I have one 16 oz Budweiser in my house and I have almost finished it. I am contemplating putting on a sweatshirt, socks, and shoes, and going down to the corner deli to get another beer. I don't think it's a bad idea. It might help me sleep. I haven't fallen asleep before 2 AM in the past week and a half, and I have trouble rising at an hour that will allow me to get to work at an appropriate time, or if I do, I'm all fucked up and can't get moving in the right direction.

This morning, for example, I awoke at 7:30 AM after drifting off sometime after the final Oscar Q&A on E! ended last night (well, early morning, I guess), got up, wrote work emails for an hour or so, sketched out a solution to a work problem (The solution having appeared in an early morning dream, just as most solutions to work problems have appeared in the past nine days. Do you understand what I am saying here about my nocturnal existence? I am strategizing the bulk of my daily work in my sleep. And not just my day job, but tasks around my apartment - bills, dishes, recycling - all strategized and planned and neatly organized in my early morning sleep.

And it is at this point that I acknowledge that I am going to break this parenthetical into paragraphs for the benefit of you, the reader, even though I don't think I'm following proper grammatical rules. But the bulk of this entry is contained within this parenthetical, and I'd prefer it be easy for you to read than not. Don't you agree? Also: there are parentheticals within this parenthetical, and I'm pretty sure there are parentheticals within those parentheticals. I think you can handle it, though. You seem pretty tough.

These dreams follow those that dominate the middle of my sleep cycle (I like to think the ones at the beginning are primarily about sex, since that's what I usually think about before I go to sleep, but I honestly can't recall because everything that follows tends to overwhelm.), the ones featuring the B-list celebrities, including Shelly Long; members of various seasons of The Real World who popped up as slovenly, annoying roommates in a dream where I lived in a webcam house, and I hated them, and they hated me, and I was right, and they were wrong, if only because I am older and smarter than every cast of The Real World, have been for five years, and will be for the rest of my life; Marisa Tomei, who you may argue can't be B-list because she's won an Oscar, but really, what has she done for us lately?; the Hispanic (Italian?) guy from Saved By The Bell - Mario something, I think, who is now or was recently on a television show, one which involved him obtaining some sort of authority by riding a bike on a beach while wearing snug shorts, and appears or appeared on the B-list cable channel USA;

A blond teen dream singer by the name of Jessica Simpson who will never make it out from the shadow of Britney Spears, no matter how many times she appears on any MTV programming, including but not limited to, TRL, a Spring Break segment, or a show with the word karaoke in the title (because, I've noticed lately, there are far too many variations on that theme happening on MTV, what with their normal karoake, celebrity karoake, karoake in Las Vegas (which I think has taken the place of normal karoake, but I can't be sure), normal karoake on spring break, and celebrity karoake on spring break, and whatever else they have up their sleeves. I only know that I would trade sexual favors to someone to make all karoake programming disappear entirely because I honestly think the world would be a far, far better place and, hey, if that same person would bring back actual music videos or even just 120 Minutes (although how many great indie rock bands are out there anymore or at least have the money to make a video?), for sweet Jesus' sake, I would not only give that person sexual favors, I would do it for a long time, like, maybe two weeks or even a month, just sitting under their desk during their work day, and in their bed at night, (or in their kitchen, or wherever they fancy; I am, if anything, flexible), sucking whichever orifice they desire, since I'm not being gender specific here. Oh wait, maybe that was a fantasy of mine. Regardless, I'm willing to go the extra mile to protect and promote the authenticity of programming, which I'm sure will impress future employers who might read this website. Hell, I'll never work for MTV, so it's chill.), simply because she didn't get there first like Britney, second like Christina, or even third like Mandy Moore (I mean, I guess she's third. What the fuck do I know?) --

She's fourth place, and as we all know, fourth place gets no medal, and in fact she should probably resign herself right now to teaching singing and dance lessons to middle and/or upper class high school students in Dallas, (Attendants in her class would include, but not be limited to, girls who obsessively enter beauty pageants; girls who aspire to enhance their already more than adequate dance skills, in order to ensure their roles as cheerleaders at whatever state university they plan to attend, be it UT Austin (Go Austin!), Texas A&M (Go A&M!), or for those overachievers, perhaps an Ivy League school back East, where the sporting events aren't nearly as fun (primarily because those Ivy League sports teams aren't any good, but also because people back East aren't nearly as rowdy as back home), but they'll get a better education, meet men who are clearly destined to make as much money as their daddy, if not more, (that is, if they're not already worth more), and maybe even have the opportunity to sleep with someone of a different ethnic background than their own for the first and last time in their life; or girls who really, really liked Jessica Simpson's single when they were twelve and/or aspire to be a Dallas Cowboys Cheerleader.), and save herself years of substance abuse and therapy and surgery, but, perhaps, for Jessica, it's too late, she has smelled Carson Daly's cologne once too often (What do you think his cologne smells like? I bet he smells like a million dollars. I also bet his penis is of a normal length, nothing extraordinary, but he wishes it were longer, and perhaps overcompensates for what might well be his only insecurity by going down on a woman religiously, as if he's praying at her personal temple, which is nice, to be sure, but beyond that, he's pretty vanilla in his sexual tastes. Not that I've thought about it or anything. Not that I analyze how every person I see on a television show or on a movie screen is in bed. Not that I have any sort of issues or obsessions, because I don't, I swear.) and she won't be satisfied until she wins a VMA;

An actor named Robert Prescott, who played Kent in Real Genius, (the film which taught us the difference between good geeks and bad geeks and has been playing an awful lot on cable lately), you know, that guy who was the mean-spirited kiss-ass geek and wore dickies (hee!), and tried to trash the unwittingly evil laser project of the then young and hot Val Kilmer (pre-, like, his doing action films, and then interviews where he opened his mouth and shit and sounded like a jackass, and then he did the "I'm blind!" movie with Mira Sorvino which pretty much sealed his transition to him way being way less hot. But we'll always have Real Genius, won't we, Val?) and his 15 year old protegee, Mitch, only for Kent to receive his comeuppance at the end of the film by entering a house that explodes with a poetically and politically vast amount of popcorn, (A scene coincidentally scored by the now B-list 80s band, Tears for Fears, although I must admit "Everybody Wants To Rule The World" wasn't half bad, though I always liked "Head Over Heels" much, much more, if only because the video involved a cute, shy couple playing peek-a-boo in a library, which, when I was a sloppy 14 year old bookworm, probably made me feel like someday boys might think I was cute, too.);

And then Robert Prescott clearly leads to my final B-list celebrity who has made a recent guest appearance in my dreams, a woman who had a supporting role with Prescott in that pivotal Tom Hanks vehicle, Bachelor Party: yes, I'm speaking of the brassy, feisty, zaftig Wendie Jo Sperber (also of another Hanks project, Bosom Buddies), the woman who, I'd assert, paved the way for characters like Mindy Cohn's Natalie (and, for that matter, perhaps even Kim Field's Tootie, when she lost the braces and gained more than a few cup sizes) in Facts of Life, and a whole host of actresses who were either big and boisterous (your Kathy Bates, in, say Fried Green Tomatoes or even, in a way, Primary Colors, or the simultaneously majestic and loudmouthed Camryn Manheim)

or Jewish and nasal (Fran Drescher immediately pops into my mind. By the way, even if you hated her CBS show The Nanny - and really, who didn't?, except for the four boroughs surrounding Manahattan and most of southern Florida, which is apparently enough people to keep a sitcom on primetime television for a good six years - you have to admire three things about her: the fact that she insisted on pursuing a career in show business even though her voice sounds the way it does; that she has always taken roles that are distinctly Jewish, because really, why pretend to be anything else?; and her performance in This is Spinal Tap. Were you in Spinal Tap? Yea, that's what I thought. Leave her alone about The Nanny, already. She needed some money for retirement and general, uh, upkeep.);

Yea, Wendie Jo, she was all of that and more, except without the truly resilient pop culture cache, the Oscar, the Emmy, or the residuals, and that's why she was in my dream. I'm cleaning out my mental closets as I clean out my lungs, or at least that's the way I'm looking at it. Otherwise, I'm going to have to consider some sort of media overstimulation therapy, and, in case you haven't heard, I don't have health care, so it's just not in the budget.),

showered, masturbated, dried off my body with a white towel, rubbed Kiehl's lotion everywhere on my body, save the arm I had selected to place the patch for the day (the Nicoderm CQ manual instructs you not to place the patch on a lotioned area), wrapped a baby blue towel around my damp hair, walked into my room, watched the snow falling through the windows for a minute or two, sat down on my bed, then turned on my side to study my clothes (I don't have a closet, but a clothes rack next to my bed instead), and determine my outfit for the day.

And then I rested my head, still wrapped in the baby blue towel, just for a few minutes. It was 10 AM. All I had to do was get dressed. Screw makeup. It was snowing. I could be at work before 11, and not feel guilty in the slightest since I had already worked an hour and a half, and that wasn't even counting whatever work I had done in my sleep. I would close my eyes for fifteen minutes, and reward my body with some desperately needed calm. The snow was so white and soft and gentle. The apartment was perfectly silent as both my roommate and I had long since killed the snooze function on our alarms. But if my body and mind had woken me up at 8 AM, surely it would wake me up again.

Of course I woke up at noon. I grabbed something clean from my clothes rack, a long camouflage-green colored skirt that looks like it could be made out of pants, a thick wool grey sweater from my dresser, grey tights, grey knee socks, and black Fluevog combat boots. I ran to the bathroom. The baby blue towel fell off during my sleep, and my hair was now dry. I ran my hand through it. It actually looked adorable. I put on some eyeliner, and a touch of mascara. I brushed my teeth. I sprayed on some perfume. I hauled ass to work, and was then cranky all damn day. Wouldn't you be? If your dreams were haunted by B-list actors and solving work problems and you didn't have a normal sleep schedule anymore, wouldn't it drive you up the fucking wall?

There's another part to this day.

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