Not much work got done today.  I read the first chunk of some school reading, but was called away by the siren song of my whaling ship disaster book.  I’m a huge sucker for disaster and survival stories - particularly tales of the early exploration of Antarctica.  But this book that I read today was awesome.  I have now decided that, though Antarctica is a terrible place to be, the middle of the Pacific Ocean without food or water is pretty terrible too.  The castaways of the Essex spent three months floating around the ocean without sufficient water or food - there’s all kinds of extreme physical privation, desperation, suffering, and of course cannibalism in this story.  While stores lasted, they were on a ration of half a pint of water a day and three ounces of hard tack for food!  And of course it’s not exactly a story, but rather a history.  This really happened.

These tales always leave me amazed at the fortitude of certain people.  Survival seems to be linked at least in part to the maintenance of totally unreasonable hope in the face of astronomically bad odds - Were I ever to find myself in a survival scenario, I have no doubt I’d be among the first to die off for lack of hope.  I give up hope of living if I get the flu, for god’s sake.  Never mind being stranded thousands of miles from land in a little leaky boat with a ration of a cup of water a day to hold me.

Anyway, I enjoyed this book quite a bit and am now inspired to actually read Moby-Dick which I have been threatening to do for years but have never gotten around to.  We shall see!

So I’m at my dad’s place in the valley, ostensibly house sitting while he is away on a week’s vacation.  But actually I’m babysitting, though it’s terribly insulting to refer to your 17 year old brother as a baby, to him if not to me.  Hence “house sitting.”

I’m digging being here.  It’s quiet.  There’s air conditioning.  And a cat.  And no one to pick up after but me! (Hi Husband, I love you!)  I’m living on corn on the cob and Zoodles and diet iced tea.  And some sucker has a wireless connection without any security so I’m footloose and fancy free with regards to the internet.  I’m thinking of downloading several hundred megs of nasty porn just to mess with them… nah.  I’m too busy lazing around for that.

Actually I’m getting a lot of reading done.  I’m reading an account of the sinking of the whaleship Essex, which was capsized by an angry sperm whale and is, so I’m told, the inspiration for the climactic scene in Moby-Dick.  I’m also reading more Jung, and how’s this for a shocking quotation?   In reference to women who are acting in accordance with their animus, or masculine rational side:

“… with women is it a question of power, whether of truth or justice or some other ‘ism’ - for the dressmaker and hairdresser have already taken care of their vanity.  The ‘Father’ (i.e., the sum of conventional opinions) always plays a great role in female argumentation.  No matter how friendly and obliging a woman’s Eros may be, no logic on earth can shake her if she is ridden by the animus.  Often the man has the feeling - and he is not altogether wrong - that only seduction or a beating or rape would have the necessary power of persuasion.”

There’s more but you get the idea.  I added the bolding to make sure you didn’t miss the important part: If your woman starts trying to use logic to argue with you, not only will she actually be illogical, but obviously she needs a good raping!

It’s this kind of thing that gives turn of the century (last century, that is) men a bad name.  And so it should, of course - I was pretty shocked to read this.  I think Jung is pretty interesting, and he does get me thinking - but it kind of puts a bad taste in my mouth when I come across things like this.  I try to be all post-modern and remind myself that we shouldn’t judge those who came before us by the standards of today, but really, how on earth can this be explained away?  Like slavery - It’s just never excusable, ever, in 1700 or 2000.

Of course there’s more to Jung than sexism and advice to rape the sense out of nearby females.  But yeah… shocking.

Every couple finds ways to divide the labour of living together. Husband and I have a very good setup, and as part of my portion, I do all the housework at our place. As a general rule, this suits me just fine. I like to keep house. I like knowing how long it’s been since the toilets last got cleaned (usually once a week, only rarely stretching to - the shame! - two weeks). I like the feeling of accomplishment that comes when the chores are done. I even enjoy the cleaning process, which is just physical enough to feel busy but easy enough that my mind is free to wander. (As an aside, I’ve often wistfully considered pursuing a career as a long haul trucker for the same reasons - the chief reason I don’t is because I hate pineapple earrings and I understand that’s part of the uniform. Plus I’d rather shoot myself than say, “Ten-four Big Daddy. This is Pink Ladybug Four signing off,” over CB radio.)

The up side of this domestic arrangement is that Husband and I never argue about whose turn it is to do the dishes: It’s always my turn. The down side is that I have days when I believe I may kill him if he leaves one more sweater lying around the dining table. (He likes to collect them there, perhaps because he gets lonely for them if they’re all the way in the bedroom.) When the house is messy - and I’m certainly the messier one - his stuff sticks out to me like a sore thumb. In my lower moments I mentally accuse him of making a mess specifically to get to me, and vow to exact revenge. But actually I would never seek revenge - for two reasons. One, I am in touch with reality and realize he does not, in fact, make a mess just to get to me, and two, I’m much too passive for revenge. I do occasionally consider running away from home and leaving this note:

Dear Husband,

Pick up your goddamn sweaters. Only then will I come home. Until then, I don’t even know who you are.

I never have, but if I disappear one day, you’ll know why.

“Nature is aristocratic. The normal man is a fiction.”

Yesterday was fabulous.  Really fabulous.

My sister in law and her fiance (and their two kids, one of whom is my goddaughter) were expected for dinner, so I spent the day in a pleasant buzz of household activity.  I don’t know if you know this, but secretly I wish I was June Cleaver.  Not all the time… and June really needed to go to university… but anyway, I do enjoy puttering around the house, cleaning and ordering the place.

I had a good chat with my dear friend Al, made three separate trips to the grocery store for forgotten items, and finally I sent Husband out for beer at the last minute.  By dinner time all the food was prepared, the house clean (if not 100% tidy - there is always book and paper detritus around this place), and I was calmly enjoying a beer.

The family arrived and we had a picnic style dinner on the patio, where my potato salad was roundly praised, except for my sister in law, who prefers no egg in her potato salad.  No egg?  What the hell is that?  Then there was much passing around of the baby.  Husband has a natural touch with her and she seemed to groove to the ’80’s music he was dancing to.  I got her next and finally I have met someone who actually appreciates the fact that I like to jiggle my leg all the time.

After all was said and done I was full, content, and in possession of a clean house.  It’s good to do things like this with your family.  The truth is that my sister in law and I get along pretty well, but we probably wouldn’t be friends if we weren’t family.  It’s nothing nefarious, we just have very different interests and habits.  The thing that ties us together is being related.  And that’s okay.  Family can be a big pain in the ass, but they can also save your ass - and that’s the thing.  You count on each other.  So you host dinners and drive to each other’s houses and take the enjoyment that is there.

And it’s good to get out of your social shell and spend time with different types of people, especially for me, because I am Super Shell Woman.  SSW is getting out of her shell again this weekend, when I go to an overnight women’s stagette for my friend who is getting married in a few weeks.  The aforementioned Al and I will drive to a little cabin in the boonies with I believe about four other women for a night of drinking and the ensuing shenanigans.  I won’t really know anyone but the bride (and Al) so once again I will be stretching those social wings.  I’m kind of excited about it actually!

Well, I am pleased to report I am feeling just fine today.   I don’t know what happened yesterday - I suspect the cherries I was eating.  Maybe I didn’t wash them well enough.  Maybe there was some e coli or one of his evil bacterial brothers clinging to some scrap of manure on the fruit.  So I don’t know what went wrong.  But holy cow, did I get powerfully sick.

When Husband got home from work, he could see in the bathroom my little “barf camp” as he called it: the toilet seat up, a loose roll of toilet paper on the floor next to the bowl (for post-vomit drool), a pile of towels spread out on the floor for knee cushioning, a glass for intermission water intake.  I’ll spare you the gory details but let it suffice to say I now have aching abs from all the work they performed yesterday.  And knee bruises, despite the towels.  And no desire to eat the cherries still in the fridge.

But!  I feel tip top now, save for a smidge of physiological tenderness.  I just enjoyed a peanut butter slice of toast and a glass of milk for breakfast.  I’m ready to start my paper for the dreams analysis class, though I’m still a bit fuzzy on the meaning of my dream.  This is okay; analyzing one’s self fully is as possible as looking at your own back without a mirror.  The idea is to practice the skill and relate it to theory.  So if I don’t unravel the deep meaning of me at the same time, it won’t affect my mark.

The idea of dream analysis isn’t to find The Meaning of a dream.  There probably isn’t one, and even if there was, unraveling it from tangle of bizarre and seemingly nonsensical elements, with perfect authority, is probably impossible.  The idea behind dream analysis is also not to create a one to one correspondence between elements of your dream and some kind of symbol definition book.  The way it works in modern practice, generally speaking, is to use the dream as a tool for self understanding.  What do the elements mean for you?  What hidden messages can the therapist and client develop together, in a way that is meaningful for the client?  It’s quite a bit like moving poetry I think.  Amazing poetry stirs things up inside you, even though you weren’t the author or originator of the writing.  But that doesn’t matter - what matters is your reaction, and the meaning you take away from the art.  So it is with dreams.  If you give yourself over to the process, you may find it’s a powerful tool for accessing self knowledge.  Talking about dreams can also feel safer than talking about certain hard realities of your life, and in this way dream work can function as a less threatening segue to work on ugly feelings or painful memories.

Did you know that, based on laboratory studies, the most common emotions represented in dreams are, from first to fifth:

1. anxiety

2. anger

3. sadness

4. confusion

5. shame

Only about twenty percent of dreams have a positive emotional tone.  How d’you like them apples?

Horrible vomiting illness.

That’s all I have to say.

Fuck I hate it when shirts shrink!  Aaargh!  Why can the manufacturers not prewash the freaking fabric?  Is it to much to ask that the thing I buy remain the same when I wash it?

Today I am going to SuperStore to buy veggie burgers. The have two kinds I endorse: the portobello and swiss burgers, and the burgers that attempt to be meaty. Both are excellent, though the former turn to mushy grey cowpies when they melt so make sure you pop them on the grill from frozen.

I have some family barbeques to go to this weekend and I really make the family nervous - they have no idea what to feed me. This is why I need to bring the patties. It doesn’t matter how many times I tell them that they don’t need to do anything special - there will be plenty of potato salad and chips with salsa and pie and buns and bean salad to keep me in calories. They insist on the presence of some sort of central dish, a meat place holder if you will. The result is I end up overeating because really, I fill up on potato salad and pie but feel compelled to eat my vegetarian dish too, because dammit I made it and brought it. Tonight will be no different.

I have an aunt who is also a vegetarian and now the three of us (aunt, me, Husband) are collectively eyed askance at family dinners. What do we eat? Why are we so difficult?

To them I say:

So did I tell you I’m mostly over my fear of spiders?  It’s true.  I can tell because there’s been a little spider living in the corner of my bedroom, under the curtain by the head of the bed, for over a week.  I check on him every night and he’s always there, but by the time I’m in bed and ready for sleep I’ve forgotten entirely about him.  The spider-presence just doesn’t bother me any more.  And this is saying something - I used to be such a spiderphobe that I wouldn’t go into any gardens or forests, or put my hand anywhere I couldn’t see.  Reach up under a lampshade to turn on the light?  Hell no, might be a spider up there.  I had to stick my head under the shade first to check.  And I was a champion at the spider dance - you know, when you walk through a web and have to flap around frantically brushing off every part of your body in case you got a spider on you.  Even though you know you look like a total ass.

I got over spider fear with my own informal program of exposure therapy.  Simply put, when you have a fear reaction and then flee the feared stimulus, you experience reward (reduction of anxiety) and this reinforces the fear.  So every time you flee your feared stimulus, the fear can grow more entrenched.  The best way to deal with it is by forcing yourself to remain exposed to the feared stimulus (in my case the horrible, horrible spiders) until your anxiety has totally extinguished.  I’ve been doing this in bits and pieces for the last few years.  Sometimes I google “spider” and just stare at the pictures until I relax, which let me tell you takes a long time.  One time I went to a fantastic insect and arthropod museum in Newfoundland, and spent close to an hour in the tarantula area, totally freaked out, staring at the monsters in their cages.  It was awful but very helpful.  After that I really just couldn’t get too scared of the garden variety house spider.

Anyway I figure I’m mostly over it now.  I still think tarantulas are a blight upon the earth and need to be fired off into outer space, or maybe sent to the bottom of the ocean without oxygen, and I wouldn’t want a big spider running amok in the house, but I’m totally cool with the little ones.  I think the chief differentiation is bristlyness.  If I can see a spider’s bristles, it’s too damn big and has forfeited its right to live.  I prefer a smooth spider, or at least one so small as to have undetectable bristles.

Interestingly enough, Husband is very bristly.  He has one of those short beards that never quite reaches the smooth stage.  Is he a spider in disguise?  Will I have to mash him to death against the wall with a shoe one day?