last night, i had a dream. i had a dream that Martin Luther King Jr. wanted to snuggle with me. he was standing there, above me, looking down, hands in pockets, just waiting for me to initiate a cuddle. i just wasn’t sure whether or not he really wanted to cuddle or whether i was misreading his non-verbal cues so i didn’t initiate. we never did cuddle. instead, i woke up to an instrumental version of a bob marley song playing on my alarm clock. then i lay in bed a did some online faux fur boot shopping and found the perfect booties but didn’t buy them because i was too lazy to get my credit card.

today i was in the grocery store and a woman stopped me and told me that she recognized me and started asking all about my cuddling. she was a very nice and very positive lady. very encouraging. i appreciated her positivity. this happened in home depot a few days ago too. it always makes me wonder…. when people recognize me, they know things about me that they’ve read about me and part of me feels like i’m running into an old friend or associate cuz they ask me questions about these details in my life that only someone who knew me would know. but i don’t know anything about them. at the end of our conversation today in the grocery store, the lady said “I’m Patricia”. that was nice.

two days earlier, i was in the grocery store and found an article about myself in a tabloid. in my head i kept saying “i found myself in the tabloids” and it amused me to think of what sort of deeper meaning this might have. i know it has no deeper meaning and it does not matter at all. but i liked it. it ignited a little happy bit of me for a few hours and i bought the tabloid for $3.79, then went to another store and bought another copy for an additional $3.79, then drove over to my mama’s house and said “look, mama, i’m in the tabloid” and then she read the article and said “how nice”. she showed it to my father and after he read it he said “have you tried your sister’s homemade peanut butter cookies yet? they’re fantastic!” i said i had tried one the other day and that they were, indeed, fantastic.

tomorrow, i have an interview for that show 20/20. in preparation, i’ve been drinking extra green juice and i haven’t washed my hair since thursday. that’s 4 days of dirty hair now. the dirtier my hair gets, the better it looks when i finally do wash it (sometimes… though with hair like mine one can never be certain what it will do). so, my plan is to wash it tonight or early tomorrow morning.

i miss the ocean regularly. i used to go to central america (usually costa rica) for a few weeks every 6-12 months and find a desolate spot on the beach, walk into the ocean, and let my body go limp so i could feel the waves and the current drag me along the ocean floor. limbs tangled and suspended in water like i was made of seaweed… that was a good feeling. back at the shore i’d sometimes hear Peti shouting for me to get out of the water. he was littler than… 3 to 6 years old. he’d shout that i looked dead and i needed to stop it right now. then i would come back to him, wrap us in a towel, and hold him in my arms under the blazing sun. we’d bury our feet, look for crabs, and he’d fill my pockets with broken shells and i’d secretly throw the ugly ones back when he wasn’t looking. one week we went to the same spot every day because it had an enormous piece of a driftwood– it looked like a limb from a tree. peti called it his teeter totter because he could stand on it and every time a wave came the half he wasn’t standing on would start to float slightly in the water and he’d bounce up and down. he was so delighted with himself, standing on the bobbing branch with the spray of the waves, jumping into the ocean every time the water receded far enough. i took so many pictures of him and then i left my camera in my backpack on the beach while i went back into the ocean. then a man came through the jungle. he had a machete and he stole my backpack and all my clothes. i chased after him through the jungle, barefoot, thinking of all of the images of peti he was taking with him. i couldn’t run fast enough to catch up with him. when i came back to the beach, back to peti, i realized that someone had stolen our bike too. so i was stuck about 6 kilometers from my lodgings with no clothes and no shoes and no money and a three year old child. i remember looking at him, asking him what he thought we should do. he said “piggy back ride” so i put him on my back and started along this dirt road back to the room. it was fun at first and when i was just about not fun anymore, a car passed by and i stuck my thumb up and the lady stopped and picked us up. she happened to have a restaurant in town so upon hearing of our misfortune, she brought us to our restaurant and fed us very well. it was a good day.