The Zen of Sleeping, or, Not just another dream post!

It's been months since the Little Drummer Boy on the 8th floor woke me in the wee hours. Let's hope this was a fluke and not a return to form, yes? I've gotten terribly sensitive to such disturbances as I've grown older and it's not usual for me to spend a half-hour lying awake in bed debating the pros and cons of confronting the noisemakers rather than just putting a pillow over my head and going back to sleep. (Actually, I'm already in the habit of sleeping with a pillow over my head, thanks to my heinous previous set of neighbours.)

Of course, however hard it is to change yourself, it's still almost invariably easier than trying to change other people. So I've been trying to use my Zen to desensitise myself to upsets. At one point, when the drumbeats were coming few and far between, I tried to visualise my mind as the metaphorical reflective pool the great Buddhist masters are always going on about. Each thump was like a stone being tossed it: It sent ripples across the surface without disrupting the deep, clear water underneath.

It didn't really work, but at least it improved my dreams.

Because my sleep was so fitful (perhaps Thai ice coffees at 5:30 p.m. are not a genius idea?), there were a lot of them, they were rather lucid, and the line between sleeping and waking was blurred. Basically, I dreamed a series of those dreams were you "wake up", only to find you're still dreaming, but they felt so convincing that I was trying to find ways to prove they were true. For instance, I knew before going to bed that I had a dime in my pocket, since I gave the rest of my change to a classmate at dinner. In one dream, I found two coins and put them in my pocket, thinking that counting my money later would tell me if the incident had really happened. In a later dream, I found more coins and added them; then, even later, it occurred to me that I wear briefs to bed, so how could put anything in a pocket? (Then, when I really woke up, I thought, What was I thinking? I never wear briefs to bed except when I have or am a houseguest.) And so forth.

In any case, at one point I was standing in backyard of a childhood home. There was a large muddy puddle on the ground (not coincidentally, right where we used to flood the yard with the hose for fun). I realised it was a proxy for my monkey mind and tried to still it, but there was a noisy car idling in the alley. The roaring of its engines became more and more threatening and I realised that it was turning about and preparing to run me over. But I told myself not to fear and not to flee. Fleeing would cause me to wake up in terror and I didn't want that, so I stood there and stared it down as it hurtled toward me. My only regret is that I closed my eyes right before "impact". Whether it drove right through me or melted away just before running me down, I proved to myself that it was all an illusion.

Now if only I could do that in real life!

What good can come out of Missouri?

Today I discovered that a raunchy song I learned to sing back in college, The Moose Song, is set to the tune of an English ballad called Villikens and his Dinah. How did I discover this? I was listening to Johnny Cash sing a comic Western ballad called Sweet Betsy from Pike and I realised the tune was eerily familiar.

Johnny tells us in his spoken-word preface that the song concerns a young couple from Pike County, Missouri. That sent a shiver up my spine: It shares a border with the site of my adolescent exile, Lincoln County. (A landmark for out-of-staters: The largest port in Pike County, Louisiana, is only about fifteen miles downriver from Hannibal.)

My memories of Pike County are solidly positive. I saw my first opera there, we used to go eagle-watching at Lock and Dam #26 near Clarksville, and I'm pretty sure it was in the county seat that we all got shut up in a hotel room with cable and far too much sugary soda while my parents attended some event. Good times!

Corruption of Catholic youth: Progress report

I'm not sure if I told y'all about the time when AWI was only a few months old and playing with multicoloured plastic beads. I rearranged them into proper Roy G. Biv order before handing them back; I then pointed out to my sister that the rainbow was a gay pride symbol. Her response: "Give it your best shot."

Looks like (a) my influence is far more insidious from 300 miles away than I could ever have imagined or (b) my work's been done for me. I've already mentioned his "purse" (i.e. the pretty bag he totes his Hot Wheels around in). But here's a list of new signifiers observed in the course of one short weekend:

• Coordination After he grabbed a liquid yoghurt (which his mother likes to serve dissolved in milk), he told his mother he needed an orange cup, to match the orange yoghurt container. She gave him red, since that was the closest available, and he trotted into the playroom with that and a teal sippy cup of juice. He then went through his immense box of Little People, found the figure with the closest matching red and the figure with the closest matching teal and put these atop the respective cups.
• The Princess We then preceded to tear apart the playroom and the living room in order to help him find "my p'incess", a female Magus in blue with a gold circle.
• Underwear At one point, when his mother was getting him into fresh pants, I pointed out his Spongebob Squarepants underoos. My sister said, "He wanted Dora the Explorer, but I figured pink was something we didn't need to deal with."
• The Princess II Later in the day, he was seen cavorting with a silver plastic tiara on his head.
• Fastidiousness At one point, his mother offered him some chocolate chips. "Hold out your hand!" she told him. "But I need them in a bowl!" (Only when she threatened him with no chips at all did he take them in his palm.)
• Dolls His favourite seems to be a butt-ugly baby girl from Spain in pyjamas. (Her little cap is constantly falling off, forcing him to ask for help pulling it down over her bodacious brunette curls.)

Sure, he's only four, and he still has the fearsome abyss of heterosexual indoctrination (i.e. kindergarten) ahead of him, but as of right now it's looking like I can coast.