wobbly times.

Yesterday morning, I awoke at 7:20 AM, to find that I had dozed off at Joey's apartment, just twenty minutes after my parking spot became a no parking zone and subsequent minivan race track. I hurriedly slipped my pants on and grabbed my man-purse; Joey followed suit and we both tiptoed past two half-naked men asleep and sprawled out on a futon in the living room—his roommate and roommate's boyfriend. I quickly received a goodbye routine at the door and then exhaustedly trudged up the sidewalk to Hollywood Boulevard, and my car wasn't there. No car. Just the mocking buzz of engines and smell of exhaust from the morning rush of jobgoers. I attempt to call Joey, but my phone dies after one ring. I keep calling, but it keeps dying after one ring. I send him a text message saying "My car is towed, will you drive me to the towing place?" I stand idly on the sidewalk watching old Russian women sweep porches. Joey appears with disheveled hair at the door of the complex, and we get in his roommate's car. At the towing place, the cashier gives me thirty dollars off for appearing so soon after my car arrived. My credit card doesn't go through though, and I knew why, but my phone is dead, so I have to use the towing place's phone. After being on hold twenty minutes with Bank of America and then finally hearing the cheerful voice of a Midwestern customer service representative woman, the towing place cashier tells me he's kicking me out, sends me to a payphone with four quarters. I walk two blocks and find a payphone. I wait on hold as another half hour erodes into Bank of America muzak. Some homeless deranged weirdo walks up and points at some of the quarters I still had, and I tell him I need them. Then, as he's walking away, he turns every five seconds, looks back and smiles and waves as melodramatically as you can fathom. A big teeth-exposing smile and jingle of the hand, and then he turned and marched three steps, then would turn and smirk again. At that moment I thought maybe I was actually having a nightmare. I almost hung up the phone when finally a representative came on. It turns out, they had already reactivated my card from the last call, so all that muzak and hesitantly waving back was for nothing. I go back to the towing place, and as it turns out, I somehow lost my credit card between the towing place and the payphone. I'm not at all surprised, since I remember dropping my vehicle registration information on the ground multiple times while at the payphone. It also turns out that they had a payphone right there in the towing place, but I just didn't notice. I called my friend Dave who lives in West Hollywood, and he paid them off and brought me to a nice breakfast place for bacon and eggs. Morals of the story: Don't get in someone's bed when you're tired. Have lots of friends in every part of town. Learn how to stick to one verb tense—this paragraph needs to go into rehab.

November 29 might have been the most stressful day I've had all year. When I was going to bed, I checked up on Kalu, and he wouldn't come out of a ball. I tried prying him to no luck, but finally saw his nose and then legs after a half-hour of petting. He wouldn't walk, wouldn't eat, didn't sniffle or wiggle his nose, couldn't lift his head off the ground. I looked up and found websites on hedgehog illnesses, including Wobbly Hedgehog Syndrome. It's basically multiple sclerosis for hedgehogs. And Kalu had all the symptoms. What an awful thing to have to watch happen to Kalu. I cried uncontrollably for maybe an hour while watching Kalu wobble six inches and then fall asleep. I read in horror this extensive website a woman made explaining how she spent night and day with her wobbly hedgehog basically giving him deluxe hospice care: daily massages, syringe feeding, and apparently the best (and final) months of his life. Typically, wobbly hedgehogs lose the ability to walk in one side of the body first, so they end up wobbling in circles. This lady built a spiral walkway for her wobbly hedgehog to get exercise. She'd bring her hedgie to the doctor like twice a month, and made special "deluxe" basket beds for it. And take a look at the photos of the hedgehog lying immobile on its side. And the way she put ugly stickers with captions on the photos before she scanned them. This is my fate. And this. Then I found another site called something like "It's probably not Wobbly Hedgehog Syndrome after all" and read that hedgehogs wobble like that when anything is wrong with them. It turns out Kalu was going into hibernation. It was almost freezing temperature here last night, and the building's heating system apparently doesn't work in my room (which I like, but apparently Kalu doesn't). I left him next to my heater for an hour and he eventually came out of it and drank a whole bowl of water. Now he's himself again, huffing and puffing and pitterpattering around the room while I sleep. Today I missed class so I could buy him a heating pad.

As you may know, I like keeping a lot of unending lists and journals. "To do list," "art and music ideas list," "the bored list," "the worry journal" (I update this every time I'm horribly worried as a form of catharsis), "time journal" (which is a quick diary to keep track of how I spent my time every day of my life since the journal started), "internet meetings list" (a very long, comprehensive and incomplete list of everyone I've met in person from online), etc. Anyhow, I just started keeping a file for all my dreams. Now that I have it, I've been writing in it every morning. The trick is to write something down as soon as you wake. The sooner you do it, the more interesting the details will be. The following paragraph is an unedited example of a dream I wrote down immediately upon waking:

Clear movie announcer voice. "The pot being turned inside out was all too easy." —Minor 2nds on piano, starts out with one, notes added quickly. Visually: camera moves away from me lying down in auditorium to the ceiling, then slides around faster. Teacher: I'm not superstitious so of course I don't buy into this stuff.