The Mayor of Non-Sequitur City

I had a dream the other night about a writer who I sometimes have a crush on. I hadn't thought about him in a while, so his appearance in my dream was a bit of a surprise. In the dream, he called me to tell me that he'd named both his television remote control and fantasy football team after me. I was very touched. When I awoke, crush somewhat reinstated, I emailed him for the first time in months and months to tell him of my dream. He wrote me back the next day to tell me that he thought it was a pretty great dream. I was drunk when I got his email, and responded perhaps a little too flirtatiously. I guess I was still feeling chuffed about the remote control. Regardless, I'm feeling a bit sheepish about all of it. But I'm probably going to name all my remote controls.

When I was a child, my mother built me a dollhouse that was an exact replica of the home we lived in while in Newfoundland (ages 1-6). I loved it. At the time that she built the house, I was obsessed with frogs (i remained so until my early teens, at which point i lost interest in animals until my late 20s, but that's another story). Instead of buying little dolls to fit in all the delicate, expensive, mail-ordered furniture, my mother spent weeks figuring out how to sew tiny frogs that would fit in the furniture. Rice left them too rigid, they couldn't settle into the tiny rocking chair or sit at the piano. In the end, she went with tapioca. They were more flexible, but still never got the hang of using the tiny knitting needles or enamelware cookset. Years later, my father hired a student to clean out the basement. I was living at home that summer, and came home one afternoon to find the student chopping the dollhouse to pieces with an axe, on my father's direction, in order to maximize space in the truck for the haul to the dump. There were only three frog dolls--these were in the days before my brother was on the scene, and now there's but one left. The father. Of course.

I'm returning to Toronto tomorrow, with incredibly mixed feelings. I have no idea what will happen in the next three months. My burn it down/build it up year off is drawing to a close, and I can't help but wish for the universe to intervene. I don't care what I do, I just want to be happy. That's not too much to ask, right?