I slept a lot today. This makes a certain amount of sense, as I went 12 rounds with insomnia last night and have vague recollections of noticing morning-slanted sunlight through my blinds.* It was my usual trick: wake up at 10 or 11, go back to sleep, take brief naps between blasts from the alarm clock, go back to sleep for a few more hourlong spurts, finally haul my ass out of bed... all three feet to my desk chair and start surfing the web. (Suddenly occuring thought: Maybe if D. ends up going to Paris, I'll eventually reclaim the third bedroom as my office so that I at least have to walk down the hall first.)

{*this was after my spree of what the litany of odd emails I am currently receiving suggests to have been DRUNK FRIENDSTERING! I am ordinarily very particular, see, about whom I'll consider a friend. I don't usually go around thinking, "Oh, I met that person once" or "Oh, I see that person around and we've almost had a conversation" and reaching the conclusion that we're friends. Not so while drunk. So my Friendster circle is now enlarged by several random scenesters and coffee lovers}

When I sleep in fits and starts in such a manner, I tend to remember my dreams much better-- which is to say at all. There were several of them and they all involved work, distressingly enough. In one of them I had ridden my bike up to Baltimore on my day off and decided to drop by the Cafe franchise up there. The layout was entirely bizzarre, more like a house than a coffee shop (though the actual backrooms at the actual Cafe could be described as such pretty accurately). The espresso machines were self-serve, and when I tried to use one I discovered that instead of coffee grounds, I was packing hummus into the basket.

The other two dreams I remembered both took place at closing time and both involved several coworkers showing up at once to help and getting more in the way than anything else. The first one involved customers refusing to leave. I have taken to bringing a copy of Lou Reed's Transformer to work so I can play the last track, "Goodnight Ladies," at closing time. It's more polite than turning the stereo volume way up and seems to get the message across better. In the dream, I was looking for the CD but I couldn't find it. I kept looking desperately, as if it were some kind of talisman necessary for the closing. But people kept on coming in and ordering, or asking questions, and I had to keep running back and forth.

I think it was the second dream in which I actually got into a shouting match with a guy who refused to leave. This time I kept trying to clean up, but there were all these strange new items (tray of brownies!) that I had no idea what to do with. Then somebody turned off all the lights -- I think it was the most recent hire, who bugs the hell out of me for no real reason I can discern (which in turn bugs the hell out of me more-- I find it annoying that I'm so easily annoyed) -- and I had to explain that we don't usually turn off the table lights unless the store lights are on. And that's when I discovered the secret compartment above the cake fridge full of empty bottles...

My plans for today were of trying to get my car working again (at long last) and then calling up the bass player who contacted me through Friendster about playing together. After about a month of our failing completely to find a time when we were both free, she Emailed me on Friday to say that she would be in town Sunday after all. And I never got around to calling her back. I thought D. would be back in town and able to try giving my car another jump, but she didn't show up until about an hour ago.

I ended up watching Citizen Ruth from Netflix, making myself an omelette with green peppers and onions, reading the Sunday Times while listening to the burned copy of that Olivia Tremor Control album the one Cafe regular lent me, and finally going back to bed.

Either my fundamentally introverted nature demands a day without human contact after five straight days dealing with customers and coworkers, or I'm more depressed than I have been wanting to admit.

Everything seems clearer after the nap, though possibly this is because I no longer have the shame of not calling someone I was supposed to call battling the slinking dread of possibly being thrown into a new situation with a new person. Days like this make me marvel that I haven't yet moved into that windowless basement apartment and become an urban hermit.

I am, however, partway there. Rather than beat back my severe disinclination to leave the apartment to buy groceries, rather than even pick up a phone, I just ordered a pizza on the internet. It will be here soon, so I should get out of this bathrobe and put on some pants.
- posted by Bob @ 9:51 PM