space attack!

I had a dream last night that I had an opportunity to go on a spaceship and live in outer space for two years.

I remember Danny Glover was the captain and he was telling me how this was an opportunity of a lifetime (he seemed like a trustworthy figure). I looked at all the others that were getting on board... they were very eager, All-American folks.

The things that went on in my mind as I was putting on my spacesuit:
How claustrophobic am I going to get?
What are their bathrooms like?
I need to call school and ask them if I can put my status on hold...
Is this potentially dangerous?
The guy to girl ratio is definitely in my favor...
Would I be okay with possibly dying in a spacecraft?
Hey some of these guys are kinda cute...

If you want to feel uber depressed, read this book (though I have to say its contains some lovely prose):

"Cold men destroy women," my mother wrote me years later. "They woo them with something personable that they bring out for show, something annexed to their souls like a fake greenhouse, lead you in, and you think you see life and vitality and sun and greenness, and then when you love them, they lead you out into their real soul, a drafty, cavernous, empty ballroom, inexorably arched and vaulted and mocking you with its echoes- you hear all you have sacrificed, all you have given, leading with a loud clunk. They lock the greenhouse and you are as tiny as a figure in an architect's drawing, a faceless splotch, a blur of stick limbs abandoned in some voluminous desert of stone."

"Even his I Love you's", she said, "were like tiny daggers, like little needles or safety pins. Beware of a man who says he loves you but who is incapable of a passionate confession, of melting into a sob."

I think of my father, imagine him long ago at night casually parting my mother's legs with the mechanical indifference of someone opening a cupboard. And I say to myself: I will leave every cold man, every man for whom music is some private physics and love some unsteppable dance. I will try to make them regret. To make them sad. I am driving back toward my tiny kitchen table and I will write this: forgiveness lives alone and far off down the road, but bitterness and art are close, gossipy neighbors, sharing the same clothesline, hanging up their things, getting their laundry confused.
-Self Help, Lorrie Moore