Haunted sun

2003-09-12 - 10:18 p.m.

I finished reading Shogun several days ago, but I just got around to writing a review of it today. That book is a must read for everyone. Tonight at dinner my aunt's boyfriend was asking me about my trip to Japan and making fun of how in Japan you have to take your shoes off to go indoors and how the tables in many restaurants are only a few feet from the floor and I was totally reminded of the barbarian crew in that book. Not that I particularly enjoyed having to take my shoes off all the time or having my knees cramp and feet go numb during dinner, but still.

My grandfather on my mom's side has been complaining about chest pain for years. His family doctor had him do a treadmill stress test a few years ago and it came back negative so she has been treating him for GERD. He's been on every H2 blocker and proton pump inhibitor available in the U.S. and still his problems have persisted. His doctor finally sent him to a gastrologist for an endoscopy. When he got to the gastrologist though, the gastrologist listened to his history and decided not to do the endoscopy. Instead the gastrologist sent him to a cardiologist for another stress test. This one came out poorly and the cardiologist is sending my grandfather to San Francisco to have a cardiac catheterization done on Friday. I'm very familiar with this procedure and if I were hearing that it is being done to some random patient in the hospital I would say it's no big deal. These are routine. But I'm still scared. It's my grandfather. Complications are rare, but they do happen. And what if they find something bad? My grandfather asked some friends of his to take him to the hospital and stay with him there and my mom is upset that he didn't ask her. To me it makes sense, they are retired, she has to work. But she's upset and she doesn't want to go. I convinced her that we should go be there. I want to hear everything first hand from his doctors instead of hearing it translated through my grandfather. I'm scheduled to work Friday, but I will cancel it. The fact that he isn't being rushed into the procedure is comforting, but the fact that he is being sent to San Francisco to have it done is not.

Anyway, tomorrow is race day. My grandfather (from my dad's side), my aunt, my cousin, and my aunt's boyfriend are all here. My aunt and her crew are most enjoyable in small doses. We went to Hometown Buffet for dinner. I never feel like I eat enough there for it to be worth the money. We stayed there for nearly two hours. When we got home we discovered that someone had left the hot water running in the bathroom sink the whole time. Great. Then my aunt showed us pictures she took during her trip this summer. She had three photo albums full. Mostly her descriptions were something to the effect of, "It doesn't really show in the picture but..." and here we are looking at a picture of blackness. Anyway, it doesn't matter. Tomorrow, instead of running in the race, I'm going to play chauffeur. My aunt's boyfriend is running the 12k, but this year everyone else is doing the 5k.

Last night I had a dream. It was fairly vivid and mostly unpleasant. I typed it up first thing when I woke up this morning and it took me nearly an hour. I understand if you don't want to read it. There's nothing else in this entry except the dream so feel free to end here if that doesn't interest you!

In the dream I was at some sort of a camp, although I don't know what for, exactly. It was similar to when I went to Asilomar in May. The camp mostly consisted of people I knew from college, but there were also some people I knew from high school there. We were all staying in cabins along a dirt road that sloped down a hill. The cabin I was assigned to was old and rickety and it happened to be at the very top of the hill at the end of the road. I took all of the stuff I had brought to camp to the cabin and set it down on my bed. I had a bag full of clothes and my backpack full of books and my laptop. Also in the room were two of my cabin-mates who happened to be two people I didn't much care for on my high school soccer team, Chelsey and Jenner. They were very stuck up in high school, and in my dream I completely ignored them. I sat down on my bed and pulled my laptop out of my backpack. Suddenly, the whole cabin quaked and creaked and slowly started sliding down the hill. We all froze, hoping that by not moving we could prevent the the cabin from moving. But it was already set on its course and it was picking up speed, right down the middle of the dirt road between the other cabins. That's when I saw it. At the end of the road was a cliff with a dropoff many hundreds of feet high. As we started to tip over the edge I heard Chelsey and Jenner scream. Out the window I could see a shelf in the cliffside about fifteen feet below the top. I grabbed my backpack in one hand and jumped out the window. My backpack was unzipped so everything had fallen out during the jump and the shelf was only a few feet wide so I didn't dare move lest I fall off. I watched the cabin shrink to a small dot as it fell and then I heard a faint crash as it hit the bottom. I thought Chelsey and Jenner were still in the cabin but then I heard them screaming my name from up top, apparently they had jumped out a window before I had. I yelled up, "I'm down here!" They were relieved to know I wasn't dead and then asked me, "How are you going to get back up here?" I looked around me. To my right was the dropoff, to my left was a wall of rock, and above me was rock also. I couldn't stand up. I saw that the shelf continued on in front of me and sloped slightly upwards. So I wormed my way along the shelf until I came to a place where there was a hole in the rock above me and through it I could see daylight. It was a tight squeeze for me to get through that hole and I had a tough time of it, but I made it. When I got to the surface Chelsey and Jenner were waiting for me, but there was no one else around. We walked up the road to where our cabin had been originally and saw that it had already been replaced by a new cabin made out of metal. The camp director was there, Dr. Kehoe, a professor of mine in pharmacy school. We walked up to him and he said emotionlessly, "Oh, you're alive. I thought you were dead." I yelled, "We almost died! I lost my books, my computer, and all of my clothes and I came within inches of falling off that cliff!" He said, "Hmm, that's too bad." "I have nothing left except the clothes I'm wearing!" I fumed. He just shrugged and turned away. I started crying with frustration. What was I going to do? Then Doodle found me and asked concernedly, "Euc, are you OK?" "Yeah," I sniffed through my tears, "but I lost everything." "Don't worry," she said, "we'll get you some new stuff." She put her arm around me and steered me away from the cabins. We walked up a hill through some trees and then along a sidewalk. The sidewalk passed over a creek and I stopped to look down at it. There were scantily clad people dancing in the creek, trying to impress each other. I walked down a path towards them for a better look. Apparently they were on some sort of reality show called "The Match" and I was a participant also. I didn't understand how the show worked, though. They stopped dancing and a new game started. The male participants had to swim the back stroke down the creek blindfolded without running into anything. The creek ended up having a whole bunch of channels and things, making it relatively maze-like. When this game finished we all ran off to a clearing in the forest to play another game. This was a card game of sorts and I didn't know how to play this either. There were six people playing. The Mole and my brother were among them. There was also one other person I recognized at the time. The other two were strangers to me. The Mole started by playing a card. The cards all had bits of landscape on them. More specifically, cityscape. Every time a card was played the city would come to life and something would happen. Next was the person I recognized and then one of the strangers, and then it was my turn. I had no idea what to do. The Mole and my brother were the major contenders in the game, the rest of us didn't stand much of a chance. I didn't know what to do so I hesitated and the Mole yelled, "Play a card!" "I don't know how!" I yelled back, "What are the rules?" My brother, who was sitting right next to me, said kindly, "Figuring out the rules is part of the game, we can't tell you." So I sat there staring at my cards and staring at the cards that had already been played trying to see some kind of pattern. The Mole yelled again, "You are taking too long! Play!" and my brother said back to him, "This is her first time, give her a chance." Slowly I began to see how things worked, I picked a card and played it. Not too much happened, but apparently it was acceptable. Then it was my brother's turn. He played a card and suddenly a huge battle broke out between the people in his section of the city and the people in the Mole's section. It died down and the other stranger played. Then it was the Mole's turn again. When he played his card all of his troops withdrew to a certain point and regrouped, looking deadly fierce. Then the guy I recognized played and quite a bit happened, followed by the stranger who didn't do much. Again it was my turn. This time I had an idea what was supposed to happen. I played a card and amazingly, I got sucked right into the cards as if I was part of the action. I saw the guy I recognized slink away in the darkness and I followed him. I had a gun in my hands. I saw him climb up onto a building and a followed until I was directly below him, then fired my gun up at him. Apparently it wasn't a very powerful weapon. He screamed and cursed and yelled down, "Stop it! I have a chance this game! Nobody has ever beaten your brother or the Mole before, but this time I have a chance! Let me go!" But I didn't want to, I had him in my sights. He ran into a building and I followed him. But I lost him somewhere along the line. I began searching through the rooms unsuccessfully. Suddenly, out of nowhere, he leaped out at me. I was taken by surprise and he hit me in the stomach with a pain stick and left it there long enough to "kill me" in the game so I was out.