. If you have visited my home, you will know why I laugh.

On Saturday night, I made a few pleasant thesis-related surprise discoveries. The first was that I'm enjoying thinking like an English major again. I even wondered if my decision to not do my PhD was a mistake. I even have a topic picked out for a PhD dissertation - it's more cultural studies than strictly English, which makes it even cooler. I've been thinking that it would be interesting to look at Harlequin and related romance novels, and to see how they are culturally determined, and how they help to support certain ideologies and certain political stances. I think that it might be a tough sell for the academy, because come on, these novels don't have a great reputation, and for good reason. However, they are some of the most widely read books from some of the most prolific publishers. They're their own cultural phenomenon, and they seem to work as ideology tools in many ways. I won't start an in-depth discussion here, but I will totally talk about it if anyone asks. I think that it's a mistake to underestimate their cultural importance. I would take a cultural studies approach to these books, almost sociological, and look at how they have evolved in the past 50 plus years. Anyway, I digress. The point there was that academia is starting to excite me again, which is good. The other pleasant discovery I made is that my thesis chapter on Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 is almost entirely usable, so I have 16 usable pages out of the 20 I'm aiming for. I hadn't looked at it since Reading Week, so I had no idea what it was about. It was a pleasant surprise and a relief to see that it's actually on my new topic and not my old one.

Today was a fun day as well, though so far not very productive thesis-wise, though I did get my chores done. Zenon dropped by again and we watched some more Coupling episodes and played Settlers of Catan (I taught him how to play it on Friday night). And, because it's Zenon, there was also some guitar playing. All in all, a very fun afternoon/evening.

I talked to Anna on the phone tonight, and we got to catch up. That was super-fun. Anna and I sometimes don't talk for months at a time, but we always go straight into girl-talk-giggly-fun mode when we chat. She told me about her trip to Europe, which I hadn't yet heard about and about her new-ish (though not really new) boyfriend who I haven't met. She also caught me up on random other gossip. Anna's so awesome. My Mom also called me tonight. She and I are getting really excited about her visit. She is arriving a week from this Tuesday. We are making plans and deciding what we want to do. I have to pack a bin of stuff for her to take back to Ontario with her so that I have less to move in August. Mom told me news about my niece, who can now write her numbers up to 10 without help, and past 20 with help. Anie's not even 4 yet (though almost)!

I need to write about the nightmares. I have had at least one bad dream every night for the past couple of weeks. It must be thesis stress, because I rarely have bad dreams normally. I already mentioned how many of them are House-inspired (I've decided that no matter how enjoyable that show is, it's really a bad show for me to watch. I'm too much prone to hypochondria (sp?) anyway, and now that I see that every disease leads to a seizure, and many lead to throwing up, I've become paranoid. I pulled a muscle in my neck this weekend, and instead of thinking a normal thought like, "I wonder how I did that", I began thinking, "Oh my God! I have meningitis!" I don't really, but it was a fear), but now some of them are starting to be thesis-inspired too, and featuring throwing up. Last night I had a dream that started as a nightmare about my thesis, and ended with throwing up, making it the quintessential nightmare. For those of you who don't know, throwing up is my #1 irrational uncontrollable panic-inducing fear. Nightmares involving throwing up are the worst for me (though I have to say, I had one recently where my Mom died in a car bomb which was also super-traumatic). There's no reason that you would need to know what my nightmares are about, but my point was just that I've been having a huge number of them lately. I'm going to have to start doing yoga and doing more meditating, I think, to help me relax.

Anyway, this is a long enough post about random events in my life. I should probably find something to eat (nachoes not being a super-nutritious supper, no matter how yummy and tempting they are) and begin work on my thesis, again. The thesis is really starting to come together, now, though, so I'm not even dreading working on it as much as I might. I have an outline, so I have a path through the wild forest of my ideas, which is good. Anyway, off I go.