bloodyrosemccoy | Dream A Little Dream Of Me (Reply)

Four Chaplains Memorial Day
Tu B'Shvat (Jewish)
Anniversary - "The Day the Music Died"
Birthday - Norman Rockwell (artist)
Bean Throwing Festival (Setsubun - Japan)
Heroes' Day (Mozambique)

One of my favorite words in Spanish is bambolearse, which means to sway, wobble, or lose your balance.* Ever since I started taking Fukitol, I’ve found this to be a highly useful word to describe my state when I have withdrawal.

The website for the drug lists “dizziness or vertigo” as a possible side effect of the withdrawal, along with about twenty other symptoms.** Since I’ve got such a messy endocrine system anyway, I often give no notice to the others (and yes, I get a whole bunch of ’em) until I stand up and the floor slides out from under me, at which point I think to myself, “Aha! I am not nauseated because of something I ate, or because of angry hormones! I am nauseated because I forgot the Fukitol! And now, because of that, me estoy bamboleando!”

But there is one more symptom that always precedes this phase by about twelve hours. Unfortunately, I never remember it because of its very nature—instead I think “Hmm, that was weird” and then have to wait until me bamboleo. The website also lists this other symptom under the dry category of “nightmares,” which is a clinical approach to saying “you will spend the entire night on a yellow submarine, only it will be evil.”

I got that one yesterday.

These are not your ordinary nightmares, with the vague “My plane leaves in ten minutes and I haven’t packed yet!” or “It’s coming to get me!” plotlines. These are epic, mindblowing, emotionally charged dreams with a pervading sense that DOOM is behind every corner of everything, even if the dream is set at Nanny Smoochums’ Gingerbread Shelter for Dolls and Bunnies. (It never is, though. It’s either a library or a museum, or the place I call the Glass Ocean.) They have no real symbolism except to show what images have been lying around in my head. They are dreams Peter Jackson would be proud to direct.

The thing is, I wake up with residual emotions from them, something I don’t do with normal dreams. I woke up generally pissed at the world yesterday, and it took me a few minutes to remember that none of my friends had ever actually kidnapped anyone,*** so they didn’t deserve the blame.

At least I didn’t wake up with the vague notion that evil gods were out to get me. That’s usually the sign of a bad day ahead.

*Another is the word for ‘bat,’ murcielago, because it’s so much fun to say. However, I hope that they don’t translate Batman’s name in the Spanish-language comics, because while I enjoy the enormous amount of syllables of the word, el Hombre de los Murcielagos would take up a lot of text, and even Hombre-Murcielago is kind of a mouthful.

**For those of you who are interested, there is a difference between dizziness and vertigo when you’re reporting medical symptoms. Dizziness is when you feel lightheaded or faint; vertigo is when your equilibrium is off. I get both, but mostly vertigo.

***We’re not counting the time the carpet guy kidnapped me. That was only for about five minutes, and he was actually trying to help. It merely demonstrated that at seven years old I failed at Stranger Danger—but in my defense, he wasn’t a stranger, and in fact he’s a very nice guy and still cleans our carpets.