Spider Dreams

Two nights in a row, I dream of spiders.

Sunday morning I wake after dreaming about opening the pantry and confronting a horrible fat-legged mass the size of a starfish hanging on the wall above the flour and sugar. The only thing spider-like about it is the way it wriggles to the corner below the shelf as I stare and then slowly close the pantry door. The dream me learns that the species is not indigenous to North America and thinks it must all be a prank. The real me wakes up and shuffles to the pantry, the scene of a recent unsettling moth infestation, to make sure all is well.

That night it is a black spider, smaller but still palm-sized, suspended by a single thread above the fireplace in the living room. An ambiguous character scrawled in red on its abdomen only confuses the question of its toxicity. Returning with my wife, the tips of its legs are red as well. One of us swats at it, misses, it drops, we don't know where. It's gone. Dead? Probably not. It ends sometime in the dark of morning and I roll back to sleep, perhaps dreaming of other things that I won't remember as clearly as that light outlining that ominous shape slowly rotating its red-marked body in the living room air.

I wake calmly from both dreams, no sweats, no thrashing or sitting up abruptly, no gasping for breath, not even feelings of panic or alarm. Only a milder, more sinister sense of unease and a quiet lingering fear that all is not right.

The real-life spider in the shower this morning whose webs cross from the ceiling to the shampoo bottle and around the corners of the windowsill is real and causes more panic than its dream-siblings. It is also vanquished more easily, squished on the shampoo lid and rinsed down the drain. The nearly-invisible threads remain.

Results to my Google search about spider dreams offer a variety of options: a controlling female figure, hostility towards a spouse, feeling like an outsider, misfortune, manipulation, deadly force, or feeling trapped. Bingo.

Friday, the email from the Vice President of Marketing brought a real disappointment: they were going with an external candidate over me. The primary reason? They believed I had all the competence the job required, but they didn't think I would be happy doing it. They liked me too much to give me a job that they expected to make me miserable over the next three to five years. As a result, I'm dodging awkward office encounters with old team members while trying to overcome injured pride and dashed hopes. That's the outsider part.

The VP says "You are one of the most talented writers I have ever worked with. You can succeed at anything it is you want to do." She's not the first--people have been telling me that my whole life. But what do you do when you don't know what it is you want to do?

Check that. What do you do when those things you want to do don't seem to pan out? What happens when the things you want to do turn out to be unrealistic? What happens when everything that feels rewarding, valuable, and beautiful turns out to not be sustainable as a lifestyle? Or worse, what happens when everything you thought you wanted becomes uniformly unappealing for one reason or another? What happens is you find something that will do; you pick up something that works and you are afraid to let go of it. Some days you hate it; some days it is not bad; and some days you experience victories. You find good in what you have in spite of the bad bits. After a while, you start wishing for something better, something different, but what? What will you find that you can do for the next thirty years without feeling discontented at some point or without compromising some of the things that you want? Afraid that nothing will pan out, nothing will be as good as it seems, and nothing will ever be good enough, you don't do anything.

What happens is you start dreaming about spiders.

Not my son

Arrested in my workday by blue eyes staring earnestly up at me, as if to say
"I'm not your son anymore."
Those eyes are right, that straight line mouth almost smiling tells a grim truth:
That is not my son.
He was my son; my hand knew the curve of that head, the soft of those cheeks, gripped the impossibly
Tiny bones of that hand when crossing streets, but only for a time.
That boy was left behind by a mere two years and now I only see that face
pressed between sheets of glass, static, but holding in its stillness
all the vivacious energy that nearly pushed him out of the narrow frame,
propelling his legs up that grassy hill
to where he stands now, only slightly older but much taller, leaner.
Coming years hold a thousand unspoken goodbyes as each night
I kiss my child to bed and wake to find standing over me a new boy.

Connecting

In high school, my best friend moved to Las Vegas. We kept in touch for the rest of our high school years primarily through writing letters. Long letters where we played with type faces and colors and reveled in the glories of late 90's word processors. Who knows what I wrote about, probably just what I was up to those days, what I had read, who I had hung out with, what movies I had seen, and the like. It didn't matter, we were just keeping in touch.

I think we both had email accounts, though I don't clearly remember when I took that step, nor what my first email address actually was (my oldest email account now only dates back as far as 2004, when I returned from two years' missionary service in Italy). If I could somehow recover that high school email inbox, I would find the skeletons of those impossibly long forwarded email surveys, jokes still in circulation on new platforms, and other indications that my friends and I were riding the wave of this exciting channel of communication in the typical fashion for people in our generation.

I further connected with my friends via ICQ, with its colorful flowers and status indicators, all while playing freecell and listening to stolen MP3's on winamp. The freecell and the music were really just to keep my hands busy and to shut out other distractions while sending and receiving chats from my friends. I even vaguely remember having my own domain on angelfire, though the content and time frame of that site are even more lost to me than the origins of my email. After all, this was my internet infancy.

I graduated high school and went to college 10 hours away in eastern Idaho. Email became not just a secondary source of contact with my friends who stayed in Washington, but my primary one. To send and receive email, I would walk across the small courtyard of my apartment complex to the computer room, which boasted 4 internet-connected dinosaurs. My brother and I had brought my family's outdated HP with us for word processing (and freecell of course), but I don't believe there was a single internet connection in our apartment. This would have been the fall of 2000.

I also remember banking by phone during this time in my life, checking my balance via an 800 number I dialed on the corded phone in our apartment kitchen, while my easy mac cooked in the microwave.

At the end of 2001 I left the country, and for two years I emailed my family and a few friends, wrote a few snail mail letters, and called home about 3 times. I also used a film camera--not because digital cameras were not around, but because they were so expensive that it would have been difficult to replace one in case of loss. In retrospect, I'm glad I have the film negatives of my time in Italy as the miniscule digital images that I would have brought home with me would hardly have translated into quality prints.

When I got home in 2003, I got a laptop for Christmas, a now clunky Dell Inspiron 1500, which probably weighed at least 20 pounds. It had a 30 GB hard drive, which sounded impressively expansive, considering during my high school years, my Dad had allotted each of us kids with a 100 MB ZIP disk  for storing our personal files. I went back to school and could now email from my apartment, or even from the wireless network available on campus.

Email and Windows Instant Messenger were my main modes of online communication. I still have the chat archives in which the blossoming friendship with my future wife has been preserved. My children may eventually cherish those archives the way many regard bundles of dusty love letters written by their grandparents. We married in 2005 and continued emailing our families and friends updates about our married lives.

In April of 2007, we had our first son. I emailed a couple of pictures of him to my closest friends and old roommates.

Five months later, we "joined the bandwagon" and started our own family blog. It made sense: why send emails to everyone when you could create one update and invite everyone to catch up that way? Notice the shift from what were primarily personal modes of communication to a more public, one-size-fits-all-audiences genre. Traci did most of the posting in the early days, but I contributed, and I directed my friends there to "keep in touch," or at least, to keep tabs.

Maybe the problem with blogging was (is) that it was (is) so one way. You put a post up there and your audience engages with it very passively. There is the option to comment, but what a hassle, especially when you have to prove you are not a robot. You really have to want to leave a comment, and there is next to no obligation to do so. Eventually, instead of sending a targeted email to a friend, you are posting a story and pictures on a wall that you don't know if anyone is even looking at anymore.

I caved to the mounting pressure in early 2009 and felt like something of a latecomer to Facebook. Traci joined before me. Our second child had just been born. The joy of reconnecting! Finding old friends from multiple eras of my life--high school, mission, college--whose email addresses had been lost to me, or which I had never bothered to collect. Where blogging felt like a painted wall facing a void, this felt more like a room with a circle of chairs.

One key lesson I learned about using facebook: you have to interact with people to have people interact with you. The temptation to just be a fly on the wall, endlessly scrolling, never clicking or commenting, results in an empty notifications bar. So you have to like things, you have to leave comments, and you have to add your own updates.

Three years later, as Facebook's algorithms determine more and more of what and who I connect with, as advertisements continue to creep in, it all gets to feeling so hollow. It love to see pictures, to read status updates, to follow life events, to know what friends are thinking and doing, to read and share interesting articles, but it still feels empty.

It starts feeling like we are talking to the empty air, casting a status update or a picture out into the middle of the room and waiting for someone to grab onto it. You've got to have good enough bait to get a bite in their news feed, that endless list of hooks and lures. I start to discover that having someone on your friends list is not the same as having a real friend. Genuine human connection comes from one-on-one contact, which most modern social platforms discourage because they are too archaic, too reminiscent of the email or letter-writing days.

Maybe, no matter the medium, we've only been talking about ourselves the whole time, but something changes when you have an audience of just one person.

Blogs are fading out, but I keep posting there. Facebook growing obnoxious, and I am reluctant to try newer forms, which experience leads me to expect to be less and less authentic. I'm getting to feel like writing letters again, but how many relationships do I even have that could bear such a burden?

Winter

You have to know how to love winter. Much like you have to know how to love summer, but few people think about that. Precautions like sunscreen, light clothes, and afternoons at the beach or the pool seem to come naturally. But winter seems almost universally loathed.
You have to learn how to love the cold, or at least how to bear it, as one bears the 100 degree temperatures of summer. A fireplace, a heater, a heavy blanket--if you think about it, we have more protections from cold than from heat. A good coat, gloves, hat, ear-muffs. Thermal underwear. Hot cocoa. You can grow to love these things. Then, fully equipped, to love walking out in the frozen air and even find it healing.
What is not to love about a blue-sky day with the late-rising sun creating a brighter-than-usual morning thanks to the whiteness of the world and the thinness of the air? White mountains, white fields, white houses, white trees. Sparkling, crisp air. Watch your own breath rise from your mouth and marvel at your own internal locomotive, that coal-burning fire within.
You can learn to love the winter, love the cold, and embrace the early dark. To open your eyes on a frosted morning with joy and peace that no other season provides.
Winter is quiet. Winter is lucid. Winter is peace.

Toy airplanes

They float, drifting through any color sky, from pale morning blue to December afternoon gray. They are noiseless, at least through my windshield. Through the windows at the office I can sometimes hear a low, unobtrusive rumbling reaching me from what seems like the wrong direction. Something about the way they move, like bubbles, or like puffs from a dandelion, compels me to watch. I can't look away as the tiny shape crawls across the blank sky and eventually vanishes behind a mountain, or beyond the frame of my window.
It was evening a week ago that I saw one lifting from an air field some miles ahead of me. It climbed silently up over the lake whose surface threw a reflection of the sky, of the hills beyond. They are supposed to be fast, but they always seem so slow looking from the ground with a craned neck, eyes squinting, flattened hand standing up on my brows. The color of bone, or of tooth, they seem to hang impossibly long in space.

We own the Bison

I wonder if they know they are publicly-owned, those American
Bison roaming and grazing this hump of earth stranded
in a lake of salt.

"Don't grow sentimental over the seven," the director spat,
"The animals are worthless - there isn't worse meat
on earth to eat."

Enormous, shaggy, drifting nomads hoisting heads big
as car tires; dark glossy eyes peering below curls. Why
would we eat them?

Pencil Sharpener

It hung at the front of the class beside the blackboard, which was usually green or blue. A heavy metal foot anchored to the wall an oval casing, graced with a metal dial of holes, each waiting its turn to be rotated over the round black eye that stared a line paralell to the wall all the way to the teacher's desk. Within that thin casing, two twisted horrors lurked, bound together and turned by a crank. Every child feared those gears, picturing their own finger inserting that channel where it was chewed, and turned to pulp among the piles of shavings.
Between lectures, you could cross the carpet and insert your pencil, and turn that crank, interrupting the silence with the grinding of those gears. You'd pull back a precise point, gleaming beneath the flourescents, needing only a quick puff from your lips to remove the chaff. The newly crisp line on your paper would bring a satisfied smile to your face, well worth braving the ominous sharpener's stare.
Years of school, and lots of practice, bring with them the hubris of ink. Blues, blacks, reds stand out more boldly and more permanently on the page. These marks cannot be erased, and so we believe they needn't be. And if not a pen, the insubstantial media of 1's and 0's, mediated by the keyboard that occupies the primary work space. The printer translates those tappings with its crisp laser, shooting out sheets of paper hot off the custom press. At the very least, the pencils we use are now mechanical, with tiny sticks of .5 graphite, ready at the click of the eraser.
Another childhood terror diminishes, becomes obsolete. If you hunt around your office, you'll find the token, grudging presence of their electric counterparts, sitting for the most part on some table in a room down the hall from your desk, ready to growl your old fashioned PaperMate down to a fine point and reinvoke that ghost of the past.