Winter Itch

Last night I had dreams about drag queens.

This isn't really that strange; I found RuPaul's Drag Race, season two, on the VH1 site and watched the first episode. I love a good drag queen; the metamorphosis of it all, the pageantry, most of them don't take themselves too seriously.

After I woke up around 4 a.m. with Fenway, I went back to bed and dreamed about Albuquerque. I think I've written before about how I dream about London with alarming frequency (I'm too lazy to sift through my previous posts and find out whether I did indeed write about this, so sorry about that). I had a dream about London just over the weekend. They almost all have to do with walking from the Bloomsbury area south to the Covent Garden area and across toward Soho and Trafalgar Square and all the museums.

Anyway, I think this was maybe the second or third dream about Albuquerque since my trip there in October. Dan and I have been talking a lot about travel plans for this year, since we have some out-of-town weddings to go to and then there's the possibility of Leadville, and over the weekend I was thinking about Albuquerque, just picking up and driving back. I got this overwhelming urge to get in my car and just go.

I think it's because it's a time of year where everything sucks. Work sucks--we had all these furloughs last year, and I got used to taking lots of time off. I have more money now, true, but I can't spend it yet since it's all going toward trips. There are also shifts with things at work that are grating on my nerves because I'm that kind of a pessimistic-yet-prideful person, the way newspaper journalists tend to be after being at a paper for a few years. It's been raining for weeks on end, it seems like, and everything outside is a mudpit. The riding arenas are a mess. It's generally cold and still fairly dark.

Everyone is itching for a change, everyone is waiting for spring, and that's why I thought about New Mexico, I think. It's just the irritability that comes with late winter. If I were still up in Boston, I'd be going crazy about right now, because winter never really ends until around March, and spring is all rain. At least I'm not on the East Coast, 10,000 leagues under the snow.

I've decided a project to get me through the rest of this season is to work on my Spanish so I can exchange at least a few words with the guy who works at the barn in the evenings. I've tried looking things up in dictionaries and trying to remember some conjugations, and it should be remembered that I only had two years of Spanish in high school and only made a B in each class. Those classes were more than 10 years ago, now, so there's a lot to be learned. These days I can say about four lines in Spanish, and all of them have to do with horses or being sick.

Some day I will get back to griping about the newspaper industry, don't worry. A big shout-out to those who are still sticking it out. I heard someone once refer to us all as "The few, the proud, the morons." I'm glad to be a part of that, even if just for the martyr aspect.