OK, how is one supposed to treat a company that refers to translators as “trannies” and editors as “eddies” with any degree of seriousness?

I know that the blog has become completely bipolar with sad and tragic posts coming right before funny ones and right after hopeful ones. But that’s how I feel these days.

Today, for instance, was the very first time that Eric’s death was integrated into my dreams. Before today, sleep was a refuge from what had happened because nothing connected to the pregnancy was ever featured in my dreams. Tonight, though, I dreamt that I was buying baby clothes. Huge quantities of baby clothes. I knew Eric was dead but I still had to buy all these clothes.

When I woke up, I felt completely exhausted because now I couldn’t use sleep to hide from sadness. But I also know that it’s good that this happened because this is a sign that I’m beginning to come to terms with the tragedy and learning to integrate it into my life experience. Sleep is the time when our subconscious resolves the problems we accumulate during the waking hours. Today’s dream is a sign that my psyche is no longer perceiving Eric’s death as so destructive that it has to be ignored.

The really sad thing isn’t even that somebody is wasting the Senate’s time by quoting Dr. Seuss and offering uninspired imitations of Darth Vader while the entire country has to worry about a government shutdown. What is really sad is that people keep voting for politicians who are completely useless at what they do and will keep voting for them.

Will the happy day finally come when I will open a news app and see no stories about circus-like antics in the Senate? Is there a chance we will once read about our elected representatives coming to work and actually achieving something other than endless posturing and bickering?

A colleague from the PoliSci department came to visit me yesterday and told me how hard it is to get the students to notice a difference between Marx and Mussolini, so I guess the answer to my questions is “Not a chance.”

This person must have also encountered Windows 8 and swapped “Jesus” inside the fish for “Linux.”