Lost, rocks and ebay
Lost is my favorite television show. I am addicted to it and on Wednesdays when I know there’s a new episode on that night, it feels like Christmas is coming and I can’t wait. The show reminds me of the video game Myst that Eli and I played years ago. We got so hooked on the puzzles and secrets and SHEER FRUSTRATION OF IT ALL that we stayed in playing it over an entire weekend trying to win. (We eventually had to go online to get some help to finish because we were getting ridiculous and exhausted over a stupid game and we wanted to get on with our lives)
But the thing about Lost is that I’m not sure it’s good for me. Because I’m on medicine that affects my brain, a side effect I’ve come to accept is nightmares. It’s a trade-off for being able to function in my waking life better than I have in at least a decade that I have horrible, scary dreams that cause me to wake up terrified in my bed at least three times a week.
And the dreams are all Lost-based. I don’t dream about the characters. But in my dreams, I am playing by the rules of the island. I find myself in situations where I need to hide to avoid capture. And I am always dressed in red or bright pink and I’m trying to hide myself in a landscape of earth tones. There is a security system waiting to kill me if I do things like use electricity, say certain words, or wear certain colors (this may be a little bit of The Village influence sneaking in) And there are always The Others. They are the dream monsters. I never see them, yet they are waiting to capture me.
I realized this morning when I woke up in my bed drenched in sweat after a terrifying dream that seemed to last forever where I was wearing a bright red shirt and trying desperately to hide myself under a fallen tree to avoid The Others, who were on a hunt in the woods searching for me, that perhaps I need to watch a little more Sesame Street and a little less Lost.
I haven’t been updating my journal lately because I’ve been busy. Spring has come and it seems stupid to be at my computer when I could be outside with Joey enjoying the nice weather before the next snowstorm. Joey loves to be outside, and I don’t have to come up with complicated games for us to play when we go out. He prefers to just run along the sidewalk and touch all the parked cars along the street. This used to always be a fun and harmless game, until Joey discovered two rocks in the backyard that have become his hand anchors that he must hold whenever we go outside. We keep them on the front steps, and as soon as we walk out the door, he goes right for the rocks, picks them up, and clutches them in his hands before taking off for another round of car touching. But the thing about touching cars when you have rocks in your hands is that you’re no longer gently touching the neighbors cars with your soft baby fingers, but smashing rocks against them and the neighbors don’t dig that. So I have to be on alert for rock smashing and all the redirecting gets exhausting.
On Thursday Eli took the day off and we all went to the park. Joey held his rocks for the whole two hours we were there. He held them on the slide, he held them on the swings and he banged them against the seesaw. He tried to share one of his rocks with another baby but as soon as Joey put it in his hand, the kid dropped it like it was a rock. Joey then picked his rock up off the ground and walked away, unwilling to spend another second on a kid who can’t appreciate something so special and magnificent as a rock from the backyard. When it was time to leave, Eli put Joey on his shoulders and Joey banged his rocks into Eli’s head the whole way back to the car. And on the way home he fell fast asleep in his carseat, still clutching his friggin rocks. We may need to substitute the rocks for something softer before someone gets a concussion or one of the neighbors comes after us for a new paint job.
Over the last week I’ve also put a ton of stuff up on Ebay and started to organize for our yard sale. I had no idea Ebay was such a time-consuming pain in the ass. I spent two nights organizing, photographing and creating attractive written descriptions of baby stuff. And the thing I’ve learned about stuff is that it is easier to not accumulate it than it is to try to get rid of it when you realize you don’t want the shit anymore.
If we ever have another baby, we are going to create his gear out of things we already have lying around the house. I could rig a swing out of a sheet, some rope and a spare cardboard box, a bouncy chair out of a couch cushion and a few elastics, and I could make a kickass exersaucer by cutting a few holes in a big Tupperware storage container from the basement and sticking rattles all over the top with electrical tape.
