Category Archives: Dream

15 of my Favorite Feelings

Posted on June 11, 2018 | 6 comments

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Today, in honor of a youtube video I watched once and quite liked, I decided to write down 15 of my favorite feelings.

  1. That feeling when, in the middle of some stressful or generally unpleasant situation, I get a cup of tea and a little space of time where I don’t have to make any decisions.
  2. The feeling of someone gently French braiding my hair
  3. Splashing around barefoot in a summer rain. (Unfortunately, as an Oregonian, I almost never get to experience this wonderful feeling)
  4. When I’m working on a project and suddenly get this uncanny tunnel vision, where I’m so absorbed in the project that I have no concept of time passing.
  5. Public speaking. Oh my goodness. There is nothing like just getting to stand there and SAY the things I think, all at once, in a logical progression, and having everyone just sit there and listen. Amazing.
  6. Being in places or situations that are so bizarre and uncanny that it feels almost like a dream. Such as exploring a huge mostly abandoned mall in Thailand, or having a traffic jam in front of our quiet country home.
  7. Swimming in warm lakes.
  8. Hanging out with a group where it’s easy to just belong, swapping interesting ideas like they’re friendship bracelets.
  9. This is one of the weirder ones, but I have really vivid dreams, and every once in a while I’ll have a musical dream. They are fantastic. Lyrics just occur to me, and everyone around me dances with perfect choreography, and I have a good singing voice, and music magically plays in the background. It’s awesome.
  10. When I pick up a book that I know nothing about besides the title and cover picture, thus having zero expectations, and it ends up being 110% fantastic.
  11. Getting snail mail.
  12. Acting in a skit or a play and hearing the audience laugh.
  13. When I secretly admire someone, and then they pay attention to me.
  14. Sipping McDonald’s iced tea while on a sunny road trip.
  15. Seeing places or things in real life that I’ve only ever read about in books.

I’ve been thinking about #4 recently, and I’ll likely explore it more in a blog post later this week. But in the mean time, please tell me: what are some of your favorite feelings?

6 Comments

Posted in Dream, Lists, Random, Thoughts About Life

MOP April 23: Basic Complaints About a Semi-Bad Day

Posted on April 23, 2015 | 2 comments

Today had all the benchmarks of a good day. It was a Thursday, aka, the day I have my most interesting classes. I had no homework due. I even ran into an old friend from the ROV club.

Unfortunately, despite all those promising features, I had a bad(ish) day instead.

First of all, I’ve been having anxiety/heart palpitations lately, so I decided to stop drinking caffeine. The trade-off was that I was tired and headachey all day.

I got to school at 8:00 am because Ben had a class, but my first class wasn’t until 10:00. Normally I use these morning hours to do homework, but today I went back to my car and fell asleep on the back seat. I had some blankets in the car.

Unfortunately I had bad sleep paralysis. In case you have never experienced this terrible body-alseep mind-half-awake state of being, let me walk you through my thought process as I lay there.

My phone is right beside my head. Let me pick it up and see what time it is.

*Pick up phone*

Okay. Now I see the phone in my hand, but I also see the phone still lying beside my head. There can’t be two phones, so one of those phones is a hallucination.

How can I test the phone I’m holding to make sure it’s real? Maybe I can bite it.

*Bite phone*

Okay. The phone was soft and bite-able, which means it isn’t real, which means that I hallucinated picking up the phone and biting it and it’s really still by my head and I really can’t move at all. If I throw this fake hallucination phone, it won’t make a “clunk” sound, because it isn’t real.

*throw phone. Hear no “clunk” sound.*

I finally woke up for real, and picked up the phone by my head, and looked at the time. It was only 9:35 or so, but I didn’t want to go back into the sleep paralysis, so I got up instead.

It was cold and drizzly and I’d dressed in a t-shirt, skirt, and sandals, thinking it would be sunny like yesterday. WRONG! I took my laptop out of my backpack, and in the free space I’d cleared, I shoved in a fleece Tinkerbell blanket and a pair of socks.

Now, even though walking to class would be cold, once I got to class I could put on socks and snuggle up in a blanket.

I had planned to post, today, about being a ponderer. About how I ponder everything so much that I live half my life inside my own head and have trouble shutting off the thought stream when I need to, like, sleep. But then I had a headache and didn’t feel like posting about that after all.

I will, however, tell you about something I pondered today. I pondered blankets in class. I have never seen people take blankets to class, but it seems to me a perfectly logical thing to do, as long as you’re not in a stadium classroom with a huge blanket that spills over into the seats beside you. Blankets are warm and cozy in a stark and cold classroom, and they make you miss your bed just a little bit less.

So why don’t people take blankets to class?

It’s weird how we have these rituals for how a classroom is supposed to operate, and everyone kind of naturally picks up on all the implicit “rules.” Since no one brings blankets to class, people pick up on that, and don’t take blankets to class.

I like to think that when I break those unspoken norms it’s because I’m counter-cultural or don’t care what people think about me or whatever, but often it’s just because I’m too lost in my own head to pick up on some of the implicit rules.

Anyway.

After school I went home and went straight to bed, this time setting my alarm clock so that if I DID get sleep paralysis I’d have something to jolt me out of it. I slept for a good two hours until I had to get up and make supper.

The point of this whole ramble is to say that when it came down to it, I was tired all day and had a constant headache, and the last thing I wanted was to try to come up with a clever post, even though yesterday I had TWO post ideas bubbling in my brain. One was about being a ponderer, and the other was a further rant about culture and humanity.

Cleverness will have to wait. For now, here’s a complaint post to tide you over. Ta da!

Until next time, you can enjoy clever MOP posts over at Life in the Shoe and Dreaming of Dragonflies, the blogs of Mom and Jenny, respectively.

2 Comments

Posted in Dream, Stories

MOP April 13: The Unwinnable Contest

Posted on April 13, 2015 | 17 comments

I was the one who came up with the idea to do a Month of Posting. Me, Emily Sara Smucker, the Girl in the Red Rubber Boots. But it wasn’t long before I was merely riding the coattails of my mother’s and sister’s successes.

First, Mom posted about discrimination and religion.

Then, Jenny posted about Disney-inspired clothing.

Then, Mom posted about how to raise perfect children.

Suddenly they were getting thousands of hits and I was just getting, well, significantly less.

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Fortunately for me, I have a life outside of blogging. One in which I do really cool stuff like stand in front of artsy walls.

Sometimes I think that if I just put more effort into blogging I could really make something of myself. I could learn to take pictures, and post the rants in my head that would be shared over and over by people who agreed with me, and write click-bait headlines.

But I don’t. It’s an unwinnable contest to create disposable content. I’ve decided it’s not worth the effort.

Also, everyone says that successful social media is all about creating a “brand,” which is not appealing to me at all. Too much stuff is branded already.

Instead of posting “THE TOP 10 REASONS MENNONITE GIRLS SHOULD STAY SINGLE UNTIL THEY’RE 25,” I’ll post about stuff like this:

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I had a beautiful dream this winter.

(And by dream I mean normal night-time dream.)

In the dream, many people I knew worked or went to school in Eugene, and every morning we’d all gather in a coffee shop for 10 minutes or an hour or however long we had. And we’d just chat and drink coffee and hang out before starting our day.It wasn’t very profound. As far as dreams go it sounds quite boring. But to the lonely girl of Eugene this seemed like an exceedingly wonderful thing.

After I began going to school in Corvallis this spring, I told my friend Sarah Beth about the dream. She actually lives near Corvallis, and she immediately said, “hey, that sounds like fun! We should do that!”

So Wednesday morning she and I and our friend Ashley met at a coffee shop in Corvallis called “The Beanery.” We’re making this a weekly thing, so if you live in the Corvallis area and want to hang out with us please feel free!

The shop is on the corner of 2’nd ST and Washington Ave. and we meet at 8:15 am. Approximately.

I’ll be the one in the yellow coat.
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17 Comments

Posted in Dream, Thoughts About Life

The Traveling Dream

Posted on January 30, 2011 | 1 comment

I was traveling with my family. We were in the Nairobi airport. Our plane was about to leave. It was taxing along, and we had to run to catch it.

Alongside us came one of those luggage carts. The people had to throw our luggage into the plane as they both drove along. But we made it, and so did our luggage.

We settled into our seats. Some time passed. And then, something terrible happened. The cabin lost pressure, even though they had not anticipated it, and yellow oxygen masks dropped from the compartment above.

I knew what I was supposed to do. I was supposed to pull the mask towards me to release the flow of oxygen. Then I was supposed to put on the mask, using the little tabs to adjust it. And, most importantly, I could not help my little sister Jenny, who sat beside me, until I had finished putting on my own mask.

Well let me tell you. Those oxygen masks were terrible. They were not like the ones the flight attendants show you at all. No, airplanes had upgraded, and so we had these heavy duty little yellow masks with black tubing. It took a lot of force to pull the mask toward you to release the flow of oxygen.

Jenny couldn’t breathe. But none of us could help her because we HAD to do our mask first and we were all struggling to pull the mask towards us to release the flow of oxygen. Also, her mask had caught on something. It was awful.

But in the end we all lived.

When I was assured that we were all going to live, I looked out the window. We were still at the Nairobi airport. We hadn’t even left the ground.

The airplane began to taxi towards the runway. But suddenly the big metal doors began closing! Oh no! They were going to smash our airplane!

(Just for the record, once in one of the airports Amy and I were going to go through big metal double doors when they began closing. It was kind of weird, like we had done something wrong and were being denied entry. It turned out that they were automatic doors but apparently the image was pretty traumatizing since it appeared later in this dream of mine.)

The captain radioed the people in control. “Emergency!” he said, “the big metal doors are closing on us! Emergency!”

I was glad he said the word “emergency” because once I heard this pilot who was in deep trouble and radioed in and they ignored him because he hadn’t used the key word, which was “emergency.”

The doors began opening back up, but they weren’t quite fast enough. The wing of the plane was hit, and the airplane caught on fire!

We all had to evacuate the airplane. We were halfway out when I realized I hadn’t gotten my backpack, but that was okay because KLM airlines always reminds you that in the event of an evacuation, you are not to take anything with you.

I had the book “Northanger Abbey” in my hand, though. I looked at the pink and purple cover and knew I would be all right because I had something good to read.

The End.

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Posted in Dream

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