Compact, episodic dreams packaged neatly into before and after I wake up with my leg aching dully but purposefully: I am a violent sleeper, and my dreaming body doesn't know I broke my leg until my the pain reminds it.

In the first dream, I'm wearing a silk fifties-style frock and I'm riding a train into a large city with an older man who is not my husband but in the dream I understand I will be ousting his current wife. We arrive in the city and walk a long way until we enter a building that looks abandoned on the outside but inside has been remodeled as a chic Hollywood agency.

I am given a combination office/studio apartment and a new silk dress. The old wife's office/studio is next door. I have new earrings but there is a hall in the back of my studio that is dark and dank and I suspect it leads to a sewer.

I wake up and wonder if I should stop watching reality television before bed. Take the Advil. Close my eyes.

In the second dream, I'm part of a team tasked with standing upright for forty hours. We can walk around to make it less boring. I get in line to take a series of physical challenges in an old water park, and when I finish and towel off I'm elated to hear at eleven my forty hours will be up and as my prize I get to ride a dolphin.

I've been awake now for six hours and still remember this, though beyond the water park the rest of the forty hours are now gone.

I also forget whether or not I'm displaced by a third wife in the office building or what was in the tunnel.

Is it too much to ask for there to be jobs for people? I'm picturing a drone attempting to navigate to my house via GPS, only the maps haven't been updated and it's raining and there's a sunspot, and my beautiful books get left on a rock in the middle of the creek a hundred yards to the right where they are eaten by squirrels.

It could totally happen.

{Editor's note: Of course this is about me. This whole blog is about me.}

It started with texts. She held off for a long time, preferring not to pay, preferring email and keyboards, so much easier, especially since she typed more than 80 words per minute, maybe more. (Who knows? It had been over 15 years since her last typing test.) She typed so fast she could drip clauses into sentences the way chefs drizzled cherry sauce over cheesecake.

Texts were, by nature, short. Disturbingly short. Leaving off the niceties of language. She did not approve.

Then came text language. Even when she had to painstakingly punch numbers on her phone's keypad three or four times each to use capital letters and punctuation when the rest of the world referred to her as "U," she still composed complete sentences on principle.

And she noticed something happening. Her insistence on punctuation grew increasingly desperate, as if were she not to end a salutation in an exclamation point the recipient might not read her missive. Everything! Became! Exciting! Or enthusiastic? She didn't know. She just stopped using periods.

She cried the night Facebook stickers appeared, although she embraced emojis with her sister and daughter because they became another form of family language, where chickens meant things are good and cats whistling whispered the mood in the room had turned awkward. She could only accept the substitution of pictures for words if there wasn't a word that meant quite that thing. For everything else? Enthusiastic punctuation.

She didn't even notice she was doing it until she reread a work email to find only one period in a paragraph of six sentences. A paragraph about email newsletters. The email newsletters were not putting out forest fires or rescuing babies. They were just showing up innocuously in people's inboxes, saying hey. Surely there was no need for that much exclamation in such an email?

That was the day she stared at her correspondence, at the mix of frantic punctuation and pixelated turtles that would've been borderline crazy talk in 1999 and threw up her hands. Then she began rereading every email to make sure she was using periods. Because really, she ruminated, most of work talk only requires periods. Unless one is a brain surgeon, but even then, she thought, one might become desensitized to the idea of cutting open skulls and removing things found inside.

As she consciously worked to edit out the unnecessary enthusiasm, she found herself channeling her thesis adviser, whose complete lack of enthusiasm for most things revealed itself to be an extremely dry sense of humor, and she appreciated getting her own jokes. Playing this game with herself was almost as much fun as unsubscribing from PR firms' media lists, and she rode the inside joke with every comma as she attempted to rid her writing of so much unnecessary hype.

So tonight I was wearing a shirt like this. (I love you, Raygun. Keep it klassy.)

So then we tried to explain Prince to my daughter.

(Cannot be pronounced. Screw you and the contract you rode in on, Warner Bros.)

Then we tried to introduce her to the greatest Prince song of all time, Seven.

Then we tried to explain the '80s phenomenon of Purple Rain.

Then we found THIS.

(hang in until the one minute mark)

And that concludes this evening's lesson on being awesome.  Congratulations, Eva. Goodnight, children.

"You are the party," she said.

We were in college. I'm sure I was crying over what the kids now call FOMO. It was easy to do at a party school when I was trying so hard to balance perfectionism and grades and social acceptance and my bad habit of seeing my self-worth reflected (or not) in boys' eyes.

It was a reassuring thought, then and now, when even at forty-one I occasionally feel left out of this get-together or that trip. When I think about places I can't get time away from work to visit or haven't had the money to see yet.

I am the party.

Repeat after me, and see if you smile.

Try moving through life expecting people to embrace you with open arms, knowing you will bring interesting stories and intriguing conversation. Pretend until it is.

Something about this little lie I've told myself since that night when I repeated her in Iowa City, most likely feeling rejected, then feeling better, buoys me even now.

Who cares what they think?
You care what you think.
We all die alone.
So believe, even for a minute, that you are the party.
Let yourself believe.

Hey y'all. A cool company in Missouri sent me a wooden watch. I reviewed it on Surrender, Dorothy: Reviews here. It's less than $150 and totally cool. You should check them out.

Fun with Photoshop!

JORD Wooden Watches

After our family visited Grant's Farm last summer, we fell in love with the Budweiser Clydesdales. My husband tried to surprise us with a stop at Warm Springs Ranch one weekend as we puttered east back to Kansas City after a writing conference in St. Louis, but alas, it was a no-go.

Warm Springs Ranch is where the magic begins: Clydesdale foals. Unfortunately for us that day, the gates were locked. You have to make an appointment to get a tour, which we didn't know. But now we do, and so do you. And we got invited to go! So here are all my pictures.

Sorry, folks, park's closed. Moose out in front should've told you.

This time, the park was not closed. BABY CLYDESDALES FOR EVERYONE!

I learned some things about Clydesdale birth. Mares are pregnant for eleven months and give birth in 5-25 minutes.

(!)

Because the labor happens so fast, the man in charge (John Soto) has an alarm that goes off when the foal's hooves break open a special device installed in the mare's birth canal. Once it starts, it goes fast because the foals weigh about 150 pounds and gravity exists.

Look closely. There's 150 pounds of foal in there that will be born within six days.

Once the mares get within thirty days of their due dates, they get beautiful, huge stalls in the special foaling area and are only taken outside to the exercise paddocks instead of the full pastures. Everything from breeding to foaling happens in this big, red barn in Boonville, Missouri.

I don't know how much time you've spent in barns, but most of them do not look like this.

One of the foals we saw was less than twelve hours old. When they are first born, the staff shave part of their bodies because the foals can't regulate their own body temperature very well at first.

This little guy is brand-new. I stared at his hooves, which have never touched dirt. Wow.

The mares kept trying to give us the 2,000-pound paparazzi block, but this little one wanted to play kissy-face with the little angel.

I'm a sucker for all horses, but the sheer size of these beauties is really something to behold up close.

SWOON.

The end.

No matter what I do, I never get people's addresses right on holiday cards. Then they start coming back, and most of the time, I'm all screw it, Christmas is over and we can stop pretending this is a fun thing to do.

Apparently holiday greetings make everyone ragey.

Especially people who live where my BIL and SIL used to.

*shakes fist in the direction of Cedar Rapids*

I have this metal, over-the-door snowflake/flower hybrid with a bunch of slots to hold holiday cards. Despite my bad attitude today, I do very much enjoy watching the flower fill until I can only see the pink epicenter. It makes me feel loved to have so many people in my life who want to show me what they and their children look like. (The letters, maybe not so much, but that's a personal preference.)

There's a flip side to this loved feeling, and that is the guilt feeling that comes from throwing them all away. I tried telling myself I was hanging on to them until Epiphany, but that was like, last week.

It's time. And that means it's time to let go of the six remaining cards in my little box, too. People can see what we look like again in eleven months.

Goodbye, carefully designed, rounded-edge, heavy card-stock lovelies! I can't wait to see what you all look like next year!

How long do you hold on to holiday cards?

Kizzy's been begging to be taken outside on his harness every day. He doesn't care that it's cold. He doesn't care that people keep asking if we got a dog when they see us from across the street. He doesn't care that he's a pussy (SEE WHAT I DID THERE) when it comes to loud noises.

Or maybe he does now.

Usually it's me that takes him outside, but the other day I went to pick up a prescription and some stuff for spaghetti and came home to this.

I stared at Beloved. "How?"

Him: "There was a loud noise. He freaked out at the garbage can."

Me: "But ... how? There's no blood. No cut."

Him: "I know. Um? I don't know. He's magic."

HOW?