Dreamed last night my sister had a son or daughter named Jing-Ding Ding and a single bedbug in her house. It did not look like a bedbug to me but that was Jing-Ding’s verdict on the species/genus/phyla/whatever of this tiny 8-legged creature that looked to me more like a miniature Frisbee with 8 legs than any kind of bedbug I’ve ever seen.

Science still claims to not understand why we dream. I read a piece in the Times that said sex dreams are rare and that about 30% of your time asleep is spent dreaming. There is also no definitive correlation between REM sleep and dreaming. It had previously been thought that REM sleep was when the dreams were at full tilt but it has since been determined that dreams occur during non-REM as well. I’m saying all this off the top of my head, possibly futzing a fact or figure here or there or everywhere.

It seems like it could be hard to justify serious funding for dream research. Do you really need to understand why my sister had a Chinese offspring and a single bedbug of debatable evolution? Is that worth thousands of dollars in sleep analyst salary and overhead?

…

I am at the workplace, calmly eating strawberries and preparing for the daily banana. I have been contemplating the health and lifestyle disruptions associated with working the spilt shift, or the shit splift, as I’ve come to call it. I used to idealize it by saying I get 2 Fridays a week, but of course that also means there are 2 Mondays. I’ve learned to make my co-workers chuckle with this type of comment but really, the shit splift sucks for many reasons, and in my conversations with others the question is often raised as to why the shift is ever scheduled in the first place.

I thought I had some kind of relief on the horizon when talk of a “compressed” schedule came across. I applied to work a 4-day week from 9am-6:45pm, and was told this schedule would start last week, but no further communication has occured regarding this matter and my schedule remains shit splift. As one who is persistently and perhaps self-detrimantally hung up on rank I find that my bottom-of-the-org-chart place in this company makes asking questions inappropriate if not altogether verboten. I speak when spoken to, timidly.

I have limited time today to find a sandwich. I will now commence the search, after finishing consumption of this fine banana.