Dreams and Anger

This is really my first real post, besides the test. This blog is basically going to be dedicated to my dreams and things that make me angry. I plan to blog pretty often about my dreams at least, which are very frequent and usually weird. I've been wanting to start writing about them and thinking about them, so if you don't like that, you probably won't like my blog.

Other than my dreams, I am also going to relate humorous anecdotes of things that piss me off. On this subject, I will probably also be posting quite frequently, as a lot of things really chap my ass, and I've got a lot to say about it most of the time. I'm also going to warn right now that it is entirely likely that I will eventually stop capitalizing 'I' in my posts, mostly because I just don't care. I am not a prescriptivist grammarian, and I appreciate word play and absurdities, as well as accepted colloquialisms, especially ones that pertain to the web.

Anyway, with such a prelude taken care of, I feel it is appropriate to get my first post out there so my thirsty readers can finally be satiated. One point I feel I must mention is that lately I have been rereading 'Pride and Prejudice' by Jane Austen, and I have found myself making my own writing much more formal in accordance with her style from that time. I especially appreciate the impenetrable wall one can create with language simply by altering the syntax slightly, and stepping up the vocabulary. However, recently, it made me feel pretty silly when I was confronted by a frustrating situation. We are going camping this weekend at Pillsbury State Park in New Hampshire, and I was entrusted to make the reservations online, since we were informed that it was impossible to make them over the phone. The reservation system is overly complicated, and after some time, I finally figured it out and reserved two campsites for this Saturday night. As it turned out, I had actually reserved one site for next Saturday, and one site for this Saturday, which it actually took a couple days for me to realize. Of course, this would not do, so I looked to change it, only to realize I had no option but to cancel the reservation. Come to find out that they charge a ten dollar cancellation penalty if you cancel with MORE than 5 days notice, and 15 dollars if you cancel with less than 5 days notice. Also, on cancellations they still charge you the 9 dollar transaction fee. I paid 32 dollars to reserve the campsite and have the reservation blocked online for a couple days, and then I was refunded only 13 dollars when I cancelled my reservation. Needless to say, i was fucking pissed off. I was exasperated. I wrote to A. (names of people/friends involved in my posts will henceforth be abbreviated by first name, I've just decided, to protect their identities) an email that I just could not express how angry I was that I got fucked out of 20 dollars just for using the website. I then went back to the NH state park website and to submit a complaint to the customer service department and I wrote this , which it took me about 0.23 seconds to realize how ridiculous it was and how much influence reading Jane Austen was having on my writing:

"While I realize that reservations on this website comprise one of the ways that the state park service generates revenue, I feel that it is utterly ridiculous to charge transaction fees AND cancellation penalties for canceled reservations made on the website. How can either be warranted? I made two reservations and one came back to me inaccurately - not only did I have to pay IN FULL to reserve the site, but I also had to pay 20 dollars NOT to have the site. This is outrageous to me. I believe this website reservation system to be quite inconvenient and not at all advantageous to be used, considering the penalties and transaction fees, and if I believed it would be worth my effort, I would pursue having my money refunded in full for the cancellation."

Even though I even work in a department similar to the one where this message is received and I know that if I ever received an email like this I would laugh and talk about how much of a fuckbag the person that wrote this was, I still sent it. It almost felt good. I even got an answer back, although the only answer they gave me was that if I didn't feel the website was convenient, I could make reservations by phone. I just hope they think I was an old, crotchety man, which I am, but I am not old, really.

So that happened. I am still looking forward to the camping trip even though I am a little bit afraid that they are going to continue to try to fuck us out of money. Can't trust those state parks..

Last night I also had two dreams that belong here. One was of a similar thread of dreams that I have been having lately in which I am being threatened with physical violence for money/material objects. In this incarnation, I was living in some sort of weird neighborhood that was fairly rural, but still sketchy. I was out for the day chasing around some sort of animal that was like a cat but more like a squirrel or monkey, or squirrel monkey if those are real animals, but it seemed to be my pet. I eventually ended up following it back to my house, where I realized I had left the garage doors open, and the hatch door of one of my cars was open. I waded through the large puddle that was in front of the garage, closed the hatch, and decided it would be a good idea to shut the garage doors, since it was already lucky that they had been open so long and I hadn't yet been robbed. I turned and saw that three large men were coming towards my garage, and I started to shut the doors. The motorized doors were closing, but I hadn't locked the regular doors, and even though I tried, they pushed their way in. The largest guy was approaching me and he looked to the side where some golf clubs were resting on against the wall. "I'd like to buy this golf club from you," he said, taking a small wedge out, which actually appeared to be some sort of child sized club. I said, "Okay, make me an offer," but then, thinking better of it, I said, "Wait a minute, I don't know too much about golf clubs, so I need to do some research to figure out if your offer is any good." The club was actually breaking in half in his hand as I said this, but he looked at me and said something like, "It's okay, you won't need to," and suddenly he was choking me. He wrestled me to the ground, but I also had my hands on his throat, squeezing as hard as I could. Somehow, even though he was larger than me and clearly would have had longer arms, I was able to continue choking him while his choke was not as effective. I punched him in the face a couple times and he got a better grip, but I was still able to choke him better, and all I was hoping was that I would be able to kill him before he killed me. Before either of us died or anything else happened, I woke up. I'm not really sure why, but lately I've been having similar dreams where I am being threatened with physical violence and they usually end with me reluctantly killing the other person in order to save my life or maintain my property. I have been finding them rather disconcerting, because the deaths have been rather graphic.

In my other dream last night, which was actually a pretty awful nightmare, I was involved somehow with an elementary school class that was participating in a mystery game that was being staged at a haunted house. The haunted house was put on, so it was pretty tame, and the mystery was somehow explained/put on at the first floor, and then answered/solved by the kids by going to the second floor. The third floor, however, unbeknownst to those of us running the game, was actually the site of a horribly grisly mass murder that was purpetrated by some wispy white spirits. Unfortunately, I found out that one small girl had gone up on her own to the third floor in an effort to solve the game. The girl came down the stairs from the third floor in a catatonic state and everyone freaked out; I tried to find out what happened to her, but all she could say was a whispered "THE WHITES OF THEIR EYES...THE WHITES OF THEIR EYES.." I ran up the stairs and saw a giant room full of dismembered bodies covered in blood and shit, and wispy white curtains or something at the windows. There was at least one corpse hanging up with its eyes wide open and teeth bared, even though the face was covered in blood or shit or something. I deduced that this was the reason she was saying 'the whites of their eyes' and I had some kind of vision of white wispy spirits and just gore in general, and then, luckily or unluckily, I woke up. I was freaked out and I tried to cover myself up with the blanket as much as possible, but I also saw my mirror, which freaked me out too because mirrors in the dark freak me out. But anyways. Now that I've freaked myself out by reliving last night's nightmare for your amusement, I am going to go to bed.