Say it like you mean it!

I love and hate when this happens. I had a really disturbing dream the other night. In short, I dreamed that a bunch of people seemingly forced their way into my house, although my door was always unlocked. A couple time I tried to lock the door, but people kept coming in. The weren't really doing anything other than walking around the living room. They weren't terribly friendly. I was frightened and defensive at first, and then I asked them all to remove their shoes and coats, and put them at the front door. The I asked them to sit down, and I asked them to tell me their names.

In the past week, pieces of the dream have turned up in my waking life. Not that people just came into my house uninvited, but the whole range of feeling that I had in the dream. First, a total stranger extended a stunningly sincere hand of fraternity. Then one of my patients answered a question before I asked it, and extended a sincere hand of fraternity. And three times, my heart found a clear voice and spoke out. Loudly. In the first instance I realized that I needed something intangible, and needed someone to help me get it. In the second, I asked for it, and received it within hours. In the third, I let go of some anger and pride, and I found a long neglected wound where they once sat. This has otherwise been a craptastic week, and at first I didn't notice the emotional parallels with the dream. Yeah, that's all vague, it's probably impossible to see the parallels, but they're there.

Best of all, it's okay, or at the very least, it will be soon, and I believe that now.

The Attic is Still a Scary Place

So we finished our Sorcerer game. Shizuka and Tai reconciled. She discovered that Tai had not killed one of their kids, and he (Taiichi) was living in the attic. This made her happy. When she and Tai re-binded she suggested that they send Taiichi to live with her mother in Kyoto. Tai had reservations, fearing mom might not be pleased, but Shizuka reminded him that Taiichi was mom's grandson. And grandchildren are all mom wanted. I think everyone lived happily ever after--at least in Shizuka's story. Meg started a hilarious journal from Harriet's POV at The Forge. Hopefully Joshua and Emily will give their reports, too. Me, too.

So why is the attic still a scary place? Because every time I go up there I end up bringing more stuff down than I intended. I was just looking for a couple of books. I came down with many more than a couple--more like 25. There were the rare fragile books that needed to be kept elsewhere, the books that I will need to work on my game, the books on Japanese tattooing I'll need to finish designing the tattoo on my arm, the game books, the books I've already read, but like to have around, the graphic novel I'd started reading before we bought our house and misplaced (Blade of the Immortal, book 2 I think), a book I thought Joshua would be interested in reading, and Bea's Waldorf doll, Millie Cookie. I was really just looking for my Japanese tattooing books. Now that the half sleeve is well underway again, it's time to plan ahead to making it a 3/4 sleeve, which I'd like to have done in the next two years. I needed some inspiration, although I know what I'd like to have done.

We have many many boxes of books that we have yet to unpack. I cannot bring myself to get rid of a book, but I know the time will come where I'll have to do it, otherwise we'll never be able to finish the attic. We need to get rid some stuff. Anyway, last night I had an interesting dream where I was looking for the two Japanese tattooing books, but all I could find was Summer Sisters by Judy Blume. Guess where I found the books in question: in the same box as that Judy Blume book! I had other dreams last night that were weird, if not a little geeky. I dreamed of a recipe for a mojo bag I'd been thinking of putting together but have not been able to figure out what I needed, and I also dreamed that there was a strange, but friendly being who lived in the walls of our house and wore a black mask, who knew my "true nature as the one who gives the marks." I had a little too much to drink last night, I think.

I think I also have a kidney infection again. I had one this summer, and was totally miserable. I don't even remember getting the initial UTI. Everyone in my house has had a cold with a nasty gooey nose and a sore throat, except me. I get a kidney infection. Life is unfair.

Happy New Year. Gotta go cook some black eyed peas, or my mom will have my head on a frying pan, or we'll have bad luck, or both.

Other cool Noh Masks!

Your Favorite RPG Character

I'd like to know, gentle reader, if you have a favorite RPG character of your creation. Last night I found mine, Shizuka from our Sorcerer game.
It doesn't take much for me to cry at movies or in dramatic moments on books or TV, so it's no surprise that I'm really sad for my Sorcerer character Shizuka. At first I thought she was just a nervous wreck, near a breakdown, but I realized this morning, after pondering what transpired last night, that perhaps she just enjoys pain, arguing, and being unhappy. That really sucks for her, because her demon's need was that he needed to make her happy. And we all know that not even the funniest clown can make someone who wants to be unhappy become happy. She wasn't feeding his need, so her homicidal demon husband left her. The last straw was that after he admitted to killing their children, she asked him to get a demon vasectomy, which seemed to be a logical request at the time, but probably not something one should ask if you and your partner are not getting along, or when you're both high on opium. After I said it, Vincent, the GM, flipped through the book to clarify demon rebellion and unbinding. I thought, aw, crap. Shizuka is screwed. Even my husband, who has very little to say about my gaming experiences because I tend to talk to him about it when I come home and he's geekin' over his Think Tanks game quickly chimed in that it was a bad thing to say. It's a bad thing to say when I mention the V word between us. But every time I say "let's have another baby", he gets all prickly and grimacy, too. I don't get it, but I digress...
The kicker started out as something just to be scary: She finds a dead baby in a beautiful wooden box. But her reaction to it was the kiss of death for the marriage. She didn't trust Tai (demon husband) anymore. She thought he had something to do with the appearance of the box (I'm still unclear of how it appeared), and that maybe he put it where she would see it to be cruel. She's touchy about babies, having had 5 that just disappeared, and she overreacted.
Speaking of babies, at first I thought she was all about having the babies, but also came to see her mother wanted grandchildren much more than Shizuka wanted to make them.
Her price is that she has large gap memory loss (and I play it that she conveniently forgets painful things as well, and remembers things incorrectly, or just enough not to have an accurate account of what happened) So all these years she's relied on Tai to tell her the truth about what's happened, since she can't or won't remember. She doesn't trust him, and her denial and desire to forget a succession of traumas (the husband killing all 5 of their children mere weeks after they were born, year after year), caused her not to ask the all-important "why?" When she got the answer (they would have turned into really horrible demons) Tai was on the way out the door. Sad. (And still the Shizuka in me thinks, would they really go evil? Tai's not that evil and he's the father.)
I love it when you think you've formed something about your character that ends up only being true on the surface. While your initial statements about your character may be X, their reactions and expereinces show that Y is truer. Like the baby in the box thing. Since her cover is that she's an ethnobotanist, I've explored that maybe she tends to abuse opium, which can also account for a lot of memory loss, mental confusion, hallucination, delusions, etc.
I've found it great fun to play characters whose inspiration comes from a part of me I'm not comfortable with, and I had to get past the fact that I was exposing my own bad sides. I got inspiration for Shizuka from me....
~Ages 19-22, when I not-so-secretly enjoyed being unhappy.
~Ages 22-24, when I was very unfortuneately romantically involved in two toxic relationships and cared very much for both people. (one of whom I'm still friends with, but the toxicity is all cleaned up)
~On those days when I wake up in the morning and am just looking to pick a fight with anyone who crosses my path (and it tends to be the husband)
~That phase before I met the husband when I loved the Bad Boys.
~That part of me that can be really passive aggressive to the husband, even though I know it's wrong.
~The part of me that has nightmares of the husband leaving me without any explanation or contact afterwards. And that came through in play in an eerie scene. Shizuka tried to summon Tai. She wrote in her own blood a long letter of contrition [My beloved Tai, I'm sorry I've been such a bitch lately...Perhaps a vasectomy is not a good idea at this time...If you come back, I'll laugh at your jokes, praise your superior cooking, work at being a better wife who is attentive to your needs...], begging for forgiveness, did her ritual summoning of placing the letter in water, chanted, burned inscence, surrounded herself in Tai's possessions. Due to my crappy roll of the dice, the summoning failed, and Tai did not show. That he did not respond in the least was beautiful. Horribly beautiful. I've had that nightmare before--where the husband and I have a fight, he walks out, and I can't talk to him. That scene gave me chills.
Everyone else's stories are intense and depressing. There isn't much of an emotional reprieve, except for the fact that Shizuka has only interacted with Harriet, Meg's character, whom Tai tried to brain with a hammer. I get to sit and listen to Joshua and Emily do their story-telling. Amazingly, Harriet agreed to help Shizuka locate Tai. It could have been a light moment in the whole game, but Shizuka willingly cut off the tip of her pinkie to feed to Harriet's knick knack making, bone eating well demon, as retribution for Tai's attempted murder of Harriet, and clogging her well with 6 yen pieces. We've stayed consistently dark, even darkly funny.

So there's mine. What's yours? What was (even if so far) your favorite scene? What inspired their formation? How did they evolve? Where did your characters end and you begin, and round the other way?
I've only been doing role playing games for less than a year. I have been really lucky to have played with wickedly imaginative GM's too! Growing up I played lots of pretend, and in high school I had a couple of friends that I did a free form kind of role playing-story telling thing. In nursing school we did lots of role playing to gain perspective on patient/nurse relations. And I do SCA here and there, love to dress in Renaissance and Faire garb. I like to play pretend, but my "formal" role playing experience is pretty limited. (Shhhh....I've never played D&D, and don't really plan to...) I'm amazed how drawn into a story and how attached to a character one can get. So I'm curious to hear other people's experiences with characters that really stuck to them or haunted them.

The Good, The Bad, The Ugly

The Good : My mom had the cardiac catheterization done, and everything went well.
The Bad (but not so bad): She does have some blockage in her arteries, but she won't need really bypass surgery, or an angioplasty, just drugs. She said she's also going to work harder at keeping her blood pressure down, and will try to lose some weight. Good for mom.
I just noticed I look just like my mom in the picture to the left. Same facial expression and everything... Not a bad thing, just an observation.
The Ugly: Speaking of weight loss and exercise (okay, I didn't talk about exercise yet, but I saw a theme and I ran with it), I noticed some very interesting dynamics in the Nautilus Room at the Y yesterday. There appears to be a self segregation between the men and the women. If there are more men in the weight room, the women all go do the cardio machines, and vice versa. I never really noticed this until yesterday when I was doing the Nautilus machines and there were two men (among many men, mostly regulars) there who were grunting really loudly. Loud enough for me to crank up the iPod (Grateful Dead, "Tennessee Jed" to start). It was distracting. I just wanted to yell "get a freakin' room!" So you can imagine what it sounded like, if you're not one to hang out in fitness centers. The husband tells me this is a fairly common thing, and on the list of rules in the free weight room it says something like "No Loud Grunting". I also looked around to see if there was anyone else with a visible WTF or amused look on his face. Nope, just me, and I was the only woman there. Then I looked into the cardio room, and there was not a single man in there. I wasn't about to change my workout and join the herd, so I just tried to ignore the grunters, and then did a quickie cardio. (Later that night I had a funny dream about self segregation, which would only really be funny to someone else in the dream, so I won't share. Sorry.)
I am now fascinated with this phenomenon. I've never really heard women grunt like that while working out. I don't grunt loudly while working out, even when I up my weight level. I made crazy primal grunty sounds when I was giving birth to my kids, but can we really equate birthing a baby to lifting weights? I'm not convinced that the workout grunting is necessary. Amusing and somewhat disturbing, perhaps, but not necessary. There's a time and place for grunting, and working out in a public place may not be it. I don't think my being the only woman in the weight room had any impact on the volume or frequency of the grunting, as no other men joined in. Now that would have been really odd and distrubing. I would have gone to the cardio room, and joined the ladies if I suddenly found myself in a room full of loudly grunting, sweaty, middle aged (and a few adolescent) men. I shudder to think.

Anyone out there, please share. What's the workout grunt all about?
Here's more information about No Grunting Policies in gyms. I really feel bad for the guy who was kicked out of the gym for grunting. OTOH, the sign said "No Grunting".

Julia's Dream

Thursday night (Thanksgiving), I had a terrible dream. It started out as a standard post graduate anxiety nightmare, where I was back at school, and forgot to attend a crucial class. Had that part of the dream continued, I eventually would have discovered that I never attended the class and thus couldn't graduate. But this one was a little different. When I got to class I saw my mom standing in the doorway, and I went over to talk to her. She was dreamily cryptic, telling me I knew why she was here, smiling but sad looking. Then I heard her mumble something, which my dreaming brain interpreted as "I have Cardiac Amorphism." I tried to remember what I had learned about Cardiac Amorphism in nursing school, and I didn't think it was a good thing. So I asked her what she was going to do. She said there a surgery that might help, but it had an incredibly low survival rate ("One Tenth of One percent"). She was not going to have the surgery. She would live with the illness and die from it soon. I cried, she cried, and she told me had accepted this, so I should, too. The rest of the dream is a little sketchy. I woke up incredibly sad and heavy hearted.

So this part is real and not a dream: Yesterday my mom had an EKG at her appointment with a cardiologist. The EKG detected an abnormal heart sound, and given my mom's family history of heart disease, the cardiologist recommended she go in for a cardiac catheterization, to see if the abnormal heart sound indicated a blockage or other defect. She asked if I thought she should have the catheterization done. I told her yes.

I dream in color, I have vivid dreams, and I remember a great many of my dreams. When I was growing up, I frequently had nightmares (Bea does, too). As an adolescent I learned how to alter the course of my dreams. Basically I realize I'm dreaming and then I can do what I want, like fly, make the bad things go away, etc. Sometimes it works, sometimes not. I frequently have deja vu, so much so that I don't pay much attention to it. Dead relatives visit me in my dreams all the time, although they generally don't have much to say. They just kinda check in. And I've had dreams that seemed to tap into real events. In 1995, I had a dream that I was in an elevator, looking out a building across the street, and that building suddenly exploded and collapsed. I woke that morning to news that someone had detonated a bomb in a building in Oklahoma City. In 2001, I had a similar dream, where I saw people jumping out of a building and the building exploded and collapsed. That was a couple of days before Sept 11. I've had similar disaster dreams before high casualty earthquakes. I assume this happens to all of us, and some of us are more open or tuned in to it.

And I scare easily through visual stimulation, much to my husband's chagrin (he loves horror movies). If he gets me to watch a scary movie--one with angry ghosts or evil spirits--I watch it through a screen of my fingers. Scary movies give me nightmares 80% of the time, and I already have a nice little collection of recurring nightmare themes. I don't need any more.

11/29/06--Edit: I'm having an easier time processing the wierd and freaky cardiac amorphism dream as it relates to the reality of my mother's abnormal ECG than I am the uncertainty of the significance of the abnormal ECG. So I hope the 3 or 4 people who actually read this will think of or pray for my mom that her cardiac catheterization goes smoothly.