Gender Confused Santa and the Suicidal Office Lady

Sorry for the lack of action around here lately. I've been pretty much in lock down inside our air conditioned apartment for the last few days because it's been wicked hot, and thus I haven't been doing much of anything interesting. Thanks to the Slingbox coming into my life, I've been able to make the hours go by with healthy doses of good old brain-rotting American TV.

We've also been watching the annual Koshien Baseball tournament which has been going on in Osaka since last week. This high school tournament pits the best teams from each of Japans 49 prefectures against each other over two weeks. The second round of games started on Monday. We watched a pretty riveting game this evening in which the team from Niigata (Chieko's home turf) came out with a 12 inning victory. The pitcher on the losing side pitched all 12 innings and threw 150-something pitches. This tournament is partly famous for the losing side's players openly weeping after game while they fill their cleat bags with dirt from the infield. The field they play the tournament at is home to the Japanese Professional League's Hanshin Tigers (the Japanese equivalent to the Boston Red Sox), so it's quite a thrill for the young men to play there.

It was an exciting day all around for baseball, as this morning (thanks again to Slingbox) I watched the Red Sox' dramatic 9th inning victory. I was ready to be pretty unenthused about the Sox if they dropped a 1-0 game to the Devil Rays. The Red Sox have managed to reduce their once lofty (albeit unrealistic) 14 game lead over the Yankees down to 4. But is anyone really surprised about that? We have 6 games with the Yankees left, so it should be an interesting last month and a half of baseball.

Now, let's address the title of this blog post. I had two of the weirdest dreams I've had in a long while last night.

In the first dream, I was tasked with training the next generation of Santa Claus on how to fly the sleigh, which I knew how to do for some reason. The new Santa wasn't embracing his role, as if he had just been saddled with it rather than actually elected it as a career. He didn't yet look anything like Santa Claus physically, though if I recall we were both wearing Santa suits. For our purposes we only had a few reindeer hooked up to the sleigh.

New Santa was doing a pretty crappy job of flying, yawing the sleigh back and forth so that we practically fell out the sides, making sloppy turns and overshooting landings. I suggested that maybe I should take over for a while and do a little demonstrating, and then he could give it another go.

New Santa like this idea, but he had to pee, so we landed the sleigh and he sauntered off behind some building or another to relieve himself. Before doing so though, he confided to me that, "I think I might be a woman." Make of that what you will.

At about this time there was a young man walking by and seeing me in my Santa suit he put on the air of a child. I asked him what his name was and he responded all child-like and told me his name, though at this point I forget what it was. He was carrying something and I asked him what it was.

"A chainsaw," he said with a childlike smirk, as he started it up.
"What are you going to cut," I asked.
"You're eyes!!!" he beamed as he came at me gunning the chainsaw. Freaky.

I hopped in the sleigh and tried to spur the reindeer into action and they would run a few feet but couldn't seem to get off the ground, while buddy is all the while coming after me with chainsaw. I distinctly remember worrying about Santa, who was still off peeing, and thinking that if I ever got the damn sleigh of the ground I would have to circle back around and try and get him. At that point I stirred from my sleep, thought to myself what a crazy dream that was, and drifted off to have yet another wacked out dream.

In my second dream I had taken a new job from some guy that was opening up a new business of some kind, and he was very adamant that I should take one of the great positions he was offering. So I did.

I remember he didn't tell me what the position was, nor where the store was, so I spent some portion of the dream wandering around the city looking for the place where I was supposed to start work the next day.

So I reported to work and the guy who hired me was quite a jerk and just kind of ran off. I went up to the top floor and into the PA system announced, in Japanese for some reason (the setting wasn't overtly Japanese), who I was and that I didn't know what I was supposed to do, and could someone help me out.

It turned out I had been hired as a salesperson in a clothing shop. Sweet! I was assigned to tidy up the shoe display; picture a wall in a shoe store with all the shoes sitting on individual plastic shelves. So I set about that task, as opposed to walking the hell out of there and going back to teaching English.

I suppose in my dream I needed money because I actually showed up for work again the next day, but I'd gotten the idea to add some personal flavor to the shoe display and was putting up a new colored background on the wall. One of my coworkers, who it turns out in real life is the secretary in our office at the school I work at, saw what I was doing and sped out through a door, visibly disturbed by what she had just seen.

Concerned, I follower her out. Turns out the door led out to the roof of the building, and she was perched atop the edge, ready to jump. More concerned, I ran back inside to find someone ELSE to deal with this, but finding nobody, went back out to try and console her. As I tried to coax her back from the edge she gave me one very clear, unwavering demand regarding my work in the store: "You must NEVER use a crayon."

And that was it, I was awake again and wondering what the hell was going on inside my brain. I've had some pretty trippy, nonsensical dreams before with really random people in them, but I can't remember something this nutty, let alone twice in one night. If nothing else, I hope it was interesting reading.

I'll try to get back soon with some pictures and more reality based, though perhaps less entertaining blog posts.