beowabbit

Just got back from a lovely trip to Kripalu and Albany to visit

Dreaming. I had dinner at Kripalu with

pheromone and had a wonderful time. I’d been sort of agitated before I got there (for no particular reason I was aware of, except maybe feeling like I have a lot of stuff to do), but when I got there my stress dissipated. Kripalu is a very relaxed and relaxing place, but in this case I think it was just seeing

pheromone’s smiling face and getting to be outside my mundane world for a while.

Then I went on to Albany to see Dreaming. He was at a party that his upstairs neighbours were having, looking very elegant and lovely in a tunic pheromone had brought him back from China. It was excellent to see him in his Albany social circle and meet some of his friends. As I walked in, people were playing Quiddler and Apples to Apples, so I felt right at home. :-) It was slightly odd to walk in on people who on the one hand felt very comfortable and familiar to me, and on the other hand were at a fairly different stage in their lives than I am. (Dreaming’s going back to school to finish his final semester of college after taking about a decade off.) In retrospect, it makes me nostalgic for college. (It also reminds me of a dream I had a couple months ago, which wasn’t set in college, but had the same sort of easy-to-make-friends stay-up-late-talking optimistic lives-ahead-of-us vibe I remember from college.)

Speaking of dreams, I had a wild one last night, at Dreaming’s. It was clearly largely inspired by my conversation with pheromone over dinner the previous night. I was getting into the bathtub or getting ready for bed or something, and discovered to my shock and surprise that my legs were covered with tattoos and scarification, which had turned me into a walking ayurvedic massage chart, with chakras and energy lines marked. [Disclaimer: I know nothing about ayurvedic massage or its terminology, so I have no idea how accurate my dream-image was.] The tattooing looked like it had been done quite thoroughly in black and then filled in in vivid and varied colours. The scarification had been done on top of the tattooing (but clearly some time ago since the scars had spread and lost their clarity) and was all long almost-straight lines. The thing that weirded me out in the dream was not that I’d had this done, but that I couldn’t remember having this done. How could I have undergone such extensive tattooing and scarification and not remember it? How could I even have forgotten the decision to get it done, never mind the experience itself? Then the dream morphed into me hurrying along Mass Ave in Boston (near where I work in real life). It was warm weather, and I was in shorts, which afforded me the opportunity to catch glimpses of all the body art, which was still a marvellous mystery to me. As I was rushing someplace — I might have been jogging —, I noticed a couple women walking down the street, arm in arm. They were both fairly tall, and seemed clearly a couple. As I passed them, I noticed that one of them was topless, and thought to myself, “Cool! I wonder if she’s hoping to be a test case.” Then the dream switched to the event I was hurrying to, which was a film festival hosted/MC’ed by my friend Wayne (who in real life is a film buff and has written a book on bisexual characters in film). I was early; people were drifting in, but the auditorium was still pretty empty and the lights were up. I went up to Wayne to ask some question I had and keep him company while he waited to start. And then I woke up.

How’s that for a dream!

So Sunday morning (this morning as I type this), pheromone came to Albany from Kripalu. We started the day with some amazingly yummy veggie pot pie that Dreaming made from the Country Life cookbook. Then we went for a walk to and through the park. We stopped in SUNY Albany’s gorgeous graduate library with its stained-glass windows on the way; it looks like a library should look, in my opinion. Then after stopping to grab food at the food co-op near Dreaming’s, we went to see Master and Commander — pheromone for the first time, and me and Dreaming each for the second. I loved it as much the second time as I had the first, and I’d still see it again if anybody out there has a craving. We discussed the politics of it on the way home, and then, much too soon, I needed to leave to get home and get to bed at a reasonable time for work tomorrow.