geekent’s stuff’n things

Okay, hands up:
- How many of you have been head-butted in your sleep by their somnambulist partner?
- How many of you have done the head-butting in your sleep?
All right, so we all been on both the giving an receiving end of the dozing head-butt, but riddle me this, Batman: how many of you have been bitten… in the back!!!… by your unconscious significant other?
I thought so.

To sleep, perchance to dream…
Running through my mind last night:
It was there that I awoke, my hair had grown out quite rapidly (overnight-like), but it also accentuated the thinningness of my locks (which isn’t really happening in real life) causing me to have a near-combover (more of a combforward, like Donald Trump).
I woke up in a place that seemed like an amalgam of my home in Thunder Bay, my current apartment, and the neighbour’s place. My mom was around asking me if I wanted breakfast, and she kept running down a list, like she had a menu of possible servings.
I checked my GMail account to find that this woman from a publishing company (whom I’ve exchanged a couple of emails with as a result of my Comic Column reviews) was coming to Toronto from New York for a wedding and was wondering if I would be her date. Sure it was weird, but also very inviting. But the ending of the letter was kind of odd going something like this:
“…and if things work out and we sleep together we can keep seeing one another and spend our lives together forever or something.”
She attached a picture, but it was a picture SHE took of her friends helping the bride into her wedding dress (the purpose of which was so I could match my tie to the bridesmaids dresses, which was a canary yellow with flecks of pink in it). All her friends and the bride were quite good looking and for some reason I assumed that would mean she was too.
And for some reason I thought, yeah, this is a good plan. So I wrote back, said yes, and asked my mother if the outfit I wore to the work holiday social was appropriate for a wedding and if I should find a new tie.
There were some other weird bits of this dream I remembered soon after waking up, but as it happens they’re lost in the ether now. Oh, and the publisher lady from New York? Smokin’ (not to be confused with “smoker”).

SILLY THINGS TO DO

by me - 11.01.06
Take tally of all the times you sing “Happy Birthday” this year and then send a royalty cheque to Time-Warner (as they own the copyright, see)

I slept 12 hours last night (actually falling asleep during my viewing of Aqua Teen Hunger Force Volume 4… unheard of… “Are they mooning us?” “They can’t do that. WE are the Mooninites!”) and when I woke up, well, I hit snooze and slept more. Repeat this wake/snooze/sleep cycle another half dozen times and the result is, well, groggy Graiggy.
Nevertheless, a lovely lunch out with the always enjoyable freak girl spew drinking copious amounts of tea and having a hot ‘n’ spicy bowl of pho has made me feal loads better. I think I may be kicking this cold in the nards.
Nope, that’s myself.
Ow.
—
Still no internet connection at home. This dry-line internet takes bleeding forever to set up. Busy work combined with clouded brain has made my blogging postings rather… blah lately (eg. this post). But when that net connection gets going and this cold gets gone, you’ll get my year-end list of favourite albums, a long rant on hip hop, and some more reviews of things… oh, and probably some meanderings about relationships. Or friendships. Or relatives. Or the holidays. Or crazy dreams. Or somesuch.
—
Digested recently (aside from pho at lunch):
Scrubs: Season 2 - really funny. A great ensemble cast, sharp writing, and just enough quirk to make it appealing, but not so much that NBC prematurely yanked it from the air. Not like, say….
Arrested Development: Season 2 - outright hilarious. This is the smartest comedy that’s been on tv, perhaps ever. I don’t mean smart as in the humour is all “intellectualized” like Frazier, but rather smart in how tightly the show is put together. Set-ups to gags take place episodes in advance, and and even though the storylines are continuous, they don’t rely on soap operatic techniques to keep you interested and they managed to self contain each episode (although it does work best as a whole). Cancelled as of season 3. Bastards.
Space: Above and Beyond: complete series - Still working on this one, but I loved this show back in the mid-90s and still like it now. Created, co-written and produced by X-Files luminaries Glen Wong and James Morgan (they went on to create “Final Destination” and Jet Li’s “The One”), this is like a gritty combination of Starship Troopers (the movie, even though it predates it), Babylon 5 and Battlestar Galactica (the original). The show is 10 years dated in its effects and production, and some of the stories aren’t as well put together as others, it’s still a compelling show for its rather visceral presentation of war. The score for the show is done by Shirley Walker, who composed all the music for the Batman Animated series.

SILLY THINGS TO DO

Karaoke + choreographed dance moves = silly. But practice in front of the mirror first.

Said before lunch

-I figured out very early on that there was no Santa
-Yeah, but what about Jesus?
-No, I still write to Jesus to bring me presents every year. I mean, if he’s been accruing interest on all that gold, frankincense, and muhr for the past 2000 years he can afford it. Seriously, when Jesus comes back, if he invested wisely, he’s going to be loaded.

I had a dream last night that went so far beyond absurd that when I woke up I was pretty frustrated about the whole thing.
Apparently I was in Japan - Tokyo to be precise - with some of my fellow GTA Bloggers (I don’t remember exactly who came with me but I wouldn’t be surprised if it was David, Jacqui, Carla, Rannie and Jeremy). There was a huge blogging convention going on and we were a day early.
The hotel was pretty ritzy - as I would imagine all hotels are pretty ritzy in Tokyo - and yet the lounge was a dull scene.. It wasn’t an ugly place, but we were all sitting at the bar, the rest of the place with its circular booths virtually empty. On a stage in front of a large bank of tinted windows (it was night so I’m not sure how I know they were tinted) was a pretty drab space-pop band backing up a lilting space-pop chanteuse. The whole thing was putting us to sleep, and the gin’n'vermuth wasn’t helping.
But then out of nowhere a trio of Japanese-beatnik-hipsters approached us and infected us with their enthusiasm.
“Hey, okay!” They moved and stood in a triangular formation, the leader had a bright white smile permanently etched onto his face. His companions, a male and a female, were both wide-eyed and grinning but exposing no teeth. “You guys are bloggers, right!”
“Yeah,” I said barely lifting my heavy head up from the bar, “how’d you know.”
“We can spot bloggers miles around. Canadian?”
“Right,” I responed, managing to sit upright finally.
“Aha,” he said, and he slapped his hands together. The lights around him seemed to be brighter than everywhere else.
“You want to come with us. We show you good time, Canadians.”
Everyone hopped off their stools except me. “Come see band. Good fun-time band, not boring stuff like this. Planet Smashers. Ska make you dance!” And behind him his two compatriots started kicking their feet skank-style.
“Planet Smashers? Here?” I perked up, and hopped off my stool. “Hey, ho, let’s go!”
And we went.
Along the way I was chatting with Jacqui (I think), asking her about Japanese money, because I had none so far, just our pretty Canadian bills. She explained to me that the Japanese had money similar to the Euro, only here they called it the “en” (the eeee en), and roughly converted one Canadian dollar was worth a 10en bit.
Don’t even say it, as I know quite well this is incorrect.
We arrived outside the club, which was actually inside a shopping mall. Everything inside was closed except for this one area with blaring music and a giant blue curtain in front of it. All the other stores had big grey slab walls erected in front for nighttime security (don’t ask me how that works ’cause I don’t know). Everyone went to the curtain, where a big burly but not quite sumo-sized bouncer stood at the entrance. He didn’t ask for id, he simply pulled the curtain back slightly and tapped everyone on the back as they went in.
I hung back noticing the ginormous bank machine on a nearby wall.
The thing was a grey tank, and had two terminals to service people… however I couldn’t read any of the signage as it was all in Japanese, which I not only can’t read but can’t even begin to comprehend, so feeble is my brain.
There was a very go-go-space-girl already at the one terminal, and I tried to observe her in action at the machine to see how it worked. She was just finishing up her transaction, pulling a large black card out from one slot in the terminal and putting it into another slot. She retreived her stack of oddly shaped bills (about 2/3 the size of our money) and pulled out her card. She saw me watching her as she packed up her shiny silver purse, and she looked scared. I smiled politely but the white stranger was perhaps even more menacing with a toothy smirk. She clomped away in her white vinyl platform knee-high laceup boots, while I was left examining this machine that only seemed slighlty less complicated than a console on the Enterprise.
My first step was to put in my bank card, thankfully the screen also was displaying in English… but its instructions past “insert stripup” were nonexistant. After my card and pin number were accepted, a long card, like the black one I saw the girl move around minutes ago, ejected from the machine. It was about 10 inches long and the width of a credit card… it had all these holes in it, as well as silver foil on it, and a bunch of tiny tiny switches. The silver foil was like that you would find covering a tray of Claratin or Dentine Ice, you would have to punch through it to get your pill/gum and in this case, there were all these obvious spots for you to punch through, as beside each of these spots were a number 100en, 200en doubling itself all the way to k96en (which I guessed was 9600en). I punched the 200 en and noticed all the little switches, which had Japanese characters beside them. Perhaps this was account information? I randomly pushed some of them, and they clicked when moved from 0 to 1 or vice versa. There was a slot on the machine that had a little flashing light so I supposed that’s where I was supposed to stick this horrendously long punch card.
It made some clicky-whirry-old-fahioned-processing sounds (like the grind of a dot-matrix printer) and then something flashed on screen. “PRESS YOUR OPTION” it said… although I had no idea of what option it meant. I looked around… there were buttons, dials, slots, switches, lights and the like everywhere. I randomly hit something, and the machine went ballistic with noises sounding like an electronic jackpot machine that just cashed out.
From above me a microphone fell down, and I became very confused. On the screen was a Street Fighter meets Bad Dudes style side scrolling fighting game. My head was about to explode but I figured I should play… but there were no joystics, and the microphone had little lights on it that flashed every time someone hit my avatar.
I said “Ach” into the microphone and my character hunched over throwing his arms in front of his face. I said “hit”, “punch”, “left”, “right”, “kick”, “punch”, “kick” until 8 seconds later my character was on the ground “dead” because it didn’t respond to anything I said.
Another short-skirted, ponytailed girl walked by. She stepped a little closer to me and the machine to see what was going on, got a look, giggled (her hand covering her mouth) and kept walking.
Oi.
A black card, like the one I had seen before, ejected out of a slot. Up close it actually looked like those Florida voting cards I’d seen on the news with all these punches taken out of it and a few “hanging chads”.
I put it into the slot like the girl did before me, and nothing happened, except my bank card was spat out. A few tuchscreen options then appeared on the monitor, nothing English though. The backdrop image was something akin to the baby in the sun looking over the fjord like on Teletubbies, only less childish but still ungodly bright. I touched one section and a whole new set of selectors appeared. I pressed another random selection and the whole screen went blank.
An exact duplicate of my bank card shot out of another slot, only this card had gold foil lettering on it, but it was still a TD green card.
It seemed like I’d been at this machine for hours at this point, when the guy who rescued us from the louge appeared behind me. I knew he was there because things were brighter all of a sudden.
He noticed my confused look and at the blank screen on the machine and laughed heartily. He said “Give me card,” with his palm up.
I gave him the new gold lettered card the machine gave me. He wiped the back of it on his pants and stuck it in a slot I didn’t even see. The screen went blue and he moved with the quickness as other cartridges needed to be moved from one place to another. It took him less than 10 seconds before he was handing me my money, and his last step was to put the gold lettered duplicate in a slot that essentially ate it and made a horrid grinding noise.
I was curious about the whole procedure but also extremely frustrated. I was going to ask my new saviour what the deal with the machine was, to get an explanation but, well, then I woke up… the vivid memory of defeat branded to my brain.
And I was looking forward to seeing the Planet Smashers in concert again.

dream 1 - catamaran
Our cat of cats, Bailey, has FIP (feline infectious peritonitis), or as we call it, kitty-SARS (as it’s also the corona virus, just a different, non-people infecting strain). Most cats transmit the virus via their saliva, touching noses, or touching feces (in a shared litterbox, say).
Bailey got hers, we suspect, from another kitten Emma once had that died a sad, painful, young death. We’re not entirely sure she’s got it, but we suspect it is so. When people who have kitties come over and pet Baily, we ask that they wash thier hands before they leave, and that’s usually enough of a preventative measure.
When I informed our new upstairs neighbours of our kitty’s disease, they got concerned for their cat… a little freaked out, in fact. “We better go get ours tested,” he said. I said it wasn’t necessary especially because they’ve never come in contact with one another or even the same objects (aside from the occasional foray into the backyard for some grass eating, Bailey is strictly an indoor cat).
So last night, I had this odd dream where the cat from upstairs was waiting by our door, only this cat look exactly like Bailey - black and white fur - only the black spot on her nose was on the opposite side. But I didn’t notice at first. So I let this cat in our house saying “Bailey, how’d you get out there in the hall?”
She meowed at me and walked towards the back of the house. The meow was slightly off.
“Bailey?” I said quizzically to myself like they do in the movies when they suspect something’s up but then immediately dismiss it afterwards.
As the faux-Bailey made her way into the bedroom, real Bailey emerged from the basement. I knew immediately my mistake. It was only a brief matter of time before they saw each other and god a little curious, making nose to nose contact. I raced to the back of the room and I tried to grab one of the cats, but I couldn’t. They kept avoiding me.
“I need to get the faux-Bailey back upstairs before she gets infected,” I thought to myself. But Bailey and faux-Bailey, now circling each other in giddy glee were getting ready to make contact, and I had one of those “which one do I shoot” moments (shoot ‘em both is usually my answer), and seeing as neither of them had one of those “parallell universe, evil-twin goattees” I had to randomly select one.
I wish I had a more exciting conclusion to that dream, but I don’t even remember there being a resolution. I think the other cat did come in contact with Bailey, and I did get her and take her back upstairs, but I didn’t warn the neighbours that she might have kitty-SARS because I’m a bad person.
dream 2 - insert coin
I remember the next dream I had, and I know it stemmed from reading Supercade, a book documenting the progression of home video games and the arcade from the early 1970’s to 1984.
Having immersed myself in these simplistic but addictive games, it’s only natural the dream turned out the way it did.
I was in my Grandmother’s garage, the one from her first house in Thunder Bay. In it however was all mine and Emma’s crap, as opposed ot my Grandma’s. I was cleaing it up a little when I heard a squeek, and looked down, and it was a little, fuzzy, grey mouse (ovalish, not quite pixellated but blurry, and no distinguishing features - no tail and just black dots for eyes). I stared at it for a second, and then it jumped, emitting a curt “squek” (not “squeak”.. sounded more like a cat toy) as it jumped… straight up, about four feat high.
Being unexpected this made me jump back a bit.
And then it did it again.
“SQUEK”
It jumped chest hight and back to the ground again, running around. I heard another “squek” and another small grey ball fell from the ceiling behind me to the ground. Now there were two running around.
I had in my hand a long flat object and I began trying to smack the mice, but they moved too fast.
Another “squek” and a third one fell from the ceiling onto my hunched over back, bouncing off and to the ground, just as “SQUEK” one jumped four feet up just beside my face. As that one fell to the ground I swatted at it, and it flew across the garage and into the boxes.
AHA!
“SQUEK!” One jumped. “SLAP!” I swatted it.
“SQUEK!” Another one jumped. “SLAP!” Across the room it went.
And as more little grey blobs fell from the ceiling and jumped up in my face, I swatted them too. I even tried swatting them as they came down from above… score more points that way.
The only thing was, the mice that I swatted were stunned, but they’d crawl out from under all the boxes of crap, and return to jumping four feet, sometimes bouncing off my chest, knocking my “ick meter” down a notch.
I knew I had to get brutal.
So I grabbed the arm/leg end off of a dismantled futon fram and began to squish like the dickens. I had to hit each mouse on the ground twice before they were dead, with each hid a little red pixellated circle of blood would appear on their grey body.
When I woke up, I was still in the “game”, and I was a little more than disturbed by the final round that I was “playing”.

Saturday was spent moving my sister and her boyfriend into their new house up in Barrie “snow capital” Ontario, a city where people are allowed to drive their snowmobiles on the side walk (and if they aren’t allowed, they do it anyway). Much physical exhaustion ensued, but, even still, I wound up having the waking hours of 8am - 2am that day (thanks to a rediculously silly train-wreck of an episode of Knight Rider).
When I rather quickly zonked out to sleep I guess the bite of that Starbucks Cappucino Brownie I had half an hour before took effect because, dude, my dreams were PHucked up!
I obviously don’t remember them all but what I do remember, I remember in quite vivid detail.
In the first dream my contact lenses were bothering me, as every time I would blink the lenses would shift out of place, obscuring my vision momentarily. I was at the house I grew up in in Fort William (south end of Thunder Bay), at some sort of intimate party being held in the living room by strangers.
I’d keep looking around the room but everything would only be in focus momentarily, until I blinked and it all blurred out of distinguished existence.
I realized the rental truck I had for the weekend was due back and I had to excuse myself from the party. My contacts seemed to stabilize once I got outside in the chill air. I hopped in the Ford Escape (the vehicle I rented to go up to Barrie) and headed for the rental centre. But as I started driving my contacts started shifting again, and once again the world melded into a blur of colours and brightness. If I leaned my head down, pressing my chin into my chest, and looking upwards, I could sort of see clearly, but I couldn’t drive like that. Then I noticed the chair we had bought (more on that later) was still in the back and I needed to get it out of the vehicle before I returned it.
I pulled a U-turn and started making my way back to the house I had left, advancing the vehicle by gunning it for short bursts then breaking hard.
I would briefly see clearly the shapes of humans standing on the side of the road or oncoming cars, and I’d try to distinguish them as my vision went blurry again. It was rough riding but I made it back okay, without hurting anyone, but the vehicle was going to be late, and I’d have to pay for an extra day. I threw those contacts out once I retreived them from my eyes with much complication.
This makes me wonder about something… anyone else with bad eyesight out there? Do you dream in clarity or in blurry vision land? Of this I am curious. Do the blind dream images or darkness. Do the deaf dream sounds or a mute world? Do the skinless dream of sensation? Ponder…
Dream II

(more…)

In reference to my dream I had the other night, Eva pointed out this dream analysis site and these are all the key indications:
Tuesday night I had a dream that I was Professor X from the X-Men,

To dream that you are a superhero, indicates your above-average talents, ideas, and abilities you may not realized you possessed.

and I was sitting in my wheelchair (this is pre-Morrisson X-Men for the comic geeks out there) in front of a large bay window, when all of a sudden

To dream that you or someone is handicap, symbolizes your own weakness and neediness. You are confronted with many challenges and need to utilize your full potential. Consider which part of your body is handicap and its symbolism. Alternatively, it suggests that you are becoming too arrogant for your own good. You need to be more humble.
To see or dream that you are in a wheelchair, suggests that you need to stand on your own two feet and stop depending on others. Perhaps you are feeling helpless. Alternatively, it indicates that you are literally letting others push you around. You need to start standing up for yourself.

a huge, red-gloved hand crashed through and grabbed me out of my seat. It was Magneto, and he was now 70 feet tall.

To see a giant in your dream, signifies of a great struggle between you and your opponents. This may prove to be a major and overwhelming obstacle for you to overcome. Alternatively, a giant may be symbolic of an issue or feeling that is dominating you.

He was using his powers of magnetism to keep my fillings stuck together, and thus I could not move my jaw.

To dream that your jaws are tight, indicates unexpressed angers and other powerful feelings which you are holding back.

I wanted to scream but could only do so through clenched jaw, and so I did. I screamed a muffled scream which eventually woke me up

To dream that you are screaming, symbolizes anger and fear. It is an expression of your powerful emotions which you have kept pent up inside.
If you try to scream, but no sound comes out, then is suggests that you need to immediately confront some situation. Perhaps you are unable to pinpoint your fears or feelings.

HMMM, there seems to be a pattern in there.
To me, it sounds like I’m… ANAKIN SKYWALKER!!!

Yeah, so, anyone familiar with King Missile?
No? Yeah? Maybe?
Years ago this guy sent me a mixed cd as kooky and crazy as any I’ve received (it was entitled “captain tracktor boatshow hour”) and it contained a King Miss song entitle “Detatchable Penis”.
Yeah.
You heard.
Kinda silly, but played straight. Very amusing.
So you see where I’m going yet, with the title and the what not?
Yes, in my dream last night, I had, mmmhmm, a detatchable penis.
I’m sure nobody actually has a detatchable penis (strap-ons don’t count) and I’m not talking about reversable penis’ here (a whole different conversation), nope, we’re talking about my penis, regular and fully functional, only detatchable.
When detatched… well, we won’t go into those details… all questions asked will be answered though.
So I have this detatchable penis, and I think in my dream it was a new development, as I was worried that once I took it off and reattatched it, it wouldn’t work anymore. I was so stressed about it, I actually woke up(!) to check to see that my bits and pieces were actually still a part of the whole (and, yes, thank-you, they were).
The strange thing is, I don’t think this is the first time I’ve had a detatchable penis dream before, but I think this is the first time I’ve fretted about it so much.
But just what function would a detatchable penis serve anyway?
Mr. Bobbit, would you like to answer that one?