aubli

because i said i would...

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once there lived a mermaid who was inexplicably born into the middle of a desert. the spirits of the desert were baffled at it, and did not know what it was, but waited to see what it would do. and the mermaid did not know what she was either, but she dreamed of oceans and seas and great expanses of water.

she told the spirits of the desert about her dreams, and the spirits replied, "this is a wasteful thing to dream of. a place where the entire ground is covered with water? you are an extravagant and wanton creature." but still they watched it, to see what it would do.

as time went by, the mermaid's fins grew dry and wilted, and she began to cry, because this is a reflex of mermaids. left in an barren place they cry themselves rivers upon which they escape to the sea. the mermaid did not know this, but she cried nonetheless, and the water began to puddle around her.

the spirits of the desert are always thirsty, and at this they drew closer. but when they drank the water and felt its taste they drew back in surprise.

"this water is salty, and salty water is worse than no water at all! now we are thirstier than before... what a horrible creature you are, to make such a thing!"

and the spirits whispered to the winds and the sands, and the mermaid's tears soaked into the ground and evaporated into the air, and were soon gone completely.

and so the mermaid lay there, and her tail grew dry and scaly, and writhed weakly upon the sand. and she wondered why, try as she might, she never seemed to get anywhere at all.

but every so often, deserts have flash floods.

and that is all...
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it's a presumptuous thing to do, to tell stories about other people. it isn't what i set out to do, either, yesterday when i was trying to calm down - but that's what happened and this story made me feel better. is something i've been thinking a lot about lately - how people's rights and feelings intersect, and just how honest a person should be when most any important truth is necessarily subjective and usually involves people besides oneself. (oneself? is this even a word? peh.)

and i'm not entirely sure why this story made me feel better, either. i hope it doesn't come off as depressing to other people, because if it does i think they're ending the story too early... i think i like this story myself because it lets me express, in some indirect and not wholly articulate way, how beautiful someone is...

it's normal to feel foolish, i guess. and probably to be foolish in one's attempts as well.

i think i'm trying to consciously learn the language of the subconscious - not only how to understand it but how to formulate simple useful sentences - ask where the restroom is and let it know that i'm a foreigner in these parts and really only know english. i don't know what exactly my motivations are. part of me thinks i would like to downsize my subconscious, to tell it, "you've been replaced, i've already trained your successor, you're off the payroll - move on out." but it would be really and truly nice if i could engage my subconscious in some kind of open dialogue, and we can figure out what we're doing. and trying to learn its language is at least a gesture of respect, i would think. perhaps if i was better at lucid dreaming... who knows?

sometimes i think that i am a true weirdo, and probably try too hard. i'd rather try too hard than not hard enough...

in other news, i got a free sandwich at work and i'm saving it to eat later. it looks really, really good. its name is "vegtarian sandwich with fresh mozzarella, spring lettuce, tomato, balsamic vinegar, olive oil and pepper." yay, free catered darden food!

ha, i keep adding to this... forgot to mention my actual dreams of late - dreamed last night that it was a commonly accepted procedure, almost a rite of passage, for girls to have a part of their brain removed sometime after puberty so that they'd want to eat less. i was living at home in my dream, and my mom had scheduled such an appointment for me. it was one of those expected and routine kind of things, so i thought nothing of it. but as the hour the doctor was supposed to come drew nearer, i became more and more apprehensive. i felt like i was being a real baby about it, just like i did in real life when it was time for me to have my wisdom teeth out and i began to wonder if perhaps i'd die while under the anesthetic. so i was trying to get a hold of myself and just go through with it, because it was perfectly natural and correct to have this thing done, but something kept bothering me. i know i wasn't pleased by the idea of something being taken out of my brain, and i asked the doctor (a man) just what they were going to remove, and he explained that by taking out a particular piece of my brain i'd become more gentle and empathetic and be less inclined to eat meat because of it...

in the end, even though i knew that i was being completely unreasonable, i flatly refused to go through with the proceedure, and my mom and the doctor were a bit surprised at me but acquiesced, in the confused but exaggeratedly sensible way reasonable people do when faced with another's passionate but nonsensical fears.

when i woke up and regained the knowledge that having a piece of your brain removed is not normal and not happy and not good(!), i was so incredibly glad that i hadn't caved into societal demands... i can hardly describe the confusion and the relief.

and all my other dreams were of metal gear solid. complete with the background music and the little exclamation points that appear over the guard's heads when they spot you. believe it or not, i actually woke up with the "game over" sequence playing in my mind, the ending music in my ears.