Tag Archives: dream

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. What dreams may come. I don’t know what I spent the night dreaming about. I very rarely remember dreams. What I can tell you is whatever it was it left me well and truly annoyed. I can only surmise from the result that it somehow involved people being stupid. That hardly seems insightful but I can’t think of anything else that leaves me with such a general feeling of annoyance and disappointment in the universe.

2. Christmas. Go ahead and call me Grinch, Scrooge, Krampus, whatever, but it’s three days before Christmas and I’m just not feeling it this year. Maybe it’s because I’ve usually already started my Christmas vacation by this point in the week. Maybe it’s because it was 50 degrees today. Maybe it’s because I want to bludgeon the next person who whistles past my cubicle wearing an ugly Christmas sweater to death with my keyboard. I might not be ready for Christmas this year, but I’m damn good and ready for this eight-day weekend… and that’s not nothing.

3. Backup. I’ve been saying for months now that I needed someone to at least get familiar with some of the things I’m working on. I don’t need someone to do the work, just someone who can speak intelligently about it if I happen to get hit by a bus, win the lottery, or, you know, take a few days off. Now that the latter scenario is upon is, let’s not act like anyone is surprised it’s happening. The decision that every project was going to have a single point of failure was made at echelons far above mine and despite all evidence to the contrary, decisions have consequences. The consequence here is that while I’m gone, no one is going to be around to answer whatever questions happen to come up. Yes, it means there will be an unmitigated shitshow when I get back. I may not be able to avoid those problems, but I can sure as hell defer them and for the time being that’s good enough.

Getting Bloomberged…

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I went for years without being able to remember a single nighttime dream sequence. They’re happening often enough now that I barely take note of them, unless, of course, I feel like it was a blogworthy experience. This morning was one of those times.

It was at the office, which could qualify the experience as a nightmare rather than a more run of the mill dream. Upon returning to my cube from a meeting, I found four people in it, busily putting traders-at-terminals.jpgtogether what appeared to be a monstrously over sized Bloomberg terminal – a dozen monitors, cabling snaked everywhere, multiple keyboards – and cramming it all into my 10 foot by 10 foot cube.

I ask what they’re doing. The only one of the group I can identify, the dream version of the guy who sits in the cube next to me, just looked up and laughed before going back to work with the impact wrench. Don’t ask me why putting together a computer system sounds like the service bay at the local tire shop, but in my dreams it apparently does.

Dream Jeff stood there for what felt like a very long time demanding to know what they were doing and why all this crap was in my area, finally screaming at them for an answer while they calmly worked on – and just before the alarm clock startled me back into the real world.

I never did get a satisfactory answer about what they were doing, but I can certainly speculate on the meaning behind the dream. If that’s not my subconscious screaming “Fuck Monday!” at the top of its voice, I don’t know what is.

Dreams and wishes…

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With all respect to Dr. Freud who argued that dreams are and exercise in wish fulfillment, I’m afraid I have to go out on a limb and beg to differ. I woke up in a cold sweat this morning near enough to 3AM in the aftermath of a dream in which I (for some unknown reason) was sitting on the back porch watching the back yard wash out all the way down to the bottom of the foundation. I can assure the good doctor that I in no way have any wish to do that kind of excavation work. Ever.

Maybe the most entertaining part is that Dream Jeff was completely uninterested by the every growing chasm that was appearing where his dream yard was supposed to be. I can only assume that the entire thing was just a bad reaction to too-late-in-the-evening meatloaf sandwiches and spending too much time obsessing about a dry basement.

I’d like to think the couple of hours I allocate to sleep are supposed to be a restful time. Fortunately last night is largely an exception to that rule. Even so, it’s yet another of the many reminders that sometimes inside my own head is a very strange place to pass the time.

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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If you thought movin’ on up was going to in any way interfere with regular installments of WAJTW you clearly don’t know me at all. In my head there’s always something worth bitching about. Like these:

1. Going bump in the night. Two nights in a row I was brought out of a dead sleep by something going bump in the night. It’s a fine little rush, but doesn’t make for a restful time. The third time it happened it wasn’t so much a bump as it was a persistent scratching… and that’s when reality sank in. My headboard and George’s tank align almost perfectly and are separated by two thicknesses of drywall and about three inches of air. Every time he did a little excavating or nudged the side of the tank I was hearing my tortoise loud and clear from half a foot away. That made it a lot less unnerving at 3AM, but didn’t do much at all to eliminate it’s the week’s most annoying “discover” here at Casa de Jeff v2.

2. High efficiency. I inherited a high efficiency front load washing machine. It’s an impressive piece of equipment, no doubt. However, with the old top load $300 Sears outlet model, when I set it to a normal wash cycle it would finish like clockwork in about 40 minutes. This new, improved, high efficiency model on the other hand just takes as much time as it decides it wants to take no matter what it’s set on. Could be 30 minutes. Could be 2 hours. Just depends. While my clothes, I’m sure, are cleaner than ever it sure would be nice to have a little predictability in how long getting them to that state might take.

3. Stupid dreams. So far this week I’ve had dreams about home networking, dreams about washing machines, and dreams about work. Whatever happened to dreams about Sports Illustrated cover models, I have no idea. All I know is going to bed is way less fun when it involves home improvement projects rather than scantily clad supermodels.

Living the dream…

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Picture it. Appalachia. 1984. If you asked the average five or six year old in that time and place what he or she wanted to be when grown, the answers you’d hear would probably be something like fireman, cop, nurse, baseball player, a teacher, or vet. My answer was pretty much always that I wanted to be a senator when I grew up. Even from a young age I had a sense that high office was pretty damned good work if you could get it.

Today, by contrast, I wouldn’t want to be a senator for 10 times the salary. I’m not sure I could spend the day dealing with sycophants and lobbyists, the right wing crackpots like Tom Cotton and Ted Cruz, or left wing ideologues like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. I don’t know that any amount of senatorial decorum could stop me from carrying out my deep desire to heave the whole lot of them into the Potomac. At least now I know what I don’t want to do.

What I do want to do – what I’d consider my dream job today – is a little harder to pin down. I know I’d want to write, but not all day every day. I’d like to have an unlimited amount of time to sit on a sunny porch in the morning and drink good coffee. I’d like to walk through the woods, ride 4-wheelers, and shoot guns. I’d like to really take the time to learn how to brew beer and distill whiskey.

As far as I can tell, my dream job is essentially being a PowerBall jackpot winner and having the financial freedom to pursue whatever happens to interest me in the moment. Don’t get me wrong, I’m compensated well for the time I spend in the office, but it doesn’t take too many days of playing “Who Has the Key to the Mysterious Locked Equipment Room” or “1001 Ways to Make Your PowerPoint Better” to make a guy wonder if there’s something more out there.

I’m not Thoreau and this place certainly isn’t Walden, but it keeps me off the streets. That’s probably as much as a reasonable person could want… but I’ve never claimed to be the model of reasonableness. So the answer to the “dream job” question really is, “it depends.” It depends on the day and hour you ask. For me it’s always been something of a moving target.

This is the second of three answers “By Request.” Thanks, Chrissie!

What Annoys Jeff this Week?

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1. The long slog to summer. Now that we’ve tipped the hat to the father of our country, we start the long, hard march to Memorial Day. For those of you not keeping track, that’s 13 straight weeks without a federally approved long holiday weekend in the mix. It feels like a very, very long time between breaks. Of course I’ll probably throw a few days of my own leave at this problem to keep from having a complete break from reality. That’ll stave off the worst effects, but it clearly no substitute for legitimate long weekends. Others will disagree, but for me, this slog from mid-February to late May is the worst part of the year.

2. CBO Reports. The Congressional Budget Office is the non-partisan doer of research on behalf of the feckless officials we elect to Congress. Their reports are spun by both sides equally, but on balance the reports themselves are as close to fair and balanced as we’re likely to see from any large bureaucratic organization. I forced a laugh when I saw their latest report on the impact of the proposed minimum wage hike. It’s the classic Washington good news, bad news story. The good news is raising minimum wage could lift as many as a million people above the poverty line. The bad news is it could also simultaneously throw as many as half a million people out of work. A report like that gives both sides plenty of ammunition and seems to increase the likelihood that we’ll stay true to form and opt to do nothing at all. Based on the CBO’s report, it seems that a radical increase in the minimum wage is a devil’s bargain at best… great if you keep your job and get your raise, but a spectacularly craptastic deal if you’re one of the 500,000 extraneous employees who are thanked for playing and invited to go on back to the house.

3. Dreaming while you sleep. It’s very rare for me to remember dreams I have once I wake up. Sometimes they’ll stick as a vague recollection, but usually they’re gone by the time my eyes are fully open. Except the one I had last night that featured a former boss of mine. Somehow he showed up in my current office with glowing red eyes, tore up a couple of cubicles and then hurled a potted plant at my head. The odd thing might not be that I remembered this little episode once I woke up, but that it didn’t actually feel very surprising. Make of that what you will.

Dreams from a past life…

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I had a dream last night. Before someone asks, no it wasn’t about equality, justice, or peaceful coexistence, which I guess if you know me isn’t really all that surprising. What is surprising is that I remember the dream at all. I’m sure that like everyone else on the planet, I have plenty of dreams at night, but it’s extremely rare for me to remember them at all when I wake up. Occasionally I’m vaguely aware that I had a dream, but remembering anything about it almost never happens… Which I suppose makes last night’s stand out more vividly.

In the early 2000s I was introduced to the now defunct Baltimore nightlife institution, Bohager’s. The “Bohdome” was an all purpose concert venue, bar, grille, meat market, and only slightly disguised illicit drug emporium. The cavernous space offered up five bars, a DJ or live music depending on the night, an all-you-can-drink $15 or 20 cover, and a live action version of Girls Gone Wild: Spring Break Edition. The place reeked of stale smoke and spilled booze, testosterone, and cheap thrills. There was a while there in my early 20s when I wanted to move in.

Bohager’s has been a parking lot/condo development for the better part of a decade now, but I was there in Fell’s Point last night, back on my favorite perch just between the upper level bar and the railing, with the best view of the stage and the dance floor below. And I mean it was real; so real I could taste the cigarette smoke and off brand rum in my mouth when I woke up this morning. That’s why I know it must have been a dream since I haven’t had a smoke in over two years now and it’s been a hell of a lot longer than that since I drank cheap alcohol.

It’s strange the things that come to us in our dreams. I could spend hours analyzing what I think it means and why my brain took me there last night. Instead of making much of a deal out of it, I think I’ll just smile and appreciate the happy memory… and maybe raise a glass or two tonight in honor of times long past.

I had a dream…

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Some people have the knack for recounting dreams they have almost every night. Although I know I dream, I very rarely remember more than a few details of even dreams that I know where intense. Last night, however, was an exception. It was like dreaming in Technicolor… everything was just a little too bright, the people were just a little too expressive, and it was a little too real.

My colleagues and I were sitting in what I can only think of as the courtroom that hosted the Nuremburg war crimes trials of Nazi officials at the end of World War II. The key members of the project team were all there and we were listening attentively to our headphones as the translators repeated the words of the prosecutor, who was one of the senior employees who has opposed the project from the very beginning. As the bill of indictment was read and translated I remember distinctly that “dream” Jeff looked towards the judges’ dais. While faces were indistinct, I was struck by the formal presentation of the flags of the United States, the Army (complete with battle streamers), and the starred flag of a general officer. The “list of complaints” seemed to go on ad infinitum and at length, there seemed to be a question, as everyone in the defendants’ dock pointed to the program manager. I wish I could remember more, but the reading of the grievances and looking at the room in detail seem to have been the crux of the dream.

I don’t generally do a lot of dream interpretation, nor put stock in “what they tell us,” but in this case, I’m willing to make an exception. I’m reasonably sure that it’s just about time to take a nice long vacation