Only In Dreams

Hello all.  Once again I'm going to talk about sleeping trouble and general weirdness, possibly due to my lack of sleep as compared to my normal schedule.

It started about a week ago on Sunday night and I had to go to sleep to wake up early on Monday morning, but this was made hard by the fact that I slept rather late that morning so I wasn't tired at a normal hour to wake up at 6:25 without feeling like absolute shit.  When I decided that I was tired enough to try sleeping, I quickly found that I was wrong and fell into one of those situations where you try to sleep but get riddled with thoughts about what you should be doing instead (whether at that moment or in general).  If I am the only one who comes across this situation quite often please tell me because that probably isn't a good thing.  Eventually after about an hour and a half of hating myself for stupid things I've done in days past and telling myself that I'm going to partake in some new endeavors with my life I fell asleep.  That is when the real fun began.  I had a dream about some sort of really weird alien epidemic (possibly induced by playing Dead Space: Extraction earlier that night) and it started with a first person perspective of a woman being woken up, and in the shock of her change of state she punched the person who woke her right in the face. Once we established that that was her default response to being woken up, we met some other girl who spent her days laying in the middle of her pet Giant Venus Flytrap (now were getting into the weirdness) and that there is an epidemic that turns people into angry killing zombie-like aliens, but it can be kept in check by some measures.  This is when the first lady catches the epidemic but she is kept in check so she is a semi-alien but can still act coherently like a normal human.  This is when we hit the interesting part of the story, the infected lady gets woken up and reacts as she normally does by punching the other in the face, and this is when Giant Venus Flytrap Girl defensively grabs the infected woman and unleashes her pet upon her, the results were not pretty.  This freaked me out and woke me up, I was freaked out to the extent that I tried to rewrite the dream.  I don't know if I rewrote it correctly because I didn't dream again before being abruptly woken up for work (I didn't punch anybody).

That's some scary ass shit.

The next night I once again battled the same battle with my brain before going to sleep, but that is nothing to discuss at the moment because I once again had a survival-horror dream.  This time rather than an alien epidemic and fictional characters, the antagonists were light-fearing zombies and my siblings and I were the main characters trying to survive in a two-level warehouse I have never seen before.  This dream wasn't nearly as vivid as the last to me but from what I remember we had one light in the warehouse and were standing in it because we knew it was the only way we would be safe from the incoming horde.  It contained a lot of dialogue and I retained exactly none of it, but some action finally came as one of my brothers decided that our barricades were insufficient and decided at the last minute to run out into the darkness and down the hall to fix them, the dream then ended with my starting to venture off after him to help.  The world may never know if we found the light.

Imagine this with only one light bulb and complete darkness otherwise

This was strange to me in that it was the first time in a really long time that I have had notable dreams on consecutive nights, and was also notable in that I usually needed more than 2 hours after waking up to be vaguely useful.  The third night I tried to avoid the typical thinking myself to sleep by just staying up later until I was ready to sleep, which worked to some small extent.  That night I know that I had a dream, but I didn't retain any of it at all, all I remember about it was there was no setting, no purpose, no people and no words.  The dream was just a sequence of images being thrown at me randomly and the worst part is that I don't remember any of what they were.  I feel like something interesting happened in writing about this so I really hope that you enjoyed hearing about my dreams and maybe I'll try to tell them more when I have them.  Enjoy the song I named this after.

Random Thoughts (I'm Not Tired Yet)

I should be asleep at this time, but I am not tired.  Working a full-time job on the summers is murder on your sleep schedule when you are in college, at least 75% of the year is spent in a situation where I would be able to consider midnight an early bedtime and 10am a typical waking time.  The last couple weeks since I've started working I have had to be in at work between 7am and 7:30am, this means waking up around 6:30ish and to get enough sleep to be functional on the next day I'll have to get to bed well before midnight and even 11pm seems like a late bedtime.  That brings us on back to our current time of 10:21pm, and my bedtime rapidly approaching.  The only problem is as you all can see is that it is Sunday night and I still live the college schedule on weekends.  This isn't a new problem as I have already stated it has been several weeks since I have been working this job, but the difference that makes me write about it tonight is the simple fact that Netflix is not working for me at this particular moment so I stumbled back upon this blog and realized it has been a really long time since I have contributed anything to it.

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To continue the monologue until I get tired enough to attempt to sleep I figure it would be nice to think back on my previous job at the local grocery store and see what I was able to take out of that.  I was a bagger or a sacker depending on what you wanted to call me on any given day, and I worked there for a solid 4 years at least, so let us examine how much different every year was for me.  The first year was by far the worst of it, I was a newbie (no0b) and I also couldn't drive so not only did I not work a lot of hours because of that, but I also had to get a ride to and from the store every time I did have to work a menial 3 hour shift.  To make matters more interesting that year was the only one that I worked with my brother, who had already worked there about a year and a half and he basically set my intentions at work as keeping to myself and doing my time.  This was terrible advice as I didn't really make any friends in the store and time goes by a lot slower when you are just alone with your own thoughts.  That first year really was unnecessary and only helped to accentuate what was at that time an awkward stage of my life.

Paper or Plastic  Mother Trucker?

Six months in found me a Senior in high school, and I was able to drive and my brother was gone from the picture.  This is around the time that I met my first good friend from the store, but not through the store itself, but rather from a mix of mutual friends and a shared journalism class in which I feel we became really good friends and still are to this day.  At this point things started to change for the better in my world, as not only did I now have a good friend to kill time with in the store but also through him and my overall change of attitude I became more outgoing and made the right friends to help me get by at work.  I started to have friendships with most of the people I would have to deal with on a regular shift, but I also found myself befriending the Assistant Managers and from that I was given some of the easier jobs and overall just made my life easier (Note: I did not make friends with them to make my life easier, it was just a side effect from them being good people).  Towards the end of my high school career I was good friends with a good portion of the people I worked with and even had a girl really flirting hard with me but I was eventually repelled by a friend of mine telling the story of she and one of his friends having "relations" by simply asking me if I have ever seen The Descent, when I eventually realized what he was getting at things changed and mostly stayed similar for the rest of year 2.

I did not have sexual relations with that woman.

Break to a full year of college under my belt (nothing notable happened in that month I came back during the winter) and I returned as an elder in the store.  As an elder I pretty much had the right to abuse my friendships with the Assistants and I have always thought, girls are attracted to older men, so I felt I was a little bit of a novelty as the college student to the high school juniors and seniors (more on this later?).  So things became slightly different not only because of this but also because things always change over the course of a year, I was broke and needed money so I worked a considerable amount of hours more than I did when I was in high school, and I had friends who I hadn't seen in months so there was a lot of catching up and storytelling to do, and there were also a whole new wave of new employees I had yet to meet.  One of which was more or less my replacement as far as my in-store clique went, and I don't disagree at all, when I finally met him it turned out that we were very much alike, mostly that he was who I wanted to be when I was his age.  We went on to become friends and he was the man I had previously mentioned in a Project Yancey story (for the record I have more or less scrapped the idea of finishing Project Yancey :( ).  It was also a shame that my great friend who helped me open up in the store had since moved into the deli so I rarely saw him while working, but we would have times when we would have our breaks together, most notably the one where we ate an entire package of Hoodsie Ice Creams in 15 minutes.  This summer followed along in a similar vein as what I have already said, and included a night where I couldn't sleep and wrote about the summer in a J.D. Salinger-esque form, but I don't think that will be posted any time soon.  Since I figured I was going to be halfway through college by the time the next summer came along I wished all my friends the best wishes going forward as I would likely not see them much in the future.

I just learned Hoodsies are a regional thing

Fast-forward to the next summer and I was wrong.  After a little original ribbing from a few friends about how I wasn't supposed to be there anymore things went mostly back to normal.  This summer was once again quite different from my other spells at the store, and I worked a lot more morning shifts which is a completely different crowd as it is the adult workers rather than the teenage wasteland the store usually is at nights.  It was also different when I would work the nights because instead of going out of my way to become friendly with almost everyone in the store I tried to ignore the younger kids, although I would still take my time to make friends with all the attractive ladies in the store.  I was coming off a situation with my personal life which didn't pan out for one reason or another, so I was actually quite eager to throw myself back into the mix and that became the most of my interest.  As the older kids ended up banding together into a posse, we had our fun when we could even though I don't believe that I hung out with anybody outside the store save for a "retirement party" at a local Chinese restaurant/bar, when I noticed something that I still need to follow up on (and should soon).  I went all out to make sure that this time it would be my last hurrah, and even went as far as asking if I could get pictures from the security cameras as I walked out on my last day doing my traditional punch-out derobing (unbutton that shirt and put the tie hanging halfway out of your pocket).

Sorry, not clever enough

The next winter I had enough money to take an entire month off and manage to get through my spring semester, and I also grew a beard as another excuse to stay away (rules say no facial hair).  Even though it was not easy and I thought I would have to go back I ended up having my current job fall on me and I am very happy about it.  In retrospect, as much as the work was monotonous and I disliked it, I liked the people I met and I still make appearances to go in and catch up with those who remain at the store (there aren't many).  I also realized one other thing, I spent those last two summers almost exclusively flirting with girls, and unfortunately due to the fact I am in my own way a very shy guy, I didn't jump on opportunities that I am very sure were there and maybe this should be a lesson to me.  I have now killed over 40 minutes reminiscing over 4 years at a grocery store, and I am beginning to get tired enough to try to sleep.  I hope someone learned something of benefits in some way from my stories (maybe one day I will get more in depth with specific stories and moments and make a comedic screenplay or something... Not likely).  Goodnight folks.  

Sums it up!