So I talked to ye olde bartender today, and in lieu of returning home before 8pm, I’m writing about it.

I hadn’t seen him since the 7th, and thus hadn’t had a chance to tell him of the sword swinging over my team’s head (someone in another group in the department went over budget for headcount; therefore, in order to balance things out, people in other groups, possibly including mine, will be removed from the company), and what a joy it is to be told that one of the reasons I’m being considered for removal is because I use my FMLA Intermittent Leave. But then again, it’s nothing personal; the company is simply looking for a reason to fire someone (multiple someones, to hear how bad the budget overflow was) to bring the books back into balance.

Fortunately I still, for some reason, care deeply about doing a good job, to the point where I’m still spending extra time and effort on my tasks. By gods, this documentation will be fucking complete and this monitoring will be robust, that sort of thing.

Anyways. Nothing is personal. It’s all just business. My bartender thinks it’s good that I’m getting a chance to better compartmentalize aspects of my life, and to not over-identify with a corporate entity.

We talked a little bit about NaNoWriMo. My bartender said he had a colleague who had written 100,350 words—100,000 in his self-published book, and 350 on the five-star Amazon reviews he posted for his own book. Ahahaha. But my bartender says this (my NaNoWriMo participation, not his colleague’s… masterpiece) is a good chance to set up new rituals. It’s not Thanksgiving Day, it’s Writing Day.

(I plan on 4000 words tomorrow. 2000 words tonight. If I ever get home, woe.)

Next we talked about nightmares. Or, more insidiously, the nightmares that are not nightmares until I wake up and realize that I just dreamed about never having left my parents. More and more often, these aren’t the jagged-teeth nightmares that claw and bite and cause me to wake up with visions of hell outside my bedroom door, but slices of my previous life that weren’t filled with anything other than, oh, trying to calculate what wouldn’t set my father off and balance that with the lying my mother wished me to tell her. (Hey, if you had your head banged straight through a wall and lived with my father, you’d force your daughter to tell you stories about how a hot young VP was going to rescue her from her husband. Or not.)

Life with the redacteds. Barrel of laughs.

My bartender has told me to not to try to forget about the dreams, because the act of thinking “I must forget X” causes X to be burned deeper into your brain. Instead, he wants me to write about my dreams. To recode the memories which are encoded by the dreams. Nightmares. Whatever they are. He says it’s natural that, having spent two decades with my parents, that naturally they would appear in dreams. Like a bad movie that sticks in your head.

“Write them as badly as you can,” he suggested. Bad writing on purpose? I think he may be on to something, but it’s not yet clear in my head. I’m not sure ridiculing my dreams with bad prose will actually work to bind them.

But seeing as elements of my dreams are making it into the current NaNoWriMo script, I might as well try to dump them somewhere harmless.