america's next top model makes me dream of my dead boyfriend

last night i had one of those all night meandering dreams. the ones that you wake up from and think about and then fall back into. it was mostly about andrew. well, sort of. in the dream i was visiting his mother's house with some friends who had never known him. for part of the dream we were lying out on a dock by a river and in the shallow water were pictures torn out from something. they were all pictures of him and me from when we were dating but most of them weren't real. in some of them i had a mohawk or some sort of fierce variation of haircuts i had when i was younger, and in almost all of them i looked much tougher and more beautiful than i ever really did in real life. as i tried half heartedly to save all of these pictures from the water, i realized that the dock was attached to the back porch of a house and his mother had laid out this giant handmade book out of rough brown paper. it was as tall as i was and i struggled to hold it upright as i paged through life sized photos of andrew and i. his mother came up behind me as i looked at a picture of some sort of formal ball and then we were there, standing in this fancy mansion filled will well dressed people dancing and his mother explained that this was the spring dance from his freshman year of college and it was such a big deal and that he had asked this girl who he must have been crazy about because he drove up to columbus to buy her a diamond necklace. his freshman year was when we first had our falling out after we broke up and i remember feeling confused and angry in the dream that he had been so into some blond sorority girl and bought into this kind of shit.

the saddest part of this dream is not that it is about missing my dead ex boyfriend. the saddest part is that it is so transparently a rehashing of obvious and despicable parts of my day that it becomes totally meaningless. the photos are from a pile of photos and prints of him at the foot of my bed that i've been looking at anxiously since thanksgiving and trying to think of what to do with. the mohawk and fierce looks are from america's next top model, which i watched before bed. the ball is from the fancy office christmas party last night that everyone where i'm temping was excited about and i wasn't invited to. and finally the sorority girl was from big man on campus which i will sadly admit to watching 20 minutes of. what a giant collection of shit rolled up in some sad corner of my psyche.


things have been pretty grim here. i'm slowly losing my shit (to use the medical term) in an ever escalating series of public breakdowns, panic attacks and weeping. i'm too broke to even consider making this documentary in march, and what little money i have is going fifty bucks a week to pay for a therapist that i don't have insurance to pay for. the good news is that one of my friends is going to start giving me the paxil he still gets but has stopped taking. this might have seemed like a bad idea at one point but right now i'm too fucked up to care.
the bad news is that i think i've finally alienated jane, thereby cutting me down to two friends in dc. and also my job. that's definitely bad news. every time i take a new temp job i think that it's the lowest of the low, but i really have no clue what low is. this job is at a corporate headhunting office. lets just say that three days into it my temp agency called my house to tell me that they had complained that my dress was not up to snuff for the position, but i didn't find out because my phone had been disconnected. i eventually learned of their complaint three days later when i called to beg for a fifty dollar paycheck that they owed me from three weeks earlier.

if that's not sad, i'm not really sure what is.

rachel