Well I am not sure it is inspirational but I have lots of things to share this week. Lots of things I have contemplated. Testing has been just as bad and time consuming and then I have been on the couch all week with that Parisian food poisoning. Uncool. One never realizes how much they enjoy chewing until they don’t have anything to chew. I’m better now.

This week we debut, Suzette! See her wearing my stripped Erotokritos skirt which was recently purchased in Paris. Notice the contrasting poka-dotted shoes. She is such a fashion rebel! I may go back to the old me wearing the outfit pictures though. They don’t express themselves the same way on Suzette (no offense luv). She does help me put things together though.

So I witnessed a couple having a fight on the Bahnsteigen this week. It was weird. He brought her a sweater and coat but when he pulled it from his bag and handed it to her, she took it without looking at him, and then turned to the train. He pulled on her bag and said something to her. Even if I spoke the language, I was too far from them to hear. He seemed to say the standard ‘Hey, don’t do that. Let’s talk’. It didn’t seem to be a ‘Hey, what’s wrong’. The body language of them both was that this was ongoing. She missed the train. She turned back to him and launched into whatever it was that was wrong. She spoke a lot before he said anything in return. Then he spoke and she responded back. It seemed to be getting more heated. He seemed to be more aware they were arguing in public than she was. Is that because he felt embarrassed by something he did? Or just didn’t want people to see them fighting? His voice got loud enough to hear but he wasn’t really yelling. She jumped back at him verbally, got very frustrated and walked off. He followed her and looked my way. I felt caught.

A friend of mine is mad at me though I don’t know why. I know she is mad at me because of her body language. When she doesn’t like someone or is mad at them, she has a very distinct way of reacting to them. She rarely looks them in the eye and swings her head around looking everywhere but at them. The tone of her voice, which is normally very modulated and high with lots of peaks – very lively and uplifting for everyone around with out being squeaky – is very flat and low. Her word choice can be vague or direct. Anyhow, besides not liking the idea that I have done something to upset someone, even though I don’t know what it is, it’s made me think about how we DON’T communicate. Today, I have sort of thought of this as a CYA move. If you don’t say anything it can’t bite you back. I talk a lot. I have a lot of opinions. I am also willing to admit when I am wrong and to change my opinions. But still, I say things people don’t like. I have opinions people don’t agree with. Often though, instead of addressing those things to me, they ignore it and me. Why? I don’t think that I am difficult in terms of being inflexible or unwilling to change. Quite the contrary. I am difficult in the sense that I do have an opinion and I am willing and likely to express it. Do people that don’t talk much, that don’t share opinions, do they not have them or just don’t care to share them? Are they any less offensive than I, accept their offense is not spoken? OK so let’s say I say something that hurts someone, somehow, if they never say anything to me about it, how will I know? How could I possibly learn not to say things like that again? How can I learn to better express myself so as to be entitled to express my opinion without offending people, if they don’t tell me when I have offended them and why? Is it to cover their own butt? So that they may not walk into the same mistake I have? I try to give feedback to people when they say or do something I don’t like or that offends me. This often ends in disaster too. People don’t like feedback unless it is good. I could use some help with how to word ‘constructive’ feedback better, but sometimes the news is just bad. I can take bad news. In fact, I appreciate bad news if it gives me the opportunity to get better. So, I guess the key would be how to state my opinion without stepping on others feelings, how to give good feedback, how to change my behavior so I don’t hurt people with the things I say (which I guess is mostly the same as the first comment) and how to let go when I can’t do anymore or someone can’t simply accept my opinion as mine, so that I do not grow resentful or make it worse by continuing to try. Seems simple enough. I wonder how successful others are with mastering these skills. I mean, am I doing ok and it is just that if you speak your opinion you are always liable to have more problems with people? Well I guess I just know this is my lifelong goal. I certainly think I have improved as time has gone by, hopefully that will pick up speed as time goes on.

People stare at me more when I have pigtails in. Why? I am going to try and make a hat that is structured like a beanie cap but has holes for my pigtails. In that case I would completely understand why people are staring at me.

This week I have had lots of really vivid dreams. Must have been the lack of solid food. My body wasn’t busy digesting my dinner so it could dream. The first I remember was a thriller. There was a psychotic killer running around and the people in the dream were trying to figure out which one of them it was. I was not in the dream. I was watching. Not like a movie but just seeing, like in my mind’s eye. I got to the part where the killer had one of the women and was starting to torture her (ritualistic bleeding and a GYN exam I would rather not go into) while the other people, including her love interest, not boyfriend, were literally running through the huge apartment building trying to find what room they were in before she was dead. Then I woke up. It was totally gruesome but not scary. I remember it because the feeling was so odd. This guy was really sick and twisted but I felt no repulsion, just observance,

I had two dreams last night. In the first, Matt, of the Matt Files, was doing something very unMatt like. My mobile went off and woke me up and I thought, ‘I have got to write Matt about this one’ and felt that it was such a vivid dream that I would remember it, but now I can’t. Maybe he came to volunteer to wear fishnet stockings and serve our drinks at Ladies Poker night? Just not sure. Oh, I added a link to his email address if you all want to write him. He is very cool and will write you back. Especially if you have a job for him somewhere other than Corvallis.

The last dream was just as strange but I was in it. I am not sure if I was first or third person though. I know at one point I looked in a mirror at myself. Patrick and I were in a foreign city (as in, not Stuttgart). It seemed like Italy or something. We were hanging out at a coffee shop/clothing store. A very beautiful woman said to me ‘You would be perfectly beautiful if your hair were a bit longer’. I told her that I didn’t look good with long hair and that I was going to let it grow only a little longer so that I would wear a proper ponytail. (Which is odd because my real-life goal is braids). Then, for some reason, we, Patrick and I, felt it necessary that I have an outfit that looked like a little girl’s nightgown. We looked around the store and I tried things on. Everything was too big. The last thing I tried on was an ok size but it sort of just looked like I was wearing a nightgown (this was where I looked in the mirror and saw myself), not an outfit that made me look like a little girl in a nightgown. Get the difference? Anyhow, we didn’t really think it worked but somehow I had gotten green mud mask on it so we felt we had to buy it. I was sort of wondering around the store and sat down next to this really made up woman. She looked kept somehow, though she wasn’t thin. She was just extremely styled. She started telling me that I could do erotica pictures and be taken care off, like she was. She showed me some of her pictures which were erotic but not, I am not sure how to describe it, they weren’t exactly sexual, they were visual. They meant something to someone but weren’t explicit. Then I woke up again. Anybody have any ideas about my dreams? What do they mean?