Me vs Overly Realistic Dreams

Pretty much everyone dreams. I mean, don’t quote me on that. I didn’t fact check or anything, but I’m guessing it’s mostly true.

Husband rarely remembers his dreams, while I have them pretty much every night and can remember them, for the most part, in more detail than I usually care to. I can’t always coherently articulate them, but I know what happened.

Sometimes this is good….I learned to fly and some hot famous guy was offering me ice cream and other euphemisms for sex, and other times it isn’t…..I’m trapped in a small cabin in the woods surrounded by bears my only means of escape is through a maze full of dinosaurs. True story.

Unfortunately, the latter seems to be more often the case. 

As far as I’m concerned, I have more than my fair share of nightmares that wake me up in a panic, end in a murder, involve alien takeovers of the world, or have me discovering severed heads in a fridge in the basement of a haunted house where I’m being chased by all manner of unpleasantness. I usually don’t sleep well.

There have even been a few dreams that would have made amazing story lines for a book or movie….now if I only had the patience to write more than a few hundred words at a time. And dialogue. I suck at dialogue.

All this said, the real pain in the ass dreams are the ones where you’re not really sure if you’re awake or not. Where you can’t be 100% sure if you are driving a rally car or if what you’re driving is actually your unimpressed cat, who is being used as a makeshift steering wheel. It’s the dreams where you are just asleep enough to be nonsensical, but still be fully committed to whatever it is you’re doing.

To date, I don’t think I have ventured so far down this path as to enter the hazy world of sleepwalking, but regrettably, this doesn’t mean that my own sleep difficulties haven’t impacted Husband to some degree.  And while driving the cat was the first recorded incident of my acting out while being only sort of awake, it was by no means the most dramatic, although I imagine that cat would have disagreed with me.

There have been a number of nights where I’ve woken up and been convinced something has happened that hasn’t. For example Husband  did not actually take up smoking or move in with a gay dance instructor, so it probably wasn’t necessary to yell at him first thing in the morning. I see that now.

And then there was the night a few years ago when I woke up, started screaming at the top of my lungs (I’m sure the landlord living upstairs LOVED that), threw all the blankets off the bed and sat on my pillow shrieking incoherently.

Husband, who at the time was sleeping like a normal person, jumped out of bed looking thoroughly confused and tried to get me to use real words to describe what had happened. All I could manage at the time was to screech and point at the jumbled pile of our blankets at on the floor at the end of the bed.

Being the remarkable (and extremely tolerant) man that he is, he began shifting through the mess of sheets looking for….what? Finally he looked at me (I was still curled up on my pillow stammering and pointing like a fool) and said “I can’t find the spider. It’s probably gone now anyway”

Small cat, big spiders

Back story…..our basement suite where we lived at that time had HUGE fucking spiders. Big like small cats. I put one through the washing machine once and was a bit concerned that it wouldn’t die. It did, but that’s beside the point.

I stopped dead and looked at him like he was the crazy one in this situation. “Spiders? No. There were snakes coming up the bed. I threw the blankets off so they wouldn’t get us.”

Yeah. Snakes. A fuck ton of them.

The weird part for me is that and as soon as I said it out loud to him, I knew it was insane, but at the time it was incredibly real. It’s like my brain had temporarily forgotten the part where I woke up. My brain is an asshole.

The next time this happened I was ready for it. There I was lying in bed and one of those big ass spiders came crawling out from under my pillow and went right under Husband’s.

I think the rational response to this would have been to scream at the top of my lungs again, wake Husband, and let him deal with it….I will take care of normal spiders, but these things were more like 8 legged tanks on methamphetamines, and no thank you.

But no. I’d been here before, and there was at least a 50% chance that I was imagining this, and the hulk-spider wasn’t real. But could I take that chance? 

Maybe. It was going AWAY from me after all. And who knows, maybe it wasn’t real. Or it was and it was plotting to eat me and my cat. You can't just go to sleep after that…what if it comes back. But I didn't want to wake Husband for no reason….

And on and on this internal struggle went.

Finally I arrived at what I determined was a perfectly sound and logical solution. 

I got out of bed, got a pair of socks, and shoved them under his pillow.

I have no idea what I thought this would accomplish. I’m guessing my sleep-addled brain determined that I would take away the spider’s little spider highway, and it wouldn’t come back. The socks would stop it. It never once occurred to me that a single pair of socks shoved under a pillow was in no way a foolproof spider trap, especially when it only blocked one direction, but fuck it, I went back to sleep.

The next morning Husband was rather confused as to why there was a pair of socks under his pillow. My explanation did nothing to alleviate that confusion, and there was no spider to confirm my sighting. To this day I truly don’t know if I dreamed it or if the spider was there and simply outwitted my one way sock trap.  Creepy.

Happily to date there have been no more of the uber-realistic dreams where you are fully convinced that there is a flesh-eating wombat crawling towards you dripping in unicorn tears, and the only reasonable response is to yell at it in broken Japanese. I still have incredibly weird and scary dreams, but at least I wake up….and know I’m awake.

Me vs Online Self-Diagnosing

I tend to be a bit of a hypochondriac. I get the flu, and I’m probably dying of consumption. So I’m not coughing blood yet, but I’m convinced it’s coming. I get a cramp, well that probably means a hernia and will likely result in a trip to the doctor (which is surprisingly difficult to do in a small town) and a terribly painful procedure to fix it, and then I’ll probably get an infection which will eventually lead to my untimely death. Or it’s cancer. Or I didn’t drink enough water today. 

Whatever.

Suffice to say, it’s possible that I jump - just a teensy bit - to the worst possible conclusions about my family’s health. Unfortunately this doesn’t stop me from eating terribly, getting too little sleep, and 

getting less exercise that I should, but nobody’s perfect. Don’t judge me.

The difficulty that I’ve faced in the past is that while I become ridiculously paranoid about non-existent ailments (no, you’re right, I probably don’t have leprosy), I don’t relish going to the doctor on a regular basis. I don’t want to be THAT person. And while I know it’s unlikely that I have encephalitis, some part of me just wants a more qualified person to tell me that.

~Enter the enchanting world of online self-diagnosis websites~

At first glance, these seem like a great idea. You have a concern? Look it up and the sites will tell you if it’s benign or something that you should probably see a professional about. Great!

The reality: Oh, you have a stomach ache? It could be overeating, constipation, gas, or you might have STOMACH CANCER. You have a headache? Might be stress, you need to get more sleep, but it’s more likely a BRAIN TUMOR!!!!

Stub your fucking toe? Yeah, you have toe cancer now.

It’s pretty much reached the point where Husband has vetoed my use of these websites if I’m ever, you know, curious about a lingering cough or what a possible case of the plague might look like. This prohibition includes my health, my kids, and the pets.

Did you know that a change in your cat's appetite can mean they’re dying of kidney failure? You do now. Or they're full. But it's probably kidney failure.

The tipping point came when I totally convinced myself that our baby had cystic fibrosis.  Why? Because he wasn’t gaining weight and I made the critical error of looking that up online.

Failure to thrive is an actual problem, and he actually did have that. He didn’t gain any weight to speak of for the better part of 2 months, and his hands turned a creepy colour blue at random intervals. This was legitimately concerning. That said, there are a multitude of non-CF-related reasons why this could have been happening.

If you start at the beginning of the list of causes for lack of weight gain in infants, what you get is that your baby may be tired and is falling asleep before he gets enough milk(http://www.babycenter.com). 

This is perfectly reasonable and completely straightforward. 

This same list follows with reasons like incorrect formula preparation (I may be paranoid, but I can read), a cleft palette (pretty obviously wasn’t the problem), and not enough milk production on the mother’s part (yeah, that’s never been my issue).

Nearer the bottom of the list is where they keep the stuff of nightmares….cerebral palsy, lung problems, heart defects, and good ol’ cystic fibrosis.

I have no idea why I decided he had cystic fibrosis (perhaps it was that the cleft palate and illiteracy reasons were obviously not applicable). He was otherwise healthy and thriving in every way…just really, really small for his age.

Now to be fair to my fixation, we did get him tested for a number of health issues, as a child that doesn’t gain weight is having some sort of problem. The paediatrician, however, did look at me like I was touched in the head when I mentioned my fear of cystic fibrosis.  

This was....messy

In the end it turned out that he just wasn’t eating as much as he needed to. We figured this out by increasing his caloric intake and literally feeding him butter. Yes, our doctor recommended butter. Once we started him on more solids and he decided that was better than breastfeeding, he put on the pounds. Well, ounces.

Basically, the online pseudo-doctor is now totally off limits for me. If I am really desperate, I can apply to Husband to do the online research for me and weed out the parts that are totally insane and completely unrelated to what is actually the problem. He provides a rational set of eyes, as compared to my worst case scenario goggles. It means I’m less panicked, and he doesn’t have to talk me down off the proverbial ledge. He alone likely saves our health care system thousands of dollars in unnecessary doctor visits.

So to summarize, I am no longer allowed to use the internet to look up anything that could be in any way related to the health of any member of my family, human or otherwise, because if you read far enough down the page, everything is cancer.

My guess is that if I had a fish I wasn’t particularly attached to, Husband may make an exception to this rule, but that hasn’t happened yet. Probably for the best.

Me vs The Blanket

My son has a blankie. Actually it’s a faded pink floral sleep sack, which is distinctly green because it was washed with something that should never have been washed. On a related note, I now have greenish socks that were once white. Also underwear, and a shirt, and at least one dish towel. All green.

This blanket scares me. Actually it terrifies me. It's insane that my child's happiness is held within the confines of an off-colour piece of floral fabric.

My kid loves this stupid sack. I have no idea what started it, but one moment it was his sleep sack (read: baby sleeping bag) and the next moment I wasn’t allowed to put him in it at night anymore, leaving me without a way to keep him warm at night, and with an additional item to keep track of on a daily basis.

He drags it everywhere he goes, and is inconsolable if he realizes he wants it and it isn’t at his fingertips. I’ve even had to leave work, drive home, and bring this blankie to daycare because he spent the entire morning losing his shit. As soon as the blanket showed up, the world was right again. I, on the other hand, was hangry because my lunch break was spent on a blankie-retrieval mission.

This was the day that I first realized how much the blanket had taken over my life. I now effectively took orders from a glorified rag.

And there rests my panic. I can’t get a duplicate of this bloody thing. If it ever goes missing, I’m pretty much up shit creek without the proverbial paddle.

I have friends who were really smart and bought 3 or 4 of the same blanket that their kids attached to, so they could swap them out. If one goes missing, bam, here’s another one. Need a third. Done! I, on the other hand, have to plan ahead 3 days in advance to a time where I can get the blanket away from him just to wash it. 

If this one gets lost, I can’t replace it. I have no idea where it came from in the first place, and I doubt I could ever find another one and then recreate the hideous grey-green colour that it has become.

And so I hate it. And I’m afraid of it. Or more specifically, of losing it.

But watching him drag it around while sucking his thumb is pretty much the definition of cute. 

And so I soldier on, ever vigilant to the blanket’s continued survival.

Me vs The Churidar Kurta or How I Got Stuck in a Shirt

Once in a while it’s nice to dress up. You get all fancy and glamourous, and pretend for a night that having crackers ground into your sweater isn’t the status quo. But I think I like the idea of getting dressed up far more than the reality of it….especially when the dressing up comes at the cost of my dignity.

I was invited to the wedding of one of my coworkers, and I intrigued because it was going to be a big (ludicrously big) traditional Indian wedding, and I had never been to one of those before. Suffice to say that the event itself was not quite what I had imagined, but I’ll leave the trauma of the actual wedding for another day. Getting dressed for it was tragedy enough on its own.

Because it was a traditional wedding, we (my co-workers and I) were all asked to wear traditional Indian clothing. Right, because I have a ton of saris just waiting for the opportunity to be worn. To be fair, I was kind of excited because I find saris beautiful, and I (misguidedly) figured that if I had to dress up, it might as well be something different. I tend to be one of those people who has one black dress that makes its way to all the parties. I change shoes. Sometimes.

My dreams of sweeping fabrics, and intricately dangerous fabric tuck jobs just waiting to come undone were quickly dashed. You don’t wear a sari to the temple. Why? No idea. I was just told not to. Apparently I needed to find myself a churidar kurta.

I could not properly pronounce the word, let alone be trusted to accurately select something that represents whatever that was supposed to be.

After having the word written down for me…my hooked-on-phonics version was not correct…I hit up google for help. It was very little help. The variety of styles and colours was staggering and I really wanted to avoid committing a cultural taboo by showing up dressed like an unknowing bar wench.

I kept trying to ask my co-worker for direction, but she looked at me as if I was asking about the differences between a ball gown and a bath towel, and the conversation would inevitably end with “don’t worry about it”. Right. I’ll be the white girl at the Indian wedding accidentally dressed as a prostitute. 

Luckily, my daughter’s daycare provider was an amazing Iranian woman who loaned me a couple of traditional outfits to try on for the event. She told me that I would not look like a hooker. This was reassuring.

I took the stuff home, got kids into bed, and decided to see how the outfits looked. I put the first one on; it was a sack. Actually it was a white and green whale-like sack. Next.

There were a couple of contenders, but the one I really liked was a cute little burgundy number. It was a bit smaller than the others, and I had my fingers crossed that it would be flattering. 

The pants fit as well as could be expected I guess. I can best describe them as ballooning silk pyjama pants that taper in to your ankle with a drawstring for a belt. Not something I would normally go in for, but hey, try something new.

The shirt on the other hand fit much better. It was awkward to get into, as it had one of those hateful side zippers that doesn’t allow the shirt to come fully apart, but just gives you the illusion that you’ll fit into it. There was beautiful gold embroidery, sequins, and a hint of shimmer. It really was beautiful. And it fit. More or less.

Actually less.

Really, really less.

I tried to take it off.

It wouldn’t come off.

I couldn’t get my arms above my head to get out of it. I struggled, tried to use gravity to my advantage….nothing. The churidar kurta had me in its vice-like grasp.

If you’ve ever been in a changing room and had this happen, you know the panic that accompanies being stuck in clothing. It wasn’t my outfit, I couldn’t just cut it off (though I seriously considered it anyway), and I didn’t really want to live in it. To make matters worse, Husband was working out of town so I had no one at home to help extract me from the silk nightmare.

I tend towards claustrophobia, and yes, this totally counted. I panicked. And then I panicked some more. None of that helped. The shirt didn't give a fuck about how much I wanted out of it.

So I called my mom.

Please understand I hate this
picture and am sharing with you
only so you can grasp the unflattering horror
of the whale sack

After she stopped laughing at me, she agreed to come over to help rescue me from the shirt that felt far more like a Chinese finger trap than an article of clothing. When she showed up at my door, it took her a solid 15 minutes of laughing at me some more before she ACTUALLY helped release me from shirt-prison. Thank God she didn’t have her camera with her, or I’m sure she would have created some sort of photo documentary about it.  

I’m also sure she laughed all the way back home.

On the day of the wedding I wore the unflattering whale sack. The picture here doesn't do it's terrible-ness the justice it deserves, but this photo was the only one I had....probably because I ran screaming every time a camera was brought out. 

To the whale sack's credit, at least it allowed me to move. Had I let vanity win and wore the burgundy outfit...which sadly I almost did...I don't think I would have been able to survive the duration of the wedding. I imagine it would have been like sitting for two hours in the cuddly embrace of a hungry boa constrictor. 

That said, dying in the loving embrace of said boa-shirt may have been preferable to attending the wedding itself. If only I'd known that beforehand, I could have saved myself one hell of a headache...

Me vs Crossing the Border

I’ve always lived within driving distance of the USA border. Not, like, spitting distance, but close enough that I can drive down there and make poor financial decisions when it comes to how many pairs of shoes I “need” to buy from the discount store.

I like shoes. Piss off.

I like going cross border shopping because it’s cheap, and I can get more for my money down there. I know this doesn’t help our economy, but realistically when I can get the identical product for $73 less, I’m going to do that.

But these savings don’t come for free. There are obstacles. Most notably: the border crossing.

Every time I cross the US/Canada border, I feel like I’m a criminal. There is no rational reason for this; I’m not, nor have ever been, involved in criminal activity. I can’t begin to imagine the set of balls you would need to even consider smuggling something like drugs across the border.  To me, this seems like a completely insane thing to do.

Regardless of my lack of criminal history, every time I come to a border crossing I am convinced that they will search my vehicle and find 2 kilos of coke that was snuck into my car when I wasn’t looking.  This will inevitably land me in jail, I will have to become a prison wife to afford myself some protection, and I will be forced to get a prison tattoo and learn to make moonshine in the toilet using old ketchup. This is what goes through my head as I wait 35 minutes to meet with the border guard. Every time. It sounds terrible. I blame Hollywood movies about unsuspecting drug mules.

All of this paranoia is particularly bizarre because it’s not as if I’ve ever had an even remotely bad experience crossing the border. In fact, just the opposite, my crossings have been good, if not a little weird.

My first odd crossing came when I went to Seattle with friends. We were heading down for a rock climbing competition, and a girlfriend and I were in one car, and the guys we were with were in the car ahead of us. They went through with no problems, and when the guard came up to us he started out friendly, asking normal, guard-y questions. He was surprisingly cheerful and started joking with us about what was in the trunk. Hahaha, dead bodies? Hahaha, fresh food (because apparently that’s a thing). Hahaha, endangered animals? Yes, I totally have an elephant back there, it’s doing nothing good for my gas mileage.  Hahaha, drugs? Um, nope. Hahaha….are you sure you don’t have any drugs back there, because if I were the guys in the car up there, I would have given them to you girls, hahaha. Um, still no.

We were pretty sure joking about having drugs in our car was not a good tactic, but this guy was really into what he obviously thought was an extremely funny line of questioning. I had a bit of an internal struggle….do I deadpan the situation and risk offending the guy who apparently thinks he’s some kind of comedian, pissing him off, and getting searched, or do I play to his joke and risk getting pulled over and searched anyway if he suddenly didn’t think my admitting to carrying drugs was amusing.  

I aimed for middle ground….uncomfortable laughter (oh border guard, you’re so clever, tee hee), 

mixed with denial (no sir, no drugs here….which was actually true, btw). I think that joking about drugs at the border is about as safe as joking about bombs in an airport. Just don’t.  We made it to Seattle.

Coming back up into Canada through the border is another joy. Please declare everything. Fine, I have no immediate issue with that, but when they stare at you accusingly as you it’s a bit disconcerting. A friend of mine has a method for avoiding that which actually seems to work. She knits.

Apparently there is some unspoken rule that people who are in the middle of knitting a scarf will not lie to a border guard. Seems legit. Everything she said to the guard was acknowledged politely and accepted without question. She didn’t even need to produce receipts. I don’t knit, but I will make it look like I can next time.

The most recent and most absurd crossing is what I’ve come to refer to as my “Next Time” expedition.

To complete our new house, I’d purchased all of our lighting from the US, and unfortunately this meant I would have to make a trip across the border to pick it up from the delivery depot. I asked a friend if she would like to come along for the ride, so the two of us and my 1 year old piled into the van and off we went.

When we got there, we realized that my friend had forgotten her passport. She had a birth certificate but no secondary picture id with her. The guard, who was really intrigued by my right-hand drive van, decided that her birth certificate plus her Costco membership would suffice. Ok.  He looked at her very seriously and said Next Time make sure you have your passport. Of course officer.

Then it was my turn. I did have passports for myself and the baby, however I had neglected to bring a letter from Dad saying that it was ok to be taking the child across an international border. The border officer looked at me very seriously and said Next Time make sure you have a letter from the father. Of course officer.

Under no circumstances should we have been successful, and yet off we went. Drive, pick up $800 of lighting, drive some more. Back to the border to return to Canada.

The returning guard asked for the inevitable declaration of goods. Well officer, I have $800 of lighting fixtures for my new house. Great, please take your receipts inside to pay duty.

Wait, receipts? Shit.

What I had completely neglected to think about what the fact that all of it was bought online by my husband and all the receipts were safely locked away in his email, which I currently had no access to. 

Could I look more like I was trying to smuggle drugs into Canada????

I went inside to plead my case to the customs officer, who asked me to estimate the value. After looking me over, probably estimating my drug mule potential,  he looked at me and said Next Time make sure you have all your receipts with you.

Good lord.