Anxiety dreams all of last night. In the first I suddenly realised that I had signed up for a math class at Foothill three weeks ago and hadn't made it to a single session. I knew it was still early enough that I could drop out of the class, but getting myself to actually admit that I needed to drop it was almost impossible. I knew, somehow, that I wouldn't go to the class, and I wouldn't drop it either -- it'd just hang there over my head, making me feel bad, and I felt helpless to avoid that. This flowed into a dream in which I was trying to get the green stains off of some of my stuffed animals (IRL, our sheets do bleed green, so some of the sheep have a greenish tinge to them), and my biomom showed up and claimed that she knew it was all her fault that they were green, because I'd only bought these sheets because she had some just like them. No, I said, Jim and I bought them because we liked them. No, she insisted, I only bought them because of her, which made the green animals her fault, so I had to let her fix them. No way was I letting her get her hands on my sheep, so I kept telling her she couldn't. On and on. I woke up at 6, anxious and annoyed, and dozed for about an hour before Jim got up and I followed suit.

I'm glad Norm is back this week. I'm tired of my dreams. Yes, I know it's good, stuff is coming up, emotions are happening, memories might be thinking of surfacing -- but I'm tired of not getting enough sleep and of being anxious all the time. I even know what's hanging over my head right now; the scholarship application for BAMM I said I'd handle. I'm going to go home and do it tonight, and if I just can't, for whatever reason, I'll call up the other woman on the committee and ask her if she can take it. But knowing all of this doesn't lessen my anxiety one bit.

I'm back from a marvelous lunch with Joe Decker, a very long and pleasant and stress-reducing lunch. I talked to him about how panicky I'm feeling about dealing with this scholarship application, and he looked very directly at me and said, "Of course you're stressed about it. It's a big decision to make, and that's very stressful." Oh! Right, yah. How much money I decide to give this woman is going to have an impact on her life, and it is a big decision to be making, and of course I'm scared of screwing it up. Even though the reality is that I can't do any real damage, that the system really does work so that if the woman is scared away by talking to me about her finances she probably isn't ready to take the class -- it's still scary. And stressful. Thank you, Joe, for seeing that, and for saying it with such sincerity that I got it & quit beating myself up about my fears. I called her & left voicemail as soon as I got back to work.

Lunch had much niceness to it other than me getting my head on straight about this scholarship thing. We ate at Zao, and I had mochi for dessert, and afterwards Joe and I went over to the University Art Center, where I spent $5 on a pantone marker (in a nice bright blue), and then fell briefly into the doom of journals, emerging with a tiny lined book bound with kanji-printed green paper, and an art book that I'm not sure if I'll keep or give to someone who might enjoy it. And a present for Jim, which I'll be coy about in here even though I know he'll get the present before this goes up.

Now I'm lazing around at work, trying to get a servlet working as an exercise in making sure that I understand our architecture before I leap ahead into writing real code. I definitely don't understand it as well as I'd like to, but I think I'm at the point where I need to go home and eat food rather than continue staring at it. It'll still be here tomorrow, after all.

Oh, I did have a nice weekend -- too short, but nice. I spent all of Saturday recovering, pretty much, but on Sunday got to the book sale, picked up 30-something books, and then went home & did in fact start making a spreadsheet of my unread science fiction. I'm at over 100 unread books right now, and only through the G's in my collection. It's a bit disturbing, but also pleasant.