señor taco’s travels

Warren Ellis writes:

“The more creators who only took on housepainting as a part-time gig, the healthier this medium would be.”

Oh man, so true. This is why staring my own work up is very appealing.

I try to donate blood about every 60 days or so. I usually get a call from the Red Cross to remind me and set an appointment. Today at 14.00 I gave my pint (473.2 mL) and while I was donating they noticed I’m a pretty regular donor. Today they asked me if I wanted to see if I have a high enough platelet count to do apheresis donation. It takes longer but you get your plasma and red blood cells pumped back into you. If I qualify I’ll probably try it once to see how it is.

If there’s one thing I didn’t want over the holiday weekend it was an anxiety
dream. You know the kind, where you wake up stressed out. Bleh.

Anyway, it starts with me visiting a hybrid software/game/animation company
(yeah, huh?) and somehow I’m supposed to be interviewing for a job there but I
didn’t know it. The interview starts and it’s everyone piled into one office
with me sitting in the corner. Apparently I had sent them a bunch of crap
attached to my resume that they could have looked up had I just referenced it
correctly. This made one person in
the group unhappy and he kept grilling me and belittling me through the
entire process. The kicker was, the guy that seemed angry with me was
Patton Oswalt the comedian. That
really freaked me out. I pretty much woke up in the middle of the dream so
there was no resolution and I was wicked stressed.

I hate dreams like that. I mean, what does it all mean? Curse you
subconscious!

So, about 11 months or so ago I started growing out a goatee. After a while
I decided not to trim it back and just let it grow out. Now it’s a
few inches long and i can braid it but that just makes it short so that’s out
for now.

Recently I’ve been thinking I should shave off my goatee. I’ve grown used to
it so it’s not an issue of it getting in the way or anything. I’m more just
wondering if I should cut it off or not. Generally when I get this way I’ll
think over it for a while and then go the direction I originally thought, in
this case that’s shaving it off.

Feel free to comment below on the issue if you know me. Maybe I’ll wait until
the end of September. Hmmm, there’s an idea. Have it for the weeding I’m
going to, but then remove it. Hmmmm, thoughts.

So, recurring dreams. Strange stuff. As it is I don’t remember too many of
my dreams. However I have some of the same dreams several times and themes
are definitely repeating. One of the major ones is, um, dead bodies (or parts
thereof) and bears. The bears are never causing the death and they don’t mess
with the bodies.

Last night was a new dream for me. Everywhere I went there were arms (both
left and right) from the elbow up sticking out of the ground. I could
recognize some of the arms via jewelry, watches, or tattoos but I have no
idea why they were there. None of them moved and they were obviously dead.

As I walked along I came across a bear. He told me his name was Shamus (the
first time a bear has spoken in a dream) and offered me a ride. We rode for a
while and then watched the sun set from the hills over the East Bay. Thats
when I woke up.

I have no explanations for any of it, but one friend told me that bears are
supposed to mean strength. That’s a little comforting I guess. At least I’m
not afraid of the bodies and the bears are always peaceful or non-threatening.

Do you ever have recurring dreams? I do. For many years I’ve had recurring
dreams that I’m in a car wreck and I lose part of one of my legs. It’s never
the same leg, but is usually the right leg. Sometimes I’m driving and
sometimes I’m a passenger. Over the years it’s been in different cars and
with different people.

Last nights version was me as a passenger in my roommates car. We were
blind sided and I lost my right leg from the knee down. Then I got a
prosthetic and ended up working with the doctor and developer of the leg
to give all prosthetics better AI software so they were more life-like.

It’s so odd. I’m sure it will continue just like the other recurring dreams
I have. The The first person to suggest therapy is going to get a big
slap on the back of the head the next time I see them.

This last week, starting with last Friday, has been my worst week for
Repetitive Stress Injury (RSI) pain in quite a long time. Starting with last
Friday I have been getting the oh so lovely burning and stabbing pain in my
forearms and wrists. Over the weekend I was reaching into a shopping bag and
pain shot up my arm just by grabbing an item inside. All week it’s been
little bits of pain here and there. Doing the dishes, grabbing things, just
sitting around.

To counter it I reduced the amount of time between my href="http://www.lcdf.org/~eddietwo/xwrits/" title="Software: Xwrits">forced
breaks, I started stretching more and even using a href="http://www.wristwand.com/" title="Tool: WristWand">WristWand that
one of my coworkers has (note to self, you really need to make one of those
for yourself). I guess I can only be preventative once again now, because
once you start feeling the pain it’s a little too late.

I of course attribute the buildup in RSI stress to two things:

1. doing more typing at work for my project (that can’t be helped, but I can
   be careful);
2. having the title="A Desk of Distractions">Worst. href="http://danimal.org/SenorTaco/2003/09/30#desk-situation2" title="The size
   of the desk">Desk. href="http://danimal.org/SenorTaco/2003/10/10#desk-situation3" title="Two
   Inches Means A Lot">Evar! And I mean that in all honesty. This is the
   worst desk I’ve ever had to sit at for an extended period of time.

Hopefully I will be able to correct it, but only time and vigilance will tell.
As a point of reference I took two forced breaks in the typing of this short
entry.

…well, one that I remember at least. I shall describe it here so I can find
it again later.

It starts out with my family and I driving in my car. My mom is operating it and we’re on Galveston Island.
Along the major city portion of Galveston is a sea wall. It was built after
the 1900 storm and raised the level
of the entire city by 17 feet. So, in my dream it’s a little different than
reality. At the west end of the wall it’s not 17 feet but about 100 feet and
very narrow. There are also factories or refineries along both sides. As
we’re driving along a giant storm has come in and there is water up around
the refineries and really close to the top of the sea wall. Pipes and stacks
are still visible and still billowing but there is very cool looking wave
action happening around them. At this point something goes wrong with the
narrow roadway and we end up careening off the side and into one of the
refineries. It’s amazingly open inside and quite calm under the water. Once
the car settles on some platform I open the door and it’s like we’re under
water, but no water comes rushing in. We can talk, but also swim around and
everything seems to work so I try to make a call on my cell phone, only I can’t
because I have no signal. As we’re waiting in the bowels of this refinery an
elevator door opens and this woman tells us she’s the caretaker of the place.
She lets us into the elevator. Once we’re topside we end up on the beach
with the 17 foot sea wall that is right next to the 100 foot sea wall and the
refinery is still under water. At this point the army is hoisting our vehicle
out of the water for us with some helicopters. Only they don’t pull my car
out the first time, instead it’s some other silver car that some other guy
claims is his, but when he gets into it it turns into a very futuristic
looking two wheeled motorcycle but with a large passenger compartment. He
drives off and then I wake up.

I love remembering dreams, it’s too bad I don’t do it more often.

We all have odd dreams sometimes. I generally don’t remember my dreams and
when I do they always seem to be of the odd or disturbing variety.

The latest couple were just odd enough for me to write them down. The first
was me running around San Francisco as a cop. I was being chased by other
cops and bad guys driving a black van with flames on it. When they got close
to me they would throw a molotov cocktail at me. I kept calling for backup
but the guys on the other end of the radio would laugh and say things like
there were no available units. That went on for what seemed like hours and
then I woke up. I’ve been having trouble figuring out where the parts come
from that assembled in the dream, but that’s actually the fun part.

Another dream I had recently involved all my friends, but it was my vision that
was wacky. I either was constantly looking through an image that looked as
though it was a TV with poor reception (lines, fuzz, horizontal jitter, etc.).
At certain points it switched to having the surfaces of everything having that
TV poor reception look, not my vision.

Those dreams aren’t so bad though. The ones that you don’t really feel like
analyzing are things like you dragging people outside at work and hanging them
on meat hooks. Where does that come from? I mean, geez, I would never do that
in real life…even if I thought it.

Pardon me while I act clever and blockquote myself:

I was sitting at lunch one day and I felt that there had to be a way to see my
friends that I don’t live near. Not every day, not even every week, but over
time. One of the blogs that I started following is the photblog href="http://www.tenyearsofmylife.com/" title="Photoblog: Ten Years Of My Life">
Ten Years Of My Life. On it Matthew Haughey has taken on the quite awesome
project of taking one picture every day for 10 years. The href="http://www.tenyearsofmylife.com/about" title="Ten Years Of My Life:
About">about page for the project has a head shot of Mr. Haughey for every
month. Then it struck me, that’s the perfect way for me to see the progression
of life for my distant friends (in fact, that would be cool for all my friends
to keep so that we can look back and see the past without the clouds of memory).

So here we are, here, this is Me, My Face, And
I. Every month I will be putting a new head shot up so friends, family,
and strangers can see me over time. Sometimes I’ll be smiling, others I’ll be
indifferent, and once or twice maybe I’ll be scowling. This isn’t about me on
my best days or when I’m happy, it’s about me not wanting to lose touch with
those I can’t see all the time. Once it’s setup it will take very little time
every month. I’ll be trying to get my friends to start doing this too and as
they come around I’ll link to them here. Contact me if you want more
information. For those interested the layout is whatever you want, suggested
image size is 100×100 to 200×200. I’m going with 175×175. Make sure to label
your images with the at least the month and year they were taken. More exact
dates are fine as are more than one picture per month (who knows, maybe you
want to show off that awesome new red hair of yours :)

So, Ladies and Germs, I give you title="Me, My Face, And I">Me, My Face, And I. I’ll be contacting friends
and acquaintances soon to see if they’re on board. Hopefully there will be
more than a few people that join in.

I’m releasing my images under the title="Creative Commons: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 1.0">Creative
Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license. You, however, are
free to choose any license or restrictions you want. Have fun.