Entry: The Seventeenth-- Four Days and One Crazy Nightmarish Night in the Life of Me
Sunday: Hung out at the Leader family reunion in Hershey, PA with several of my first and second cousins and many others relatives of indeterminate relation. Yes, a few “Follow the Leader” jokes were made; no, none of them were funny. Besides the free ice cream, the highlight of the afternoon definitely was listening to my 86-year-old great uncle and 81-year-old grandfather argue about politics and religion (no, really, it was pretty cool). Apparently, my great uncle has been touring prisons recently, preaching Presbyterianism to convicted felons*. My grandfather isn’t such a big fan of the whole Presbyterian thing, and didn’t mince words on the subject. To paraphrase the esteemed Henry Leader, “Do you know what your guy (John Calvin) did? Read about him. He tortured people. He burnt them at the stake for heresy. That son-of-a-bitch was no better than the rest of them.” Then he proceeded to criticize my great-uncle whenever he referred to “Christ,” insisting he call him “Jesus” instead. This debate went on for about half an hour or so, most of it significantly less heated and more intellectual than the above, but still entertaining nonetheless.
Sunday night/Monday Morning: This is big. This is exciting. I’m going to bed before midnight for the first time all summer. Goodbye 2:00 AM bedtime, hello normal, healthy sleep pattern. I need to wake up at 7:30 for the first day of camp the next day, but that’s no problem-I’m still going to be getting almost eight hours of sleep! Everything is great… until I wake up at 12:45 AM… and 1:30 AM… and 2:30 AM… and then wake up at 4:05 AM in a cold sweat after the first real nightmare I’ve had in a long time. It was evil the way this thing toyed with my mind-it wasn’t so much a single, coherent dream, as a series of dreams that built on each other over the course of the night, each one adding further torment to my psyche. I’m going to try to recap it here, for the sake of catharsis if nothing else, but I don’t know how interesting it’ll be, so feel free to skip this…if I cared enough to learn how do fancy HTML things in my LiveJournal, I’d make it a separate link, but instead you’ll have to settle for good ol’-fashioned brackets instead.
[I wake up in the middle of the night. Again. I’m frustrated at being unable to sleep, so I start reading the comics by flashlight in my bed…
…I wake up again. My brother’s up, though, so I talk with about being unable to sleep. It so weird how we’re both up at three in the morning…
…I’m in my grandparents’ house, sitting around their living room with my them and my family. I’m feeling really crappy and tired-I slept really poorly the night before, waking up several times-so I’m sort of zoning out on what’s going on around me. Then I notice the VCR clock: 6:11 AM. I point this out to my Mom. 6:11 AM? That doesn’t make any sense! She corrects me, saying it’s actually 6:11 PM. But I’m no fool. “No, you’re lying!” I shout. “It’s a dream!” I must’ve finally fallen asleep after waking up all those times! So I squint close my eyes and fight, fight like the dickens to wake myself up, out of this dream. I fight for a good 10 seconds or so, flailing about the dream room, then finally…
… I wake up. In my effort to fight my way out my dream, I’ve literally thrown myself out of bed, and now am clomping about on the floor of my room, exhausted…]
…and then I wake up again, really creeped out-not so much bothered by anything that happened in my dream, as much as by the eerie realness of it, how it picked up right from where and when I was before falling asleep and just continued onward. And since I saw “The Waking Life”, now I can’t help associating not-being-able-to-wake-up with death, and that’s just further scary. Around 4:40, I finally made it back to sleep. So much for being well-rested for the first day of camp…
Tuesday: Ran around taking photos of new camp staff members for the annual “Who’s Who at Camp” flier I put together. In the process, conducted an unscientific behavioral observation of my subjects, with striking results: nearly all the female subjects griped or whined about being photographed, while none of the males did. And this phenomenon grew more pronounced as the subjects aged. The typical response ranged from the 13-year-old junior counselors who went along with the process almost willingly to the 40ish drama instructor-who I was just meeting for the first time-saying “You want to take my photo. I hate you.” and then adamantly refusing to look at the picture once it was taken. I have yet to come up with a hypothesis to explain this data. But regardless, the finished product turned out nice.
Tonight: Spent a lot of time talking and hanging out with my brother. He wants to take part in this anti-Bush protest on July 4th, when Bush visits Philly for the opening of some important building, but he can’t because he needs to be with his boy choir, which is singing at the dedication of said building. That’s my brother for you: half choirboy, half fanatical left-wing activist. Also out of the mouth of my brother tonight: “My goal in life is to meet Ralph Nader.” *sigh* They’re so cute when they go through the whole radical liberalization phase of teenagerdom. I’ll truly be sad when he stops calling me a “centrist whore” (albeit, jokingly…I think).
*Who knew I was related to Presbyterians? I certainly didn’t. I guess there’ll need to be some revisions made to the Leader-Smith Family Tree of Religion that occupied mine and Charlie’s whiteboard for a good couple weeks this semester…
Sunday night/Monday Morning: This is big. This is exciting. I’m going to bed before midnight for the first time all summer. Goodbye 2:00 AM bedtime, hello normal, healthy sleep pattern. I need to wake up at 7:30 for the first day of camp the next day, but that’s no problem-I’m still going to be getting almost eight hours of sleep! Everything is great… until I wake up at 12:45 AM… and 1:30 AM… and 2:30 AM… and then wake up at 4:05 AM in a cold sweat after the first real nightmare I’ve had in a long time. It was evil the way this thing toyed with my mind-it wasn’t so much a single, coherent dream, as a series of dreams that built on each other over the course of the night, each one adding further torment to my psyche. I’m going to try to recap it here, for the sake of catharsis if nothing else, but I don’t know how interesting it’ll be, so feel free to skip this…if I cared enough to learn how do fancy HTML things in my LiveJournal, I’d make it a separate link, but instead you’ll have to settle for good ol’-fashioned brackets instead.
[I wake up in the middle of the night. Again. I’m frustrated at being unable to sleep, so I start reading the comics by flashlight in my bed…
…I wake up again. My brother’s up, though, so I talk with about being unable to sleep. It so weird how we’re both up at three in the morning…
…I’m in my grandparents’ house, sitting around their living room with my them and my family. I’m feeling really crappy and tired-I slept really poorly the night before, waking up several times-so I’m sort of zoning out on what’s going on around me. Then I notice the VCR clock: 6:11 AM. I point this out to my Mom. 6:11 AM? That doesn’t make any sense! She corrects me, saying it’s actually 6:11 PM. But I’m no fool. “No, you’re lying!” I shout. “It’s a dream!” I must’ve finally fallen asleep after waking up all those times! So I squint close my eyes and fight, fight like the dickens to wake myself up, out of this dream. I fight for a good 10 seconds or so, flailing about the dream room, then finally…
… I wake up. In my effort to fight my way out my dream, I’ve literally thrown myself out of bed, and now am clomping about on the floor of my room, exhausted…]
…and then I wake up again, really creeped out-not so much bothered by anything that happened in my dream, as much as by the eerie realness of it, how it picked up right from where and when I was before falling asleep and just continued onward. And since I saw “The Waking Life”, now I can’t help associating not-being-able-to-wake-up with death, and that’s just further scary. Around 4:40, I finally made it back to sleep. So much for being well-rested for the first day of camp…
Tuesday: Ran around taking photos of new camp staff members for the annual “Who’s Who at Camp” flier I put together. In the process, conducted an unscientific behavioral observation of my subjects, with striking results: nearly all the female subjects griped or whined about being photographed, while none of the males did. And this phenomenon grew more pronounced as the subjects aged. The typical response ranged from the 13-year-old junior counselors who went along with the process almost willingly to the 40ish drama instructor-who I was just meeting for the first time-saying “You want to take my photo. I hate you.” and then adamantly refusing to look at the picture once it was taken. I have yet to come up with a hypothesis to explain this data. But regardless, the finished product turned out nice.
Tonight: Spent a lot of time talking and hanging out with my brother. He wants to take part in this anti-Bush protest on July 4th, when Bush visits Philly for the opening of some important building, but he can’t because he needs to be with his boy choir, which is singing at the dedication of said building. That’s my brother for you: half choirboy, half fanatical left-wing activist. Also out of the mouth of my brother tonight: “My goal in life is to meet Ralph Nader.” *sigh* They’re so cute when they go through the whole radical liberalization phase of teenagerdom. I’ll truly be sad when he stops calling me a “centrist whore” (albeit, jokingly…I think).
*Who knew I was related to Presbyterians? I certainly didn’t. I guess there’ll need to be some revisions made to the Leader-Smith Family Tree of Religion that occupied mine and Charlie’s whiteboard for a good couple weeks this semester…