Friday, March 18, 2011

$8/hr doesn't buy you a friend

My sleep is extremely variable in its quality. Sometimes I sleep like a log. Sometimes it eludes me. Sometimes I dream, sometimes I remember, sometimes I don't. It just varies, and yes, seasonality counts although it isn't really the seasons but the time of the year that the veil is thinner.

I remember the first time my dreams warned me of something. It was just a bad work situation, a situation that had been most excellent and that in a period of a few months had deteriorated to untenable. Ah but I'm tenacious so I was holding on, trying to make it be better. So my dreaming self took over. Every single night I was being chased and things were blowing up. Chased. Blown up. Shattered to wakefulness. Until finally I figured it out. It is work doing this to me, creating these dreams. I made an appointment with my boss. He blew me off. Three times. I turned in my two week notice and then was sick for two weeks. When I'm done, I'm done.

Sometimes being done comes slowly like that. Sometimes it comes suddenly, like it did the other day. About 9 am on March second. Done. Still, the realizations come more slowly.

So last night I had a dream, a very vivid dream, and I really hope to heck it is just a warning dream and not a prescient dream. My dad told me he had some bad news for me, that Riddle and Rood was suing me for sixty-four million dollars. Now, just so you know, my dad's been dead eleven years this year, and Riddle and Rood is the huge veterinary practice across the street from the Kentucky Horse Park. As I was absorbing that (because even in a dream I'm trying to make it make sense -- why was Riddle and Rood suing me? why 64 million? what makes them think that's even in the realm of possibility?), Daddy said he had some more bad news, that Ashley (the new very good rider at the barn who Lisa has her latest shine on) had been working for them. This somehow meant that she was behind it. Oh. Ok. Deep breath.

Then I went to Rainwater, an old friend who is a philosophy professor, and he measured me for my shoe size. Yeah, now, that's more like what a dream is supposed to be like.

I have dreams. Real dreams, and some ability to back them up. I laid them on the line. I exposed myself but if anyone at all didn't realize those dreams were there, they were willfully blind. While she's been good to me, I've been good to her, and for her, too. By my becoming entirely vulnerable, she exposed herself, and how little regard she has for me, naked. I've been paid for my time and that and a "thank you" at the end of the day ought to be enough.

It isn't.

So I'm here putting my skin back on. It fits. Skin is like that. Although it may be a bear's skin.

Whenever she's nice to me, I don't believe it anymore. "Thank you" stings. $8/hr just doesn't buy you a friend. Still, I love the barn, the horses, and, yep, the people too.

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