The Bark & The Bite

I don't get frustrated with people all that easily, but I'm getting a little frustrated right this second. See I bust my ass to run a succesful company, I put the time in every single day to make sure things aren't just done they're done right. But people never see that. I worked fifteen hours yesterday, but all anyone in the office talks about is that I didn't come in until 11 A.M. They ignore the fact that I was only gone for nine hours, they ignore the fact that my job was totally done as was a large chunk of theirs. It's like everyone thinks the little shoemaker's elves come in the middle of the night and take care of all this shit that they find done the next morning. Add to that the fact that no one can figure out exactly what I do or how I do it, they just know that something is happening and it's working out pretty well. Hell they know they get their checks every week and they know they're making more than they used to. That's all that should really matter to them anyway.
~
Last night I conked out pretty much the second I got home. I mean I barely made it to the bed before I was done. That doesn't happen often, but despite actually getting a solid few hours the night before I was just beat. I woke up an hour later, took my shoes and pants off, and went straight back to sleep.

The weird thing is I didn't have one of those crazy dreams I normally do when I'm really exhausted, or even one of the Alter-World type dreams. Instead I had a particular type of dream that I've had every year since I started college, always right around the time of finals. Keep in mind it'll be five years next week since I've been out of college. But ever since I was a freshman I've had this recurring dream that I'm studying for finals, but I can't remember where or when my final is. I can't find the phone number or e-mail of anyone in my class to double check. I can't even remember exactly who the professor is to look up their office hours. I'm not panicking because I don't panic, but I am getting sort of worried.

Finals were always weird for me in college, I could never figure out the rhyme or reason in changing hours and classrooms for midterms and finals. It was complicated by the fact that I transferred after my freshman year and Rutgers did things differently than Marist, and that year to year Rutgers did things differently as well. I never actually missed a final (I did ace one in eight minutes while inebriated, and then walk out of the next one because I was hungover) but I was never really sure when I showed up on the day of that I was actually in the right place. There was this one time at Marist where I gave up on a midterm because I didn't recognize any of the terms or topics and handed it in taking a zero only to find out that the prof had his schedule confused and had given us the wrong exam. Another time I had to take an exam in my profs office because they had bumped an exam up a half hour and I'd missed the notice.

Apparently this paranoia leads to these dreams where I'm slowly getting frantic because I can't find out when the exam is. Last nights dream found me in the backroom of my grandparent's old house. I was sitting in Popcorn's old recliner fiddling with the lightbulb in the old brass lamp that always sat next to it, just trying to get enough light to read by. It was history textbook of some sort. I was the the same age I am now, but my siblings and cousins were contemporary to the time we would have been in the old house. My grandparents were strangely absent, I seemed to know they were dead even in the context of the dream. But there I am studying for a history class I never took, flipping through my notebooks frustrated by smudged phone numbers, illegible e-mail addresses, and irrational times and room assignments (I had one exam scheduled for 3 A.M. February 24th, 2011 in Hoffman Hall, I don't remember a Hoffman Hall and I'll likely be dead by 2011, even if I'm not I still wouldn't show up for anything at 3 A.M. unless it involved scotch and Russian women or chocolate milk and fireworks). My cousins were trying to help me find the time and place of the exam, my little brother and sister were running around bouncing off of things. Everybody but me was finding it all very funny. I was just getting frustrated. The kids kept getting louder. More and more notebook pages were blank where I just knew something had been written down before. Pictures are falling off the walls, I go to the refrigerator to get something to drink but it's empty. It's getting hot and stuffy but all the windows are stuck shut and I can't reach the air conditioner because the ceiling keeps getting higher and higher. I'm getting all worked up and I'm just about to scream as I throw open the old dusty curtains on the sliding glass doors but where the porch my grandmother used to sit on to listen to the birds and feed the squirrels was there is not nothing, only darkness. And I'm slightly perplexed.

Then I woke up, and all I could think of in place of the million things I've been locked in on lately was that I was very glad that I didn't have to find out when and where that history exam was.
~

My next thought after waking up was "What the hell is that feeling in my chest?" Because apparently last week's miserable allergies have all decided to migrate down into my lungs and now I'm hacking away every time I try to take a breathe. It's so deep and gritty a cough that every time I catch a fit sitting here at my desk my god damn guard dog starts howling in response. I'm actually not feeling sick at all, but I can feel all this shit building up and it's not exactly comfortable. So yeah, hopefully my allergies won't flare up again because then I'm really dicked, and hopefully I'll get some real rest tonight because I'm frakkin' exhausted, and hopefully I won't dream about anything but sunshine and fucking because it would sort of be nice to wake up with a smile on my face.