It’s been a strange past couple of days. Ever since the wedding, I haven’t been sleeping well (it takes me hours to fall asleep, and I’ve been waking up earlier than usual), so I’ve been a bit out of sorts for the last day or two. Just wandering around in a daze, not really motivated to do much of anything. Too tired to concentrate on anything, but aware enough to know that if I took a nap, I’d end up awake all night, which would only send my sleep cycle further into tail-spin.

I tried knitting, but my hands just weren’t buying it. "We’re too tired to move the way you want us to," they told me. So I put the knitting away. I tried spinning, but my ankles weren’t nimble enough to keep the wheel moving smoothly and my mind was too fuzzed to focus on learning how to hold the fleece and all that jazz. So I gave up and put off learning and practicing til a later time when I’m more awake and alert. So, that’s the extent of the fiber content of this post. The rest of this rather garrulous post is going to be devoted to the various thoughts that have been running through my head for the last day or two. Feel free to skip over it if it doesn’t interest you one bit. My feelings will not be hurt. :)

MySpace:

I’ve had a MySpace account for a little over a year, but I never really did anything with it. I only signed up because a friend who will remain nameless is a complete MySpace whore and kept bugging me to sign up. But a lot of my friends, including my brother, have MySpace accounts, and I suppose it’s a good way to track down old friends and acquaintances, so I buffed up my profile last night. I added pictures, school information, etc. After I had finished doing that, I started trying to track down some friends I had lost touch with over the years, and I actually found a lot. I’ve been pretty good about keeping track of the people who meant a lot to me over the years, so what I found last night were the people I knew from band and stuff in high school, but whom I was never really that close with. You know, that girl you always sat next to in math class (she’s absolutely stunningly beautiful now, by the way), the guy you had a crush on your junior year, the class president who was always friendly to everyone, the drum major you had known since sixth grade… It wasn’t until last night that I started thinking about our class’s 10-year reunion, which I suppose would be coming up in 2 years. I never thought I’d be the type who would want to go to such an event. You know, where the high school wallflowers are now 20-something wallflowers who stand aside and watch the head cheerleader and the quarterback show off pictures of their 6-year-old to all the other popular kids. But high school wasn’t quite like that for me. It was a huge school, and while there were certainly cliques, a lot of people jumped around from group to group. Hell, my junior year (I think), one of our drum majors (by standard definition, a "band geek") was voted homecoming queen. I’d like to go and see these people. Is the math-class girl as nice as she used to be, and did she become that forensic biologist that she always said she wanted to be? Is the crush-guy still an uber-conservative Christian who’s fascinated with old airplanes? Is the class president still over motivated and is he still with that girl he dated all through high school? Is the drum major still preppy and outgoing and the life of the party?

Really, what got me started on this whole kick was a conversation that happened the night before the wedding, when a few people were over here partying after the rehearsal dinner. Matthew, who was one of the groomsmen, is a long-time friend of the groom’s, and was drum major at their high school. When he found out I went to Grissom HS, he started asking me about this drum major guy, asking if I knew him, etc. He was psyched when I said I knew him, and it turns out that they were roommates at a drum leader camp one summer. So I pulled out the year books and started showing him pictures, and it got us talking about all the other people we both knew. We turned the pages of my senior year book, and landed on a picture of the three drum majors. "Wow," I said. "I haven’t thought about these people in ages – J.W., S.A., and L.J." Another of the groomsmen, Charles, and his girlfriend, Allison, pipe up. "L.J.?" they say curiously. They turn to one another and say they wonder if it’s the same L.J. they knew. After showing them her picture, they agree that it is definitely the same L.J. Turns out she’s now married, and a lawyer. I can see that, but it’s hard to picture her as anything but the cute, short little 16-year-old I once knew. But sometimes it’s a little eerie how small this world really is.

But back to MySpace. You know what irks me about MySpace (aside from the atrociously bad layouts that 90% of MySpace users insist on implementing)? The locked profiles. I can understand wanting a blog to be kept locked to the general public, but why bother creating a profile on a site like MySpace, whose sole purpose is for networking, when you’re going to lock it? Half these people have obscure "names" that give no indication of who they really are (e.g. Fat Daddy, or Mother of All Things Awesome) and user pictures of random things (e.g. dancing hippopotamuses). What’s the point? If no one can find you, what’s the point of even having such an account? The internet mentality baffles me sometimes.

Strange Dreams:

So now, changing topics completely, I’d like to share a weird dream I had last night. It was a few years from now (I was in my 30s, I believe) and I was living with my parents (or visiting them on an extended vacation, or something) in this large, up-scale apartment or condo complex. It was like a large hotel in a big city, with a doorman and elevators and elaborate staircases, with all the apartment/condo entrances inside. Each condo was two or three stories (I think). Mom was at work or out shopping or something, and Dad (who was retired) was dressed in a pair of shorts and an old ratty t-shirt. We had this eccentric old biddy of a neighbor. You know the type – always dressed in pastel skirt suits and matching heels, grey hair perfectly coiffed, carrying a little toy show dog in her left arm. Anyway, she came and knocked on our door, and asked if she could borrow some saltines. (Why saltines, I don’t know.) So Dad and I closed the door, leaving her standing out in the hall (rude, I know), and went inside to look for some saltines. We found a box deep in the pantry, but when we opened it up, there was a family of the cutest little mice living inside. I guess we didn’t really like this neighbor of ours, because we carefully moved the mice into a new box (what can I say? they were really cute), broke off the edges of the crackers that looked like they had been chewed on, re-closed the box of saltines, and gave it to our neighbor.

I think tonight I’m taking sleeping pills.