Io sono tranquilla, mai...

I went for a last minute trip to Rome last week for 4 hectic days of grant writing. In the midst of that, however, Elena prepared a delicious Thanksgiving meal for a small group of us on Friday evening. December 1st, however, is the big Thanksgiving shindig at her house. Too bad I won't be there! When I left on Monday, Elena's son Bruno was already planning the presentation about Thanksgiving for the shindig. Ha. Kind of strange to see the Thanksgiving tradition cherished in the form of a tradition of someone's mother's country (which happens to be my country too!) instead of his own. I know that didn't make sense.

I haven't been sleeping well the past 4 days. Don't worry, despite not having heat in my apartment, I sleep in a toasty bed (thanks to all the wool blankets I have). I'm just not sleeping well. Last night I woke up paralyzed and stuck in a dream about people who got sick with a virus and became zombies and knowing that I had no place to hide in my apartment other than my washing machine (and in my dream I was paranoid that I was going to get locked in it). Many things happened in the dream but in one part I wasn't Kate, but I was someone's dad with a big beer gut and a stained white tshirt, and I was in this large government building that had those M.C. Escher like stairs (the ones that go all over the place and no place at the same time), and all the while avoiding the zombies. I enter this room and all of a sudden I'm in the future where all the people have recovered from being zombies. It has become public knowledge that while these people were in zombie states, they were actually in consciousness but were powerless to control their bodies. Many people were left with severe psychological problems because of the fact that they ate other people. Anyway, the dream just keeps getting weirder and weirder. I am in the room with this politician who is recounting for me his zombie experience, that he had decided that he was going to spare himself the fate of dying at the hands of another zombie, so he took a zombie-infected arm, shut himself up in a room with a dead body for food, became a zombie, and waited for the virus to go away. This is where the details start to fade, but something about his recounting his plans for world domination using the zombie virus. Anyway, so I'm awake by this point but powerless to wake myself up because I'm thinking that this could become a good horror novel. Then I changed my mind and couldn't go back to sleep because the sun was already up. *sigh*

The night before that, I was dreaming that I was meticulously rolling myself a cigarette using loose leaf tobacco. Despite the fact that I don't smoke, I woke up craving a cigarette.

What is going on, I have no idea.

Can you believe it, it's almost December? Where has the time gone? On December 12th (the day after my mom's b-day - Happy Birthday Mom), it will be 11 months that I have been living in Italy. It's already been nearly 15 months that I have been living in Europe. I still have the feeling of being "displaced"... Desperately need to do some kind of home decorating to make this place feel more like home. IKEA anyone? :-)

Well... it's time for: "SLEEP, TAKE 5..."