by audrey -

Summer sleep

…is always a little disturbed. Maybe it’s the heat. Maybe it’s the fan that you left on because of the heat. Maybe it’s weird karma floating around from last week’s solar eclipse.

Whatever it was, I had a really weird, really distinct dream last night.  It all had the feel of a happy Ray Bradbury short story. Based in the real world, with eerie fantastical elements, but completely safe at the same time.

The parts I remember went something like this…

I was headed back to my high school, to try out, for all things, the track team. It was the same sort of dark, pre-dawn warm almost-summer morning the kind I remember from the relaxed end of swim season.   I was carpooling with my non-swimmer carpool buddy (real person who failed to recognize me at another’s friend’s wedding a few years ago), and somehow we ended up on the highway, and then in Thailand, drinking frosty fruit things, on a very large boat. More like a moving building, really.

We were there, apparently, to get our fortunes told. While waiting for Fortune Teller #1, who was an elderly white mother of my nonexistent friend Michelle (my brain is very detailed when making stuff up), we stopped by what I assume was a more junior fortune teller.  This fellow was a bit like the goofy neighborhood boy in Coraline. (That one’s name, by the way, is Wybie. And there are a surprising number of Wybie <3 Coraline videos online, but no real clips. Odd.)  This one decided that out of my (now numerous) friends, I should get my fortune told last, because, you know,  mine was special, so there might be a lot to talk about.  Best not to rush the imaginary soothsaying.

The track team tryouts?  Oh, well, we’d figure something out later.  Maybe we’d be back in time. You know how it goes.

After waiting what seemed a moment (magic of dreams), there was only one person left between me and the guy who, um… was now wearing thick circle goggles.  Anyhow, the one person in front of me was a bookwormish Real Person, also from high school.  I remember hearing that she went to Berkeley, and haven’t heard from/about her since.  Odd that she’d appear here.  Anyhow,  as she moved her  away from the table, it was finally my turn!

Taking a good look at this floppy fellow, with a smile and head cocked to one side…I was kinda curious to see what my fortune was gonna be.  Really curious.

…But then the bread machine that I’d carefully set the night before beeped, and the real world smell of fresh bread reminded me I had a 7:30 am meeting to be getting to.

Maybe the moral of the story is, don’t wait in line?  Ditch the old high school non-friends if I see ’em, because they’ll just get in my way?  Alas.  Maybe I’ll try eating super spicy food and sleeping with AC off today.

This kinda weirdness happens to me when seasons change too. I feel like I usually forget those, though.

by audrey -

Friday night at the office

It’s a party I tell ya.

Par-tay.

Sometimes, when dealing with selfish sucks-at-life-ers, I wonder what it would be like to be such a person.  To be completely clueless and awkward and destructive?  Like a wrecking ball walking through the catacombs or something.  What would it be like, you know?  What goes through the mind of a jerk?  (Slightly less than nothing, is the likely answer).

Picture 88

Tomorrow I get to watch fireworks.  ^__^  That’ll be nice.

Glowy lights, friends, and food always make things better.

Things like sitting at work on a Friday night, writing a blog post.

I suppose I could…work.  Alas,  the mind has wandered far, far away…

So far away, I signed on to Facebook and updated my profile picture.

baroooo

Dire times, my friends. DIRE.

by Audrey -

Archery ＝waiting

Last Sunday was the eighteenth annual Tokyo area one near-far target shooting competition.  You get eight arrows at each at a 60m(far) and 28m(near) target.

Having never shot further than 28m before, my fellow archers were a little concerned for my score (read: their safety).  They kept saying stuff like “Oh, you need to raise the bow more so that your arrow reaches the target.  Maybe you should raise it extra high just in case.”

It was kind of cool, because the tournament was at the Tokyo Budokan, which is a big complex hosting tons of Japanese martial arts.  As we waited for the venue to open at 9am, there was apparently also a junior high karate competition.   Another bonus of using the Budokan was … air conditioning!  Made the waiting and watching so much more pleasant.

In Japanese martial art-time, everything starts ten minutes earlier than they say it will.  You might think things start at 9:30, but really…you’ve forgotten to factor in the time it takes to line up before the 9:30 bow-in and announcements.   After scrambling to get my stuff (bow strung, arrows in the arrow box) in gear a few times, I’d learned to (gasp) be early.   “Hurry up and wait,” floats through the mind quite often.  Goodness knows it never actually starts late.

Anyhow, at the end of the day, I hit a record of ZERO arrows out of 16.  A personal low.  But I was air conditioned and hadn’t really expected to hit any of my long distance arrows, so I ended in a surprisingly unflustered state of mind.   The awesome rationalization machine that is my brain even said I did rather decently, considering my arrows were nicely clustering together rather than scattering, like they sometimes do.  Duplicability is a good thing.