Carol-Anne, I have asked you to keep the children quiet today! And for Christ's sake, get them out of the gaaaaaaaarden!!!!

I gave my mother a bit of a fright the other morning.

(Actually "bit of a fright" might be an understatement...)

You know how sometimes you have a really vivid dream right before you wake up in the morning, and the stuff happening in the dream kind of mimics stuff that's been going on in real life at the time, so when you wake up it takes you a minute before you can separate the dream from real life? Like for example, I often have dreams in which I find and purchase super exciting stuff like Baroque-style gowns, epic shoes, or extremely rare and expensive My Little Ponies, and wake up thinking I actually DID find and buy these items for a low price. And then when I wake up properly, I get kind of depressed when I realize it was only a dream.

The other morning, when I went back to bed at around 5.00 after a trip to the loo, I had a dream that my colourist, Greg had died. Aside from the fact that he is the one and only person on the planet whom I trust with colouring my hair, I adore Greg as a friend. We're both kind of snarky and sarcastic and love to gossip whilst I'm getting my hair did. We've even gone to see the Pogues together. So naturally, in the dream I got quite upset about his passing. Like REALLY upset. And because sometimes in dreams, your reactions to things can be quite a bit more extreme than they would be in real life, I was like FRANTICALLY upset. (I don't get frantic, even under extreme stress or in life-threatening situations.)

Most of the time after these types of dreams, it does take me quite a while to sort the two out (more than it probably takes normal people, I think). But the other morning... Perhaps it was a result of the sleeping pills? Or just a side effect of having epic sleep problems in general? Whatever the reason, that morning when I woke up again at around 6.00, my brain refused to separate the dream from real life ever after the normal waiting period.

My brain also failed to shake the frantic-epic-panic-attack that Greg's death had caused. I was wide awake, I knew I had just had a dream about Greg's death, but I COULD NOT figure out where the dream ended and real life began. That made the panic attack worse.

So, naturally:

You know when something sudden and startling shakes you out of a deep sleep, you get that heart-stopping FEAR? That particular kind of terror that is only caused by nightmares.

Yeah I'm pretty sure Mum almost had a heart attack.

While her brain was struggling to (a) wake up properly, (b) make sense of what I was saying, and (c) respond in the appropriate fashion; my brain decided to figure out how to separate the dream from real life.

Funny story:

This one time, a bunch of us stayed up at my friend, Number2's house in Upstate New York. His parents were away, so we were having the craic wandering around in the wilderness, dressing up in Number2's mother's old 70's and 80's clothes she had stashed away in the attic,

and drinking ourselves into a stupor. Even my friend T was drinking, and she NEVER drinks.

We retired to bed at around 2.30/3 in the morning--T and M in the spare room, S downstairs on the sofa, and me in with Number2. Myself and Number2 stayed up until like 4 in the morning finishing off the two bottles of wine we had stashed in his room and trying to convince the old and quite contrary VCR to play Harry Potter. (I'm amazed we didn't keep anyone else up with the racket we were making trying to get that VCR to work before we eventually passed out.)

I had a really bad dream. I was locked up in some kind of hospital, and awful horror-movie type things were happening all around me, and then someone started screaming. Like SCREAMING--horrific, blood-curdling screaming. It was so horrific if woke me up.

Except the screaming didn't stop when I woke up.

My brain actually cannot recall the sound of the screaming. It was that terrifying.

I tried to wake Number2, but he sleeps like the dead and so after shaking did not work, I punched him in the arm several times until he woke up and then made him go out into the hallway first to investigate. The screaming was coming from the spare room, and the more awake and alert I got, I realized it sounded like two people screaming. To be precise, it sounded like both M and T were screaming.

S was first to the scene, which still amazes me as she was downstairs, in the dark, ALONE, and yet she still rushed TOWARDS the scariness. By the time Number2 and I got there, the screaming had stopped and S was in the bedroom doorway asking T and M what the heck happened.

T was sitting up in her bed, the blankets pulled up to her chin, with a look of confusion and terror on her face. M was standing in the closet looking kind of dazed.

(Now before I go on, I should perhaps mention that M has a long history of intense sleep-walking and sleep-talking. (Sleepovers at M's house were super fun in high school.)

[His exact words--none of that was fabricated.]

I feel bad for M's mom. There was a while there that she kept finding all of M.'s pillows at the bottom of the basement stairs every morning for like 6 months. And then there were the times she'd be sat in the living room watching tv, and M (whose bedroom was on the other side of the living room wall) would start banging on the walls and screaming swear words.

Oh and my personal favourite:

The time M knocked his bedroom door clean off its hinges. And that didn't even wake up him up.)

T, still shaken from the whole incident, said she had half-woken up to M wandering around the room in the dark. He wandered into the closet and then started banging around and shouting "ARE YOU SERIOUS? ARE YOU SERIOUS, T?!?!?" etc., and so T not being properly awake, she got frightened and started screaming, and then M started screaming louder.

I'm guessing that's when I woke up.

M.'s version: "I don't know what was wrong with T, I was just getting up to go to the bathroom."

He managed to say that with a straight face, while still in the closet.

S managed to calm T down and the rest of us--dazed and shaken and still kind of confused--went back to bed. The next morning, once we were all fully awake, we discussed the events of the night until all of us were doubled over and sobbing with laughter.

That incident still makes me laugh quite a bit, actually.

Statcounter is really fun. It shows you more detailed info than the Blogger stats (although the downside is that there's a limit to how many records it keeps, unless you pay for it). I am greatly amused by some of the ways in which people have arrived at my blog when searching the internet. I think my favourite ever was "nude man bears explosion". And A LOT of people search for images of women in electric chairs. And baby bunnies. It's a bit disturbing how many people search for baby bunnies. And recently someone read my entire blog over the course of 2 days. I'm not gonna lie--I felt immensely flattered. :)

So, that's two egg mayonnaise, a prawn Goebbels, a Hermann Goering, and four Colditz salads.

This survey is from Tempest:

1. Have you ever talked your way out of a ticket (bad grade, punishment)? If so, how?

Oh goodness...adding "bad grade" and "punishment" just made my answer potentially several pages long. I've always been one of those @ssholes who refuses to abide by silly things like rules when they interfere with my own personal wants and needs, and my general attitude is such that I tend to get away with this sort of behaviour about 98% of the time. High school is probably the best example--the teachers and other various authority figures all eventually gave up giving me punishments like failing grades or detentions. By the end of senior year, my homeroom/history teacher was actually starting class 15 minutes late to accommodate my morning schedule. And the vice principal and I came to an "agreement" in which I never had to serve detention ever (because by then I had accumulated so many detentions that if I actually started showing up to those detentions, he would have been stuck after school every day of the week for the foreseeable future). 

Not many teachers had a problem with this, either. One who did was the evil troll-hag that lurked in the basement of my first high school, the one who tried to give me detentions for "non-uniform" shirts and shoes pretty much every day. I stopped showing up to those detentions fairly early on and the Troll-hag complained to the principal, Sister Ellen. I heard from my fav teacher, Sister Linda, that apparently Sister Ellen told Troll-Hag to just forget about it and leave me alone because "there's just no point."

(≧∇≦)

I think my fav ever though is how I passed geometry sophomore year.

Mr. Crucio and I did not get along. This was when I still attended the Catholic high school, and in that school, the teachers rotated cafeteria monitoring. (We didn't have monitors in the public school, and I'm not really sure what the administrators of the Catholic school thought we would get up to if left to our own devices...) Most of the teachers on monitor duty just hung out with the lunch ladies, or occasionally the "cooler" teachers would mingle with the students. (I liked it best when Sister Linda monitored; she would sit at my table to eat lunch.)

But Mr. Crucio took his cafeteria monitoring duties very seriously. On the days he monitored us, it went from lunch time in a school cafeteria to lunch time at a maximum security penitentiary.

He actually would not allow us to leave the cafeteria.

Which was totally stupid, because a lot of us liked to occasionally go to the library during lunch (read: sneak outside to smoke; I'm sure there were good students who actually went to the library, but I was not one of them) or go to the school store and buy candy. Or I dunno, go to the bathroom. Or leave the cafeteria early to stop at our lockers. None of the other teachers ever stopped us from leaving the cafeteria during the lunch period. Just Mr. Crucio.

The simple solution to this was to leave the cafeteria via the back door. Sure he'd yell and stuff when he saw you leaving, but by the time he shuffled all the way across the cafeteria, you'd be well on your way upstairs.

But after a few weeks, Mr. Crucio caught on to this and started monitoring from the middle of the cafeteria, where he could cover both exits. That still didn't stop me from leaving as soon as his back was turned, so eventually it became his personal mission to make sure Mich stayed in the cafeteria.

Game on, b*tch.

I never understood why everyone else was afraid of "getting in trouble." I mean what the heck could the teachers actually do to you? They weren't allowed to use corporal punishment. Sure Sister Clara had ignored that law, but I had never encountered any other teachers that hit us. So what else could they do? Yell at you? Oh man, I'm scared now!

-_____-

Mr. Crucio got more and more intense at cafeteria monitoring to the point where he was pretty much circling my lunch table like an effing shark to make sure I stayed there. Eventually, I got fed up with this. I attempted reasoning with him. I just wanted to go to the library; none of the other teachers had a problem with students leaving the cafeteria before the end of the lunch period; none of the other lunch monitors said we weren't allowed to leave; etc., etc. But Mr. Crucio would not be swayed. Even when his monitoring-partner (my gym teacher) tried to argue my case ("For God's sake, just let her leave."), he would not budge.

And so Mich lost her temper. In front of half of the school.

Ever watch that episode of Fawlty Towers with the Germans?

Yes, ladies and gents--I stood up on the table, gave Mr. Crucio a sieg heil, 

and then did that walk right out of the cafeteria with him too stunned to even chase after me and yell.

The next morning I received a notice that I was suspended from school for a week. (My thoughts: SCORE, week-long vacation! :D)

That afternoon, I received a notice that I was no longer suspended for a week, but instead would have a three-day in-school suspension.

The morning after that, I received a notice that I would have a one-day in-school suspension, with a handwritten note at the bottom from the principal: "PLEASE just stay in the cafeteria when he's there."

(I thought I had saved that notice, but after an intense search of my bedroom I have come up with nothing.)

Throughout all of this, Mr. Crucio was my geometry teacher. I suck at math in general, but I suck twice as bad at geometry. That plus Crucio's blind hatred of me resulted in a big fat F at the end of the year.

So the day before the year ended, I did what I always did with the teachers who were threatening to fail me--paid them a visit and talked them into giving me a passing grade. Mostly I just had to do this for math and Spanish and sometimes science, and it usually took no more than 10 minutes. But--not surprisingly--Mr. Crucio did not want to give me a passing grade.

It took all of my restraint not to come right out and call him a MORON.

Mich: "You are aware that you are the only geometry teacher in the school, yes?"

Mr. Crucio:

Mich: "Do you really want to have me in your class AGAIN next year?"

Mr. Crucio: "Jesus..."

And that is how Mich got a D in geometry.

2. Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers. Why the heck would he do a thing like that?

- OBVS so I could cook them into a delicious stir fry.

3. You hear strange noises and run to your neighbor's place to find out what's going on. She's clutching a marble lamp, and her husband lies dead on the floor. You've seen suspicious bruises on her before, but she doesn't have any now. What do you do?

Casually mention that lye and hydrofluoric acid can do wonders. And that as far as I know, no one ever does any intense hiking on this one particular trail at the Ramapo Mountain State Forest. The trail isn't even actually marked....

Oh yeah and I didn't see nothin.

4. Andy Griffith, Dick van Dyke, or Lucille Ball?

Luuuuuuuuuuuuuuucy!!!

5. Is the glass half empty or half full? What on earth is in that glass, anyway?

Either way, WHERE THE HECK IS MY WAITER because obviously I need a refill. Allagash White, and pour it CORRECTLY if you please.

6. Lots of casual friends or a few close ones?

Idk.....depends on my mood.

I received two lovely packages this weekend, and shall now gush over the contents of said packages. I am not doing this to show off, mind you--this is so the angels who sent the packages are getting proper thanks and appreciation.

I got Peri's package on Friday.

There was some lovely manicure things; lotion, which says I should use it sparingly but which I have been using every half hour; some delicious colours of embroidery thread; a lovely pair of earrings; a little dog-money-squirrel thingy in a little house; a fun turtle craft project; and a FANTASTIC diary.

...so much win...

Then Jeanne's package arrived on Saturday:

I got some awesome new books, a cigarette rolly thingy (1st attempt = epic fail, but sure try try again), some yummy lip balm, Hello Kitty ribbon I've been wearing in my hair,

a set of pink bracelets, and this GORGEOUS set of knitwear:

You gals definitely spoil me far too much. <3