I have trouble getting to sleep sometimes. After initially falling asleep, I’ll immediately have some odd dreams and wake up. Often the dreams go awry and I’m in some nightmare that isn’t frightening from any rational standpoint, but does wake me up and keep me from falling asleep for a while.

It was worse when I was in high school. I’d have a recurring dream where there was a bright light outside my room, and I’d know it was some sort of UFO. And I couldn’t wake up right away. I’d keep dreaming that I woke up but still be in another level of the dream, with the UFO still outside the window. The worst experience was when I woke up, really woke up, and looked through the window just as LifeFlight was landing a helicopter in the park a block over. As the helicopter passed overhead, I just about jumped through the window.

I guess I’m not the only one with problems with nightmares when I first fall asleep. There are cases where people feel the Night Hag sitting on their chest and sucking out their breath. This is something that I even heard about in a psychology class.

Last night I had a more run-of-the-mill nightmare. A guy was breaking in through my window, and I had to try to convince him to leave, and to leave what he took. He had chiseled away part of the window. I remember thinking the best part was that I need to replace the window anyway. But I couldn’t get the guy to leave, and he was in my bedroom. I woke up with a stomach-ache.

Well, it’s almost time for sleep to see if I have some more interesting dreams. Like maybe a third annoyingly useless one about a particular woman who already has a boyfriend. Oh, well, too sleepy to write more sensibly.

My buddy Il and I went out to a dark area on Sauvies Island, just north of Portland to try and see the Aurora Borealis. What we saw were a lot of stars and some headlights. Not much else. We kind of gave up after discussing our mutual disappointment in viewing the Leonid meteor shower and most comets. Hyakutake kicked ass but, I’m sorry, the rest of them were lame.

Il usually tries to get me to see some naked women on our travels, which is quite easy since Portland is supposed to have more strip clubs per capita than any other city in the US. But tonight he decided he’d rather build up points on his online Star Wars™ game than see nekkid women. I’m actually a big fan of letting my imagination do more of the work and very often I’m frightened by what I see in the strip clubs. In any case, I wanted to get home and install the latest version of Mac OS X (Panther) on my computers.

So, we’re perverts, but we’re much bigger geeks.

So I can go on about the jobs I searched for, and how lucky I am to find ABSOLUTELY NOTHING but I’m in Day 2 of being a dutiful Asian son while my ma is in Japan, and I’m trying to keep my dad from driving me completely nuts. I took him out to lunch and to a bakery. He loves buying pastries, but he usually doesn’t eat them. My mom usually uses me as a human garbage can to get rid of them.

In any case, I was asking him what he wanted for dinner, hoping that I could avoid cooking and also find something I could take out so I could finally see the Marlins beat the Yankees, but he said he’d eat leftovers. He had some turkey from lunch, and I knew there was rice in the freezer for emergencies like when my dad promises to take my mom out to dinner and at the last minute decides he’s feeling too bad to go out.

What happened was I realized why my mom should empty out the refrigerator before she leaves. My dad put a bunch of awful looking things together in a small pot, heated it up and ate it. My mom had left cooked rice sitting out on the counter in a Tupperware container, some stewed Japanese radish from Saturday (stewed in some sickly sweet soy sauce-based broth) that also had konnyaku, which is barely edible Japanese rubbery stuff. He also opened a can of Spam to put into this mess. That was his dinner.

I offered to take him out, I offered to buy him something at the store, I offered what is my own weakness — Popeye’s Fried Chicken but he wanted to eat leftovers.

Since this afternoon he’s been complaining that he has, “A touch of the ‘flu,” but that’s a common complaint from him, as well as, “A cold settled in my back,” and, “Give me a good rubdown.” He also likes asking questions I can’t possibly answer, like, “How much do you think it costs to sponsor a softball team like that?” or “What kind of oil do you get in Yugoslavia?” or “What do you think is wrong with my back?” and gets mad when I can’t give him an answer.

It’s proved one thing to me, though, that my college degrees are useless if I can’t answer those questions.

It’s a good thing that my sister is coming to make sure we don’t drive each other nuts.

We took my mom to the airport this morning, a place I’ve grown to dread. They swabbed the inside of her suitcase, but didn’t require the full-on x-ray scan (or whatever they do when the stick your suitcase in the front-loading washing machine in the lobby.) We left her to manage the security checkpoint on her own after seeing a line that rivalled the one leading to Space Mountain in Disneyland.

This evening my dad has been wandering around lost, but I was ignoring him and trying to watch the Marlins beat the hated Yankees. That wasn’t to be. I ended up driving to Popeye’s Chicken to get him the drumstick he was asking for and the hated Yankees scored four more runs. What I thought would just be a 2-1 score ended up as 6-1.

But the worst news came from two phone calls. One was from a friend I’ve known since kindergarten. His mom just passed away, and he was calling to let me know. A little later on I heard from a family friend that her sister-in-law had passed away. My mom always says these things come in threes (mainly because we like to group things in threes) and I’m not looking forward to hearing about the third.

On an up note, my friend Megan’s chemo seems to be working, and her tumor is shrinking!

My headaches lately have been making me sick to my stomach. That’s only one of three problems on the list according to Men’s Health Magazine:

• In the past 3 months have headaches limited your activities?
• Does headache pain make you sick to your stomach?
• Does light bother you?

Yes to two are supposed to be bad. And last night I had a headache that made me sick to my stomach and kept me from eating dinner. A trifecta. That ain’t good. I just hope my friend Megan is feeling better than that during her chemo. I was feeling worse than miserable.

Earlier in the day I went running and almost threw up. I haven’t thrown up from running since I was in 8th grade. That was almost thirty years ago. I’ve learned since then not to push myself quite that hard and, besides, I ran at my regular pace. I figure something is off.

So, I’m taking the usual path to medical awareness: I’m going to wait and see if things get better. It seems to work for most things. I figure all things are self limiting: if I’m dead or unconscious, I won’t care.

And both teams I was rooting for lost their division title games.

Well, I feel like doo-doo, so that’s all I’m going to say right now.

My writebacks appear to be working. I decided to quit using the static web pages and re-did some of the web server configuration. Whee.

So the first write back I get is from another frigging premed. “You CAN be a doctor,” they said. Actually, I can’t be a doctor. I’ve been told that how many times? Sixty-three? And anyway, I hate frigging premeds, and since premeds become doctors I wouldn’t get along with many of them, now, would I?

As an added bonus, I called about a job posting and was told that my experience in school was worth nothing and that only on-the-job experience counted. Plus, with the economy the way it is, companies are asking for five years of experience and won’t take anything less.

Headhunters can be so cheery sometimes.

So I think this time I’m really coming down with something besides unemployment. I thought the trucks were beeping reverse awfully early in the morning, but what really happened was that I slept through my alarm. When I thought it was 7AM, it was 9AM. Later on in the day I got a cramp between my shoulderblades and now I can’t hold my head up straight. I’m falling apart.

In any case, I’m still fighting with one computer running MacOS X and Apple’s X11. It just doesn’t act like the X that I’m used to. I’m also still trying to get blosxom writebacks to work on a BSD box.

This weekend I get to house sit or at least watch my friend’s cat. The cat hates me, and hides from me whenever I go to feed her, but I have to replace cat-pee soaked towels off of the wall because the cat misses the litter box.

I am truly blessed.