A dirty secret

One of the mental habits I'd like to break myself of: hating just a little bit people with great experiences, like loving a hometown, enjoying the memory of grade school, having great parents. Sam and I watched most of Dan in Real Life, a lovely movie with Steve Carrell playing Dan. Although the main character is tortured and morose, his family is extraordinary. I guess they have to be for the movie to work, but I found myself tearing up. Is this self-pity in action? Is it longing? Is it evil? Whatever it is, I need to figure out how I can stop feeling this way and realize some of my own good luck.

According to wired.com, Banksy, the infamous yet anonymous British graffitist, has hit NYC, and it sounds like his biggest statement yet. Wednesday marked the opening of The Village Pet Story and Charcoal Grill, an installment featuring anamatronic creatures that directly cross the line between animals and prepared food, among other boundaries. I'm talking hot dog hamsters here, people.

The Wooster Collective published a statement attributed to Banksy. I can't vouch for its provenance, but it's funny, so here's some of it:

I wanted to make art that questioned our relationship with animals and the ethics and the sustainability of factory farming, but it ended up as chicken nuggets singing.

I think we all knows what that feels like.

Dreaming with trazodone

So Ambien has crapped out on me. It's pretty common for a person's body to get used to some sleep aids (and certain other agents) after a while, which is probably part of why their makers recommend them for short term (6 months or less) use only. Last night, I started a round of trazodone to replace the Ambien. 

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It worked. And I had one of those movie dreams I sometimes have when I'm sleeping deeply. In last night's dream, I was a teenage daughter in a family of five. We had a colonial-style house in the country, with really big rooms. When a series of catastrophes killed most of the adults in the world, the family opened their (our) house to refugees, but it was safer for us to not let on that the house had belonged to us before the apocalypse. (I don't remember why, something to do with immunity to something.) Most rooms filled with cots, benches, and terribly sad children.

In one of the most vivid scenes, one of these children asked why I was so sad. After all, I still had my family. "This used to be my home!" I sobbed. The child replied, "It still is." Very dramatic.

Cut to a montage spanning a long time.  More and more people found their way to what was becoming a children's colony. Many of the children hit puberty, and many of the teenagers became adults. Slowly, we erected more buildings. As a community, we set up a complex system to protect people from what was still killing most adults, by taking kids out the general population when they showed signs of puberty and putting them in small, isolated groups. The idea was that if an illness emerged in one set of adults, the rest might still be protected. It was an unpopular stopgap, and a serious problem remained: discovering the onset of puberty in each child. No one wanted to be quarantined. Pubescent children began hiding their development. Adults clamored for solutions that would free them from isolation. But no doctors were available to determine what exactly was causing adult deaths, how to determine who would be affected, or how to inoculate adults from whatever was killing them.

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A lot happens after that, and I think I've set up the major conflicts. To describe it all would take up too much space and time. (Maybe I could write a serial.) At any rate, my main point is that the trazodone worked. Now I just need to get through the temporary side effects I'm experiencing. The liver metabolizes trazodone, so initial side effects feel like hangovers. And it doesn't help that I had five glasses of wine last night.