Too soft this slumber

Too soft, and yet, too heavy.

I have been having one of my sleepy days today. I can never predict when, exactly, they will happen. I suppose it would be like trying to predict an avalanche, or when an iceberg will detach from a glacier.

What is it with me and icebergs, anyhow? And water imagery in general?

Still excited about getting the new place. A week from tomorrow, we start the move. I have researched a couple of moving companies, but their sites are long on marketing talk and lo on actual practical information.

Basically, what I want to know is whether we can afford to have people show up and move all our furniture and whatever packed boxes we have.

This is not strictly necessary. Boxes, we can probably handle ourselves. And we have a LOT of furniture to move, so odds are, we can’t afford furniture AND boxes.

But still, it would be awfully nice to have the whole move done by others. It would almost seem like magic to have the whole thing go through in one day without us having to lift a finger.

Some of the places will also do the packing for you, but there is no way we could afford that, and besides, that is where I draw the line.

I would not want strangers going through all my stuff to pack it. That would just plain feel weird.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not particularly “stuff” oriented. I don’t form deep emotional connections with the things I own. I don’t have trouble sharing.

But even I have some materialistic feelings, and not wanting people I don’t even know pawing through my stuff is one of them.

My own packing should not be TOO onerous, he says, knowing full well that every time he’s said that it has turned into a freaking nightmare.

But this time, moving my bed is someone else’s problem, and that’s half the battle right there. Having a king sized bed is cool and all, but moving the motherfucker can be a serious bitch.

Not my problem!

Honestly, though, I might as well have a queen sized, because I don’t even use the half of the bed away from my nightstand. Why would I? If I ever have a partner, it would be great because we could both sleep in it without having to touch one another. I can’t sleep while touching another person.

Why? I don’t know. Pretty sure it has something to do with some very deep trust issues and problems with intimacy.

I got lots of that going on. It doesn’t come up in my everyday life because I don’t have anyone close enough to me for it to matter. I love my friends and I would be lost without them, but hanging out with them is entirely within my life experience. I have had friends before, especially in college, and we really enjoyed one another’s company and did fun things together, but we were never heart to heart, I can tell you anything type friends.

Maybe that’s just because we are dudes. I don’t know. There is certainly a lack of shared adversity, and that seems to be what gets men to bond more deeply.

But it also has to do with the conflict within me between my desire to be all happy and friendly and nice and the fact that, deep down, I am actually a fairly guarded person. I’m just good at hiding it.

I aspire to greater openness. I hope that as I patiently erase the old tapes of brittle, angry distrust, I can replace them with more positive, happy, engaged tapes and be the bright and shiny beacon of love that I hope to be.

It’s my dream.

Speaking of dreams, this being a super sleepy day, it means I have also been going a few rounds with my hyper-real dream state. I don’t recall any of the dreams, but I can see their footprints in my mind, and gosh there’s a lot of them.

These dreamy periods always feel like I have run a mental marathon, or fought a long and brutal battle. And that makes sense, because I think that one of the functions of this period is to discharge the mental energy charge that my overstimulated brain accumulates through my everyday life.

Hence my being far more calm when I am writing my National Novel Writing Month novel. Writing almost three thousand words a day does a lot to discharge that excess mental energy, leaving me a calmer and happier person.

Hopefully, I will get a similar effect when I have a way of discharging my physical energies in the gym at our new place. One problem is going to be that I don’t have any proper gym clothes. I have exactly one intact pair of sweat pants, and they don’t fit. They would fall right off me. Not good.

So I have to decide whether it is possible, let alone desirable, to work out wearing gym pants with suspenders. That would be cute.

Oh well, I am sure I will find something. I have had sweat pants before that actually fit me. I know it’s possible.

In fact, sweat pants are many a fat man’s best friend. Their elastic nature allows them to adjust to our weight fluctuations, and while it can be a nightmare to find normal pants in your exact size, the forgiving nature of sweat pants means you just have to figure out how many X’s are on your XL.

So I will probably see if they have something for me at Value Village. Which, it just occurred to me, is also only a few blocks from the new place!

Yet another advantage to the new place. We are going to be right there at the heart of central Richmond, so we will have the Skytrain, Value Village, Richmond Center, and all kinds of other stuff like the Wing Kee, our fave Chinese restaurant.

It’s not quite like living in downtown Vancouver, but it’s as close as I want to get, at least at my current income level.

And with that happy note, I leave you all! I will talk to you again tomorrow.