nightdog_barks: Illustration of a young girl wearing a cat mask bandit-style (Mask Girl)
nightdog_barks ([personal profile] nightdog_barks) wrote2019-03-04 03:43 pm

(no subject)

Cold, but at least it's (hazily) sunny. Currently 31 degrees (-.6 Celsius), but with the wind chill it feels like it's 21 (-6.1). I stepped out earlier this morning to refill the thistle socks and the dried corn cobs, and by the time I was finished my hands felt like they were burning.

Had an anxiety dream last night in which I was on a college campus and was told I could no longer attend said college because I hadn't been going to any of the classes. Which ... I didn't know about? The classes, that is. I was worrying because apparently I was all alone in this dream world and would now have to find a job, and I couldn't think of any jobs that might hire a 60-year-old woman with chronic health issues. I was still kind of sad and annoyed (sannoyed?) when I woke up.

Anyway, on a much better note, here is a link to a nice long read by Rebecca Solnit, on libraries and childhood -- In Praise of Libraries and the Forests That Surround Them. A very small excerpt:

The child I once was read constantly and hardly spoke, because she was ambivalent about the merits of communication, about the risks of being mocked or punished or exposed. The idea of being understood and encouraged, of recognizing herself in another, of affirmation, had hardly occurred to her and neither had the idea that she had something to give others. So she read, taking in words in huge quantities, a children’s and then an adult’s novel a day for many years, seven books a week or so, gorging on books, fasting on speech, carrying piles of books home from the library.

Yep. That was me. :D
silverjackal: (Default)

[personal profile] silverjackal 2019-03-06 12:24 am (UTC)(link)
A classic anxiety dream for me (with the caveat that I'll have two or three and then nothing for at least a year) is the "I'm in a strange place with some colleagues to do something important and I get separated from them and lost, and the place is a) very crowded full of hostile people and b) a maze of twisted junk and garbage in an urban landscape that morphs and changes so that the way back closes after I pass through it". For some people being lost in the wilderness alone would be an anxiety dream, not for me. Chaotic crowds and piles of garbage are evidently are my mental symbolism for anxiety inducing things. The "being mortified in front of colleagues" is also there and it's a much smaller component.