Dreaming Ethiopia

My seeds are sprouting, some faster than others, and two of my sunflower seeds are over 7 inches tall. It's always exciting and surprising that putting a seed in the ground, even the tiniest of seeds, grows into such beauty and height within such a short space of time. From bare brown earth to a carpet of green-backed color is a miracle. I wonder what it would be like if humans grew so quickly from seed and embryo to maturity. We probably would not be able to catch up mentally and emotionally to the physical explosion of growth, but plants don't have that problem. Even with all the time humans take to grow into mental and emotional maturity, there's still no guarantee their physical presence will ever match their intellectual, social and emotional presence. It's a bit of a crap shoot. Nature versus nurture or hard wired in the egg, so to speak. It's like trying to figure out how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. How about none? Angels aren't pixies and even Thumbelina was too big to dance on the head of a pin when she was born. It's one of those mental gymnastics that prove absolutely nothing.

In my dreams and out of them, I've been performing mental gymnastics trying to figure out the name of a main character in a book I just finished last night. I could name all the other characters, but not hers. Well, not her first name. I got the Doctor and the Chase part, but had to look up the first name, which turned out to be Carla. I knew it started with a C, but kept bumping up against Cordelia and getting stuck, as most people get stuck in Cordy's pseudologic that focuses solely on her as the center of the universe.

That led to thinking of my favorite story, Rappaccini's Daughter, and being unable to remember the name of the author. I knew he also wrote House of Seven Gables and The Scarlet Letter and finally Hawthorne sneaked in there, but the first name wouldn't come. I am wiling to chalk this up to being an Army brat and calling some people by their last names, as Williams (Steve) can well attest, but I don't think that's the problem. Somewhere along the line the synapses that point to first names is either atrophied or broken and needs welding. Nathaniel finally slipped in when I was musing over a dream about Ethiopian water holes and packing water to another country before telling off the ruler of Ethiopia. I explained that the people of his land were far more generous and accommodating than he was and that he needed to pay attention to the people, get out of his palace and away from all the sycophants to understand what was really important. He was making laws against giving away Ethiopian water to other countries and his people were blithely ignoring his laws because they were more interested in helping fellow farmers than in kowtowing to some distant ruler who didn't know his own people or the world they lived in.

Oh, well, in a world where leaders are completely out of touch with their people and engaged in pissing and penis size contests, what else is new?

For some reason, getting up to go to the bathroom every hour or so always brings strange dreams. I don't get deeply enough asleep to pass beyond REM and into the dreamless void and so I dream, often picking up one dream where I left it when nature shoved at my bladder and my dream self entered another bathroom, often in the midst of the weirdest places -- like the desert on the way back from the Ethiopian water hole. The whole bathroom thing is cyclical and I wonder if I truly am going through menopause since the cycle of bloat and voiding follows my normal hormonal cycles. Rather argues against the whole remaining ovary running out of eggs and beginning to fail scenario.

I doubt I'll ever understand the mentality it takes for someone who prefers playing the victim and getting little attention when there is no current crisis at hand to dangle a bloody steak in front of a hungry lion in hopes of getting mauled just so they can play the victim and get more attention. It's a sad commentary. Reminds me of a woman who stopped blogging about her real life and concocted a fictitious life where one disaster after another happened. She garnered a lot of sympathy and people avidly read her posts to find out what new disaster had struck so they could commiserate with her even more. She finally told the truth, but lost a lot of readers and people who considered themselves friends when they realized they had been played. It's just like the news. Newspapers and news services play up disasters, sexual exploits and anything explosive and/or sensational just to boost sales and readership. The stories about people who live ordinary lives and to whom nothing much happens either get no further than the center of the newspaper or are completely ignored. After all, who cares for good news when there's drama and bad news to be analyzed and rehashed?