Imagination Station

Don't worry, kiddies, I am not suffering from writer's block. Well, that's good news to me, anyway, but I think that's just the weird artist in me. Either way, I've just been super busy and super exhausted for the past two weeks.

I knew it was going to be metaphorical murder on my body as soon as I found out I would be starting work again. The fact that my sleeping schedule was all out of wacky sorts was only one part of it. You'd think that nearly 11 hours a day of sitting would be easy, but it's really not. I wake up between 5:30 and 6 am every morning, drive between 45 minutes to an hour to work, sit at my desk until 4:30 pm, then drive home, which usually takes a little over an hour, depending on afternoon traffic. When I get home, I have to fight to stay awake past 8 pm. I have started this "stay healthy" regimen, where I exercise when I get back to the house, but it's getting harder to stick with it.

Now, this is not to say that I dislike being employed. Au contrair, mon ami. I didn't realize how much I missed having to get out of the house. Plus, my entire office is full of incredibly nice people with whom I have a lot in common. And of course, there's the benefits. Thank God for Uncle Sam and his state employee health care.

Anyway, with my above stated sleepiness comes overactive imagination during sleep. I had a very strange dream the other night involving a particularly sexy Viking in a lush fur coat. Okay, I have to describe it as I saw it, and I'll just go ahead and warn you now: it's like a really weird, indecipherable arthouse film. So, I'm in the ocean next to this wooden boat, and the water is up to my shoulders. I'm basically looking like a mermaid, only I'm wearing clothes. Whatever. Moving on. I look up and the sail has started to smolder, even though I haven't seen any lightning and it's only drizzling. My gaze then moves towards a Viking (who looks oddly familiar, like a character actor that you always recognize but can't place where you saw them last) who is staring down at me with this serence expression on his face, and I ask him, "It's going to burn, isn't it?" He smiles and says, "Of course." Suddenly, the water starts to rise from beneath me, and I'm nearly to the deck level of the boat. The Viking extends his hand to me and helps me aboard his doomed ship, saying something along these lines: "Before I die ... I love you." Then he starts to cry, and he kisses me, briefly stopping in between smooches to say, "I love you" and cry some more. And then I was woken up by the sound of my cell phone ringing. (I'm determined to use this in some way in one of my stories, but I'm unsure as to how I'm going to do that. But I will do it.) My dreams have been weirder than that, but that's the most recent one that I can recall.

Well, I'm going to have to cut this short, seeing as I have to get up in a few short hours to hop on the treadmill and then go to my first day of training. Wish me luck!