The Tedium of Dreams
Feb. 14th, 2022 07:58 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
tealinI am no stranger to the anxiety dream. Usually these start a month or two before I'm due to travel somewhere, and involve losing an important item or not getting to the airport on time. I've been having a certain amount of real-life travel anxiety lately, around getting (or not?) a work visa for my usual teaching gig in Denmark. I don't know if this is too advanced for my lizard brain to process, or if it just doesn't know how to translate vague bureaucratic uncertainty into something to panic over, but somehow the usual airport anxiety has been translated into ... bus anxiety. Falling asleep and missing my stop. Missing my stop, getting off at the next one and crossing the street to catch the bus back the other way, but there are no buses going the other way. Not realising how close my stop is and having to scramble to gather up more stuff than I could possibly have carried aboard, and not having sufficient bag or arm capacity for it all. Usually this takes place in Vancouver, I suppose because that's where I took the most buses.
Last night, the usual bus problems were compounded by a trip back to my old houseshare in Cambridge, where I was supposedly still paying rent for my room even though I didn't live there, and discovered a great pile of mail for me on the counter – mostly junk, but a few returned envelopes and a some other things of interest. I had to sort through it while Troublesome Housemate hovered awkwardly behind me, and the sound of very young and raucous undergrads bounced around the house. And then it was back on the bus for another misadventure.
What is it like to have fun fantasy dreams that throw crazy stuff at you, instead of the most tedious or uncomfortable aspects of waking life? I feel like I'm missing out here ...
Last night, the usual bus problems were compounded by a trip back to my old houseshare in Cambridge, where I was supposedly still paying rent for my room even though I didn't live there, and discovered a great pile of mail for me on the counter – mostly junk, but a few returned envelopes and a some other things of interest. I had to sort through it while Troublesome Housemate hovered awkwardly behind me, and the sound of very young and raucous undergrads bounced around the house. And then it was back on the bus for another misadventure.
What is it like to have fun fantasy dreams that throw crazy stuff at you, instead of the most tedious or uncomfortable aspects of waking life? I feel like I'm missing out here ...
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Date: 2022-03-02 04:53 pm (UTC)I was so besieged by slugs in my Cambridge garden that I very quickly got over any squeamishness about them – my favoured method for slug disposal is snipping them in half with scissors. It's very disgusting but it gets the job done, and is both quicker and more absolute than salt, which they can shrug off if they're not saturated in it. Plus, then you can dump their sluggy bodies into the planters and they can feed the plants that they were going to eat! There's something satisfying about that. I've heard beer traps work well, and I have friends who swear by copper as a repellent, but nothing beats a dedicated morning of slug-snipping for decimating the population in one's garden. If you leave pots upside down they like to hide out in them during the daytime, which makes your job easier.
We have a few different slugs here – there is a brown one with a mantle but I don't know if it's a cannibal. There's another brown one that has a sort of orange flecked skirt, which is apparently invasive from Spain, and starting to take over because the mild winters aren't killing it anymore. We had a pretty hard winter last year, and I didn't notice any letup in the slugs, so the Spanish slug hasn't taken over yet!