On the Subject of Naps

Naptaking is not usually deliberate because when it happens, there's simply no telling when one is going to wake up. When I fall asleep, I sleep so deeply that it takes me two alarm clocks just to stir me in the mornings. When at last I am induced to open my eyes, I need further inducement to get up at all, and not lie back down again 30 seconds later. I have my world calculated with precision to just how much time I need to get dressed for work at Chick-fil-a, how much time I need to get dressed for school, and how much time I need to get dressed for church, though I still haven't wrapped my sleepy head around the amount of time that it takes to get to church from my new location. A nap, such a simple thing, could easily turn into a catastrophe.

There was a time when the concept of a nap was laughable, and how I laughed at those silly other people who would sit down after a long meal, not move for the better part of half an hour and then suddenly begin to shift about blearily, trying to catch up on what they missed without admitting that they missed anything. The day that I accidentally fell asleep clinging to Lynn's inflatable mattress during the Ireland trip (actually, it was a floaty pool mattress of DOOM, but we were all too kind to tell her so) was a rare and shocking event. The onslaught of college and its terrible toll on one's internal clock took care of the shock value.

Now I find that if I'm not careful, and I sit down without some degree of caution, the sandman will snipe me from the rafters. Usually I know nothing about it until I wake up some two or three hours later and wonder why on earth attaching a squid to my handbag to carry my keys seemed like such a good idea ten minutes earlier. Just as well because it turns out that the object that I thought was a squid was only a discarded sweater.

My dog encourages this phenomenon as often as possible. I think he likes standing sentry over me while I sleep (see October entry regarding scent). He is a very small dachshund and he enjoys being cuddled and receiving attention as often as he can manage to get it. He's also fun to tease.

I sleep on a bunk bed, usually the top bunk, though occasionally I'll fall asleep reading and wake up a while later on the bottom bunk, too lazy to make any geographical changes. The dog prefers the bottom bunk because he has some difficulty with heights, but he shoves aside such apprehensions for my sake. He's also afraid of the dark and of dogs who look like they might be big enough to challenge his status as the alpha of a one-dog pack.

He greeted me with much enthusiasm when I got home from grocery shopping today. He doesn't like that I lock him in his crate/den when I leave the house, but after coming home from work many, many times to discover that he'd overturned the hamper so that he could commune with my clothes, and while he was at it he'd strewn the contents of the dust bin around the room presumably for the hell of it because half the time there wasn't even anything in there to interest him, after coming downstairs from a brief interim of watching crime shows upstairs only to discover that he'd found a way to get to my very very special pumpkin bread which I'd been saving as a treat for myself and devoured every crumb of it, leaving me to weep over the empty package about how all the especially nice things I'm given get ruined, after he similarly disposed of the cake of lotion which was a gift and had been working incredibly well and I'm still not sure how he got to it, we decided that the crate was the way to go after all.

I released and fed him, I let him run around outside until he'd worked himself into a bit of a frenzy while I pottered around on the internet (I pretend that I was being productive, but in reality I was only procrastinating on emailing the parents and telling them what I had subjected their children to during their art period today.) When I let the beast in, he bounded about demanding what appeared to be hugs and kisses, I don't speak dachshund so I'm never entirely sure. One thing that is very fun to do to him, apart from spinning him around until he can no longer walk straight, is hide and call to him. He plays this game well, and we usually call it quits when he sees me, though he best likes the version where I simply throw a blanket over myself and sit very quietly. He knows I know that he knows I'm there, but he also knows I won't move until he pulls away the blanket with his nubby little forepaws. It is so CUTE! Another game is to climb up to where he can't get me and call to him. He hates this, but it's fun.

We played that today. I climbed onto the top of the bunk bed, and since no one else was in the house, I didn't trouble to shush him when he began saying “MOM! MOM MOM-MOM, MOM, MOM MOM!” insistently. I asked him what he wanted, but he seemed to be having difficulties expressing himself. He made it plain that he was no longer interested in food, and although mention of water stirred him to great activity, he had plenty of the stuff in his bowl. He said he wanted out, but his body language said something else entirely. Beyond that, I simply couldn't fathom what it was he desired. I nearly gave up and curled up under the blankets several times, but he was insistent that I was on no account to do any such thing. I asked him if he wanted up, and he began jumping up and down on the lower bunk, yelling at me the whole time. I told him that I didn't appreciate being yelled at, and he had better stop or I should give up on helping him help himself altogether.

We established eventually that he did want up (and he was sorry for yelling at me), so I clambered down, put him on the top bunk and, pleased that my work was done, sat down on the lower bunk. Oddly enough, this action had a very disquieting effect on him. He looked down at me, and whined piteously, and tried from many different angles to find a way down again. I call that gratitude! After I'd gone through such trouble to get him up there in the first place, too. I wish I had a photo of him looking down at me. He discovered the shelf next to my bed in about ten seconds, and might have been able to combine that with gravity to get down at much personal injury. I climbed back up, gave him a hug and a kiss and called him various nonsensical names.

Oddly enough, the next moment involved re-visiting Christmas, moving my bed until it was outside under the deck stairs and installing plywood boards as a replacement for walls and teleporting the whole house to somewhere were the Andes were in sight. The moment after that, I woke up to discover that it was five o'clock, and my turn to make dinner, and I still hadn't emailed the parents.

Regarding Silver

This entry is entirely about me, but I'm working on pretending to be humble, so we'll begin somewhere else. There's a reason why those word association games are so fun for people, the sort where some psychiatrist says random words at you, and you reply with the first word to come into your head next. I've never been in a professional situation with an actual psychiatrist (though a psychiatrist did once try to make adjustments to me on her own time, and I found her conduct reprehensible and have been rather off of psychiatrists since) but I assume that they still play this game and also give rorschach ink blot tests. I played it with my friends, though, and it was rather fun, not only to see where we would lead each other, but to gain insight into the other person. There are some things we would fixate on, and double back and return to later, some words were triggers for some very fascinating estuaries of thought, and it would be interesting to know what experiences led those words to their conclusions.

I have trigger memories, myself. Moments that stick inside my head as the epitome of some great emotion. I remember the time I had a solo in choir, and it wasn't just a normal solo. All us choral people had just finished singing a song where everyone stood in a different place in the audience and sung their parts. It was quite lovely, the lights were out, we each lit a candle and sang to our audience. There were several solos interspersed in that particular song: a small child, a little lamb, a mighty king and a narrator all had their roles to play. I didn't have a solo, I was part of the wind, but that song ended a little sooner than I expected. I went up to the stage while the other choir members made their way to the back, I could see their candles glinting at me in the darkness, and the jewel-shining lights that glimmered in the eyes of the audience, but what I could see most, so that it was almost blinding, was my own candle in my hand, the only one that everyone was staring at. My hands were steady, which is odd because usually they're the first prey of the jitters, but I'm thinking that most of my internal organs were trembling something awful. All of that had to stop, though. It was time to sing, everyone was waiting for me and it was senseless to keep them. All that nervousness welled up and melted away when I opened my mouth and sang Hodie Christus Nautus Est, and there was nothing left behind but a sweet, calm, lovely sound.

I can summon that memory when I feel particularly nervous, and unless it's test anxiety, it serves its purpose quite well.

There is a memory that has always associated silver with power for me. Apart from the whole anti-vampire anti-werewolf trope, which I suppose is reason enough in its own, one of my favourite moments revolved around silver. Oh, and fire. I like fire.

Once, I took a course on jewellery making, which I had assumed would consist of stringing beads in attractive arrangements, learning about findings and how to mount scrap objects as decoration, which is a legitimate form of jewellery-making, but I'm very pleased that I was mistaken. This class focused on forge tools and solder and transforming sheets of metal into pieces of wearable art, and I loved, loved, loved it. Ever since I was a kid I've loved forges and fire. At those reanacting farms, I liked hanging out in the blacksmith's forge and the apiary best of all. Now, at first this was only because those were the places to which my sister would drag me, and all autonomy of parental intrusion was good, but it turns out that watching the smiths turn iron into red hot glowing spears and wailing on them with a hammer until the iron transformed into something else entirely was pretty impressive.

Imagine my delight, little darlings, when, after much guidance and many words of caution, I set a spark to a torch and didn't set myself on fire! Oh! The power, how it coursed through me! How tangible was the thrill of soldering copper to copper, learning how to recognise that flash when you knew that you had accomplished your mission. I'm pretty sure I laughed maniacally when this happened. Actually, I know that I laughed maniacally because that twisted delight became part of someone else's story later on. Every project was a pleasure, every class period was a welcome relief from the otherwise stupid classes with which I was burdened that year, and I'm not joking about them being a burden. I can count on one hand the number of classes that I hated at that college; two of them were in that semester.

Then came the penultimate project (the final project was a “chose your own challenge” sort of thing, and not quite as climactic as a final project should be). The quest was to either make a bead...which was disappointingly banal, though it turned out to be quite difficult, or make a cuttlebone mold and cast it. Well, you can't cast copper without an awful lot of equipment that we didn't have, since copper is toxic in its liquid form, so those of us who were casting metal had to use silver instead. She taught us the form of what we needed to do, and then let us make our decision. I was the only level 1 jeweller to chose casting, so everyone else watched my progress with great curiosity.

Oh! That's another thing I liked about that class: all the different level jewellers were using the same space and the same class time. It was wonderful, there was a massive pool of experience to appeal to if ever one was stumped. One gentleman graciously gave me a green onyx cabochon because I said I liked the combination of copper and green. I made a hair pick with it, and sliced right through my finger doing it. Don't watch a horror movie while holding a jeweller's saw, or any other kind of saw for that matter.

The day that I finished making my cuttlebone mold was a mighty day. It was also a red lipstick day. There comes a time where you just know that you aren't going to get through the moment without some sort of glamour, and not being a fairy carrying a bag of the stuff with me, I have to resort to applying red lipstick. I was wearing very comfortable black trousers (God doesn't allow many of those to be made), a white blouse and a pinstripe vest. I think I was also wearing a tie that day, which suggests that I had had some kind of god-awful test in philosophy and had temporarily longed to cease existing. Anyway, the upshot of all this description was that I looked unusually dapper.

The professor handed me a crucible and some flux. To be honest, that was a bit scary, especially when several of the other students stopped what they were doing to watch my progress. I put my silver in the crucible and tried for a good while to make it melt. The silver slowly melded in on itself until it was one nebulous ball, but the professor assured me that it wasn't ready yet, and I would know when it was beyond any doubt. The silver glowed bright orange from under a veil of black ash, and sluggishly rolled from one side of the crucible to the other as I continued to point the torch at it, and I thought surely it was ready now, but it wasn't. Then the ash burst away and vanished, and the silver was undeniably liquid. It swished around, mercurial, in the crucible when I poured it into the cuttlebone cast, which immediately took on the odour of burnt hair, and turned off the torch. I can't describe the thrill of watching this, but I haven't found anything yet to top it, and it makes me sad from time to time that I can't do it again, at least not until I've found a way to make a forge of my own (probably some time after I've found a way to make an apiary of my own). Whenever I want to feel that world-dominationy rush, that sense of all powerful wizardry, I think of the day of the crucible.

So, I see that our local historical ranch site is offering a one-day blacksmithing course in the summer. I think I might take it.